Blogger Review Books

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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Takeaway: Shared Ministry (not single head pastor) is both the biblical model and a more healthy form of leadership.

Embracing Shared Ministry: Power and Status in the Early Church and Why It Matters Today is a long title.  But it is very descriptive of both the style and point of the book.

Embracing Shared Ministry has three parts.  The first part is background on Roman culture and society.  The main point is that Roman culture was very focused on status and honor.  It was not a mobile culture, people that were born low status, stayed low status.  People that were born high status mostly stayed high status.  And not completely unlike today a very small portion of the society controlled a very large portion of the wealth.

In today’s culture, efficiency and wealth creation are highly valued.  But in Roman culture it was honor.  Government was small and rich individuals donated much of the infrastructure and entertainment to the cities (aqueducts, fountains, stadiums, festivals, etc) not to generate common good, but to produce honor.  If you gave away the most stuff to the city, you had the highest honor.  And nothing was done anonymously, everything had long inscriptions giving all of the titles and honors of the one that donated it.

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Takeaway: The strength and weakness of Evangelicalism as a movement is its attachment to culture and it flexibility around authority.

Evangelicalism is my tradition.  I grew up Baptist, often going with a friend to an Evangelical Free Church youth group.  I participated occasionally in Young Life.  I went to Wheaton College and I now attend a non-denominational mega-church.  I am solidly Evangelical.

Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism is a history of modern Evangelicalism. And like hearing about your family as an adult, you hear things you thought you knew about, but from a different perspective than what you thought you understood as a child.

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Takeaway: Power is too important for us as Christians to not think deeply about.

This has been a hard review for me to write.  I finished Playing God nearly three weeks ago now, but have been unable to bring myself to write up the review.

This is an important book, whether you agree with the basic thesis or not.  Power is part of the order of the world.  Some have more power than others, some are given it easily and others struggle with it.  Some use their power wisely and others use it to abuse.  But we all have power.

Andy Crouch suggests that the highest power is creative power.  And the best use of power is creating in a way that empowers others.  This is power in God’s image.  He created us and through that creation gave us the ability use our own power.

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Reposting the review of The Sword of Six Worlds because the the kindle edition is on sale for $2.99

Summary: A girl discovers she is the protector (Paladin) of Earth and other worlds need her to save them.

Hello, my name is Adam and I like to read children’s and young adult literature.  (Hi Adam).

Lots of adults read children’s books.  I saw one number that suggested nearly 80% of children’s and young adult books were purchased by adults. (Of course it is the adults that have most of the money, so this is not incredibly surprising.)

Most adults that I know that like reading kids books have told me that they read because they still love the classic kids books that they read as children.

The Chronicles of Narnia are probably the most frequently cited books that sparked a desire for kids to become readers. (Followed and maybe now surpassed by Harry Potter).

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Bookwi.se has also reviewed the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo which is occasionally incorrectly linked to the book Silence by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Takeaway: Silence as an organizing principle can be made to do almost anything the author wants.

Originally much of the content of this book was developed for Gifford Lectures.  I don’t know if the organizational problems of the book can be blamed on that, because there are many books that were originally based on lectures that are very good.

It isn’t that Silence: A Christian History is bad.  There are many fascinating parts of the books.  The problem is that much of it is only marginally connected to Silence.

This book includes everything from discussions of Gnostic heresies to the silence of Jesus before Pilate to silent monks to the silence of those hiding their faith to the silence of those that do not reveal sin like clergy child abuse or slavery or shameful acts.

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Takeaway: The Mystery of God is a real part of historical Christian Theology.  But it is not useful as a way to explain away all the difficult parts of the bible or theology.

As I have been reading about the Trinity over the past year or so, I have run across the idea of the mystery of God as an explanation of difficult parts of theology.  It often feels more like, “I don’t want to fully deal with this, so I will call it a mystery of God.”  At the same time I have been reading introductions to Catholic theology and a few books on the importance of beauty; in both areas there is a full embracing of the need for mystery, not just to explain difficult areas of theology, but to allow for the bigness, uniqueness and unpredictable ways of God.

So I accepted a review copy of the Mystery of God hoping it would touch on more of the later and less of the former.

Boyer and Hall exceeded my expectations.  The first part of the book is historical theology.  Hall and Boyer walk the reader through a variety of Christian theologians, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Luther and others to illustrate that throughout Christian history the concept of God as unknowable has always been present.

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