Bookwi.se

Summary: A stay at home mom get shot in a robbery and starts being able to read minds. 

I have mostly stopped picking up free kindle books. Mostly because I have hundreds of unread kindle books that I previously picked up and never got around to reading.  But occasionally I will see one that looks good. Carrots was free on kindle two weeks ago and I picked up the audiobook for $1.99. I needed something light and fun for background as I was doing work.

Carrots is a cozy mystery. Shelby Nichols, a stay at home mom, gets shots in the head as part of a robbery. When she wakes up at the hospital she eventually realizes that she can read minds. This is a gift that she really doesn’t want. She doesn’t want to know what her husband is thinking or what her kids think of her. She especially doesn’t want to know what her mom is thinking. Through a series of mishaps, she ends up being forced to work for a mob boss reading other people’s thoughts while trying to catch a killer and keep her family safe and her husband away from his co-worker that is trying to seduce him.

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Takeaway: While we are not saved by our beliefs, knowing why we believe what we believe is essential to right belief.

One of the things that I have become more sure of as I have aged (and read more books) is that salvation is not simply about right belief. I Cor 13 seems to directly address the common, but unfortunate, problem that many modern Evangelicals (and other Christians have). I Cor 13 suggests that we may be right in the external features of our faith (knowledge, miracles, suffering for God) but still be missing the essential feature of Love.

So I think many, especially of the non-denominational and free church varieties of Christians, have rejected some types of knowledge in a partial attempt at being more about personal experience of faith than about the knowledge of faith. I think often this is a false dichotomy.  We need the personal experience of Christ’s love for us (and our corresponding response of love for others) but we do not need to reject our knowledge (or history) to get it.

This past weekend I was talking to my Dad about theology (a common topic for us since he is a pastor and I like to read theology for fun.) One of the things that came up is that Evangelical theology is often narrow. The problem is not with the particulars of that theology, but with the narrowness. As a response some people want to reject one narrow theology and just adopt a new narrow theology.

But the better choice is to read and talk widely within the different streams of the Christian church precisely because we need those various streams to understand the fullness of the Christian faith.

As an example we need not reject the the penal substitution model of the atonement to understand that it is just one of the models of the atonement that is part of historic Christianity and biblically supported. Yes there are weaknesses to that particular model, but there are weaknesses to all of the atonement models. All are simply models that help us to more fully understand why Christ chose to come to earth, fully incarnated as a human, die and be raised again in a new (still incarnated) body. The model is not the atonement itself, but simply a model to help us understand the atonement.

None of that is a review of Justin Holcolm’s book Know the Creeds and Councils. But it is relevant because part of learning about the different streams of faith is important to understanding how they relate and where we agree. Virtually all streams of Christianity can affirm the earliest creeds, the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed. But understanding how those creeds and later creeds as well as later councils that helped form much of what we now believe, matter because it is the history, not only of our own stream, but of the other streams of Christian faith as well.

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Summary: A scifi police procedural that is a set up for a longer series.

In addition to being a stay at home Dad to two, I have a part time gig that involves lots of data analysis. I am in one of the seasons where that data has to be transferred from one format to another, so I am doing a lot of data entry. This is fairly mindless work and one of the things I have alway liked about my job because I can listen to audiobooks in the background while I do it.

A Facebook friend recommended a book series that starts with The Disappeared last week that seemed like a perfect data entry book and I picked it up and listened to it immediately since it was on sale.

The setting is the moon. The oldest and largest of the moon colonies is Armstrong Base. Armstrong Base has the biggest spaceport and so the largest traffic. This future has a number of different alien groups that trade with humans. One of the side problems with alien economic trade is the different cultural and legal systems. Intergalactic trade policy has to include systems for prosecution of local offenses.

Several of the alien groups have bounty hunters that come to search out humans that are in violation of various ‘crimes’. This gives rise to disappearance services that help hide humans that have been convicted or are in danger of being convicted for crimes that will have harsh sentences, often for just being ignorant of cultural offenses.

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Summary: Flourishing requires both authority and vulnerability (or risk).

I have read and appreciated both of Andy Crouch’s recent books. Culture Making made the case for why we as Christians need to be creative and speak into culture. Playing God made the case for the real existence of relational power and how it should be properly used.

Strong and Weak seems like a natural follow up to Playing God. Once you have the idea that power actually exists and that as Christians we have a responsibility to use it well, then you have to understand how to actually lead, regardless of whether that leadership is of a large organization or your own life.

The basic concept of the book is simple. Crouch has a two by two grid (the image on the right is from the book). High authority and high vulnerability (or risk) leads to flourishing. High authority with low vulnerability leads to exploiting others. Low authority with low vulnerability leads to withdrawing from relationships (and the world). And the final of the four options is low authority and high vulnerability, which leads to suffering.

A simple grid like this works well for illustration. And there is a chapter on each of these four areas. Simple illustrations are memorable and bring insight into a complex world. Some simple illustrations reduce complexity by distorting reality. But I think this, while there can be real quibbles, does point to a real truth. And in the context of a fully fleshed out book, Crouch brings enough nuance to the illustration that is really is helpful.

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Summary: a human/alien construct explores both his alien and human background and finds both lacking. 

Adulthood Rites is the second book in a trilogy. After a devastating world war, an alien race has come to earth. The aliens completely dominated the world. The aliens are genetic masters that use genetic manipulation as their main technology. The aliens have come to absorb all the resources of the earth, including the genetic information before moving on to their next conquest. As part of their conquest all humans have been sterilized and only those humans that are willing to breed with the aliens are allowed to have children.

The main character in this story is Akin, the first human/alien male construct. As an infant he is stolen by rogue humans who want children. After he is recovered, he continues to explore the rogue human’s world. Over time he develops an understanding of his human and alien sides and finds his calling.

I think this is a much better book than the first in the trilogy. Butler is always concerned with concepts of oppression and community and independence. Part of what she is exploring here is the human propensity toward violence. There is oddly a very paternalistic (not quite utopian, but in that direction) bent to this series. The aliens have real limits, but their intent is to change humans for their own good in a way that the humans do not necessarily want.

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Takeaway: Understanding your own Christian background can help you better understand other Christians.

I have barely posted this year. I have been both too busy and a bit burned out. I really enjoy reading theology and Christian living books, but there is a sense in which there really does seem to be ‘nothing new under the sun.’ And so I have been reading several Catholic books. They tell the Christian story at a slight slant (to use Eugene Peterson’s phrase) that allows me to see my faith in a different perspective. That slant cuts through the cliché (although for Catholics I am sure there is plenty of cliché here.)

James Martin is a popular Catholic writer. He writes for America, a Jesuit magazine, and was one of the most frequent guests on the Colbert Report. This is the third book of Martin’s that I have read, but the one that I first noticed.

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life is an attempt to both explain Ignatian (or Jesuit) understanding of Christianity.  I have read similar books about Benedictine spirituality from Dennis Ockholm and Joan Chittister and about Franciscan spirituality from Richard Rohr. I find that reading about other Christian spiritual practices and theological systems helps me understand my own Christian background and theology more because every system has blind spots that are only revealed when looked at from a different perspective.

St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits (or Society of Jesus) and his life and writing is the basis for Ignatian spiritual understanding. Ignatius lived from 1491 to 1556. So the Jesuits were founded almost exactly 1000 years later than the Benedictines. To my outsider’s eyes that seems to come out most clearly in the Ignatian use of pragmatism and the different role of reason. Benedictines are not against reason, but Jesuits embrace it to a different degree (which is why so many Catholic schools and universities are Jesuit). So throughout the book Martin talks about embracing what works pragmatically. What works in one place and time will not work in another place and time.

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