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

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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.

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Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd

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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

Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan

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Crazy DangerousSummary: A pastor’s kid is thrust into something bigger than he could imagine.

Andrew Klavan is a big deal in the thriller world.  He has had two books made into movies and written the screen plays for two more.  He has won 4 Edgar Awards (the biggest mystery award) and written more than a total of 28 books.

Over the past couple years he has been transitioning to writing books for a Christian markets, primarily young adult books.

After I read and reviewed the very good Homelanders series, I picked up this book to review.  It was released in May but I just got around to reading it over the weekend.

If you were a fan of the Homelanders series, you will like this.  It has a similar feel.

Sam Hopkins is a pastor’s kid in a small town.  He would like to be known for something other than being his father’s son.  He gets involved with some friends that are clearly criminals before realizing that he has to break away from them.

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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely People by Glenn Packiam

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Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely PeopleTakeaway: Scripture needs to be retold, so we can hear it again for the first time and be changed.

There are lots of ways to study scripture.  But two ways have been bouncing around in my head as being particularly important for me.  One is the serious academic study of a text, long or short.  Investigation into what the language researchers say about it, what the cultural anthropologists know about the culture it was written in, what the comparative literature people know about other texts that might have been written in a similar time or culture, what the historians that can talk about how that passage has been read and interpreted over time, etc.  I think that type of reading and study of scripture is very important.  I do not do enough research into scripture like that.  (The Lost World of Genesis One is one of the recent books I have read that is along those lines.)

But the second type of scripture work is illustrated quite well by this book.  The author does a lot of the type of study that is part of the first type of study, but the focus is not the study, but the retelling. The author’s research is to understand the text deeply, so that she or he can tell others about the text in a way that is modern and appropriate for the culture and people that are hearing it.  And even more important, to use the “Theological Imagination” (as Eugene Peterson puts it) to help those of us that have heard the scripture before rediscover it in new ways.  Some Christians look down on this type of work, but it is the essential work of teaching.  Teaching takes an idea and learns to communicate it in a way that is understood, and hopefully can be acted upon.

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