Book Reviews – Page 91

Take and Read: Spiritual Reading — An Annotated List by Eugene Peterson

September 28, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Eugene Peterson’s list of books that he has found helpful in developing his own spiritual life. Take and Read is a simple concept. Peterson said he looked at his shelves of books and listed the ones he thought helpful along with a short description of why the books were helpful. I love book lists … Read more

Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck

December 13, 2023September 25, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: Moving our psychological revulsion (based around food) to morality, ethics and people, fundamentally distorts our Christianity.

I appreciate Richard Beck’s outsider perspective on theology. Beck is a psychologist who writes theology. While he is not untrained in theology, that training is not formal, and it is not his primary academic area.

Beck approaches practical areas of theology in ways that many academic theologians do not. Previously, I read The Slavery of Death, which is probably the best book I have read about the power of sin and the practical understanding of how sin controls us.

In Unclean, Beck takes his understanding of psychology to help us as Christians understand how our faith becomes distorted when we allow the concept of revulsion (a natural feeling around unclean food) and apply it to people and/or ethics.

This book is full of insights into how we unconsciously avoid doing the work that we (as the church) are called to, by avoiding the messy people that are around us. What this book is not, is a simple prescription on how to change our own perception of those around us. Beck says that this is too personal of a problem for him to proscribe simple steps.

A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion by Gary Burge

September 24, 2015 by All Old Users

This is a textbook on Roman/Jewish culture at the time of Christ disguised as a novella. It follows the story of Tullus, a newly captured slave purchased at market by a powerful Roman centurion. Tullus adjusts to life in the centurion’s household and works his way into a trusted position of influence. Due to an … Read more

Simply Tuesday: Small Moment Living in a Fast Moving World by Emily Freeman

September 23, 2015 by All Old Users

We live in a world touting the maxim “œbigger (or more) is better”; bigger homes, bigger bank accounts, more clothes, bigger status, bigger dreams, more aspirations, etc. Tremendous pressure exists to achieve and produce big things. This mindset is evident in many of our spiritual lives as well. Many blog posts, books and some sermons actively encourage believers to accomplish big things for the Kingdom and for God. Emily Freeman‘s latest release, “œSimply Tuesday“ suggests the opposite.

Freeman suggests real life happens within the small moments of the everyday. An ordinary day, like Tuesday can, and often does, contain the moments worth holding on to. We need to be reminded we weren’t called or made to do it all”¦just our part. “œThe soul and the schedule don’t follow the same rules”.

Freeman’s work runs counter to the current culture we’re experiencing of “œmore”. Consider a sampling of chapter titles from “œSimply Tuesday”: Stairwells & Stages: Learning to Receive the Gift of Obscurity, Community & Competition: Finding Safe Places to Feel Insecure, Children & Grown-Ups: An Invitation to Move Downward with Gladness. The author reminds her audience of the beauty in living small, ordinary lives and illustrates the life of Christ as an example. Ministry happens in the small moments too.

Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd

September 9, 2015 by All Old Users

Reposting this 2013 review because the Kindle Edition is free In 1989 Greg Boyd was teaching Christian apologetics at Bethel University. He hadn’t discussed his Christian faith with his father much, if at all, since he’d last tried years before when he was in his late teens and recently converted. So he decided to try … Read more

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

September 7, 2015 by All Old Users

Summary: “œLydia is dead. But they don’t know that yet.” As the Lee family sits down for breakfast one morning in their small Ohio town, they learn their teenage daughter is dead. Was it suicide? An accident? Or did the neighbor boy have something to do with it? Celeste Ng’s debut novel, “œEverything I Never … Read more

Young Adult Dystopian Fiction Avoids the Big Issues

September 4, 2015 by All Old Users

The young adult dystopian genre has, in recent years, reached far beyond its eponymous target audience and found fertile ground in the imaginations of adults and children alike. With the expansion of the YA genre into film, it has only become more popular. This stems from a number of factors from authors being unconstrained by … Read more

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

September 3, 2015 by All Old Users

Reposting this 2012 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.25. There is a sale of University of Chicago Press books including books by Friedman, Tocqueville, Tillich and more. There is not an announcement that I have seen, but this is the list of U of C Press books sorted by price. Summary: One of the most important books in … Read more

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

December 29, 2024September 3, 2015 by Adam Shields

Takeaway: I wish more people read Reinhold Niebuhr. He has much to say both about politics and international relations, and also about the limits of security and state power.

The Irony of American History is oddly relevant. It was written in 1952 and based on two lectures given earlier than that. The introduction calls it the most important book on American foreign policy ever written. That is a bit too strong, but still Niebuhr understands in a way that very few do, the weaknesses of all human forms of government, while still being hopeful that government can serve the people.

Niebuhr, with proper use of irony, speaks of the issues of the 1950s in similar terms to many others in talking about the global reach of US power. It is almost funny that Niebuhr quotes US policy makers that think that the Asians should be more grateful to the US (at the time it was Korea, soon to be Vietnam) for our intervention to their affairs. But it is very similar to the way that some in the Bush administration thought we would be received in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The narrator on the audiobook is a bit pretentious sounding and I think that detracts from what Niebuhr is trying to say. But in general Niebuhr traces the thought patterns of a Jeffersonian (roughly secular) and a Puritan (certainly Christian) that both view the United States as a fundamentally separate place. The language of the Puritans is a “City on a Hill” and “called out by God for a specific purpose”. But the Jeffersonian ideals are not much different. Jefferson was secular in his reasoning, but thought that the separateness of the geography and the rightness of our political will and life also left us with a specific calling and purpose that in the end was not much different from the calling and ideals of the Puritans.

The Nature of the Beast: Chief Inspector Gamache #11 by Louise Penny

September 2, 2015 by Adam Shields

Summary: A retired Inspector Gamache continues to need to respond to the deaths around him in Three Pines.

Popular murder mystery series always have the problem of very high rates of murder around the protagonist. It is one reason that they tend to be police officers of big cities in order to give some credibility to the number of murders.

But in the Inspector Gamache series, the protagonist has retired to a town that is so small that it is not even on any map, has a dirt road to get into it and no high speed internet access. About half of the books so far have been focused on local murders and the reader just has to wonder about the character of the town. In this book we find that the village has expanded to become large enough that it has a community theater with a dedicated theater space.

My strained credibility still enjoys the series. Gamache is a great lead and there are many characters around him that are just as enagaging.

In this case a young imaginative boy who is known for his wild tales goes missing and his body is eventually found. This leads to a case that gets bigger and bigger and eventually includes international affairs and weapons deals and a serial killer as a side theme.