Book Reviews

I am reposting this review because How (Not) to Speak of God is on sale for $2.99 for Kindle until March 1.

I have read one other Peter Rollins book, The Orthodox Heretic.  My opinion of How (Not) to Speak of God is very much the same. Rollins is very bright.  He knows what he is talking about (although I don’t always understand), and in this book where he is more directly talking about philosophy and epistemology, he is way beyond my ability.  I consider this one of those books that I read outside my comfort zone (both theologically and philosophically) to help expand my horizons.

I am not alway sure what he is talking about, and even when I am, I do not always agree with it.  But there are three ideas that I pulled out of this book that I do think are useful and/or are a different way of approaching how to speak of God.

His first tack is to take on the traditional idea of idolatry.  Not many modern people literally worship physical stone or wood idols.  But Rollins wants to move away from a concept of idol as thing.  That is common.  We have all heard sermons about turning money or security into idols.  But Rollins takes it a step further.

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Takeaway: The Holy Spirit is with us today just as he was with the apostles in Acts.

Who is the Holy Spirit uses the parallel books of Luke and Acts to illustrate how the Holy Spirit empowers Christians to do God’s work in the world.

For the last six months of last year I was focused on reading and reading about the gospel of Luke.  Spending that much time in Luke really helped to focus me on how intentional the parallels from the gospel of Luke and the books of Acts are.  This book takes the parallels and focuses on how the Holy Spirit not only is God, in the same way that Jesus was God in person on the earth, but shows how the Apostles, through the power of the Holy Spirit, worked to fulfill the mission of God just as Christ did.

This is a wide ranging book.  And if anything, that would be my main criticism.  I almost wish it was more focused.  But Yong wants to hit all the major themes and actions of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts.  So there is a very good section on the power of the spirit in salvation and empowering the apostles while they were in Jerusalem.

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Takeaway: We as Christians need to continually search for meaning in scriptures.

This was a free book on kindle a couple months ago.  It has 33 short stories/parables with a page or so of explanation.  These are intentionally attempting to retell Jesus’ parables (or at least follow the form) in a modern form.  Some of them are good.  Some of them seem to be intentionally unorthodox to try get a reaction.

In general I approve of trying to find meaning in scripture. But there does not seem to be a lot of focus on trying to be true to the story as much as being true to the form.  When I finally got past the fact that Rollins was intentionally trying to give new meaning I got a lot more out of them.

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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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Summary: A wonderfully unique young adult love story about a teen that wakes up in a different body every day. 

I love original ideas.  And Every Day by David Levithan is an original idea.  The main character, who has named himself “A”, wakes up every day in a different body.  Every day A has to figure out who he is and how to relate.  He has done this from his earliest memory.

Throughout the book A is male, female,a  depressed and suicidal girl, supermodel looking girl, illegal immigrant girl, overweight boy, drug addict, alcoholic, poor, rich, gay, straight, transgendered.  The book clearly is trying to deal with both identity and the way that others perceive you.

What really drives the story is that A falls in love.  And now he does everything he can to fine Rhiannon.  And Rhiannon has to get over the very large hurdle of never knowing who A is going to be, or where he is going to turn up or if a plan that they make will work out.

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