Blogger Review Books

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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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.
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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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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In Money, Steve Forbes provides a brief history on the development of money and monetary systems, and then spends a lot of time explaining his opinion about the recessions in the 2000s””its causes, consequences, and fixes. It should be no surprise that Forbes argues that loose money and over-regulation of the financial markets–not the opposite–are what caused our recent financial difficulties, and he traces the source of trouble to the decoupling of the dollar from a gold standard.

In the period since the Federal Reserve began meddling with the economy (1913) and the U.S. abandoned the gold standard (1973), government (and individual) debt has exploded, the purchasing power of the dollar has plummeted, and our economy has been subjected to a roller coaster ride of booms and busts, including the recent recession in the 2000s. To remedy our economic sickness and usher in an era of growth and stability, Forbes argues, we should return to a sound monetary system based on a gold standard.

Forbes spends a lot of time explaining that as a medium of exchange money has no inherent value; its purpose is to serve as a measurement of the value of other things. The government has (or should have, rather) an interest in setting and maintaining a consistent means of measuring value. Forbes writes, “œJust as we need to be sure of the number of inches in a foot””or the minutes in an hour””people in the economy must be certain that their money is an accurate measure of worth. When the value of money fluctuates, as it so often does today, it produces uncertainty in addition to unnatural and often destructive marketplace behavior””artificial booms and busts that breed malignant economic and social consequences.”

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