Elliot Ritzema

Author: Elliot

  • Book Review: The Next Christians

    I got this book out of the library a few weeks ago because I had been hearing more and more lately about the author, Gabe Lyons. He is the founder of Q, an organization that exists to “educate Christians on their historic responsibility to renew culture.” (they also have a great web site with many thought-provoking essays) He previously co-wrote unChristian with David Kinnaman.

    Lyons says that there is a new group of Christians, which he calls the “Next Christians.” In contrast to previously popular ways of engaging culture, Next Christians are

    provoked, not offended;
    creators, not critics;
    called, not employed;
    grounded, not distracted;
    in community, not alone; and
    countercultural, not “relevant.”

    There was a lot in this book that I enjoyed, particularly the stories Lyons told about particular people and groups who he says belong to the Next Christians. In particular, I agree with Lyons that creating culture rather than merely critiquing it is a much more productive way for Christians to engage the world around them.

    However, Lyons could have done a better job of describing the ways that Christians who are not “Next Christians” engage with culture. Early in the book he gives a taxonomy of various groups, and I do not think that he was entirely fair to those groups that he thinks are more antagonistic to culture. I don’t believe that they would recognize themselves in his description of them.

    Also, a few critiques of this book that I have read claim that Lyons urging Christians to primarily adopt a ministry of restoration is unbiblical. I believe that it is in fact biblical, but Lyons could have spent more time talking about how restoration related to evangelism and making disciples (which the critics thought Lyons was throwing out the window). I once listened to a couple of talks given by John Stackhouse with the titles “Our (Temporary) Christian Calling: Make Disciples” and “Our (Permanent) Human Calling: Make Shalom.” This neatly encapsulates how the two ought to relate, and it would have been helpful if Lyons had made this more clear.

  • Book Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

    My wife and I have been on a major Agatha Christie kick recently. We have been steadily watching all of the Poirot series from British television starring David Suchet, and both of us have read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in the last two weeks.

    I read several Agatha Christie novels when I was a teenager, but this is the first time I have picked one up in probably 15 years. It has everything that you would expect from a Christie mystery: a murder in an English country house, a carefully defined list of suspects, investigation by a detective (in this case, Hercule Poirot), various twists and turns, and a satisfying conclusion.

    One thing that sets this one apart from other Christie mysteries is that it uses a first-person narrator. The narrator here is a likable doctor who assists Poirot in his investigation, but is also on the list of suspects.

    In all, this was a fun summer read for anyone who enjoys the “golden age” of detective fiction.

  • Book Review: Never Eat Alone

    Before reading Never Eat Alone, I had never read a book about networking. In part this was because the word “networking” conjured up in my mind greasy opportunists who sought to exploit relationships solely for their own benefit.

    Happily, Ferrazzi does not come across as that kind of person. Though he does stress the power of expanding your network of friends and contacts, he does not want to do it at the expense of sincerity. Yes, he does counsel his readers to position themselves in places where they can meet the people they want to meet. But his focus is on building a community of friends and mentors, rather than seeing people only in terms of what they can offer you. He says that concentrating on making others successful is just as important as thinking about what will make you successful. He says that the way to make small talk isn’t to talk small at all; it is to show your real self in a vulnerable way that will make others comfortable around you.

    Those are just a few of the things that stuck out to me about this book, but there are many more. I came away from the book realizing that, although I will never be an over-the-top extrovert like Ferrazzi, I don’t need to be afraid to use networking as a tool to create a community of relationships – with varying degrees of depth – while still being a sincere person.

  • Book Review: Hitchhiker

    Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas AdamsHitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams by M.J. Simpson

    I’ve enjoyed Douglas Adams’s books for a long time. When I was young, my parents put into my hands all four (at the time) volumes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and even Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and I devoured them. I have always been impressed with Adams’s humor, intelligence and imagination.

    This biography was an informative book, but definitely more for a British audience than for an American one. I knew a few of the big names mentioned in the book (like the members of Monty Python and two members of Pink Floyd, who were just a few of Adams’s many famous friends), but there were many that I didn’t know. There is a name glossary in the back that I referred to from time to time, but despite that I found that the frequent occurrence of names I didn’t know made the text hard to follow in places. A positive point about the book was that the author was able to get to the truth behind several of Adams’s oft-repeated (and slightly inaccurate) anecdotes. A negative is that I felt like I was being dragged through an interminable succession of this-happened-then-this-happened. I would have appreciated being given more insight into Adams’s writing, aside from the fact (well-documented in Hitchhiker) that he persistently and artfully avoided doing it as much as possible.

  • Book Review: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

    Many American Christians operate within a “fall paradigm” when it comes to the history of the United States. A fall paradigm sees the world like this: at some point in the past, things were the way they should be. Then something happened (a “fall”) that changed things for the worse. Our task today is to get things back to the way they were. There is nothing inherently wrong with a fall paradigm. The question is whether it depicts reality accurately or not.

    Enter John Fea, who teaches history at Messiah College. He explains in his introduction that one of his goals in the book is to convince his readers to think historically:

    Most human beings tend to be present-minded when it comes to confronting the past. The discipline of history was never meant to function as a means of getting one’s political point across or convincing people to join a cause. Yet Americans use the past for these purposes all the time. Such an approach to the past can easily degenerate into a form of propaganda or, as the historian Bernard Bailyn described it, “indoctrination by historical example.” (xxv)

    The book comes in three parts. In the first part, he traces the idea that the United States was meant to be, in some sense, “Christian,” from the 1700s to today. In the second part, he examines the question, “Was the American Revolution a Christian Event?” In the third, he looks at the religious beliefs of a range of founders: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon, John Jay and Samuel Adams.

    The last line of the book, which is intended to summarize Part Three, actually does a good job of summing up the book as a whole: “In the end, a close look at the beliefs of these statesmen reminds us that Christianity was present at the time of the American founding, but it often merged with other ideas that were compatible with, but not necessarily influenced by, Christianity” (242). When I wrote a paper on this subject for a history class in seminary, this is what I found as well. I don’t believe that the fall paradigm through which many Christians see the history of the United States is entirely accurate.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal, and I hope that it reaches a large audience, especially Christians. I hope that Fea accomplishes his goal of getting “Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present” (xvii).

  • Love Wins. Maybe You’ve Heard of It?

    Perhaps you’ve heard of this book. It has made no little stir on the Interwebs. And it continues to make a stir, since I know of at least two books that are coming out in the next month that deal with the subject of hell, at least one of which deals explicitly with this book.

    Since so many people already have such strong feelings about the book, I’m a little reluctant to say too much about it for fear of being misunderstood. But I will share a couple of thoughts:

    1. Bell still writes like he speaks. Line breaks aplenty.

    2. Bell is an impressionist. He shares the impressions that he gets from the Bible and from the world, and his refusal to explain how he arrived at some of the assumptions behind his impressions were frustrating to me. I wished that he would go into more depth, but at the same time I know that if he had gone into more depth, this would have been a very different book. Apparently he didn’t want to write that kind of book.

    3. Bell is a pastor. He understands that the image many people have of God is violent and destructive, and leads to awful results in their lives. So he presents a different image. In some ways I think this image is biblically faithful, and in some ways I think that it isn’t. But I do know this: any response to this book that does not attempt to respond to the same issues Bell brings up, but in a better way, will not succeed. It is not enough to say that Bell is not being biblical enough. It needs to be demonstrated both that Bell is not being biblical enough, AND that being more biblical addresses the problem of destructive ideas about God, or the fate of people who have never heard the gospel. That is the issue, and in my opinion too few critiques of the book understand this.

  • The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching

    Normally I write short reviews of every book I read grouped together by month. Since I’ve been busy lately, though, I haven’t done one of those monthly roundups since March. Now the prospect of writing several monthly roundups is becoming daunting, so I will try to post short reviews of each book as I have time to write them.

    When I was growing up in North Carolina, it was hard to not be aware of college basketball. There are a lot of great teams in the area, and people can be quite emotionally invested in their favorite teams. Though I did not have a personal connection to the University of North Carolina, I did root for their basketball team. A big part of the reason for that was my admiration for their long-time coach, Dean Smith.

    This book, which Smith wrote a few years after he retired in 1997, is his attempt to reflect on what he learned about leadership during his 36 years of coaching at UNC. Each chapter consists of Smith’s reflections on a particular topic (for example, “Why Unselfishness Works”), followed by reflections from some of Smith’s former players on that same topic. The players are usually ones who have spent time in the business world, and they talk about the influence Smith has had on the way they live and work. The chapter then closes with a reflection on that topic geared toward the realm of business written by Gerald Bell, a consultant and professor at UNC’s business school.

    What Smith taught his basketball teams boiled down to three main principles: play smart, play together, and play hard. He rarely talked about winning, he writes, because winning was out of his team’s control. He wanted his players to focus on execution, and the outcome would take care of itself.

    In reading this book, I learned a lot about Smith and what made him so successful. He has strong opinions, and they are part of what made the book entertaining. For example, he called tardiness “the height of arrogance,” because you are saying that your time is more important than someone else’s. I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in leadership, teaching or college basketball.

  • Book Review: Story Engineering

    I’m not a person who has read a lot of how-to books on fiction writing, so I’m a newbie when it comes to this genre. The only book about fiction writing that I can remember reading was Stephen King’s On Writing several years ago. What I remember most about that book were the autobiographical passages rather than the nuts and bolts of writing.

    Brooks’s philosophy of writing is consciously different from King’s. Asserting that is a bold move, considering King’s success. Unlike King, whom Brooks calls an “organic” writer, Brooks believes that there are six core competencies when it comes to writing fiction: Concept, Character, Theme, Story Structure, Scene Execution and Writing Voice. Though that may sound formulaic at first glance, Brooks insists that using the core competencies in a story is no more formulaic than an architect obeying the laws of physics when constructing a building. Brooks says that those who intuitively grasp good story structure (like King) are able to just sit down and start writing without a plan, and what they end up with will be good. The rest of us need to go through the steps of deliberately using story structure. You can’t teach genius, but you can teach skill, and that is what the six core competencies are all about.

    I enjoyed this book. Brooks argues what screenwriters have known for a long time (and what I’ve believed for a long time): creativity is best utilized, and recognized, within carefully defined boundaries. Otherwise, it becomes a mess that the audience can’t relate to.

    One criticism of this book is that it was longer than it had to be. Brooks has such an evident fascination about and knowledge of his subject that he can get long-winded and go into great detail when, at least for this reader, not as much detail is needed. In fiction writing, excessive elaboration may not be as big a deal, but Brooks could use some trimming in this non-fiction book.

  • Review of Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

    Radical by David Platt (who is pastor of a large church in Birmingham, AL and has a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) is a book which, unfortunately, is needed. I say “unfortunately” because Radical is a call to American Christians to follow Jesus with their whole lives, and not to confuse pursuit of the American Dream of wealth, comfort and self-sufficiency with Christian discipleship. If American Christians were radical disciples of Jesus, this book would not be necessary. But there is a widespread collusion among Christians in this country that being a follower of Christ need not be radical. As Platt puts it, “[W]e look around, and everyone else has nice cars, nice homes, and lifestyles characterized by luxuries, so we accept that this must be the norm for Christians. We may get convicted about our way of living when we look at the Bible, but then when we look at one another, we assume it must be okay because everyone else lives this way” (205-6).

    There has been such a need for books like this for such a long time that you could almost say there is a genre of “costly discipleship” books: books that insist that following Christ is more of a life-changing commitment than is commonly thought. Platt makes reference to one of the most famous books in this genre, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, in the opening pages of this book.

    These books are valuable, but there is a danger in reading them. The danger is that in reading them we are convicted by how far away from a truly sacrificial life of discipleship we are, and we become paralyzed either by guilt or by not knowing where to begin. Platt is not interested in paralyzing people, and the last chapter of this book is where he really shows a pastoral heart. He urges readers to begin their journey toward radical discipleship by undertaking a one-year experiment involving five components: pray for the entire world; read through the entire Word; sacrifice your money for a specific purpose; spend your time in another context; commit your life to a multiplying community. Honestly, these steps, by themselves, are not all that radical. The point, I think, is to get people to start somewhere. He even says that beginning by spending 2 percent of our time in a different context could lead to giving 98 percent of our time in a different context (203). Platt wants to get Christians on the road to understanding the radical demands – and radical rewards – of following Jesus. I am thankful for this book, and will seek to follow through on some of the commitments that Platt suggests.

  • March 2011: Books Read

    1. Gods that Fail: Modern Idolatry and Christian Mission by Vinoth Ramachandra. I first encountered Ramachandra when I went to InterVarsity’s Urbana missions conference in 2000 and attended a talk that he gave. I can’t remember now what exactly he spoke on, but I do remember being impressed by him as someone who was very intelligent and articulate, who was knowledgeable about culture, both eastern and western, and who cared deeply about the church’s mission.

    Several years later, I picked up his book Gods that Fail at a used book sale, and read it recently as I prepared to give a sermon that touched on modern idolatry. I found in his writing that he was everything I remembered him to be from Urbana, and more. In any book about modern idolatry, the author has to have the courage to call a spade a spade, and Ramachandra has that ability in – yes, I’ll say it – spades. This is evident as early as page 6, where Ramachandra writes, “[Francis] Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ sloganeering disguises the massive hypocrisy, political betrayals, economic blackmail and proxy violence that have so often attended western talk of defending democracy and exporting ‘free world’ values.” Though this book was published in 1996, it struck me as being quite contemporary in its assessment of the state of the world. That is, I think, because Ramachandra is right in his belief that “the displacement of the God of the biblical revelation, which is the most distinctive feature of modernity, has paved the way for the rise of new gods which, like their ancient counterparts, eventually devour their devotees” (19). These gods, Ramachandra writes, saturate the modern world as well as the church, paralyzing the latter from faithfully carrying out its mission.

    Just as Tim Keller wrote in the book on idolatry that I read just before this one (Counterfeit Gods), Ramachandra writes that the way to defeat idols is to replace them with the Crucified God. If Christians worship the God who died on a cross, they are able to see the silliness of the obsession with technique and desire for power that is rampant within the church and without. This means embracing vulnerability, rejecting individualism and nationalism, and affirming “clearly and boldly the truth of the gospel, the fact of the sovereignty of Jesus Christ as sole Savior and Judge of every human enterprise, and to do this in the public domain whether people hear or refuse to hear” (222-3). This was an inspiring read, and a challenging one.

    2. Changed by Faith by Luis Palau with Jay Fordice. Reviewed earlier here.

    3. Doing Virtuous Business: The Remarkable Success of Spiritual Enterprise by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch. Reviewed earlier here.