Kindle Paperwhite Available in Canada

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The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, and regular Amazon Kindle are now both available in Canada.  Both are available for immediate shipping. The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite is $139 CDN and the Amazon Kindle (4th Generation Kindle) is $89 CDN. Earlier Bookwi.se gave initial impressions and then a full review of the Paperwhite. Also a review of a … Read more

Offsite: Cost of Discipleship Online Discussion

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I really like reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I have reviewed two different biographies (Schligensiepen is better than Metaxas) and Life Together as well as an Eastern Orthodox version (A Life Together) and an exploration of Bonhoeffer’s Christ-Centered Spirituality, but I am by no means a Bonhoeffer expert. I have read Cost of Discipleship (although not recently), so I might … Read more

Amazon Bought Text-To-Speech Software Company

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Lilliputing (a great little tech website) is reporting that Amazon has purchased Ivona Software, which specializes in text to speech software.  Currently it offers 44 voices in 17 different languages. I am surprised that Amazon is expanding its reaching into text to speech after it removed the feature from its e-ink kindles.  The newest Kindle … Read more

137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading

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137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With ReadingSummary: Practical steps on how to read more, and fall in love with reading, because you enjoy it, not because it is good for you.

One of those books I have not read, but I have been influenced by is How to Read by Mortimer Adler.  Adler is one of those people that approaches books scientifically.

While I have not read Adler, I have read Lit! by Tony Reinke which is intentionally a Christianized version of Adler.  I read and reviewed it last year.  Lit! had a very good theology of reading and some good ideas about how to read better.

But on the whole I think that it lost the focus on reading for pleasure and concentrated too much on reading for good.  It was focused on efficiency and ‘getting the most’ out of the books that you are reading.  That is not all bad, but it is a good way to suck joy out of reading.  It is like talking about how to get the most out of being a parent or a spouse without actually talking about enjoying your actual children or spouse.

137 Books in One Year does not have that problem.  This is a book to read if you want to find the joy of reading again.  This is a short book (93 page).  I read it in about an hour. It is in three parts.  Just over half the book is Kevin Hendrick’s 10 steps to read more and enjoy what you are reading more.  These are practical (always carry a book) and focused on pleasure (read what you like).

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Amazon is not Renting Kindle Books

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It is always odd to me how little people pay attention to blog posts past the initial headline and first paragraph or two.  I have seen about a dozen variation of “Amazon is Testing Kindle Book Rentals” over the past couple days.  They all link back to this post, which does show a kindle book … Read more

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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