Takeaway: Continuing with the theme that Love is most important.
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After reading A Wrinkle in Time, which I have not read in many years, A Wind in the Door was more familiar. I remembered most of the story line and while it has still been 20 years or so I have read it more recently and more often than Wrinkle in Time.
I am participating in Tentblogger BlogX Challenge (modeled after the P90X). John has been incredibly helpful in giving suggestions and helping me make Bookwi.se a better blog. (He and Chris Ames even came up with the name.) Todays challenge was to update the About Page. Since I will hit 700 posts very soon (probably Thursday), … Read more
According to a Wall Street Journal article (behind a pay wall), Amazon is in talks with publishers to release a Netflix style subscription program for books. This would be in addition to Amazon’s video streaming service (about 5000 of those movies are free for Prime Members). TheNextWeb has a free report about the rumor. If the … Read more
I have had a build up of paper books. My commitment is to give away the majority of paper books, including all review books. Here are the books I have to give away right now. The reviews: Uncommon Decency, Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me, Enemies of the Heart I … Read more
Takeaway: A guided devotional reading of scripture can bring new insights.
The Gospel of Amazement is the latest in my current bible reading strategy. This is a perfect book to add to a long-term look at Luke. I have read a small group bible study, a book on a short passage in Luke and my next book will be a very academic commentary. But Michael Card’s book is more of a ‘devotional commentary’. Its focus is devotional more than academic, but it still brings in clear academic insights.
Card translated Luke himself. The chapters of Luke are separated into chapters in the Gospel of Amazement and Card gives commentary on small sections. I may feel the devotional style more because I actually used it as a devotional.
Takeaway: Scripture is a diverse, important, human-written, God-breathed book.
Over the past couple months I have been wandering through an exploration of scripture, what it is, how we can understand it, what we should be doing with it. Inspiration and Incarnation is the latest book in my exploration. I was lucky enough to read this one with friends and have an email discussion about it.
Emotionally, I am a bit disappointed by this book. I knew it was controversial. Enns resigned his position at Westminster Seminary after controversy with the board of the seminary and this book. After reading the first two chapters, I kept thinking ‘no wonder he was fired’. There really are controversial statements in the book, but I think much of the controversy could have been minimized with a better editor. He seems unnecessarily provocative in a few areas where his point is not controversial. Intellectually, I am intrigued. He is pushing in many of the areas I think need to be pushed in the Evangelical understanding of scripture. I am not sure about some of his conclusions, but the discussion is useful.
These are the six most read reviews in August.
I am kicking off the discussion of John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City over at Churchm.ag. I was very favorable in my earlier review of the book and am looking forward to reading it again with a group. The schedule for the discussion is below. You have plenty of time to pick up … Read more
Before I started blogging on Bookwi.se I started tracking my books on Goodreads.com (social network for readers). I have number of short reviews on Goodreads so as part of cleaning up my blog structure I am going to repost some of the shorts reviews from Goodreads. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson … Read more
Takeaway: Start with your own sinfulness and the other’s humanness
Next week I am going to talk to a small group of college students about how to disagree with others as Christians. I think this is a particularly important topic. Luckily I found this book just in time. Coincidentally, Mouw was on Krista Tippet’s NPR show On Being last week. The interview has a good overview of the book (although focused more on civility between Christians and non-Christians.)
Mouw quotes Martin Marty’s observation, “One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil often lack strong conviction and people who have strong convictions often lack civility.” This book is his attempt at trying to encourage a “convicted civility”. Mouw’s civility is not ‘niceness’. Civility has the root purpose of acknowledging the other person’s Imageo Dei (Image of God).