The Quest for the Trinity by Stephen R Holmes

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Summary: An important look at the historical development of the Doctrine of the Trinity and how modern language drift has changed the historical definitions.

I have been looking forward to reading the Quest for the Trinity ever since I first heard about it in the middle of last year.  Consistently it has been well reviewed and it certainly deserves the accolades.  Holmes know his historical theology, he is very well read and no other book on the trinity I have read so far has been as well documented.

But I intentionally was holding off on reading this because just by reading the description and I knew he was reacting against the modern theological work around the trinity.  And it was the more recent (primarily social focused) theology of the Trinity that drew me toward investigating the trinity more.

The basic thesis is that the modern focus is fundamentally different from the Patristic understanding of the Trinity.  This is not actually all that hard to capture.  One of the things I most liked about Dunzl’s Doctrine of the Trinity is that he clearly showed that doctrinal development is at least partially dependent on language and culture of the time.  You cannot move beyond the current ability to describe the theology you are trying to document into a doctrine.

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Offsite: 10 Books About Pope Francis

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Anyone who has read more than 2 posts at Bookwi.se knows that I am a big fan of digital publishing.  The only time I consistently reading paper books is when I fly.  But today’s new post at Englewood Review of Books is a good example that not everything about Digital Publishing is good.  Already there are 10 … Read more

The Human Division (Episodes 4-10) by John Scalzi

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A Voice in the Wilderness: The Human Division, Episode 4 | [John Scalzi]Summary: A 13 episode series of connected short stories set in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe.

I have long been in favor of authors and publishers experimenting to find new methods of writing and distributing books.  Now that I have experienced a real episodic serial I am not sure that I am a fan.

First of all it feels like it is more expensive.  I don’t think it actually is, the first episode was free, the 2nd to 5th episodes I bought at the standard Audible member discount price of $0.69.  Then episodes 6 to 13 I bought during the Spring Cleaning sale for $0.51 a piece.  There was a note on my purchase that said I will be charged individually for the episodes that have not yet been released.  So Audible is going to charge me $0.51 per week for the next four weeks.  Incurring individual processing fees instead of bundling the costs together (since I bought them all at once.)

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Kindle Paperwhite Software Update

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Amazon announced an update (5.3.4) to the Paperwhite software.  If you have a Paperwhite you can make sure it is connected to wifi and it will likely update itself eventually.  If you want to force it to update, you can manually download and update the Kindle. From what I can tell, no one has figured out … Read more

Evangellyfish by Douglas Wilson

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Evangellyfish by Douglas WilsonChad Lester is an extremely successful megachurch pastor who secretly sleeps with as many women as he can (literally) get his hands on. Most of the church leadership knows (or has participated!), but life keeps humming merrily along with all the indiscretions, to quote Alanis Morissette, under rug swept. That is, until Chad gets accused of probably the one thing of which he’s totally blameless–a tryst with an underage male. The accusation is the first snowflake of an ever-growing snowball of revelation in which almost all parties (including the guilty, the victims, the ambulance chasers, and the news media) end up with something unexpected. Wodehouse’s influence is unmistakable.

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