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Takeaway: English Christianity has been formed, whether you know it or not, by the Book of Common Prayer.

I grew up Baptist.  And I currently attend a non-denominational megachurch.  But as I have grown in my understanding of the broader Christian Church and its history, I have been intentionally trying to read more about theology and practice outside of my church community.

The Book of Common Prayer is one of those theological objects that I want to understand, but without a guide it is largely a mystery.  Alan Jacobs revealed a part of the puzzle in The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography.  This is not a book on how to use the BCP, but a history of how it was developed, changed and how how attitudes toward it changed over time.

Alan Jacobs is an excellent writer and his history of the book is both of solid history and readable.

To me, what is most interesting about story of the BCP, is how it was intended as a tool of unity but from the very beginning that was thwarted. Cranmer, who compiled the BCP thought that a single prayer book with a single service was important both theologically and politically to the unity of the Church in England.  This was not a simple expedient or politically motivated conscription of Christianity but a different world view on how church and state should relate.

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I am reposting this review from 2010 because Evolving in Monkey Town is on sale for $2.99 on Kindle.

Summary: Coming of age in faith as well as years.

I picked Evolving in Monkey Town on the recommendation of John Armstrong.  It is a clever title.  Rachel Held Evans grew up and went to college in Dayton, TN, the home of the Scopes Monkey trial.  The book traces Rachel Held Evans as she is taught to be certain of her faith but eventually begins to question both her faith and God.

In many ways this is a simple book, it is the story of faith growing up from learned from others to owned by the author.  In other ways this is a much deeper book.  The fundamental questions that starts Evan’s questioning is the death of a Muslim woman.  Does God really condemn people that have not ever heard the Gospel to Hell/  This is a question that David Platt explicitly answered in Radical (my review).  Platt’s answer was one of my biggest frustrations with his book, although the practical working out of the results of my answer are not that much different than Platt.  Evan’s answer, on the other hand, doesn’t really seem to get around the answering the question.  Or rather, by the end she re-frames the question.  Although I agree with her answer more, the practical working out of her answer is less satisfying than Platt’s.  I guess I am frustrated both ways.

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Takeaway: A modern classic of what it means to be a Christian

I am on an NT Wright kick.  I was given a copy of Jesus, Paul and the People of God for review (a book of papers from Wheaton College Theology Conference).  The whole conference was a conversation with and about NT Wright.  I started reading it and realized that while I have read some of the more popular of NT Wright’s books, I have not read some of his more important academic books.

So I read The Challenge of Jesus, Scripture and the Authority of God and I have Paul in New Perspective, which I will read next.

I have read Simply Christian before, but I read it quickly right after it came out and other than the main themes I really did not remember much about it.  So I decided to revisit the book.  I am violating my rule of reading a book in a different format because I am trying to save a bit of money right now (so I am re-reading on audio instead of re-reading in paper or Kindle format.)  The main complaint that I have seen is about Wright’s prose.  He can occasionally write the half page sentence or the slightly too obtuse argument.  But I tend to listen to Wright first, get the structure of the argument and then read him more carefully later in a print format.

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Takeaway: The story of American Politics, without God or Religion is an incomplete history.

I very much respect Mark Noll’s work as a historian.  So after re-reading The Civil War as Theological Crisis, I looked around to see if there were any audiobooks of Noll’s works.  I listen to a lot of audiobooks because a lot of my job is processing data.  As long as I don’t have to write, I can listen. (But I have to pause and audiobook to even write a 10 word email.)

The only book at Audible by Noll other than The Civil War as Theological Crisis was God and Race in American Politics.

Noll is primarily known as a historian of North American Evangelicalism.  But this is a natural followup to his Civil War as Theological Crisis.  Instead of looking at the theological response to issues of race and slavery (as he did in Civil War), Noll expands his view to take a quick survey at how Race and Religion interacted over the history of the US until the 2004 Presidential Election.

As you might expect a good historian to say, the reality is much more complicated than the traditional story that is told in your 4th grade US history class.  But Noll does a very good job surveying those complications in less than 200 pages.

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Summary: A modern narrative form of catechesis teaching.

I have read several of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s books previously (God’s Economy and The Wisdom of Stability).  So I picked up The Awakening of Hope without looking into what it was about when I saw that it was a free audiobook on Noisetrade.com (it is no longer free.)  That was a couple of months ago, and I had forgotten about it when I ran across it looking for another audiobook.

The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice A Common Faith is an attempt at basic catechesis (basic Christian instruction).  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is part of an intentional Christian community and has worked with Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw, and some of the other “New Monastics.”

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Summary: A woman starts having dreams about the future, and her estranged husband, a college Don, starts working with a secretive research organization called NICE.

Over the past couple months I have read the CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy) for the first time.  And as a fan of CS Lewis, it is odd to me that I have not picked it up before.  Each of the three are quite different both in content and style.  The first feels like an early HG Wells science fiction novel. Professor Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars, where he discovers an ancient civilization that has never had sin introduced into it as the Earth has.

The second novel, Perelandra, continues with the same theme of sin being introduced into the world, but this time Ransom is taken to Venus to prevent an Eve-like character from falling prey to a human possessed by the devil and trying to get her disobey God and sin, just as he did with the original Eve on earth.  This book felt less like an HG Wells novel and more directly Christian fiction almost bordering on allegory, similar to a modern Pilgrims Progress.

The final novel of the trilogy includes Ransom, but only in the later part of the book.  Instead a young Don (British professor) and his wife and the main characters.  And from early on this feels like George Orwell’s 1984.  NICE is a secretive government research project that is trying to take over their local community and eventually the whole country.

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Takeaway: To work within to transform the system or fight outside the system, that is the question.

I was less than thrilled with the first book in this series, The Selection.  It is a mix between a Hunger Games dystopian-lite and the bachelor with a young adult romance candy on top.  (A prince is required by law to use a bachelor type game show to choose his bride in a dystopian North America.)

But there was enough in the book that I went ahead and got the second book (these are audiobooks from the library, so I am not investing too much here.)  While I was frustrated at the beginning with the ‘why would he like me, I am just a nobody’ vibe, it did get better.

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