Do Not Update iOS Kindle App

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Update: The new update to 3.6.2 is out and is safe.  If you updated to 3.6.2 and did not open the app, updating to 3.6.2 and then opening the app is safe.  (At least it was safe for me.) Lilliputing and a few other sites are reporting that Amazon has said to not upgrade the … Read more

A Life Together: Wisdom from the Christian East by Seraphim Sigrist

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I am reposting this review because A Life Together is on sale for $2.99 for Kindle until March 1.

A Life Together: Wisdom of Community from the Christian East

Takeaway: Community, like all great Christian paradoxes, is both here, with what we really experience, and potential, with what we might imagine.

I have been thinking about our theological isolation as I have been reading the two books For Calvinism (my review) and Against Calvinism (my review).  It is interesting to interact with other Christians that cannot comprehend thinking about a theological issue in any other way than the way they conceive of it.  It is not that it is wrong to be sure of our faith.  But if we are sure of our faith because we have never thought of our faith or understood that there are other ways to think of our faith, then are we really sure of our faith?

So I think it is important to read works outside our theological comfort zone.  If you are a Calvinist, you need to read John Wesley.  If you are a Baptist, you should read Pope John Paul II.  If you are Methodist, you should read Bonhoeffer or Barth.

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How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins

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I am reposting this review because How (Not) to Speak of God is on sale for $2.99 for Kindle until March 1.
How (Not) to Speak of God

I have read one other Peter Rollins book, The Orthodox Heretic.  My opinion of How (Not) to Speak of God is very much the same. Rollins is very bright.  He knows what he is talking about (although I don’t always understand), and in this book where he is more directly talking about philosophy and epistemology, he is way beyond my ability.  I consider this one of those books that I read outside my comfort zone (both theologically and philosophically) to help expand my horizons.

I am not alway sure what he is talking about, and even when I am, I do not always agree with it.  But there are three ideas that I pulled out of this book that I do think are useful and/or are a different way of approaching how to speak of God.

His first tack is to take on the traditional idea of idolatry.  Not many modern people literally worship physical stone or wood idols.  But Rollins wants to move away from a concept of idol as thing.  That is common.  We have all heard sermons about turning money or security into idols.  But Rollins takes it a step further.

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Who is the Holy Spirit? A Walk With the Apostles by Amos Yong

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Who is the Holy Spirit? A Walk with the Apostles

Takeaway: The Holy Spirit is with us today just as he was with the apostles in Acts.

Who is the Holy Spirit uses the parallel books of Luke and Acts to illustrate how the Holy Spirit empowers Christians to do God’s work in the world.

For the last six months of last year I was focused on reading and reading about the gospel of Luke.  Spending that much time in Luke really helped to focus me on how intentional the parallels from the gospel of Luke and the books of Acts are.  This book takes the parallels and focuses on how the Holy Spirit not only is God, in the same way that Jesus was God in person on the earth, but shows how the Apostles, through the power of the Holy Spirit, worked to fulfill the mission of God just as Christ did.

This is a wide ranging book.  And if anything, that would be my main criticism.  I almost wish it was more focused.  But Yong wants to hit all the major themes and actions of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts.  So there is a very good section on the power of the spirit in salvation and empowering the apostles while they were in Jerusalem.

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Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

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The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile CultureTakeaway: The hard work of building community and developing others has to start with a commitment to stability.  If we are serious about changing the world, making a commitment to a specific geography may be the best way to do it.

When I was in college I had a respected mentor of mine pray Jeremiah 29: 4-6 over me (Jeremiah tells the exiles to go ahead and settle down, stay awhile and make Babylon’s concerns and needs their own concerns and needs.)  I took that seriously.  I expected to stay in Chicago for the rest of my life.  I did for 15 years, but then moved to Georgia in order to be closer to my wife’s family.  While in Chicago for the last 10 years, my wife and I were members of church near the University of Chicago. In a five year period, there were 27 different people that were a part of our small group. At the end of the five years none of the people still attended the church and only one couple still lived in Chicago.  We live in a mobile society (especially those that live in urban areas), even if mobility is down a bit over the past few years.

One of the first things I noticed in this book is that Jonathan Hargrove-Wilson speaks of stability and community in similar ways that Rhett Smith, Shane Hipps and others do.  All of these authors fear that people get just enough community, stability, intimacy from their online or short term relationships to keep them from going deeper and getting what they are really looking for.  There is an anecdote about a parishioner complaining to the pastor that they were not finding community the church they had been attending for almost a year.  The pastor responds that they had only had one year worth of community.  The type of community that the couple was looking for requires 30 years of investment.  In many ways, this is similar advice and focus as Eugene Peterson‘s Practice Resurrection and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.

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The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales by Peter Rollins

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The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales

Takeaway: We as Christians need to continually search for meaning in scriptures.

This was a free book on kindle a couple months ago.  It has 33 short stories/parables with a page or so of explanation.  These are intentionally attempting to retell Jesus’ parables (or at least follow the form) in a modern form.  Some of them are good.  Some of them seem to be intentionally unorthodox to try get a reaction.

In general I approve of trying to find meaning in scripture. But there does not seem to be a lot of focus on trying to be true to the story as much as being true to the form.  When I finally got past the fact that Rollins was intentionally trying to give new meaning I got a lot more out of them.

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Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books by Tony Reinke

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Summary: Advice for the reluctant reader.

Lit opens with an explanation that its purpose is to convince people that do not like to read, why they should read. So obviously I am not the intended audience. But I did find some to like in this book. (Although I am not sure I can really recommend the book.) The parts I liked most were the casual reading advice sections. I did not agree with a number of the pieces of advice. Tony Reinke is consciously attempting to write a Christian version of the classic Mortimer Adler’s How To Read a Book (wikipedia link). There were many places where I thought, “Why would you encourage people to do that?”. For instance he encouraged people to spend about a hour going over a book before you start reading it, looking through the table of contents, writing up questions that you want answered in the book, reading the last couple pages, looking over reviews before you start. I think some of these ideas are good, but is this the way to encourage people to read? These are maybe things you should be doing before you pick (and buy) a book. But this seems to be squeezing the enjoyment out of reading.

My larger concern is with the structure of the book.  Reinke starts with almost a full quarter of the book discussing scripture and how we need to keep scripture as our prime reading material, how scripture is different than other books and a discussion of truth and how we can only understand truth in other books once we understand the truth of scripture. I understand why he has this long discussion in another type of book. It is important to his theology of reading, which is the basis for why the entire book is written. But if the intended audience really are reluctant readers, they are never going to get through that section to the advice sections on how and why they should be reading.

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