Elliot Ritzema

Category: Book Reviews

  • Book Review: Evolving in Monkey Town

    One difficulty with evangelical American Christianity is that many of us don’t, or can’t, make a distinction between what is essential to the faith and what is peripheral. When the brightest young people in our churches start to question the peripherals, like the union between Christianity and political conservatism for example, we feel threatened. We think they have lost the faith.

    This is what happened to Rachel Held Evans. She grew up in Dayton, TN, the site of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, the daughter of a theologian and a school teacher. By her own admission, she “knew all the answers.” She won the Best Christian Attitude Award at her elementary school four years in a row. When she heard her grandfather had voted for Bill Clinton, she thought he was going to hell.

    But while she was studying at Bryan College in Dayton, cracks began to appear in her armor. She began to wonder about what happened to people who had never heard the gospel. It seemed unfair to her that she should be a Christian merely because she was born where she was. Her friends became concerned about her.

    Unlike some who begin to doubt Christianity as they grow up, however, she didn’t decide that it was all nonsense. The reason why she remained a Christian is that she turned to Jesus. She spent a summer reading through the Gospels, and ended up more strongly committed to the “God in Sandals” than she had ever been. This did not take away her doubts. She writes, “I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubts (questioning God)” (219-220). It allowed her to remain a committed follower of Jesus without having to know all the answers anymore.

    This book resonated with me, and it will resonate with a lot of people who grew up in the world of evangelical American Christianity but are no longer entirely comfortable within it. When, as a teenager, I began to doubt what I had been told in church and at my Christian school about the way the world was, I turned to Jesus. In the end, the only reason I stayed a Christian then, and why I am still a Christian today, is that I could not give up on him.

    I’d recommend this book to any Christian high school or college student who is experiencing doubts, or anyone who knows such a person. Through telling her story, Evans shows us a way to deal with doubts. Doubts can be the means to a more mature faith. Treat them as a way to refine faith and focus more radically on Jesus, and let the peripherals fall away.

  • Book Review: Tribes and Linchpin

    Seth Godin sells confidence, and there are plenty of people who are willing to buy. These are the only two books of Godin’s I have read, but by the time I read the second one I sensed that they were very similar.

    In Tribes, Godin’s goal is to get his readers to understand that there are people all over the world (“tribes”) with common interests who are waiting for a passionate person to lead them. The reader can be that passionate person. If the reader chooses not to be that passionate person, he or she is a “sheepwalker” — someone who is only interested in protecting the status quo.

    In Linchpin, Godin’s goal is to get his readers to understand that in the current work world, employees can only have job security if they make themselves indispensable. The reader can be that indispensable person, whom Godin calls a “linchpin.” If the reader chooses not to be a linchpin, he or she can fall prey to “the resistance,” or the “lizard brain.” The resistance is fearful and cautious, not wanting you to take risks because of the possibility of failure.

    If Seth Godin were a Christian (and I don’t think he is, despite the fact that he has spoken at Christian conferences), his spiritual gift would be Encouragement. He helps readers to realize that something needs doing, and helps them work up the gumption to do it.

    This review might seem dismissive of Godin’s writing, but it isn’t. I found both these books to be valuable and, yes, encouraging. Of the two, I’d recommend Linchpin. It was longer and went into more depth, though both it and Tribes had the same cheerleading tone. If you need a pep talk (and who doesn’t, from time to time?), read Godin.

  • Book Review: Surprised by Oxford

    Memoirs are autobiographies sharpened to a point. This memoir is the account of Carolyn Weber’s conversion from skeptic to believer in Christ over the course of her first year of graduate studies at Oxford University in the mid-’90s.

    It is not just a conversion narrative; it is also a love story and an homage to a historic university. In 36 chapters (many of which could stand alone as essays), Weber takes readers through the academic year while giving background about her youth in Ontario. She is a professor of Romantic literature, and literary (and some musical) references abound. I appreciated her honesty and vulnerability in telling her story. Her retellings of conversations with her friends and family–some of whom were happy about her conversion, and some of whom were disturbed by it–were some of my favorite parts of the book. It also didn’t hurt that Weber has a sense of humor. It is a testimony to how well she told her story that by the end of the book she seemed like an old friend.

    Since memoirs tend to be shorter than biographies, some readers may be surprised by the length of this one (447 pages). It would be a pity if potential readers were scared away by that, since Weber does a good job of drawing us in and making us care about her story, her friends and Oxford. I’d recommend this book to all, but especially Anglophiles and those who enjoy, or are curious about, conversion narratives.

  • Book Review: Futurecast

    In Futurecast, George Barna has given readers a bird’s eye view of the state of American society at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. There are chapters that deal with people’s lifestyles, morals and financial behavior. As the book progresses, he increasingly focuses on religious beliefs and behavior. After presenting data in each chapter, he spends a few pages reflecting on what it all means.

    This is the first book of George Barna’s that I’ve read. Before I read the book, however, I knew that Barna was the head of a Christian research organization that conducted regular surveys of Americans, and particularly American Christians. So I had some idea what to expect. There was indeed a lot of data, and much of it was interesting, if not that surprising. The trends that Barna described were occasionally encouraging, but mostly troubling to Christians. He does, however, end the book on a hopeful note.

    Futurecast will be of most interest to those Christian readers who enjoy a data-driven way of looking at trends. My personality is strongly intuitive, and so while I did find many parts of the book interesting, it was not until Barna began extrapolating from the data and putting it all together that he really began speaking my language.

    The title is a little misleading, since the book focuses heavily on present trends rather than the future. Barna mentions in the introduction that the book contains little in the way of predictions, since predictions that look more than five years ahead are highly speculative. When he talks about the future, he emphasizes redirecting trends rather than predicting what the future will be like.

  • 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.