Blogger Review Books

Summary: Highly recommended book about biblical translations.

I do not have a lot of patience for bible version arguments.  But we continue to see large and divisive fights over English translations of scripture.

I think one of the biggest reasons for those arguments is the wealth of options that we have.  No other language has literally scores of options. There have been 19 new translations or major revisions of English language bibles just since 2000 (and 80 complete translations in the last century).  As far as I know, no other language has even 19 different translations.

The biggest fight in the English Bible translation world is between ‘word for word’ or literal bibles (like ESV or NASB) and ‘dynamic equivalence translations (like NIV or NLT) and paraphrase versions (like The Message).

Brunn’s primary purpose is to show that the way that the argument is usually framed is not honest to the reality of biblical translation.  One of the strengths of the book is that Brunn has been a bible translator for Wycliffe and tries to focus primarily on real examples and not just theory of translation.

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Summary: Brief introduction to the Catholic perspective on Saints (with a little bit about Angels).

Over the past couple years I have tried to read a book a month that is intentionally outside of my tradition to expand my understanding of Christianity and to better understand the perspectives of other traditions.

Scott Hahn has been the author of several of the books I have read about Catholicism.  I picked this book up from NetGalley to review and misremembered the publication date.  So it will not be out for another six weeks yet.

This is a very brief book, I read almost all of it in about 2 hours.  The first couple chapters are a brief explanation of the role of saints in Catholic theology.  This is an expansion of a similar explanation in Hahn’s Signs of Life: 40 Catholic Customs and their Biblical Origins.  But I actually think that original shorter explanation was better.

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Timothy Howard was an executive at Fannie Mae through the 90s and into the 2000s, leaving just a few years before the big crash of 2008 when the government bailed out the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE). This book is an incredibly detailed inside-view of the secondary mortgage market and the rise and fall of the GSEs in the modern economy.

Most people know Fannie Mae from the 2008 mortgage crisis where the government stepped in and bailed them out, but it’s been around in various forms since the New Deal. Fannie Mae does not issue loans to consumers directly; rather, they are (still) a major player in the “œsecondary mortgage market”””that is, they purchase existing loans from the banks that originally lend the money out. This is fantastic for the banks: when they sell their loan on the secondary market, they immediately earn their profit (interest), their risk disappears (since they are no longer servicing the loan and thus aren’t on the hook in case of a default), and they have their capital back to loan out again.

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There is a lot of hidden wisdom in Tolkien’s writings, seldom explicit (he hated allegory) but usually simple and always profound. His stories are famous for being “Catholic” without being religious, per se. The worlds and plots he crafted are simply soaked in his worldview; they grew out of it organically. This is a good thing.

“Hobbit Lessons” attempts to mine and condense Tolkien’s wisdom found in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Unfortunately, most of the insights and lessons seemed strained, forced and trite–even banal at times. I felt like one could easily extrapolate the same ideas from many other works of fiction with little editing. Obviously, that is impossible to avoid entirely (Solomon was right that there is nothing new under the sun), but this book did so to the point where the insights hardly felt uniquely tied to the source material. In the places where the analysis and application were the strongest, I had encountered them elsewhere. Methinks publishing the book made good business sense due to the concurrent films, but I found it underwhelming.

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Summary: A jungle of confused polemics.

I’m not exactly sure who the author is trying to convince in this short book. She claims to want to argue that sex work (a broad category that covers prostitution, stripping, pornography, and anything else in the skin trade) is a perfectly legitimate moral activity. Unfortunately, most of the time she simply assumes what she’s trying to prove and then moves on to secondary arguments that simply aren’t controversial if the reader grants her premises.

Of course the solution to social discrimination and inconsistent enforcement of the laws against prostitutes would be legalization–that is, assuming sex work is truly just like any other banal activity, economic or otherwise, such as nursing nanny work, hair braiding or babysitting. She makes these comparisons often, yet there’s little content here to actually explain why sex work isn’t immoral, let alone why it shouldn’t be treated like any other economic act–apart from pragmatic soundbites unlikely to gain a hearing with any but those who already share her worldview.

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Summary: Spiritual growth is not accidental, it is intentional and it needs to be intentional as part of a community.

The Good and Beautiful Community is the last book in a trilogy of books that started with The Good and Beautiful God and The Good and Beautiful Life.  These books together are intended to be a full year group study on discipleship.  Starting with God, then moving to individual character and concluding with community.  I read Good and Beautiful God nearly 2 years ago and have always intended to read the rest of the series.  Christianaudio.com offered me a copy of Good and Beautiful Community for review and I snatched it up.

The basic structure of each of these book is to talk about the false narratives that we as Christians tend to have around various issues.  This third book seemed a bit more disjointed than the first, but I think it is partially the nature of community.  Community is a broad topic and Smith covers the ways that community needs to come together to serve, reconcile, worship, disciple.  These topics are not always joined together in people’s minds, but for the purposes of this book, they are all primarily about the church, not the individual.

This is the fourth book of Smith’s I have read and each of them really draw me back to focusing on discipleship and spiritual growth.  I tend to enjoy discussion (and arguing in my head) issues of theology and church practice, but Smith rightly brings the focus back to growth.  If by our discussions and reading and coming together we are not moving toward greater love for God and his people, then our discussions or reading or gatherings may not be beneficial.

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