The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs

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Takeaway: English Christianity has been formed, whether you know it or not, by the Book of Common Prayer.

I grew up Baptist. And I currently attend a non-denominational megachurch. But as I have grown in my understanding of the broader Christian Church and its history, I have been intentionally trying to read more about theology and practice outside of my church community.

The Book of Common Prayer is one of those theological objects that I want to understand, but without a guide it is largely a mystery. Alan Jacobs revealed a part of the puzzle in The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. This is not a book on how to use the BCP, but a history of how it was developed, changed and how how attitudes toward it changed over time.

Alan Jacobs is an excellent writer and his history of the book is both of solid history and readable.

To me, what is most interesting about story of the BCP, is how it was intended as a tool of unity but from the very beginning that was thwarted. Cranmer, who compiled the BCP thought that a single prayer book with a single service was important both theologically and politically to the unity of the Church in England.  This was not a simple expedient or politically motivated conscription of Christianity but a different world view on how church and state should relate.

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Year Zero: A Novel by Rob Reid

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Year Zero: A Novel by Rob Reid Summary: The universe is listening and may destroy the Earth as a result.

I am a fan of the geek novel.  Because I am a wanna-be geek.  Not an actual geek, but in another life I would like to think I might actually be able to be a real live geek.  (Probably not, but that is another story.)

Year Zero is a geek novel of the best sort.  It is science fiction, involves aliens, has a geeky set up (copyright law), lots of cultural references and is still readable and enjoyable for the general public.

The basic story of the book is that the rest of the universe is in love with Earth’s music.  Starting in 1977 with the interception of the theme song from Welcome Back Kotter, literally billions of aliens have died of joy listening to Earth’s music.

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Malala Yousafzai

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This is outside of my normal posts, but after having watched parts of this several times today I thought I would share. Below is a 3 part interview that Jon Stewart did with Malala Yousafzai, a 16 year old Pakistani girl.  She is an advocate of education and has a new book out.  She first gained … Read more

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions by Rachel Held Evans

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I am reposting this review from 2010 because Evolving in Monkey Town is on sale for $2.99 on Kindle.

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions by Rachel Held EvansSummary: Coming of age in faith as well as years.

I picked Evolving in Monkey Town on the recommendation of John Armstrong.  It is a clever title.  Rachel Held Evans grew up and went to college in Dayton, TN, the home of the Scopes Monkey trial.  The book traces Rachel Held Evans as she is taught to be certain of her faith but eventually begins to question both her faith and God.

In many ways this is a simple book, it is the story of faith growing up from learned from others to owned by the author.  In other ways this is a much deeper book.  The fundamental questions that starts Evan’s questioning is the death of a Muslim woman.  Does God really condemn people that have not ever heard the Gospel to Hell/  This is a question that David Platt explicitly answered in Radical (my review).  Platt’s answer was one of my biggest frustrations with his book, although the practical working out of the results of my answer are not that much different than Platt.  Evan’s answer, on the other hand, doesn’t really seem to get around the answering the question.  Or rather, by the end she re-frames the question.  Although I agree with her answer more, the practical working out of her answer is less satisfying than Platt’s.  I guess I am frustrated both ways.

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And God Said “Billy!” by Frank Schaeffer

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And God Said, Summary: A man leaves his family and heads to Hollywood to direct a film that God told him to direct.

Frank Schaeffer is an acquired taste.  I have mostly enjoyed the three books of his that I have read.  But he has a lot of anger.  And some of it is directed toward valid issues.  Some of it is over the top.

Frank Schaeffer is the only son and youngest child of Edith and Francis Schaeffer.  He grew up at L’aBri, a retreat center in Switzerland that was focused on reaching out to youth.  For a while Frank was one of the best partners in publicizing his father and mother’s work.

But after working to help organize the anti-abortion movement and helping give fuel to new religious right, Frank started working as a Hollywood director and eventually left the Evangelical world, became Eastern Orthodox and has become primarily known as a writer.

After primarily writing non-fiction recently, ‘And God Said, Billy!’ is his first novel since 2006.  The end result is a conversion story of sorts.

We meet Billy after he has been in Hollywood for five years.  Billy Graham (his mother named him after the evangelist in honor of her becoming a Christian at one of his rallies) left his wife and daughter because he felt a call from God to direct a movie about the book of Revelations.

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Amazon Matchmaker

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We found these audio companions for your Kindle booksYesterday evening Amazon announced their Amazon Matchmaker program. (h/t Goodereader and Gospel ebooks).

Amazon Matchmaker is a single location for Kindle books in your library that have Audible books that are matched through the whispersync program (where you can move back and forth seamlessly from audiobook to kindle book.)

I really like the concept of the whispersync.  I love audiobooks and as long as the price is not much more, I am willing to purchase both for the ease of being able to move between the kindle book and audiobook. (Plus I prefer to re-read a book in a different format.  So if I read first on kindle, I like to re-read on audio or vice versa.)

This is the first time Amazon has had all of the whispersync enabled books from your library in a single place.  I have tried to get this info several times previously.  When I asked Audible customer support they can told me what books that I already own on audiobook that have a kindle option.  But they can’t tell me what kindle books that I own have an Audiobook option.  And from Amazon’s side, they have told me that all I can do is go through my kindle books one by one from the Manage My Kindle page and look to see which one has the whispersync option.

So the fact that this is a one stop look is great news.  But the implementation is awful. At least it is awful for those of us Kindle users that have large libraries.  I have a large kindle book library (around 3500 kindle books and nearly 700 audiobook.)

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The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

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The Conscience of a Liberal ReviewTakeaway: Mix of interesting and important questions with a handful of wild unsupported conspiracies.

I picked up The Conscience of a Liberal on audiobook on a whim from the library.  I knew from the description that it has a discussion of racial politics after the civil rights era and I thought it might be a good follow up to Mark Noll’s God and Race in American Politics.

Krugman runs through a history of the 20th century in the US as he sees it to illustrate what he thinks is wrong with both US economic theory and history and what is wrong with the state of current US politics (this was written in 2007, so is pretty dated when talking about current politics.)

The history sections are interesting.  Krugman’s point is that the liberal periods of 20th century history were the good parts and the conservative periods were the bad.  By this Krugman means that liberal periods were the points when the economic pie was growing and income inequality was shrinking.  He is telling this story in this method to counter the traditional economic story that says that deregulation and lower taxes expands the economic pie in such a way that everyone is better off, even if some are better off than others.

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The Mystery of God: Theology for Knowing the Unknowable

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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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Simply Christian by N T Wright

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Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

Takeaway: A modern classic of what it means to be a Christian

I am on an NT Wright kick.  I was given a copy of Jesus, Paul and the People of God for review (a book of papers from Wheaton College Theology Conference).  The whole conference was a conversation with and about NT Wright.  I started reading it and realized that while I have read some of the more popular of NT Wright’s books, I have not read some of his more important academic books.

So I read The Challenge of Jesus, Scripture and the Authority of God and I have Paul in New Perspective, which I will read next.

I have read Simply Christian before, but I read it quickly right after it came out and other than the main themes I really did not remember much about it.  So I decided to revisit the book.  I am violating my rule of reading a book in a different format because I am trying to save a bit of money right now (so I am re-reading on audio instead of re-reading in paper or Kindle format.)  The main complaint that I have seen is about Wright’s prose.  He can occasionally write the half page sentence or the slightly too obtuse argument.  But I tend to listen to Wright first, get the structure of the argument and then read him more carefully later in a print format.

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