Book Reviews – Page 102

The God of the Mundane: Reflections on Ordinary Life by Matthew Redmond

January 17, 2015 by Adam Shields

Reposting my 2013 review because God of the Mundane is free at NoiseTrade in mobi (kindle format), PDF or epub.
Takeaway: God is the God of our every day mundane tasks and activities just as much (if not more so) than the mountaintop or special times.

If I were going to write a book (which I have no intention of attempting), this is the book I would want to write. Since Matthew Redmond has already written it I am off the hook.

For the past couple years I have told people that I am attempting to live an ordinary life. It is not that I don’t want to change the world. It is that I think the way that we are Christians are most effective at changing the world is living as faithful ordinary Christians.

The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver

January 16, 2015 by Adam Shields

I am reposting this 2012 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99.
Summary: A 1960s Southern Baptist family moves to the Congo to be missionaries. Their lives are forever changed.

I have been somewhat reluctant to read this book. I know a ton of people that have liked it. My sister in law suggested it years ago and kept suggesting it to me. Many others commented when they saw I had started reading it.

It is a book that well deserves all of its praise. This is a book many should read. It is not a everything comes out happy story (which I knew going in). But not all stories that are important are happy.

Very quickly into the story the family move to the Congo. As you can guess much of the early book is focused on cultural transition issues. The father feels called by God to bring salvation to the Congo. But he is inadequately prepared for what that really means. The mother can barely survive what it takes to just live, cooking, cleaning, raising four girls in the Congo. Even without a difficult overbearing husband, it would be hard. The four daughters find their own ways of coping for better and worse.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

January 16, 2015 by All Old Users

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is a collection of essays by the comedic television actor, writer, director and producer, Mindy Kaling. Mindy writes mainly about her life, while offering advice or opinions on the side. The book comes across as a mix between hearing someone tell their life story and listening to a string of stand up jokes that might go along with that story.

I read an article earlier this week that pointed out that if you read this book along with the Tina Fey’s book, Bossypants, and Amy Poehler’s book, Yes, Please, that you will feel like you have gained three best friends and confidants. While I haven’t read Amy’s book yet, I would totally agree with this assessment. Because the three ladies also narrate their own stories, listening to these books really does feel like you are having a one-sided (at times, two-sided) conversation with these funny people.

What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive by Rob Moll

January 15, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Science can help us better understand how we are created to know God.

Everyone is price conscious, at least a little bit. I knew that Christianity Today voted What Your Body Knows About God as book of the year and it was on a number of other lists. But it wasn’t until it went on sale this week for $2.99 on kindle that I decided to pick it up (although I ended up listing to the audiobook at Scribd).

Christianity and Science books are a bit iffy much of the time, in large part because Christians tend to not be great scientists. Rob Moll is not a scientist, he is a journalist. So What Your Body Knows About God is more like one of Mary Roach’s books or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Christianity and Science books also tend to be apologetics oriented, either trying to prove that God was behind the science or that science is wrong (neither of which I am all that interested in). There is a little of that, but the focus is different. This is the Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic type of apologetics if it is anything. Moll is not trying to convince the skeptic, Moll is trying to pull the attention of the believer toward how we can use science about the body to help us better find God.

The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation by Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell

January 14, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Sophisticated history and political science in graphic novel form.

I like the idea of being someone that reads graphic novels. And I have enjoyed most of those that I have read, but I rarely read them for some reason.

The Gettysburg Address was highlighted in some article or podcast when it first came out and I put it on my watch list (along with a gazillion other books.) When it went on sale right before Christmas I picked it up, in part to give myself something to read on my new Amazon Fire HD 6 to help justify the purchase price. (It is back on sale for $4.99 as of posting)

I was expecting the Gettysburg Address to be more simplistic, a well done 6th grade history in graphic novel form. But it was much more than that. It started out with a fairly long, fairly violent look at the reality of the Civil War before pulling back and really introducing the book.

Bonita Avenue: A Novel by Peter Buwalda

January 13, 2015 by All Old Users

Bonita Avenue is the debut novel from Dutch journalist, Peter Buwalda and tells the story of renowned math professor and former judo champion, Siem Sigerius. On the surface, Siem seems to have it all: a happy second marriage, a wonderful relationship with his step-daughters and an illustrious career.

The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard by Kara Tippetts

January 12, 2015 by All Old Users

Bookwi.se Note: The Kindle edition is currently on sale for $2.99.
Author, blogger, wife and mother Kara Tippets has written “œThe Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard” charting her spiritual journey from her childhood, to her early days of marriage and motherhood, and to the present as she fights her multiple battles with cancer.

I must tell you I find this review very difficult to write. Kara’s story is most likely not going to have a happy ending, in human terms. It’s hard to not be affected by Kara’s reality, especially reading her blog “œMundane Faithfulness“ or seeing the updates on her Facebook page; but I so desperately appreciate her allowing other people to be a part of her journey. She’s living honestly and beautifully.

Kara writes openly about her reality without oversharing. She consistently points her readers to God’s promises and discusses her daily, sometimes moment by moment struggle to grab on to God’s grace in the midst of pain. Kara and her husband, Josh, have a goal of walking through this journey as “œbroken but not bitter”. One by one, Kara gently dismantles the beliefs many of us actively and subtly believe. We are not promised long lives, pain free existences, or trouble free days. But we are promised something better.

Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good by NT Wright

January 9, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: “The one true God has now taken charge of the world, in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection.”

NT Wright is an author that many are excited about and many are frustrated by. There is good reason for both. NT Wright is a serious scholar and he has helped reinvigorate serious scholarship about the New Testament that is focused on orthodox Christianity.

The main theological frustration, especially for a particular group of Reformed, is that he has focused on Paul and interpreted Paul as not being primarily focused on Jesus’ Penal Substitution. He has not ignored Penal Substitution, or said it is not a real part of Christianity, but he has said the focus of Paul is not on Jesus’ penal substitution, but on Jesus as King and restorer.

That major focus on Wright’s work is front and center in Simply Good News. Wright does fairly well writing either to an academic audience (as his 1700 pages opus on Paul) or a popular audience. Simply Good News (like Simply Jesus, Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope) is popularly focused and has few footnotes or academic references. And it is one of Wright’s shortest books.

NT Wright is in one way imminently readable. He tells stories and builds a case that can be followed. But in another ways Wright is almost always frustrating because he usually seems to complicate even small matters. Nothing by Wright is unrelated to the whole story because the nature of Wright’s project pulls together parts of the Christian story which some minimize or over simplify.

Wright cannot talk about the Good News without talking about Jesus and his project (obviously) or the broader concept of covenant (which Jesus is coming to fulfil), or the work of the church (doing our part in reconciling the world to Christ), or the end times (which should drive our understanding of what our reconciliation should be focused on), or the history of Israel (to which Jesus came as Messiah) or a whole host of other issues that are interrelated and connected. Anyone that has read Wright before always feels the repetition that is necessarily a part of Wright’s method of presenting the story.

Love Is Stronger Than Death by Peter Kreeft

January 8, 2015 by All Old Users

“”¦life is either totally meaningful or totally meaningless, depending on what death is. Therefore we had better try to find out what death it.” So begins Peter Kreeft in a book that is basically him thinking methodically through the concept of death. He argues that death plays a number of roles to us:

Death as Enemy: it takes, destroys, unmakes.

Death as Stranger: we pretend it doesn’t exist, but ignore it at our peril. Or we attempt to reconcile ourselves collectively to the inevitable.

Death as Friend: “Death is necessary for life as silence is necessary for speech” (45). It frames our lives and gives it finitude, a start and end point. It challenges us to define ourselves within the hard lines it draws. “The realization of our mortality now jolts us into a new appreciation of the now” (45).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Meditations on Psalms edited by Edwin Robertson

January 7, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A collection of sermons, letters, devotional writing, etc on the psalms with helpful biographical introductions.

When I wrote the review of Martin Marty’s Biography of Letters and Papers from Prison I said I needed to read more Bonhoeffer directly and rely less on the secondary sources. Edwin Robinson has a helpful halfway point between primary and secondary works. He has edited together a book of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the Psalms. Most of these are directly sermons or devotional writing of one sort or another. Rarely is a section longer than 15 minutes (I listened to this on audio semi-devotionally for about two weeks).

Most of it is fairly traditional Christian material. That is not to dismiss it. But to instead say, Bonhoeffer was first a pastor. No matter what else he did, his vocation was pastor. So this collection is primarily pastoral. There are clearly difficult sections here where Bonheoffer is struggling against the weight of the German state and Hitler’s power and God’s role in it (especially in private letters). But still primarily he was pointing to the power of Christ to transform and using the wide variety of emotions that are contained within the Psalms as prayers and reflections as the church has always used them for thousands of years.