Book Reviews

Summary: A long interview with Pope Francis and the declaration of the Year of Mercy statement.

I keep meaning to read something by Pope Francis. But I have not up until now. Or really I still have not, but this is closer. The Name of God is Mercy was on sale at audible, so I picked it up last week.

It is short, only 3 hours. Two hours of it is a transcribed interview between an Italian reporter and the Pope. The last hour is the official statement on the Year of Mercy.

The interview was interesting. The most striking thing for me was how much of the interview revolved around a discussion of sin. I do not internally connect Mercy and Sin, but Pope Francis did.

Part of this is differences in the theology of sin between Catholics and Protestants. I read George Marsden’s biography of the book Mere Christianity right after this and Marsden has a discussion about the difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies of sin that was helpful. My short, and overly simplistic explanation is that for Protestants, the importance of sin is that it separates us from God. So the real issue for Protestants is that we need forgiveness. And Protestants tend to then focus on the permanence of forgiveness.

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Summary: Tippett shares what she has learned about wisdom and life from her many interviews from her shows On Being and Speaking of Faith.

I have been a fan of Krista Tippett for at least the last 10 years. She is a good interviewer and she has a real interest in pay attention to both socially conscious issues and how religious backgrounds motivate people.

Listening to this as an audiobook, which I think is probably the best method for this particular book, it is hard not to think of it as a clip show. There are so many clips from her interviews in the book that I was a bit distracted at times from the content. (And many of them I remember from when I heard them originally on the show.) But the clips had real meaning and they did build upon one another to make her point. As a professional interviewer, conversation is what she does. It is perfectly natural that much of her learning is coming from people that she is interviewing.

One of the points that I both appreciate about Tippett and slightly concerns me is that she views part of what she is doing and gaining insight into ‘spiritual technologies’. This term, ‘spiritual technologies’, I think is helpful but also significantly problematic. On the one hand, I get the point that we can learn these spiritual technologies across faith lines and it is a helpful way to think about cross religious dialogue. And I think it sort of fits with James KA Smith and others view of spiritual practices.

But spiritual technologies as a descriptor seems reductionist. Her point of talking about becoming wise is that we often are valuing the wrong things, which leads us to place emphasis in the wrong areas of life. By using the word technology, there is a problem with viewing spiritual practices and ideas as primarily about gaining mastery over the spiritual. I wish she had used another term, like the traditional ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘pathway’ or similar term that was focused less on mastery and tool building and more on internal development and process. We do not become wise, we work on the process of becoming wise. Wisdom is not something we confirm on ourselves. It is something that others confirm about us.

But I do appreciate the focus on wisdom. I think we should value wisdom. And many of the people she is interviewing genuinely appear to have gained real wisdom and understanding about life. The interview subjects are not necessarily powerful or well known (although many have some real influence). She confronts the importance of struggle in achieving wisdom. Her background as journalist and diplomat in Eastern Europe before and during the fall of the Berlin Wall give real insight into how struggle works. And how something that no one really predicts, can suddenly just happen.

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Takeaway: History is complicated. 

In my continuing quest to understand European history, I picked this up on sale from Audible a while back.

It is the first of a trilogy of books on the history of England. It is a fascinating mix of standard famous men (mostly kings) history with a fair amount of explanation about the living conditions of the standard inhabitant.

England was conquered early and many times. It is the mix of a variety of cultures. There is some very interesting linguistic history mixed in here especially around place names and political offices. It was not until near the end of this history that a king of England actually was a native english speaker (Henry IV around 1300).

Early England was violent and it had more than several despotic rulers that believed that God gave them their rule, so they needed to take advantage of everyone they could. And there were more than a few sincerely devoted kings as well, but life was not always much better for the people.

Demographics were interesting too. England under Roman rule was probably as high as 4 million people. After several rounds of invasion, the 1086 population was estimated to be down to around 2 million. But then grew to around 5 to 6 million by 1300 with a fairly stable government and economy. The Black death several times between 1348 and 1400 until the population was down to about 2.5 million. It wasn’t until around 1600 that the population grew to about 4 million. Smaller plagues and wars continued to happen, but there was not another significant population loss until (not in in this history) the 19th century started a significant migration.

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Summary: 19 Years after the setting of the final defeat of Voldemort, an older Harry Potter and the gang, and their children face a new challenge. 

If you are a Harry Potter fan and have not heard about the new book, you have been probably hiding on a desert island somewhere. There have been lots of reviews floating around and I am not going to write some great one that changes people’s perspective on the book.

I thought it was a solid effort, with clearly evident input from other writers. It is written in a play format (since it is a play.) That is easy enough to get used to. Maybe it was just me getting used to the idea of a new story, but as the play went on, it seemed to find a more traditional Harry Potter voice.

But there was a hint of fan-fiction feel to it. That is not all bad. Fan-fiction can be good. But there is usually just a hint of ‘not quite’ to the story. I can very much see why some have compared it to Rainbow Rowell’s book Carry On. Carry On is a fake fan fiction book that Rowell actually wrote but was initially just part of one of her character’s stories. It is about a fictional series that was clearly influenced by Harry Potter. It feels like the Cursed Child was influenced by a fake fan fiction book that was inspired by the actual Harry Potter and that is a bit odd.

The story primarily concerns Albus (Harry and Ginny Potter’s son) and his best friend Scorpius Malfoy. Albus is in Slytherin and does not get along with his father. When a forbidden time turner is recovered by Harry (head of magical law enforcement), Albus convinces Scorpius to help him steal it and go back and save Cedric.

That is already quite a bit of spoilers. This book has more action by the adults than most of the Harry Potter books. But that makes sense because it is a play and because the readers are really wanting to know what happened to the beloved characters more than their children.

I liked it more at the end than I did at the beginning. And I think I like it more a couple days after I finished it, than I did immediately after I finished. So maybe it is nostalgia that is clouding my brain, but I do think it is worth reading. I am just not sure it is worth running out to purchase. There will be lots of copies in used book stores in the next couple months. There are already 3683 reviews on Amazon and 33% of them are 1 and 2 stars. It really isn’t that bad.

I have one real complaint, but it is spoiler-ish. So stop reading if you don’t want to get any spoilers.

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I am reposting this 2010 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99.
When you read as much as I do every once in a while you need some palate cleansing. I am a huge fan of pickled ginger, which is always served with sushi and wasabi. Pickled ginger has great taste, but when you finish you do not have an aftertaste, you just have a mildly pleasant feeling in your mouth. The two Christopher Buckley novels I have read, No Way to Tread a First Lady and Supreme Court, are the pickled ginger for my mind.

I enjoy politics. I like watching the weekend political talk shows, although I rarely have time. I often listen to Shields and Brooks podcast from PBS news and the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. My favorite NPR show is Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, a radio equivalent of Christopher Buckley’s political satire. So when I had it up to here with memoirs and other books telling me how wonderful the authors were doing at processing what God has been telling them, I picked up some emergency Christopher Buckley. I am saving the rest of his novels for future need.

No Way to Treat A First Lady is a satirical novel about trying the first lady for killing her husband (the President).  She found him, yet again having an affair. This time the the dalliance was in the Lincoln Bedroom, while she was asleep down the hall. The next morning he is discovered dead in bed and the First Lady is suspected and tried for Presidential Assassination. Buckley does a fabulous job making a trial both boringly realistic and exciting to read about.

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Summary: Darcy has decided to take Georgie away so they can elope. But his father is accused of murder and yet again the two them must put aside their own desires out of duty.

Crowned and Dangerous is the tenth book in this cozy mystery series. Georgie is 35th in line to the throne in the late 1930s, put penniless. Darcy is the son of an Irish lord and just as penniless. The pair of them, while trying to survive, continue to solve mysteries and take care of problems for both the royal family and their friends. But they are getting a bit frustrated with propriety keeping them from getting married. So Darcy decides to whisk Georgie away to get married and worry about propriety later. As is normal in the series, a problem happens and they are prevented.

Darcy’s father is accused of murder, so Darcy goes away to support his emotionally distant and unlikable father. And because the situation looks grim, attempts to break things off with Georgie so that her (and the royal family) will not be associated with the crime. Georgie flutters around a bit before going to him.

Crowned and Dangerous corrects several of the problems that have been going on in the series for a while. Queenie, Georgie’s incompetent maid, is mostly out of the book and by the end seems to have mostly stopped being a punch line and allowed to be a real person. Georgie mostly stops worrying about Darcy’s past and whether he really loves her or not. There is not a lot of whining in the book.

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Summary: A returning missionary has to work through the problem of evil in light of the death of his whole team and what he previously understood as God’s clear direction and guidance.

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to the online magazine Christ and Pop Culture. Their private Facebook group is the best thing about Facebook right now. Marion Hill (an author and book blogger) is one of the active participants in the group and frequently talks about books he is reading. So, several books that are on my radar are directly a result of his advocacy.

The Sparrow is not a new book—it will be 20 years old next month—but I had not heard of it prior to Marion’s suggestion. The Sparrow is the story of a group of people, mostly Jesuit priests, who travel to the first new alien world discovered to understand the population and eventually evangelize it.

The story starts at the end. We know that Emilio Sandoz (one of the Jesuits who specialized in linguistics) was the only survivor of the trip. He was found by a team from a follow-up United Nations mission and sent back to Earth. Once the initial introduction to the story occurs, then we start at the beginning of Sandoz’s journey out of poverty through the priesthood. We see how God appears to have gathered together a team of people put at the right place and time to providentially be prepared to take on a first-contact mission.

Theodicy, or how a good God can permit evil, is the book’s main focus. It takes until the very end of the book to really get the story of what happened to the mission, how everyone else died, and why Sandoz was found in the status that he was found in. Sandoz, at the start of the book, is a completely broken man, physically, mentally, and spiritually. The telling of the story is in part about the care of the man who has been brutalized (in ways that are not completely unique to other missionaries in history.)

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I am reposting this very early Bookwi.se review from 2009 because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $1.99

It is hard not to compare this series of young adult fantasy books with Harry Potter.  Both Harry Potter and the Nicholas Flamel books concern magic, immortality, the epic struggle of good and evil and children that are powerful magicians, but grew up unaware of their power.

The first book, The Alchemyst (my review), barely started the series. Even at 400 pages, we only follow the two teens for two more in the first book.  The Magician is just under 500 pages and only gets us another 3 days.  But these books are not slow.  They follow two 15 year old twins that we discover in this book are, in fact, the twins of an old prophesy.

This is not a new theme for young adult books.  I think it is one of the older themes of young adult books, the discovery that you are someone that really is important.  There is a Steve Taylor song, “Hero”, that talks about a boys dream of becoming a hero.  As the boy ages in the song, the dream cracks, but does not die.  The hero is what most boys want to be (an probably most girls too.)

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