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Summary: When a group from Three Pines decides to have a séance to purge the evil spirits of the Hadley house, one of the participants appears to die of fright.

I know some people like to be scared by books or movies or TV shows, I am not one of those people. I have never read a Stephen King novel, I don’t watch horror movies, I won’t watch Walking Dead no matter how many people tell me that I will like it.

So I was put off by the early part of the book. The characters in Three Pines first have a séance for fun, then a semi-serious one to try and rid evil spirits from the Hadley House (which was connected to deaths in the previous two books.) In the end, the murder at the center of the book occurs at the second séance, where a woman appears to have died of fright.

The first two books I enjoyed, but I thought were missing the final piece that makes me want to recommend them. This third book I loved (and the fourth that I am half way through now I love even more.)

The series is set in a small rural village filled with extraordinary people that have escaped the outside world to settle in Three Pines. There is a back story to everyone, and with the first two books it felt like that back story was sitting there and unused. It was hinted at, but without the actual story, the bruised and battered people of Three Pines (as well as the few that have found healing) were just cardboard without the additional background.

This story, about half way through, really started working on giving back story to Inspector Gamache. The case that has hung over the previous two books came to the fore. The conclusion of the book almost minimized the resolution of this murder too much to deal with the problem Gamache’s historical problem. But there was a resolution to it all, or at least enough to keep you reading the series.

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Summary: Science can help us better understand how we are created to know God.

Everyone is price conscious, at least a little bit. I knew that Christianity Today voted What Your Body Knows About God as book of the year and it was on a number of other lists. But it wasn’t until it went on sale this week for $2.99 on kindle that I decided to pick it up (although I ended up listing to the audiobook at Scribd).

Christianity and Science books are a bit iffy much of the time, in large part because Christians tend to not be great scientists. Rob Moll is not a scientist, he is a journalist. So What Your Body Knows About God is more like one of Mary Roach’s books or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Christianity and Science books also tend to be apologetics oriented, either trying to prove that God was behind the science or that science is wrong (neither of which I am all that interested in). There is a little of that, but the focus is different. This is the Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic type of apologetics if it is anything. Moll is not trying to convince the skeptic, Moll is trying to pull the attention of the believer toward how we can use science about the body to help us better find God.

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Bookwi.se Note: The Kindle edition is currently on sale for $2.99.
Author, blogger, wife and mother Kara Tippets has written “œThe Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard” charting her spiritual journey from her childhood, to her early days of marriage and motherhood, and to the present as she fights her multiple battles with cancer.

I must tell you I find this review very difficult to write. Kara’s story is most likely not going to have a happy ending, in human terms. It’s hard to not be affected by Kara’s reality, especially reading her blog “œMundane Faithfulness“ or seeing the updates on her Facebook page; but I so desperately appreciate her allowing other people to be a part of her journey. She’s living honestly and beautifully.

Kara writes openly about her reality without oversharing. She consistently points her readers to God’s promises and discusses her daily, sometimes moment by moment struggle to grab on to God’s grace in the midst of pain. Kara and her husband, Josh, have a goal of walking through this journey as “œbroken but not bitter”. One by one, Kara gently dismantles the beliefs many of us actively and subtly believe. We are not promised long lives, pain free existences, or trouble free days. But we are promised something better.

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Summary: A collection of sermons, letters, devotional writing, etc on the psalms with helpful biographical introductions.

When I wrote the review of Martin Marty’s Biography of Letters and Papers from Prison I said I needed to read more Bonhoeffer directly and rely less on the secondary sources. Edwin Robinson has a helpful halfway point between primary and secondary works. He has edited together a book of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the Psalms. Most of these are directly sermons or devotional writing of one sort or another. Rarely is a section longer than 15 minutes (I listened to this on audio semi-devotionally for about two weeks).

Most of it is fairly traditional Christian material. That is not to dismiss it. But to instead say, Bonhoeffer was first a pastor. No matter what else he did, his vocation was pastor. So this collection is primarily pastoral. There are clearly difficult sections here where Bonheoffer is struggling against the weight of the German state and Hitler’s power and God’s role in it (especially in private letters). But still primarily he was pointing to the power of Christ to transform and using the wide variety of emotions that are contained within the Psalms as prayers and reflections as the church has always used them for thousands of years.

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Summary: Despite what you might have heard, marriage is actually doing pretty well these days.

One of the reasons I like to read good social science is that much of the world is actually doing pretty well. Of course, we would like things to be better than they are, but stories about the world doing pretty well don’t sell well. So we tend to hear about how bad the world is.

If you want a Christian perspective about how the world is doing I would first commend Bradley Wright’s Upside, which generally looks at a variety of different ways of measuring the world, happiness, economics, health, etc.

Shaunti Feldhahn, who became well know because of her For Men Only and For Women Only books has stayed on the same general theme and instead of focusing on what men and women need to know about their spouse, is writing this book to encourage people more generally about marriage.

Her main point is that Christians in particular have been emphasizing the problems of marriage in order to uphold its importance. But in doing so, we are likely discouraging couple from either getting married, or if married, communicating that marriage is primarily hard work.

Instead Feldhahn starts with the divorce rate and shows why what we all think we know is wrong. The rate of divorce has never been 50% or higher in the general population and it has been decreasing steadily since the high point of around 1980. She estimates that first marriages have less than 30 percent chance of getting a divorce. And later marriages, and more highly educated couples have even lower rates of divorce.

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Summary: Maybe, at least for some, the right apologetic is not about logic, but emotion and experience.

It would be hard to over emphasize how many people I respect have been fans of this book. It has been reviewed (and I think generally reviewed accurately) in Books and Culture (long), Christianity Today (short), the New York Times, the Telegraph and the Gospel Coalition (critical but appreciative). (Although not everyone likes it.)

The central idea of the book is that given our culture (and Spufford is writing to a secular UK here, not primarily to an Evangelical US) the idea that we should try to prove our Christianity through logic or proof is the wrong move.

As Alan Jacobs says in the opening of his review, apologetics should be more concerned with rhetoric than dialectical tasks, in other words, follow the interest of the listener, not your own desire to be right.

So Spufford is concentrating here on why, for him, Christianity can be an emotionally right choice, even if he can’t prove it scientifically or logically as many of the New Atheists are challenging Christians to do (or vice versa).

Spufford starts with trying to find the shared belief that we all have about this life. That central shared idea is HPtFtU, which stands for the Human Propensity to F*ck things Up (and he abbreviated most of the time.) Christians call this sin, but I think Spufford is right that calling it the HPtFtU feels more accurate. We can debate the reality or transmission method of original sin, but pretty much no one can debate that HPtFtU is real. We all have been a part of it and we all have seen others participate in it.

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Takeaway: Regardless of whether you are Protestant or Catholic, John Paul II was important.

Last year, I picked up Witness to Hope for Kindle when it was on sale. But the size and time commitment kept me from actually reading it. As much as I would like this blog to not influence my reading, I often don’t pick up long books because of my attempt to keep up, with assistance from several regular contributors, a 5 review a week schedule.

So, I do not often make room for a biography that clocks in at more than 1000 pages. At the same time, I tend to hate abridged audiobooks. If it was important enough to put in the book initially, it was probably important enough to read later.

But when I noticed that the audiobook of Witness to Hope was in the Scribd audiobook library, even though it is abridged, I picked it up.

The actual content is just under half of the original book. And it feels like an abridgment. The biggest problem with the abridgment is that it focuses too much on the political life of John Paul II as Pope and not enough on the spiritual influence. Spiritual is undoubtedly there, but when you compare the time devoted, it seems less important.

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Summary: It is not a violation of faith in Christ’s work, to pay attention to our own soul.

Lately I have been increasingly frustrated with Christian Living books. Particularly their introductions. I think I first noticed this strongly with James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful Life, but I have noticed the problem with a number of other books as well.

Maybe it is my problem and not one else need pay attention. But if I have to diagnose a more general problem, it is that for some reason Evangelicals seem to need to over compensate in their introductions for the general feedback that they think they are going to hear. And worse that overcompensation seems to be particularly focused on clichés. The books that are am frustrated with often have some really good content, once I get past the general introductions. But several times I have been so frustrated with the cliche-ridden introductions that I have had to force myself past them.

Soul Keeping has this problem. I really love that John Ortberg is writing a book that is as much about a tribute to the work of Dallas Willard in his life as it is about soul keeping as a subject. But honestly, I don’t need to be convinced that it is important to think about and work on my own spiritual health. I have been seeing a spiritual direction for over a year now. I read Christian books incessantly. I go to church regularly and while far from perfect, I really do think I am paying attention to my spiritual life for a lot of good reason. And the primary reason I don’t need to hear about the importance of spiritual care is that I grew up as an Evangelical (as would most of the readers).

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