Book Reviews

Summary: A good man is shot in his home and there does not seem to be any suspects.

I was first turned on to Georges Simeon’s Inspector Maigret by John Wilson during a not that long-lived Books and Culture Podcast episode. Simeon is a French mystery novelist that wrote around 500 books, short stories, or novellas. Nearly 150 of them involve Inspector Maigret. Penguin has commissioned new English translations of the whole set and they have been coming out at a very nice clip. I have read several, mostly in order from the start. I have been picking them up as they come on sale for kindle. I decided last week when I picked one up (it is still on sale as I write this) that I would go ahead and read it even if it is theoretically 58th in the series.

There is nothing about the book that really requires you to know the Inspector. And I do not think I missed too much by jumping to the middle of the series. It is brief, I read it in three not too long sittings. This is more of a psychological mystery (think Inspector Gamache rather than a whodunit like Agatha Christy or Sherlock Holmes.)

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Summary: Collection of sermons on the parables, mostly from the 1950s.

This year I have been trying (with mixed success) to read a sermon a day. I have been alternating between Eugene Peterson, Fleming Rutledge, Howard Thurman, and in the past few days, Karl Barth.

Thurman’s Sermons on the Parables are faithful transcriptions of the full sermon with introductory material by the two editors. The commentary helpfully points out features and places the sermons in context. I have heard enough of Thruman’s voice in recordings that it was easy to hear Thurman’s voice as I was reading them. Thurman had a slow, deliberate style of speaking, and I think it would be helpful if you are not familiar with his speaking style to listen to the audio collection of his sermons on Audible or watch a few of the youtube video link this one.

The parables are very familiar territory for most Christians; there is little that can be said that is new. But I was surprised at how often Thurman was able to bring a fresh perspective to the parables while at the same time taking the text seriously; he was not just creating new.

I am not going to comment anymore but quote from an introduction to one of the sermons and then the sermon itself to give a sense of the book.

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Summary: After almost two weeks of reading, my children watched the 2005 movie last night. 

I have looked forward to my children being old enough that I started liking the books I was reading to them. Many of the books I read are still very young (my son just turned five, and my daughter is 16 months older.) In many ways, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is still too old for them. But I do think that this is one of the books that you do not need to understand every little bit to enjoy the book. We discussed it as we went on. I occasionally used different words when I was reading to if I knew they wouldn’t understand it. And they were still introduced to a lot of new vocabulary.

I do not know anything to say about the book other than when I read as an adult it is hard to believe that leaving the Beaver’s house is not until the 10th of 17 chapters (50% of the way through the book) and the children don’t meet Aslan until the 12th chapter (65% of the way through the book).

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Summary: A dystopian trilogy (with a prequel) that is both an enjoyable read and prescient. 

I have not been reading much fiction lately. But with my brain distracted by real life and less time since my kids are not in school right now, it felt like a perfect time to pick up KB Hoyle’s Dystopian series. About 18 months ago I read Hoyle’s fantasy series that started with The Six. I read the series quickly and loved the books. They were certainly in my list of favorite fiction books that I read in 2018.

Once I have a feel for fiction authors, I tend to try to read them completely blind. I had not read any of the descriptions of the series before picking it up. And as I finished each one, I just picked up the next without writing a post. At this point, I do not think it makes sense to write individual responses because this is a single story, told over four books.

The setting is roughly 200 years after two different mass devastation events. There is a single world government that is trying to repopulate the earth after the majority of the population died in a massive famine, a wide-scale pandemic or a third event that I will not reveal. The main character at the start of the first book is one of the breeders, Seventeen (later Pria). Other characters are quickly introduced and many of them continue through the series.

I am not going to give away plot details but a couple of notes. KB Hoyle has great plots. Hints are given, but I did not know where the story was going to end up as I was going along. I can also guess that a few people will be disappointed in how some of the first two books end, but remember, this is a single large story arc, keep reading.

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Summary: Short book thinking about how we can arrange our lives to think about them as service to God.

This is a short book, about 90 pages and just under an hour as audio. It is cheap on both kindle and audiobook right now ($0.99 on kindle, $2.77 on audio). Sunday morning I could not sleep and after putzing around on social media for a while I put this on audio to listen to as I sat back and closed my eyes hoping to fall back asleep.

I don’t think I feel back asleep but I also need to read this again and it is quick enough I probably will later this week. Thematically, this is simple, some meditations from the head of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio about how people outside of the monastery can incorporate some of the practices and ideas of the monastery in a non-monastic setting.

There are good looks at being a parent and how parenting (or other relationships) primes us to sacrifice for others.  Also how there are seasons of life and looking at those seasons (or times of day) can be used to be thought of like the liturgical year or the prayers of the hours.

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Summary: A practical, story filled guide on how to have spiritual conversations with children.

I am approaching this with a definite perspective. I am in training to become a spiritual director (for adults), but I also have spent much of my life doing administrative and evaluative work for ministries for children. I am also am the stay-at-home/work-at-home parent, and my wife is an elementary teacher. I spend a lot of time thinking about children and how to serve them well.

I am reading this directly because I want to be a spiritual director. Still, parents, teachers, pastor, and many others that are interested in the spiritual life of children would also benefit. There are good theoretical discussions about children and spiritual matters that are approachable for almost everyone. And lots of practical examples.

Lacy Finn Borgo in Spiritual Conversations With Children is not adapting adult spiritual direction for children, but starting with children’s needs and their own developmentally appropriate modes of communication and building a practice of spiritual direction that is oriented around them. It is very much focused on a listening mode of spiritual direction. (She says at one point, children already have parents and other authority figures, the adult spiritual listener is there to listen to the children not correct them, or teach them.)

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Summary: A memoir about a man who became a pastor because of calling. 

I do not really know Will Willimon except through his book with Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, and I read that nearly 30 years ago as a freshman in college. I really did not know what I was getting into, but I needed a change in pace and I tend to appreciate memoirs or elder preachers.

Willimon is funny. He knows he is funny and he likes to use self-depreciation humor, not just for effect, but also theologically. At the start of the book he has these two quotes

My story is a comedy, as opposed to a tragedy, not because my life is funny but because my life is having a happy ending due to God’s gracious choice to be God for us and choosing even the likes of me to be for God.

and

You can tell that Kathleen Norris is a Christian. As she wrote her memoir, she repeatedly reminded herself, “œYou’re not that big of a deal. The call is the big deal.” If my memoir makes me my life’s chief protagonist, me, the big deal, I’m the most miserable of writers. More interesting than my life are the hijinks of a vocative God who explains my life.

There is some real similarity between Hauerwas and Willimon in tone and history. Both seem to like to be cantankerous, getting riled up about things that both are really important and over things that seem odd to be riled up about to me. But because they are so serious about both their faith and their understanding of human and divine grace, there is a lot of inbuilt willingness on my part to allow for a bit of ‘grumpy old man’-ing.

Willimon was a pastor, the chaplain at Duke for 20 years and then a United Methodist Bishop. He seems to live as he preaches. And hold himself to even higher standards than he holds others. Willimon does keep others the center of the story. He grew up with an absent father (often in jail) and was seeking father figures. When he was young and in a confirmation class at church, he was supposed to get a picture taken with the other kids and the pastor. A woman organizing the picture chastised him for not having a tie. But the pastor gave a sense of grace.

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Summary: MLK’s last book. It is frequently quoted, but I wonder how much it is read.

It is probably trite to comment about how Martin Luther King Jr is commonly sanitized and made safe. Books like Radical King were designed to break him out of the confines of his dream. Books like  Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought are trying to make King useful for our current time by looking at him more holistically and comparing him to Bonhoeffer and others to make him more intelligible. But it is still helpful to read King directly.

The Radical King reprinted a whole chapter from Where Do We Go From Here, which I had previously read. And there is an enormous number of quotes here that are commonly shared. But there is much here that also is not widely shared. King had a unique vision. He was anti-war, radically anti-violence, for massive social changes, not just around race, economics, and social cohesion. His radicalness was not despite his faith and prior experience but because of it. He became more radical not because of his earlier successes but because of what many perceived as a massive success he saw as scratching the surface.

It is not that the Birmingham bus boycott, the Selma marches, or the March on Washington were unimportant; those brought about the ability for people to have integrated transportation, voting rights, and national attention on segregation. But they did not end the cultural belief in the superiority of white skin and culture. They did not solve the problems of massive poverty and inequality. They did not address the issues of empire and colonialism.

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Summary: Helpful, practical look at what the prayer of examen is, and its structure. 

I think I was first introduced to the idea of the Prayer of Examen by Richard Foster about 12 or so years ago in his book Prayer. Foster’s chapter on the Examen is about five pages and cannot go into the detail that an entire book does. I have attempted to do the prayer of examen over the years, but at least in Gallagher’s presentation, I have always been missing part of the prayer.

Early in the book Gallagher has a summary of the prayer:

Transition: I become aware of the love with which God looks upon me as I begin this examen.

Step One: Gratitude. I note the gifts that God’s love has given me this day, and I give thanks to God for them.

Step Two: Petition. I ask God for an insight and a strength that will make this examen a work of grace, fruitful beyond my human capacity alone.

Step Three: Review. With my God, I review the day. I look for the stirrings in my heart and the thoughts that God has given me this day. I look also for those that have not been of God. I review my choices in response to both, and throughout the day in general.

Step Four: Forgiveness. I ask for the healing touch of the forgiving God who, with love and respect for me, removes my heart’s burdens.

Step Five: Renewal. I look to the following day and, with God, plan concretely how to live it in accord with God’s loving desire for my life.

Transition: Aware of God’s presence with me, I prayerfully conclude the examen.

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