Blogger Review Books

These books have been provided free for review. The review is mine and has not been influenced by

The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?

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The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?

Takeaway: Anxiety is real emotion. Allow God to use it to help you and do not allow it to control you.

I have followed Rhett Smith on twitter for several years as moved to Texas and started a counseling practice.  I have read his blog as he thoughtfully talked about issues of technology, theology, marriage and faith.

I was not surprised when Moody approached him about writing a book.  I knew it would be good and well worth reading.

But when I heard it would be about anxiety, I thought it would be a good book for me to pass on to friends and family.  Because I have a particular understanding of anxiety.  Anxiety is rooted in fear, fear is something that as Christians we should not have.  Therefore the best thing to do with anxiety is to reject it as sin.

Thankfully, that is not the thesis of this book. Autobiographically, Rhett Smith works through how he dealt with fear and anxiety through the early loss of his mother (and much of his extended family to cancer), his problems with stuttering, school and the normal anxiety of growing up, finding a career, and relationships.

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America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation by Grant Wacker

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Summary: An evaluation of Billy Graham’s place in history.

I have been reluctant to read biographies of living people recently. Sometimes it just feels like we need more distance to be really able to understand  a person’s contributions, and when that person is beloved, their weaknesses as well.

So I was not planning on reading America’s Pastor. I have read Billy Graham’s own, way too long and detailed without being all that interesting autobiography(-ish), Just As I Am. And I figured that was probably enough for the next decade or so. But after two pretty positive reviews by Mark Noll and Ted Olsen and then the same day being offered a review copy, I decided to pick it up.

And I am glad I did. America’s Pastor is not a biography. There is a fairly short overview of Graham’s life at the beginning, but the rest of the book is chapters focused on different aspects of Graham’s work, image or legacy. The eight chapters are: Preacher, Icon, Southerner, Entrepreneur, Architect, Pilgrim, Pastor and Patriarch.

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It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell

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The tough part about reviewing a memoir is not to critique the author’s story but to review how they told it. A memoir is an account from a real person so a different set of eyes is needed compared to reviewing fiction. Most of the reviews I have read of Andie Mitchell’s It Was Me All Along treated this work as fiction. Many amateur reviewers commented on the choices Mitchell made much as they would when reading a fictional piece. I understand how easy it is to do so but I feel that’s unfair to the author and I’ll strive to avoid the same path others have chosen in their reviews.

Andie Mitchell is the blogger for Can You Stay for Dinner.  Mitchell has chronicled her weight loss story and offers helpful advice and recipes for her online audience who are pursuing a healthier lifestyle. It Was Me All Along is a more in depth account of the obesity which has plagued Mitchell most of her life, her journey to lose well over 100 pounds and learning to develop a healthy relationship with food. Mitchell’s story is a good one. I appreciate her story is one of striving to make healthy decisions, avoiding fad diets, and using tried and true methods such as healthy portions and exercise to achieve her goals. It many ways, primarily on her blog, Mitchell is a great example of how the average person can achieve and sustain weight loss with a healthy mindset.

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Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner

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Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith CrisisTakeaway:  Loneliness is often a spiritual disease, which is a profound insight for a country that has more people living by themselves than ever before.

I have been sitting on this book for over a week.  Normally I write my reviews almost immediately after I finish the book, read through them a couple of times and publish them.  But I am not sure how to review this book (and officially the book did not release until today).  It is not because I didn’t like it.  I really did like it.

It is more because I am not sure how to describe the book.  This is not a straight forward memoir, or standard prose Christian Living book.  Parts of it are more like diary entries.  There are chapters that are just a single quote.  It is a book intended to take a while to work your way through.  It is the taking the reader through the arc of pain and spiritual loneliness that the author went through.

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You Don’t Understand the Bible Because You Are Christian by Richard Gist

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Summary: We as modern Christians miss a number of nuances of scripture because we do not understand ancient Hebrew culture.

The title of this book is intriguing. I rarely accept review copies any more because I just prefer picking my own books and the prospect of a free book is not all that enticing. But I accepted a review copy of this book by the author after he emailed me.

The overall point of the book is important and I think useful. There are a number of things about scripture and the Christian faith that we miss because the bible was not written directly to us as 21st century Americans. It was written to people of a particular time and place (although that time and place varied throughout scripture). And while we can trust that the message of scripture is not completely lost to us as 21st century Christians, because of the power of the Holy Spirit, the tradition of the church and research by academics, there is real value in exploring ancient culture.

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The Ancient Path: Old Lessons from the Church Fathers for a New Life Today by John Michael Talbot with Mike Aquilina

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Summary: John Michael Talbot’s memoir-ish look at how the Early Church Fathers changed his faith.

I grew up Evangelical, I went to an Evangelical College and seminary. But honestly other than a couple of songs I don’t really know anything about John Michael Talbot. I have always kind of thought of him as similar to Michael Card. They both are known for writing theologically sophisticated Christian music that I don’t really listen to. This book has made me re-think my previous uninformed opinion.

The Ancient Path is half memoir and half exploration of the early Church Fathers. I really was assuming that this would be more exploration of the church father’s writing, but the memoir parts were an unexpected help.

John Michael Talbot dropped out of school at 15 and was in a band with his brother. After an early marriage and a conversion to Christianity through the Jesus Movement, Talbot became an early CCM musician. But his marriage still fell apart. He started meeting with a Franciscan spiritual director and eventually, in large part through his studying of the Early Church Fathers Talbot converted to Catholicism and later founded a lay monastic community that invited both married and single Catholics and other Christians to live and serve in community.

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Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, for the World by Stephen Nichols

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Reposting this review because the publisher has this as well as three others from the series on sale this week for $1.99. The two other books from the same series on Francis Schaeffer and BB Warfield are also on sale.
Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, for the World Summary: Best short introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology I have read.

Bonhoeffer is arguably one of the most important theologians of the 20th century. It is not just his writing that has made him important, but his life and death and how his theology and Christian understanding was lived out.

I have read a number of books by and about Bonhoeffer. And I think one of the biggest problems with Bonhoeffer studies is the attempts to make Bonhoeffer reflect the author’s ideals. This was clearly a problems in the late 20th century as many liberal scholars attempted to claim Bonhoeffer as a late 20th century liberal. And over the past decade some Evangelicals have essentially done a similar thing by trying to make Bonhoeffer into a 21st Century American Evangelical.

But Stephen Nichols, while clearly writing for a primarily Evangelical audience, manages to write for an Evangelical audience while allowing Bonhoeffer to be a early 20th century German.

Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life is not a biography (although there are a number of biographical details included in the book), instead it is an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology and work.

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Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill

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Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and HomosexualityTakeaway: Sometimes not having something really allows you to look and understand.

One of the things I remember from a grad class about understanding diversity is that often people do not focus on their identity as “_____” until they are a minority in that area.  So people often do not think about their maleness, until they are in a class of all women.  They do not think about their Appalachia roots until they live in New York City.

Wesley Hill has a better understanding of the purpose and use of sex from a Christian perspective than most Christian books on sex or marriage that I have read.  I think it is in part because of his struggle to understand sexuality as a consciously gay (and celibate) Evangelical.

There are three things that this book really gets right.  One it is very consciously personal.  About half of the book recounts Hill’s struggle to understand his sexuality and his decision about why he feels that the only way he can be authentically Christian and still true to himself is to be celibate.  The second thing that he gets right is that he does not keep it personal.  He tracks two others Christians that also were both gay and celibate (Henri Nouwen and Gerald Manley Hopkins).  Hill is still young, as a 20 something he does not have the life experience to discuss celibacy as a long term lifestyle and I think he wisely brings in the experience of two now deceased men.  The picture of these men is not all that pretty, they lived tortured and lonely lives, but that is also part of what Hill will live as well if he continues to choose a celibate life.  The third thing that I really appreciate is a view of sexuality as something that is not a ‘right’.  And he views all of life as a possible means of teaching us to be like Christ.  This connectedness of life to Christ is important to how he understands God.  God is not a cosmic killjoy that says he can’t have sex out of meanness, but instead God has created a world that is fallen and that God uses the fallenness to mold us into the people he (God) wants us to be.

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The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians by Scott Paeth

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Summary: A short book that felt longer than it was because it felt like a book report.

I like the idea of introduction books. Short books that are able to give an introduction to an idea or a person can be very helpful, but also very hard to write.

I have read a number both the Armchair Theologian books and the Oxford Very Short Introduction Series. They are a very mixed bag. The best of the Armchair Theologian series that I have read is the book on Aquinas by Timothy Mark Renick.

This book by Scott Paeth is definitely on the weaker side. I am still glad I read it because I did not know much about the biography or context of the Niebuhr brothers. Their context and history is important to their writing. I have read at least one book by each of the brothers. So I was not coming into the book blind.

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