Book Reviews

Summary: A theologian and scholar walks us through CS Lewis’ Narnia.

The Narnia books, and maybe Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity, are all that many know of CS Lewis. I am far from a Lewis scholar, but I have read over 20 books by or about Lewis over the last three or so years. I continue to gain insight into Lewis as I read different perspectives.

Rowan Williams, in his 2011 Holy Week lectures, talked about Lewis and Narnia and how both can speak to our Christian lives. This book is the result of those lectures (similar to his later book, Being Christian, that I read earlier this year and his book on Paul.)

I did not realize until I was done that this was based on a series of lectures. This did not feel like a series of lectures but like a planned book.

What I most appreciated about this book was its generous nature. Williams illustrated well what it means to read to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Especially in the chapter about Narnia’s critics, but also throughout the book, Williams wants to make sure we are not unfair to Lewis and his time or what Lewis was attempting.

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Summary: An overview of many of the sacred texts of world religions.

After my last positive experience with a Great Courses audiobook, I picked up several more when they were on sale last month.  The first of those that I have listened to is Sacred Texts of the World by Grant Hardy.

As Professor Hardy notes in the opening, this is an introduction. As someone that know a good bit about Christian scriptures, I had some quibbles with his presentation of Christian scriptures. But if I can assume that the rest of the presentations were of roughly similar quality, then I think this was probably fairly accurate.

Part of being educated about the world is being educated about the world’s religions. This is not primarily about evangelism, although I think it is a good idea to know about for evangelism reasons. Primarily this is about understanding additional context to international news.

My overwhelming feeling is how much the ‘Protestant Bias’ has effected the way we think about other world religious scriptures. As Hardy presents it, Protestant Bias comes into play because so many of the early scholars of world religions were Protestants that assumed that other world religious scriptures acted like the Christian bible (and they often do not.)

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Summary: A secret service agent wakes up in the woods outside of small town where nothing seems quite right.

The Wayward Pines trilogy hit the world a few years ago and many people I know recommended it. Last year Fox turned it into a TV show. And because I signed up for Kindle Unlimited a couple weeks ago, I decided to pick it up since the audiobook is part of the subscription. I thought I had picked up enough hints from reviews and discussion that I knew what was coming. But I was just enough wrong about the story to be surprised while thinking the big reveal was just ahead.

As I said in my review of Countdown City, reading these two books back to back has left a bit of strange taste in my mouth. For Wayward Pines, it is more about the violence than anything else. The creepiness and fear of madness that runs throughout the book totally makes sense. The flashbacks to torture in the Iraq war and in the current timeline just felt over the top. It is not that they do not fit in the story as written. It is more that I did not want to read (or listen in this case) to them. (There is enough horror in the world right now for me to want to intentionally ingest more.)

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Summary: The end of the world is coming soon, but there are still cases to solve and people to help.

Maybe it is just too easy to envision the end of the world, but I am having a hard time reading the apocalyptic and dystopian fiction lately. It has been a steady part of my book diet for years. But reading Countdown City and Wayward Pines back to back, during political convention season, was probably a bad idea.

Countdown City is true apocalyptic fiction. Hank Palace is a former police detective. At the end of the The Last Policeman he gave up his job and now he is ‘working’ as a private detective. The problem is that the world is going to be ending in a few months and society is falling apart. (A giant asteroid is coming.)

What is interesting about the trilogy is Detective Palace’s desire to solve the crime in the face of impending doom. What is maddening about this book (and clearly it is intentional) is Palace’s focus on the crime as a tactic to avoid reality. Palace is not getting paid. He is doing the impossible to find a missing man when the whole world has gone missing and at a time when society and infrastructure is crumbling. The minor issues of pay and preparation for the end of the world all end up in the back seat. The constant question from others, ‘why are you doing this?’ annoys both Detective Palace and the reader.

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Summary: A ghost story about the nature of good and evil.

Charles Williams was one of the Inklings, the famous literary group that included CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Charles Williams books have been picked up by Open Media, an ebook publisher that has focused on 20th century literary fiction that is out of print. Open Media has a daily sale with five sale books and a free public domain books. Over the past couple months I have picked up two of Charles Williams’ books for $1.99. All Hallow’s Eve is the first I have read (and the last book he wrote.)

When I read review of Charles Williams’ books they are most often described as odd or strange. Williams was interested in the supernatural. While I would not consider All Hallow’s Eve all that odd of a book, it is a ghost story. Which I think is an odd choice for Christian fiction. Charles Williams was not writing ‘Christian’ fiction. The category did not really exist in the 1930-1940s when he was writing. He was writing fiction and he was a Christian. His faith is evident in the story, but it is not explicit like Lewis’ fiction but more a part of the worldview of the author like Tolkien’s fiction was.

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Summary: Brief exploration of the Apostles’ Creed by a significant 20th century Catholic theologian.

I have been interested in von Balthasar for a while. He is a significant trinitarian theologian of the mid 20th century and a good friend of the reformed theologian Karl Barth. I started reading Stephen Long’s book Saving Karl Barth, which is a joint biography of Barth and von Balthasar’s friendship. But I realized I didn’t know enough about von Balthasar’s theology. So I set it aside.

Credo is the first of von Balthasar’s books I have finished. I also have his book Prayer, which I started but have not finished. The book prayer has been praised by Eugene Peterson and a number of others as being one of the best books on prayer written.

Credo was not written as a book. But is a compilation of church newsletters articles about the Apostles’ Creed written in the year before his death. As a book it is very short. The introduction is a third of the book.

I did not grow up with Creeds. They are late additions to my faith. But I have been convinced that the creeds are important. Earlier this year I talked my small group into doing a video about the Apostles’ Creed. The one we did was a shortened form of a 12 hour (way too long) documentary. But at 2 hours it had such short clips and bounced from talking head to talking head so quickly, it was hard to get that much out of it.

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