Book Reviews

Summary: Satan, at least as a concept, is a pretty important part of Christianity. Even for those who are resistant to seeing Satan behind every sin or temptation, the theological concept of something greater than simple temptation or individual sin is important.

Richard Beck is a psychologist who writes theology. And honestly, he is one of the best theologians that I have read. He is accessible. Beck is a long-time blogger. Many of his books have been heavily worked out on his blog before becoming full books, so the chapters tend to be short and focused. There tend to be lots of stories and illustrations. And there tend to be relatively few footnotes.

Beck is on the liberal end of Christianity. He is not overly fond of Penal Substitutionary Atonement theories. (He likes Christus Victor as his primary atonement theory.) But does not reject the basics of Christian orthodox theology. Theology for Beck has to be practical to the people around him. While Beck is an academic and college professor ( academics and college students are some of what theology has to work for), he is also a prison chaplain and a member of a church that leans Pentecostal and poor.

In many ways, Reviving Old Scratch is riffing off of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. One of the central images of Reviving Old Scratch is the Jefferson bible. Jefferson snipped out all of the miracles and difficult passages for Jefferson’s rationalist mindset. But just because you have difficulty with the supernatural does not mean that the supernatural does not exist.

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Summary: There is no way to really describe this book.

I have never heard of Adam Roberts prior to this book. But he has written several books as a sci-fi novelist and he is a professor of 19th century English literature at the University of London.

Both John Wilson and Alan Jacobs spoke very highly of The Thing Itself (John made it his book of the year for 2016), so I added it to my list. Anything that both Alan and John highly recommend I will read.

It is not a traditional scifi book. While it deals with science fiction concepts (time travel, Artificial Intelligence, conspiracy theories, etc.) it also spends a lot of time discussion philosophy, especially Kant. Adam Roberts is an atheist. John Wilson has a quote from Roberts in his piece, “As an atheist writing a novel about why you should believe in God, I have taken more than I can say from the eloquent and persuasive devotional writing of my friends Alan Jacobs and Francis Spufford, Christians both.”

That line was enough to make me pick up the book. But when I read Alan Jacob’s piece again (linked above) after I finished, I am reminded that there is often much more going on in a book than what is immediately obvious to the average reader. I am not a well read Kant scholar. I feel like I need to read a book on Kant and then go back and re-read The Thing Itself again. I understand the basic book, but I do think I missed a lot.

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Takeaway: Super soldiers, bred for combat get frustrated with worthless wars too.

It has been five years since I read the first book in this years, Old Man’s War. I probably should have re-read it before I started this. But I did not and so it took a little while to remember the previous book and all the characters and story line that I was supposed to be remembering.

The first book was about humans from earth that when they were near death, were allowed to leave earth and be given new bodies, in exchange for 10 years of service in the military. It was a riff off of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It was bleak and a mostly anti-war, war book.

Ghost Brigades is about the second part of the military. Instead of using the minds of the elderly in new bodies, the special forces units are specifically bred as fighting machines. They are still mostly human. But they have been genetically altered and “˜birthed’ as adults. They are kept away from building many real relationships with normally born humans and tightly bonded with their squads.

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Summary: Fairly straight retelling of a number of Norse myths.

I am a big Neil Gaiman fan. And I love his voice as a narrator. So it was really inevitable that I would pick up this new book of Norse Mythology.

I had a few hesitations, reviews from people that are seeped in Norse mythology have been fairly mediocre. But this is an introduction to Norse Mythology, not a masters level literature course. So I drug my feet a bit until I had four different online friends finish it and give it decent reviews.

And it was pretty much like I expected. I still am not a fan of most short story collections, even those by Gaiman. Norse Mythology is a collection of short stories, they are all Norse Myths, but they are short stories.

I did enjoy seeing some of the ideas behind different elements of Gaiman’s American Gods book and a few other of his stories. He has known these stories for a long time and they are well into his head. Rick Riordan’s new series, Magnus Chase is also based on Norse myths and several of the stories here are in Magnus Chase.

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Summary: A scattered look King and his legacy.

This is the third book by Michael Eric Dyson that I have read this year. Tears We Cannot Stop and The Black Presidency were excellent and I was looking forward to reading more. I stumbled across April 4, 1968 at the library. I expected it to be more biography, or at least more concretely tied to King. But April 4, 1968 was more a jumping off place to loosely connected essays about a variety of topics.

Most interesting to me were the mini-bios of Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton and Barak Obama (this was published before his election). Placing them in context of King was a helpful way to see them in the broader civil rights leadership picture.

On the opposite end, was Dyson’s Afterword, an imagined interview with King on his 80th birthday. Obviously a speculative interview will say a lot about the imaginer. But even though much of the words seem roughly accurate, that type of speculation just seems odd to me.

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Summary: Clear eyed history of both pre and post-prohibition history of Bourbon.

I grew up in a non-drinking stream of Christianity. And then I went to Wheaton for college, which included a pledge not to drink. And from there to University of Chicago Divinity School, which was nearly the opposite (although I worked for a Drug and Alcohol rehab program through part of my grad school years so I mostly didn’t drink there either.) I was not particularly comfortable with alcohol personally, although I did not have any theological issues with it.

Slowly I become more comfortable with alcohol over time and tend toward the snobbish side of drinking, because it is more about the taste than the nostalgia. I have never acquired a taste for the non-craft beer. It seem natural that wine and bourbon, as well as some other spirits have been added to my repertoire.

Midtenbuler tells a fascinating story about Bourbon. And I use the ‘story’ language intentionally. There is a line in the book where he says, “˜Even though reality is often less romantic”¦’. That is much of the story of the book. Bourbon likes to bill itself as an old drink and it’s naming and labeling is mostly trying to point to how old the recipes are or at least how old the name is.

But Bourbon is really a pre-prohibition and post-prohibition story. Prior to prohibition there were few brand names. Bourbon (and presumably most other alcohol) was a commodity. Brands were not particularly well known and in many cases there simply was no way of knowing what you were getting because individual bottling only started a bit before prohibition. Before that you brought your own containers to the store and filled them up with what the store had.

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Takeaway: The history of the Tudors is in large part a history of the English Reformation.

When I was a student, history was always one of my favorite subjects. But European history, other than the very broadest of strokes, was something that I never formally studied. As an adult, my lack of European history keeps coming up as a lack of understanding of current European events.

My one advantage has been a decent Christian history background. I have read a number of books on the Reformation and some on other parts of early Christian history. This history of the Tudors is in large part a history of the English Reformation. From Henry VIII’s movement away from the Roman Catholic church to the backlash against the English Reformation under Mary to the re-assertion of the Anglican church under Elizabeth, the English Reformation is inseparable from the Tudors.

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Summary: On the anniversary of the worst disaster in the moon’s history, a terrorist plot may be even more devastating.

A Facebook friend of mine loves this series. On his recommendation I picked up the first book in the series, The Disappeared, about a year ago. The Disappeared was a well written police procedural with a scifi setting. But I haven’t picked up any more of the series until Anniversary Day went on sale.

I do not traditionally like reading books out of order, even if they do stand alone. Anniversary Day is the start of an 8 book sub-series within the larger 15 book series. I did feel like I was jumping into something that I did not fully understand. The main characters from the first book were still here, but a lot of additional characters had also been added.

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Summary: A current events focused commentary on the book of Lamentations.

I veer wildly between an honest concern about too much focus on the bad in the world (there is far more good than what is often credited) and a frustration about the lack of concern about the harm that is being ignored by many. I think many more people need to read Bradley Wright’s book Upside about how much about the world has drastically improved recently.
But at the same time I am concerned that many have far too little concern about systemic issues of oppression. Black Lives Matters (whether the broader movement or the organization), systemic problems of the criminal justice system, a rise of nativism or xenophobia, continuing revelations about ongoing racism, sexism, and other bias that impacts real people on a regular and ongoing basis, matters.

And so I picked up Prophetic Lament when I was frustrated with the inability for the Evangelical church in particular (but the larger church as well) to actually embrace lament. Christian Music that is ‘safe for the whole family’ and Christian fiction that seems to only be able to tell happy tales with tidy endings is not particularly faithful example of historic Christian artistry. It is not that we cannot be happy or that we should not consume tidy books or safe music. It is that we should not only consume safe music and tidy books.

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