Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic

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Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical CatholicSummary: Evangelical Philosopher tells his story of conversion to Catholicism.

Over the past 18 months or so I have been reading a variety of books about Catholicism.  This was partially sparked by a friend that became Catholic, but just as much it is about understanding a large segment of the church that I do not have real experience with.

If we take John 17 seriously, then Jesus was praying that the church (universal) be one.  And a church that does not at least strive to understand those that are in different streams cannot be one.  So I read one or two books a month outside of my Evangelical background to better understand parts of the church that are outside of my experience.

I have found that conversion stories are particularly helpful.  In part because people that convert out of the evangelical world still understand it and are well placed to be able to speak in a language that Evangelicals will understand and can act as mediators between the worlds.

Francis Beckwith is a Christian philosopher, former head of the Evangelical Theological Society and current professor at Baylor University.  This is a short book.  I remember the small dust up his conversion caused in 2007.  But I have not actually read anything by him previously and did not really know much about his work.

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New Kindle Fire Tablets

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New Kindle Fire HDX

Overnight Amazon released three new Kindle Fire Tablets.

The Kindle Fire HD now starts at $139 making it the cheapest of the tablets, just $20 more than the new Kindle Paperwhite.  It will start shipping on Oct 2.  This is a slightly different version of the Kindle Fire HD that was released at $199 last year.  The processor is faster (1.5 GHz dual core instead of a 1.2 GHz dual core).  But the screen has the same specs.  It also comes with a smaller 8 or 16 GB of memory instead of the 16 or 32 GB of Memory from last year’s model.  Presumably to save money, it also has dropped the ambient light sensor, camera and microphone (so no Skype or video conferencing).  The battery is also rated at 10 hours instead of last year’s 11 hours and takes 2 more hours to fully charge.

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The Elite by Kiera Cass (The Selection #2)

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The Elite by Kiera Cass (The Selection #2)

Takeaway: To work within to transform the system or fight outside the system, that is the question.

I was less than thrilled with the first book in this series, The Selection.  It is a mix between a Hunger Games dystopian-lite and the bachelor with a young adult romance candy on top.  (A prince is required by law to use a bachelor type game show to choose his bride in a dystopian North America.)

But there was enough in the book that I went ahead and got the second book (these are audiobooks from the library, so I am not investing too much here.)  While I was frustrated at the beginning with the ‘why would he like me, I am just a nobody’ vibe, it did get better.

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The Civil War as Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

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The Civil War as Theological Crisis by Mark NollTakeaway: Cultural blind spots affect our reading of scripture far more than we realize.

There are very few books I have recommended more over the past year or so than Mark Noll’s The Civil War as Theological Crisis.  It has been about over a year since I originally read and reviewed it, so I thought it was a good time to read it again (that and the price dropped.)

One of the clear takeaways from this book is that we often do not see our own cultural blind spots.  For instance, an argument that most pro-slavery Christians did not hear or respond to is that the main difference between American Slavery and the slavery of biblical times was that American Slavery was racially based.  Because civil war era White Christians were so convinced that Blacks as a race were inferior it was inconceivable to most that there could be non-racially based slavery or that free Blacks could or should be considered equal to Whites.  And this was true for the vast majority of Christians whether they were from the North or the South, and whether they were for or against slavery.

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World War Z by Max Brooks (Book and Movie Review)

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World War Z by Max BrooksI’m not into zombie stories. I don’t watch movies or tv shows about them (although I’m told The Waking Dead is quite good) and I don’t usually read about them. Similarly to Twilight being as much of a romance novel as it is a book about vampires, I had heard that the movie, World War Z, was more of an action flick than a horror movie. I chose to read (listen to) the book because I had read that the audiobook was great and I wanted to see the movie if for no other reason that I find Brad Pitt to be a talented actor (please see my The Lucky One review for my definition of talent).  Well, guess what. I am still not that into zombie stories but I liked the book.

To start with, Brooks found a unique and captivating way to the deliver the story of what it might be like if there was a mass outbreak of zombism.  It was as if I was listening to an actual documentary about “œthe Zombie War” just like I might listen to or watch a documentary about World War 2.  There were survivors of all kinds that gave their accounts of what happened.  The characters varied from a housewife to an army colonel to a doctor to the Vice President of the United States.  Each chapter of the book was an interview with a different person and took place in a different part of the world spanning from China to Cuba to California.  Their stories touched on what happened at the beginning of the outbreak to the way media covered it to the way that total cities were taken over to the war that took place to fight them and the aftermath of that war.

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Offsite Review: God in My Everything by Ken Shigematsu

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Yesterday I posted a review of Kevin DeYoung’s new book Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem.  DeYoung’s book was helpful and I recommend it.  But there have been a number of others books that approach the problem if busyness differently. James Matichuk reviewed God in my Everything: How an Ancient Rhythm … Read more

Amazon Updates iOS Kindle App

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Yesterday Amazon released and update to the Kindle app for Apple devices to go along with the update to iOS 7.  It was more than a visual update.  The update brought the app in line with many of the features of the stand alone ereaders. The main two feature updates are X-Ray – a potentially … Read more

Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture edited by Johnson & Larsen

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Bonhoeffer, Christ and CultureSummary: A Book summary of the 2011 Wheaton Theology Conference on Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am always so excited to read the book produced from the papers of the Wheaton Theology Conference, but then I tend to have to force myself to finish the book.

It is not that the papers are bad, there are always some very good essays and a few that are less interesting to me (I am sure mostly because of different interests between myself and the authors more than the quality of the papers.)

Because these books are only loosely connected around the subject I tend to read a chapter or two and then put the book down and then pick it up again quite a while later.  I have been reading Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture for a couple months now on and off.

Timothy Larsen’s chapter on how Evangelicals have received Bonhoeffer over time was very interesting.  It was a good supplement to the biographies that I have read on Bonhoeffer because it was more about why we read Bonhoeffer than Bonhoeffer himself.  (Makes me want to read Martin Marty’s book on the history of Letters and Papers from Prison).

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Two New Books by NT Wright

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I just picked up NT Wright’s new The Case for the Psalms.  It is a fairly short book about why the Psalms are important to Christian worship and theology.  While the Kindle version has dropped from its initial $12.99 starting price (it is $11.04 right now), it is still cheaper for me to get the … Read more