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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Amazon Changes To Free Kindle Book Promotion

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English: Amazon Kindle wordmark.
English: Amazon Kindle wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It appears that Amazon is concerned that free Kindle book promotion blogs are becoming too successful.  A few days ago Amazon made a change to their affiliate program that is going to shut down several of the larger free Kindle book blogs (or at least radically change them).

The rule change now will make it so that any blog that has more than 20,000 free kindle books a month and less than 5% of books sold are paid books will no longer receive any Amazon Affiliate income for the month.

I do not believe that will affect Bookwi.se because I am not that big.  But I am not sure because Amazon does not currently share how many free books are purchased through my Affiliate links.  I assume that Amazon will have to start publicly showing this information so that we can know what is going on.  20,000 books seems like a lot, but it is only an average of 667 free books purchased a day.  If every visitor or RSS or email subscribers gets one free book a day I could be very close to the threshold.

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Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by CS Lewis

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Summary: Memoir of CS Lewis’ early life and how he came to faith.

CS Lewis is an author that you just have to read if you are a Christian.  If you have not read the Chronicles of Narnia, then you will have read Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity (I never have) or his Science Fiction Trilogy or one of his other books.  But as a person that considers myself fairly well read, I have not read nearly as much CS Lewis as I feel like I should have.

I picked up the Science Fiction trilogy when it was on sale last year but I have not read it yet.  I have tried Mere Christianity a couple times but I have not finished it.  I really like Screwtape Letters and the Great Divorce and enjoyed Till We Have Faces.  One I have enjoyed more than almost any other is his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.

What really moved me to read this is the fact that two books I really like were adapted titles.  Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford was the story of how she came to faith at Oxford and she intentionally modeled the title after Lewis’s book.  And Lyle Dorsett titled his biography of Joy Davidson (CS Lewis’ wife) Surprised by Love (first edition of the book was called And God Came In).

I had always assumed that Surprised by Joy was about his relationship to Joy Davidson, but it was written long before he met and married her.

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Just Courage by Gary A. Haugen

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Reposting because the Kindle version is on sale for $2.99 right now.

Just Courage by Gary HaugenTakeaway: It takes courage to stand up to violence.  But Christians should not be lacking in courage when we have Christ.  God desires to use us, not to keep us safe.

This was a free book from ChristianAudio a couple months ago.  It is a brief book, just over 3 hours in audio version, but it is powerful in its story of International Justice Mission.  I have been aware of IJM for a few years.  I serve on a committee with a woman that is part of their fund development committee.  I have heard news reports about their work releasing people from slavery and sex trafficing for years.

But this was my first real introduction to the work directly.  Gary Haugen started IJM about 10 years ago.  It is a collection of lawyers, social workers and advocates that work around the world to raise awareness about and free people from slavery, sex trafficking and injustice.  Haugen has a particular definition of the work that they do.  It is more than just producing justice or alleviating need, it is directly addressing injustice where violence is present.  He asserts that when violence is present, people are often incapable of releasing themselves from injustice and require outside intervention.  Violence of the sort that is associated with slavery and sex trafficking is exactly the type of work that we as Christians need to have the courage to work for, but often are either unaware of the need or assume it is much smaller than reality.

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The Science of Fear: How Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

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Takeaway: Humans are very bad as understanding risk whenever risk becomes complicated.

The Science of Fear feels like a book that was written specifically for me.  It is filled with statistics, it has a good bit of sociology and psychology.  Its messages is overwhelmingly that we fear the wrong things, that humans as a whole are not all that good at evaluating risk, and that in the end it is very easy to manipulate people into fear.

That is not to say this is a perfect book.  Even for someone as stats obsessed as I am, this book was easily 75 pages too long.

The summary thesis is that we have a rational side and an emotional (gut) side.  The gut side is what takes over the majority of the time and only rarely does the rational side come up on top.

There are several psychological or behavioral economic principles that that make it hard for the rational side to hold the gut side at bay.  Gardner gives several examples: The Anchoring Rule (if you give a number or example even if completely unrelated to the topic, the listener will use that to anchor the evaluation), the Rule of Typical Things (basically if it sounds right it probably is right: chemicals are bad, rare things must be more dangerous, etc.) and The Example Rule (if you can see that anyone has had this happen to them, then it is probably more frequent than you know).  He also uses some of the more familiar principles of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance but focuses more on the behavior economics rather than the older psychological ideas.

So in an example on the fear of serious degenerative diseases from leaks in silicone breast implants you see how this works.  The example rule says that is a woman has breast implants and has a degenerative disease then they are probably connected.  But if there are a million women with implants and the particular degenerative disease occurs in the general population at 1 percent, then normally 10,000 women with implants should have that disease.  It requires large scale epidemiological studies to know if it is likely that the implants and the disease are related.  In this case they were not.  But the Rule of Typical things says that putting silicone in your body sounds like a bad idea, so it is probably the cause of the disease.

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