Adam Shields

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by CS Lewis

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Summary: Memoir of CS Lewis’ early life and how he came to faith.

CS Lewis is an author that you just have to read if you are a Christian.  If you have not read the Chronicles of Narnia, then you will have read Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity (I never have) or his Science Fiction Trilogy or one of his other books.  But as a person that considers myself fairly well read, I have not read nearly as much CS Lewis as I feel like I should have.

I picked up the Science Fiction trilogy when it was on sale last year but I have not read it yet.  I have tried Mere Christianity a couple times but I have not finished it.  I really like Screwtape Letters and the Great Divorce and enjoyed Till We Have Faces.  One I have enjoyed more than almost any other is his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.

What really moved me to read this is the fact that two books I really like were adapted titles.  Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford was the story of how she came to faith at Oxford and she intentionally modeled the title after Lewis’s book.  And Lyle Dorsett titled his biography of Joy Davidson (CS Lewis’ wife) Surprised by Love (first edition of the book was called And God Came In).

I had always assumed that Surprised by Joy was about his relationship to Joy Davidson, but it was written long before he met and married her.

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Just Courage by Gary A. Haugen

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Reposting because the Kindle version is on sale for $2.99 right now.

Just Courage by Gary HaugenTakeaway: It takes courage to stand up to violence.  But Christians should not be lacking in courage when we have Christ.  God desires to use us, not to keep us safe.

This was a free book from ChristianAudio a couple months ago.  It is a brief book, just over 3 hours in audio version, but it is powerful in its story of International Justice Mission.  I have been aware of IJM for a few years.  I serve on a committee with a woman that is part of their fund development committee.  I have heard news reports about their work releasing people from slavery and sex trafficing for years.

But this was my first real introduction to the work directly.  Gary Haugen started IJM about 10 years ago.  It is a collection of lawyers, social workers and advocates that work around the world to raise awareness about and free people from slavery, sex trafficking and injustice.  Haugen has a particular definition of the work that they do.  It is more than just producing justice or alleviating need, it is directly addressing injustice where violence is present.  He asserts that when violence is present, people are often incapable of releasing themselves from injustice and require outside intervention.  Violence of the sort that is associated with slavery and sex trafficking is exactly the type of work that we as Christians need to have the courage to work for, but often are either unaware of the need or assume it is much smaller than reality.

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The Science of Fear: How Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

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Takeaway: Humans are very bad as understanding risk whenever risk becomes complicated.

The Science of Fear feels like a book that was written specifically for me.  It is filled with statistics, it has a good bit of sociology and psychology.  Its messages is overwhelmingly that we fear the wrong things, that humans as a whole are not all that good at evaluating risk, and that in the end it is very easy to manipulate people into fear.

That is not to say this is a perfect book.  Even for someone as stats obsessed as I am, this book was easily 75 pages too long.

The summary thesis is that we have a rational side and an emotional (gut) side.  The gut side is what takes over the majority of the time and only rarely does the rational side come up on top.

There are several psychological or behavioral economic principles that that make it hard for the rational side to hold the gut side at bay.  Gardner gives several examples: The Anchoring Rule (if you give a number or example even if completely unrelated to the topic, the listener will use that to anchor the evaluation), the Rule of Typical Things (basically if it sounds right it probably is right: chemicals are bad, rare things must be more dangerous, etc.) and The Example Rule (if you can see that anyone has had this happen to them, then it is probably more frequent than you know).  He also uses some of the more familiar principles of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance but focuses more on the behavior economics rather than the older psychological ideas.

So in an example on the fear of serious degenerative diseases from leaks in silicone breast implants you see how this works.  The example rule says that is a woman has breast implants and has a degenerative disease then they are probably connected.  But if there are a million women with implants and the particular degenerative disease occurs in the general population at 1 percent, then normally 10,000 women with implants should have that disease.  It requires large scale epidemiological studies to know if it is likely that the implants and the disease are related.  In this case they were not.  But the Rule of Typical things says that putting silicone in your body sounds like a bad idea, so it is probably the cause of the disease.

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First Shift – Legacy (Wool #6) by Hugh Howey

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Summary: A Prequel to Wool, we find out how it all started or at least we start to find out.

First Shift: Legacy (Wool #6) is the start to a prequel trilogy for five books of Wool by Hugh Howey.  Without giving up too much of the storyline of Wool, the setting is a post-apocalyptic world where everyone lives in underground silos waiting for it to be safe to return to the above ground world.

First Shift tells both the story of how (and a little bit of why) the silos were built and the early years of living in the silos.  The main character tells both stories through flashback.

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2012 Best Books for Preachers

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  Al Mohler has a round up of the 2012 best books for preachers in a very long article at Preaching magazine.  I did not read the full article (I don’t have that much time) If you are just interested in the short list of the 10 Books Every Preacher Should Read in 2013 (part of Mohler’s … Read more

Bookish.com – Discover More Books

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Bookish.comBookish.com, a new book recommendation website, has entered the fray.

Bookish uses recommendation algorithms like Amazon or Goodreads, but also real editors to make suggestions.

I have only played with it briefly, but I have not been incredibly impressed.  You enter a book and it gives you recommendations.  More books entered, the better the recommendations supposed to be.

The basic problem with Bookish is that it does not seem to fit a need.

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New Harry Potter Covers

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According to a Scholastic press release and a gawker article, Harry Potter is getting new covers to celebrate its 15th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The Anniversary Box Set with all new covers will be released in September. As far as I can tell, only the one cover has been released.