Augustine: A Very Short Introduction by Henry Chadwick

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Augustine: A Very Short IntroductionSummary: Augustine is very important to the the history of Christian thought and often misappropriated by all sides.

Augustine is not my favorite Christian thinker.  I know this is partially because he is not incredibly accessible.  And partially because I have not read that much of him, and there is a lot to read.

I read his Confessions in grad school.  And I have read bits and pieces since.  Chadwick says that is part of the problem with Augustine.  Because Augustine wrote a lot, more than virtually any other of the church fathers prior to middle ages (or at least we have more of his writing than anyone else), there is a lot of material to mine for Augustine’s support of your favorite theological point.

There are three main points that I got out of this introduction.  One, I have heard frequently that Augustine was anti-women.  There is a lot of evidence to marshal for that position, but Chadwick says that Augustine was not anti-women, he was anti-sex.  And much of his anti-sex position was really about the fact that he was concerned about his own weaknesses rather than being against sex as a whole.  Augustine for a while advocated that pastors live apart from their wives in celibate community.  This was not all that popular among the pastors he supervised. (Although it was part of the movement toward celibate priest.)

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Offsite Review: The Sun at Midnight: Monastic Experience of Christian Mystery

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The Sun at Midnight: Monastic Experience of the Christian Mystery Bernardo OliveraLast year there was a bit of an internet hubbub when a well known Christian Reformed blogger reviewed a a well known book by an offbeat female author.  The details really don’t matter.  But one of the main complaints about the book was that author flirted with mysticism.  The Reformed blogger suggested that mysticism is outside the mainstream of Christianity and bordered on heresy if it did not actually step over the line.  The blogger got a lot of push back from the author’s fans for dismissing her book.  But what was more concerning to me (because I have not read the book in question) was the the blogger was dismissing the long history of Christian mysticism.  Eventually the blogger apologized for the way that he criticized the book, but he did not apologize for dismissing mysticism.

Clearly the church has always had its stream of mystics.  And yes, some of those mystics have skirted the line of orthodoxy.  But there are many groups that skirt the line of orthodoxy.  We do not dismiss all academics, because some academics skirt the line of orthodoxy.  We do not dismiss all missionaries because some cross over the line into syncretism in their attempt to spread the gospel.  I found it interesting that in the comments of the review, there were people that denied that mysticism had always been a part of mainstream Christianity.  I specifically mentioned Bernard of Clairvaux as an example of a very mainstream mystic and was told that Bernard and many other middle age Catholics were an example of what is wrong with mysticism.  To which it was clear to me, that these reformed commenters did not know anything about the stream of Christianity that they were criticizing.

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Lendle.me Quietly Removed Payments for Lending

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Lendle.me LogoOne of the mostly underutilized features of the Kindle is book lending.  About 30 percent of my books are lendable.  Lending is a bit of a pain.  You only can lend a book once.  And you only have 2 weeks to read the book before it expires.  The larger problem is figuring out what to borrow.  Unless you have lots of friends with kindles and you talk with one another about books, then it is difficult to know where to borrow a kindle book.

This is the problem that book sharing websites are trying to solve.  Book Sharing sites like Lendle.me, allow you to put the books you are willing to lend and then to search for books you would like to borrow.  I have reviewed Lendle.me and Booklending.com before, but Lendle.me recently changed owners.

While there is not much visually different, the site seems to be a bit faster, the emails you get from Lendle include advertising and most importantly, Lendle has very quietly removed the small payments for lending. It used to be that you would get anywhere from $0.02 to as much as $2.50 for lending a book.  I have loaned about 120 books and received around $50 in Amazon gift cards for lending.  The amount is not a big deal, but it was a nice bonus for the site.

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End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex is Too Import To Define Who We Are

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The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We AreSummary: Sexual identity is not the same as full identity, so we need to define ourselves as a person, not a sexual identity.

When I started The End of Sexual Identity, the Louie Giglio issue has not yet come up.  But I do think that Paris’ book is a good place to start for people that are uncomfortable with the orthodox Christian response to homosexuality and/or not ready to reject same-sex sex as a sin.

Jenell Williams Paris is an anthropologist.  So she starts by approaching sexual identity as a cultural construction.  That may seem overly academic, but she writes clearly and gives good examples so that even if you do not have a background in sociology or anthropology her argument is understandable.

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A Murder of Quality (A George Smiley Novel) by John Le Carre

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A Murder of Quality: A George Smiley Novel

Summary: The second book of the George Smiley series, Smiley works to solve a murder.

I am going back and reading the first two of the George Smiley series after having reading the more popular third to sixth books in the series.

These are not as good as the Karla trilogy (starting with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).  But they give some good background on Smiley.

In the middle of the first book Smiley resigns from the British intelligence service.  I believe this is the only book of the Smiley series that has nothing to do with espionage.

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The Truth About Organic Foods by Alex Avery

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The Truth About Organic Foods

According to Alex Avery, it is scientifically proven that organic foods are not safer than non-organic. Organic food is not more nutritious, overall. Non-organic milk has almost zero chance of containing hormones and is by far the safest food item on the market today. Even if hormones made it into the milk supply, the are the exact same hormones that humans have, and the levels in milk would be so low as to pose no risk whatsoever. The pesticides that organic farmers use (yes, they do use them–and often shield that fact with euphemisms) are less powerful and less efficient than modern non-organic pesticides, which means that they are applied much more frequently and crop yields are often lower.

These are just a few of the claims Avery makes. I am an equal opportunity skeptic, which is why this book appealed to me. I like things that challenge the conventional wisdom. I recognize that I have no easy way to confirm much of what Avery writes; he cites a LOT of studies from a variety of research bodies (collegiate science departments, the FDA, European research bodies, etc), but I don’t have the expertise to know if (or how much) he’s spinning. Sometimes the biased tone gets a bit obnoxious, but that doesn’t (necessarily) mean he’s not telling the truth.

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