Book Reviews

Summary: A useful introduction to the Catholic expression of Christianity.

As I continue on my project of reading about Catholicism, I stumbled on a book that is a companion to a documentary series.  I did not watch the documentary, but I picked up the book because the point of the documentary and companion book was to explain Catholicism to those that are inside and outside the church.

My first thought is that this is not about Catholicism, it is about Christianity. But the author of the book and documentary is not primarily explaining Catholicism, as opposed to Protestantism or Orthodoxy, but explaining Catholicism as an expression of Christianity.  So parts of this book read more like a basic systematic theology.  Barron is explaining who God is, why we worship him, the basics of the Trinity, the revelation of God, basic teachings of Jesus, end times, heaven, hell, purgatory, etc.

There were three areas that I found particularly helpful. Most helpful is Barron’s discussion of the church. He takes three different looks at it. One is a discussion of St Peter and Paul as exemplary of the tension between the organizational care of the church and the outreaching mission of the church.  Both are essential and a focus on either one to the exclusion of the other weakens the church as a whole.

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Takeaway: Real life is usually not like the movies.

Joy Davidman is best known, not for her own work, but as the wife of CS Lewis. The story of their marriage was featured in the movie Shadowlands. It is a good movie, but it seems as much fiction as reality.

I have previously read a short biography by Lyle Dorsett that was the rough basis of Shadowlands and I have read several biographies of Lewis which include discussions of Joy and her life.

This new biography is the first full fledged biography of Joy Davidman and is the product of much new documentation (primarily newly discovered letters) and research. It is hard to think more documentation would become available to warrant another biography.

Santamaria has written a highly readable and interesting biography of a complicated and not always likable woman. Davidman was a child prodigy, a promising young author and poet. But she was swept up with communist fervor, atheism, and her art became primarily focused on her causes.

Davidman was brilliant, but troubled. After strings of affairs, starting as a fairly young awkward teen she started a relationship with Bill Gresham. They were married in August 1942 and had two children. But it was a turbulent marriage. Bill was an alcoholic and likely had other mental health issues. But Joy was an equal partner to the turbulence.

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Summary: A great overview of the New Testament in less than 150 pages.

I love the idea of the Very Short Introduction series. Short books, around 150 pages, written by experts in the field for a general reader that has little or no background in the field. The reality is that the series (now over 300 books) is wildly inconsistent. Luckily, this is one of the better from the series that I have read, not as good as Mark Noll’s book on Protestantism, which is the best in the series that I have read, but it is close.

My main complaint about the Very Short Introduction to the Bible is that it did not talk at all about the content of the bible. Luke Timothy Johnson spends the majority of time in this book on content. Much of that is focused on the synoptic gospels. Then there is an overview of Paul, with an in-depth look at of Paul and an overview of Johannine books (including the Gospel of John and Revelations).

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Takeaway: Pastoral wisdom like this is rare.

Lila (the third of the trilogy that starts with Gilead) came out just over a year ago. I read it immediately and then reread it about a month later. It is in my short list of best books I have read.

It has been three years since I read Gilead, and while I remember enjoying it, I wanted to reread it before I went back and read the second novel of this trilogy (Home).

Gilead is a slow novel. I can understand why people would not like it. There is a story, but the action is almost entirely internal. John Ames is a 76-year-old pastor in a small Iowa town. Late in life, he married Lila, and they had a son. John has been having heart problems, and he has been told to prepare for death. So the book is a series of letters (no real chapters, just pauses between letters) to his son about his life and what he thinks is important about the world.

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Summary: A slim volume of prayers by a young writer in training, seeking after God for her vocation.

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor made a splash when it was released at the end of 2013.

This slim volume (I read almost all of it in a single sitting) is exactly what the title says, an edited version of a prayer journal that O’Connor wrote while she was a student at University of Iowa.

At the center of this book are lots of variations of this prayer, “Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You.” She wanted to be a writer, a good writer and one that pointed to her faith.

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Takeaway: “Hearing is an act of the senses, but listening is an act of the will.”

I have been looking forward to this book for a while now. Adam McHugh’s first book, Introverts in the Church, was extremely helpful to me as an introvert that also deeply loves the church.

“Listening ought to be at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships, our mission as the body of Christ, our relationship to culture and the world. We are invited to approach everything with the goal of listening first. We are called to participate in the listening life.”

I probably should have expected that much of The Listening Life would be about listening to God, but I did not. After an introduction, there are three chapters on listening in relation to God, how God, as King, listens to us, how we should listen to God and how scripture helps us better hear God.

“In a sense, the Scriptures are a tuning fork for adjusting our ears to the tone of God’s voice. It attunes us to the quality, the pitch and the cadence of God’s voice, and to the character that his voice expresses, so that we can identify his true voice over false ones.”

Throughout the book, McHugh keeps reminding us that listening is part of being a Christian, part of being mature, part of being fulfilling our created role as humans.

The strongest chapter (or at least the one that was the reason I purchased a couple copies to give away) is the chapter on listening to people in pain.

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Summary: A mother risks her own safety to protect her children.

I was about 9 when the movie version, The Secret of NIMH came out. I remember seeing it in the theater, and I think that was only time I saw it. So I was a bit vague on the details of the story when I picked up the audiobook.

Mrs Frisby is a field mouse widow. Her husband died the previous year, but as a family they are doing fairly well. They have a warm winter house in the garden field where food is abundant, even if it is monotonous. Spring is coming soon and the family will move to their summer house by the creek.

However, when one of Mrs Frisby’s children gets pneumonia, things suddenly become dangerous. The family cannot move because of a very sick child. But they have to move because the field will be plowed soon and if they stay they will all likely die.

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