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Takeaway: Doctrine is the attempt to speak of God faithfully to our culture, but it is limited to the tools that are available to our language, philosophy and culture.

Speaking of God is difficult.  There is one group of people that believe that God is so Other that we can only talk about what God is not.  And they have a point.  God is far beyond our comprehension.

But God has revealed himself to us.  There is both scripture, which is God speaking in human language through the writing of dozens of God’s followers.  And then there is Jesus Christ, which was God himself come to earth to reveal God’s nature and love to us.

This very helpful book, details the early working out in human language the nature of the Trinity.  It is important to remember that what was being done was not creating the Trinity.  The Trinity exists independent of human language.  But the early church had to figure out a way to speak of the Trinity using human language and philosophy.

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Summary: Charlie now knows who actually killed Alex and he is searching for Waterman, his best clue on how to get back to his normal life.

This is book three is the Homelanders series. You do not want to jump into the middle of this series.

This book picks up almost immediately after The Long Way Home.  In the Long Way Home Charlie re-connected with his friends and girlfriend Beth.  He found out how he got connected to the Homelanders, but there is still a year missing from his memory.

Klavan has done a good job in the series keeping the action moving, giving new information so the story moves and keeping the tension up.

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Summary: Charlie West is on the run, from the police and a group of unknown terrorist.  How can he prove that he is innocent and at the same time stay alive long enough to make sure the terrorists do not kill anyone else?

Charlie West, the hero of this series, has just stopped a murder at the end of The Last Thing I Remember (do not try to read this series out of order).

The Long Way Home picks up a couple weeks later.  Charlie is trying to discover why he has been framed for murdering his best friend Alex (and by whom) while trying to avoid both the police and the terrorists that are after him.

Charlie decides to head back to his home town, in part because of home sickness, but mostly to get to the scene of Alex’s murder.

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At this point I would recommend reading Great Sex Rescue and once you are done with that, then maybe you can find value in For Men/Women Only.
Takeaway: Women and men are different. Using interviews and surveys can show some differences, only conversation will work them out in your life.

I first heard about For Women Only when I saw an interview with Shaunti Feldhahn when  that book first came out.  All the women in the audience received a copy.  So I read my wife’s copy to see if it was any good and then highly recommended that she read it.

A couple years later Shaunti and her husband Jeff co-wrote a men’s version of the book.  Both books take fairly large surveys of men or women and a lot of focus group data to try to build a case for the important differences between men and women.  There is no discussion about nature vs. nurture, just that these are the real differences that actually exist between men and women right now in the US.

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Takeaway: The concept of original sin has greatly shaped Western culture.

Original Sin is a doctrine I have always had trouble understanding. It is not that I disagree that we are all sinful. I affirm that.

My issues have been in the way that Christians understand the origin of sin, the way some understand the need for a physical Adam and Eve to affirm the doctrine of original sin (which then some need to justify the need for Christ’s death and resurrection), and the extent of the corruption of the world caused by the fall.

Jacobs is an author I appreciate. He was a professor at Wheaton College, and while we overlapped, I did not have him for any classes.  But he is one of those authors that, as I read, I am always aware that he is much smarter than I am. Not in a snooty or negative way. He is very readable. It is that he always brings in ideas and sources that I would not have considered (and often do not even know exist).

This is not a theological history but a cultural one. So Jacobs deals primarily with how Christianity and the West have culturally understood original sin. Occasionally, the cultural and the theological understanding separate.  I think, at least partially, this is my issue with original sin. I hear people speaking of the transmission of sin as if it were literally part of our DNA. I believe it was Augustine who proposed that one reason that Jesus could be born of a woman and not be corrupted by original sin is that sin was transferred through semen.

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Summary: Powerful teaching of a Chinese Christian leader calling the church to greater devotion and service.

I recently read the autobiography (Heavenly Man) of Brother Yun, a dissident underground Chinese church pastor that now lives in Germany.

I bought Living Water when I first heard about Brother Yun and started it twice but did not get far each time.  After reading his autobiography and giving context to his life and teaching I finished Living Water.  This seems to be mostly adapted sermons that have been structured together as a book. I listened to it as an audiobook, so maybe that format makes it seem more sermon-like.  But each chapter is mostly self contained and there is some repetition of stories and examples between chapters, so that contributes to the sermon feel.

This is a book of readable, but heavy, teaching.  It is not a feel-good, breeze-right-through book.  It is not all that long (a bit over 8 hours in audio, 320 pages in paper.)  But I spent a couple weeks listening to this on and off and pushed through the last half of the book in two days.

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Takeaway: It is really many stories of divorce (her own and those in her family) followed by an almost accidental discovery of an actually happy marriage (so far).

Marriage is both overly prized and distained in our culture.  Some think it can do anything, so think it can do nothing.  Some people think both.

Patchett wrote this essay for a friend.  Her young friend wanted the story of Patchett’s happy marriage.  And Patchett does seem to have a happy marriage by her account.  She has been married about 11 years to a man she adores and who seems to be right for her and she for him.

Patchett starts not with meeting her husband the how they fell in love and got married and lived happily ever after, but with the story of many divorces in her family.  Staring with her grandfather who came to the US and worked for 10 years before saving enough money to send for his family.  When his wife wrote back that she wanted to come, but that she had to tell him that there were now three boys instead of two, he rescinded the offer and never saw his family again (even refusing to see the son that came to find him later in life.)

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