Book Reviews – Page 88

The High Flyer by Susan Howatch

October 7, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A high flying lawyer, with no time for the spiritual life, is forced to confront the spiritual world.

Carter Graham is a no nonsense lawyer that has a life plan and is sticking to it. That life plan includes getting married at around 35 and having children sometime before 40. When Carter meets Kim Betz, she thinks she has found a perfect partner to continue her life plan.

As with most of Susan Howatch’s books the story is important, but the story is also a means to work through spiritual and philosophical issues. In this case, the atheist Carter Graham, confronts the reality of the spiritual world through unexpected spiritual manifestations (ghosts, spiritual healers, curses, etc.) and then has to work through her issues around theodicy, the problem of evil, the role of God in evil, why God didn’t create a perfect world, her role in sin and how her sin affects others and other’s sin affects her, etc..

More than most of Susan Howatch’s books I have read this is a book of explication. Carter spends a lot of time talking through issues with counselors, doctors, psychologists, spiritual directors, friends, etc. This allows for a lot of different perspectives, but also a book that is as much theology as story.

Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happended to the Good News by Philip Yancey

October 3, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: The central message of the gospel is grace. If the world around us understands the central message of the church to be judgement, then we have messed up the message that Christ came to give.

There are four parts to this book and even in the introduction Yancey says that this is essentially four different books. I just wish he had tried to do less.

The first part is all about the vanishing of grace from the message of the church. This part is five stars and I would like virtually all Christians to read it. He calls on Christians to not only recover grace as the central message of Christ and the church, but also to remember that the method of the message has to be in love. I really don’t think that basic message can be emphasized too much in Christianity because the natural temptation of Christians is to change the message of the gospel to one that is about earning our salvation through moralism or tradition. After all, a gospel of moralism or tradition is easy for Christians who tend to be already familiar with tradition and fairly good at presenting a moral facade to the world around them. But that changing of the gospel away from grace fundamentally changes the message of the gospel.

Sacred Pathways: Discover Your Soul’s Path to God by Gary Thomas

October 1, 2015 by Adam Shields

I am reposting this 2011 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99 for the month of October. The audiobook edition is $3.99 with the purchase of the kindle edition.

Takeaway: People are reflection of God. The ways God creates people to draw near to him are a gift to the church. God has created us all with a desire for him, but those methods of spiritual growth are not the same. Gary Thomas talks about 9 ways that we can draw near to God.

This is a book I have had on my shelf for a long time and just finally got around to reading it. I have read a couple of books that are similar, most recently Streams of Living Water by Richard Foster. Streams of Living Water is focused on the different Christian faith traditions and their strengths and contributions to Christianity as a whole. Sacred Pathways is focused on individual spiritual temperaments and how the way God has made each of us, affects the way that we are designed to love God.

Unfortunately, some people fall into the trap of believing that all spiritual growth should look the same (30 minute quiet time, daily prayer alone, Sunday School attendance, active service to the poor, etc.). Instead, if we read our bibles it is pretty easy to see that the characters of scripture had different temperaments, different ways of relating to God and different pathways to spiritual growth.

Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints by James Martin

August 16, 2024September 30, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Brief exploration of seeking after who you were created to be.

I originally read this just over a year ago. James Martin originally put this together as a lecture to honor Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen.

On the second reading, Martin’s insights are still as hard to internalize, but as still important.

God has created each of us as unique individuals. Working toward becoming the self that God created is a lifetime process. And at least part of that process is rejecting the roles that are placed upon you but not a part of you.

The second reading I was struck by how we become who we are, not by focusing on our own selves, but by serving others. This was the theme of a sermon at my church recently so the focus here resonated more.

I mentioned this in the earlier review, but part of what is helpful about this book is that it is focused on people that many consider spiritual giants. Merton, Nouwen, Mother Theresa all were human. They were all broken people that struggled into their spiritual lives.

Take and Read: Spiritual Reading — An Annotated List by Eugene Peterson

September 28, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Eugene Peterson’s list of books that he has found helpful in developing his own spiritual life. Take and Read is a simple concept. Peterson said he looked at his shelves of books and listed the ones he thought helpful along with a short description of why the books were helpful. I love book lists … Read more

Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck

December 13, 2023September 25, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Moving our psychological revulsion (based around food) to morality, ethics and people, fundamentally distorts our Christianity.

I appreciate Richard Beck’s outsider perspective on theology. Beck is a psychologist who writes theology. While he is not untrained in theology, that training is not formal, and it is not his primary academic area.

Beck approaches practical areas of theology in ways that many academic theologians do not. Previously, I read The Slavery of Death, which is probably the best book I have read about the power of sin and the practical understanding of how sin controls us.

In Unclean, Beck takes his understanding of psychology to help us as Christians understand how our faith becomes distorted when we allow the concept of revulsion (a natural feeling around unclean food) and apply it to people and/or ethics.

This book is full of insights into how we unconsciously avoid doing the work that we (as the church) are called to, by avoiding the messy people that are around us. What this book is not, is a simple prescription on how to change our own perception of those around us. Beck says that this is too personal of a problem for him to proscribe simple steps.

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

December 29, 2024September 3, 2015 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: I wish more people read Reinhold Niebuhr. He has much to say both about politics and international relations, and also about the limits of security and state power.

The Irony of American History is oddly relevant. It was written in 1952 and based on two lectures given earlier than that. The introduction calls it the most important book on American foreign policy ever written. That is a bit too strong, but still Niebuhr understands in a way that very few do, the weaknesses of all human forms of government, while still being hopeful that government can serve the people.

Niebuhr, with proper use of irony, speaks of the issues of the 1950s in similar terms to many others in talking about the global reach of US power. It is almost funny that Niebuhr quotes US policy makers that think that the Asians should be more grateful to the US (at the time it was Korea, soon to be Vietnam) for our intervention to their affairs. But it is very similar to the way that some in the Bush administration thought we would be received in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The narrator on the audiobook is a bit pretentious sounding and I think that detracts from what Niebuhr is trying to say. But in general Niebuhr traces the thought patterns of a Jeffersonian (roughly secular) and a Puritan (certainly Christian) that both view the United States as a fundamentally separate place. The language of the Puritans is a “City on a Hill” and “called out by God for a specific purpose”. But the Jeffersonian ideals are not much different. Jefferson was secular in his reasoning, but thought that the separateness of the geography and the rightness of our political will and life also left us with a specific calling and purpose that in the end was not much different from the calling and ideals of the Puritans.

The Nature of the Beast: Chief Inspector Gamache #11 by Louise Penny

September 2, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A retired Inspector Gamache continues to need to respond to the deaths around him in Three Pines.

Popular murder mystery series always have the problem of very high rates of murder around the protagonist. It is one reason that they tend to be police officers of big cities in order to give some credibility to the number of murders.

But in the Inspector Gamache series, the protagonist has retired to a town that is so small that it is not even on any map, has a dirt road to get into it and no high speed internet access. About half of the books so far have been focused on local murders and the reader just has to wonder about the character of the town. In this book we find that the village has expanded to become large enough that it has a community theater with a dedicated theater space.

My strained credibility still enjoys the series. Gamache is a great lead and there are many characters around him that are just as enagaging.

In this case a young imaginative boy who is known for his wild tales goes missing and his body is eventually found. This leads to a case that gets bigger and bigger and eventually includes international affairs and weapons deals and a serial killer as a side theme.

Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely People by Glenn Packiam

August 31, 2015 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: Scripture needs to be retold, so we can hear it again for the first time and be changed.

There are lots of ways to study scripture. But two ways have been bouncing around in my head as being particularly important for me. One is the serious academic study of a text, long or short. Investigation into what the language researchers say about it, what the cultural anthropologists know about the culture it was written in, what the comparative literature people know about other texts that might have been written in a similar time or culture, what the historians that can talk about how that passage has been read and interpreted over time, etc. I think that type of reading and study of scripture is very important. I do not do enough research into scripture like that. (The Lost World of Genesis One is one of the recent books I have read that is along those lines.)

But the second type of scripture work is illustrated quite well by this book. The author does a lot of the type of study that is part of the first type of study, but the focus is not the study, but the retelling. The author’s research is to understand the text deeply, so that she or he can tell others about the text in a way that is modern and appropriate for the culture and people that are hearing it. And even more important, to use the “Theological Imagination” (as Eugene Peterson puts it) to help those of us that have heard the scripture before rediscover it in new ways. Some Christians look down on this type of work, but it is the essential work of teaching. Teaching takes an idea and learns to communicate it in a way that is understood, and hopefully can be acted upon.

Wonder by RJ Palacio

August 27, 2015 by Adam Shields

Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99. (Wonder was one of my favorite books of 2013)

Summary: Middle grade fiction about a boy with significant facial deformity learning to live in the world and the world learning to live with him.

Wonder is a book I would not have picked up on my own. In general I like young adult (teen), but do not read a lot of middle grade fiction.

But more importantly, the description discouraged me from wanting to get started. Another book about a sick kid that changes the way people think about the world.

Yes, this was a book about a kid that changes the way people think about the world, but it was a very good one.

Ten-year-old August (Auggie) is going to school for the first time. It is 5th grade and a new middle school. August has been homeschool prior to this because of the many surgeries to try and repair his body.

The first section of the book is all narrated by August. And had it stopped there, this would have been a good book about how people can feel bad when they are mistreated. Or maybe even a good book about how a kid can overcome adversity.

What makes Wonder a great book, is the book changes narration throughout the school year. His best friend at school, the girl that first reached out to him at school, his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his sister’s best friend, and then August again. The change in voice allows us to see that while August has facial deformities that make his life difficult, the love of his parents, his friends and other things make his life good.