Elliot Ritzema

Category: Books

  • November 2009: Books Read

    1. The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne. I bought this book at a small used book shop in Hanapepe, when Mary and I were on Kauai for our honeymoon. It is very engaging and story-driven, which made it a very fast read, and I finished it on the plane ride home.

    Shane, who grew up a Christian in Tennessee, is part of the Simple Way community that lives among the poor in inner-city Philadelphia. I found his account of this life, and how he got there, to be fascinating and compelling. I agree with much of what he wrote in this book about the life-transforming power of the gospel, about how Christianity has been married to political power, and about the biblical mandate to serve the poor.

    But I didn’t like everything about this book. It may seem like a small thing, but Claiborne’s folksy tone (literally – he uses the word “folks” 165 times in the book) was annoying after a while. I mean, did he really have to call Mother Teresa “Momma T”? I also got the impression that he looked down on his fellow Christians who were rich, or who were Republicans. He seemed quite willing to love his enemies when they had names like Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh, but I was left with some doubt as to whether he loved his enemies named George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. This was unfortunate, given the fact that Claiborne’s activist lifestyle by no means requires him to look with scorn on other people. Last summer I read Dorothy Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, and I did not detect a self-righteous tone in her at all. Even though Claiborne’s irresistible revolution is in many ways compelling, and what the church in North America deeply needs, the tone he sometimes adopts isn’t.

    2. The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. The premise: Roose, a student and aspiring writer at Brown University, decides that he wants to spend a “semester abroad” at conservative evangelical Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell. Though raised in a household he identifies as Quaker, Roose seems thoroughly secular in his outlook at the beginning of the book. While working as an assistant to A.J. Jacobs (author of The Year of Living Biblically), he visits Liberty and comes to think that spending some time at Liberty would be a good way to understand the evangelical Christian subculture in America (and a good premise for a book).

    The result: a highly entertaining read. I did not attend a Christian university, but I am an evangelical Christian, and I understand the sort of subculture that Roose enters when he enrolls at Liberty. I found his outsider’s observations about dating life (he finds that the option of sex being off the table is strangely freeing – i.e., two people can just get to know each other without ulterior motives), battling with lust (he visits a support group for what he calls “chronic masturbators”) and evangelical attitudes toward homosexuality (he finds that the subject comes up way more often at Liberty than at Brown, where there actually are gay students) to be illuminating and, at times, hilarious. My favorite passages in the book are his account of going on a Spring Break mission trip to Daytona Beach with a group of his fellow students, and his account of meeting Falwell himself and interviewing him for the school paper – just a few weeks before his death in May of 2007.

    Roose is surprised to find some diversity at Liberty, including students who experience doubt and regularly break the social rules. He is also surprisingly charitable toward the people at Liberty, with whom he ultimately disagrees about many things. He even has kind words for Falwell, about whom he writes,

    Realizing that Dr. Falwell isn’t a fraud – as troubling a notion as that is – has helped me solve one of the great mysteries of this semester. For months now, I’ve been puzzled by the thousands of good, kindhearted believers at Liberty who follow a man who seems, to my mind, to be almost unredeemable. They like him, I’ve learned, because he’s a straight shooter. In half a century of preaching, Dr. Falwell has said some outrageous things, and he’s angered Christians and non-Christians alike, but he’s never revealed himself as a hypocrite. He’s never been caught in sexual sin, and he’s been as transparent in his financial dealings as you could reasonably expect. And in the world of televangelism, a world filled to the brim with hucksters and charlatans and Elmer Gantry-type swindlers, a little sincerity goes a long way. (261)

    All in all, this was a highly entertaining book and a compulsive read; I was sad when I reached the end. I’ll certainly take a look at Kevin Roose’s next book.

    3. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall. Lyall is an American journalist who has lived in England for several years, is married to an Englishman, and has two daughters. Her book pokes fun at various British idiosyncrasies, such as their attitude toward sex (covered in a chapter titled, “Naughty Boys and Rumpy Pumpy) poor dental hygiene (“I Snapped It Out Myself”), the House of Lords (“Lawmakers from Another Planet”), and their stiff upper lips (“By God, Sir, I’ve Lost My Leg!”).

    Mary took this book along on our honeymoon for some light beach reading, and it certainly fit the bill. I found many passages to be incredibly funny. I also found some of them to be discomforting, such as those on drunkenness and sex. It isn’t that I’m particularly prudish (that is, I’m not shocked at what I read). Rather, what made me uncomfortable is that those passages depict the British to be singularly unattractive. Also, Lyall doesn’t use profanity in her narration, but she certainly doesn’t shy away from reporting what others say, especially in her chapter on British journalists.

    The question that I was primarily left with at the end of the book was, “Is it accurate? Or is she merely embellishing on her own experience in order to get a laugh?” Not being British, and never having even traveled to Britain, I can’t say. I can only say that, having lived for a year in Prague, I found her description of British stag and hen parties (in the chapter “Distressed British Nationals”) devastatingly accurate. Almost every time I walked around the city center at night, I would see (and more often, hear) a crowd of drunken, boorish men, often dressed alike (except for the groom-to-be, who was more often than not in drag), making lewd comments to passing women and generally making fools of themselves. They were always, ALWAYS British. So perhaps her descriptions of Britons are accurate, but in the same way that descriptions of “Ugly Americans” are accurate. That is, there is an uncomfortably large slice of the population in both countries that makes everyone else look bad. A more accurate title for this book would have been Ugly Britons. But that probably wouldn’t sell.

  • October 2009: Books Read

    October was a light reading month for me – you know, because of getting married on the 24th and all. I did manage to finish a couple of books, though (and both of them on the honeymoon).

    1. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling. A lot of people have heard of The Jungle Book from the Disney movie of the same name, so you may be wondering why the title of this book is plural (at least, I was when I picked it up). The reason for this is that Kipling wrote two Jungle Books: one in 1894, and a sequel in 1895. Both are collections of short stories, and both deal primarily (but not exclusively) with the world of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves. The edition that I read combined both of them in one volume.

    The book is a fun read. It is fascinating to enter into the jungles of colonial India and learn about the various animals. Kipling is very good at giving the animals voices and personalities of their own. His great gift in these books is to imaginatively project himself into the world of animals, and show how they would talk if they had human personalities and emotions.

    As I said, not all the stories deal with Mowgli and his world. A couple of the stories are not set in India at all, but the Arctic. My favorite of all the stories is one that was also translated into a cartoon: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the story of the pet mongoose who becomes a hero to an English family.

    2. The Heart of a Goof by P.G. Wodehouse. This is a collection of nine stories about golf by that great master of the English language, P.G. Wodehouse. They all start out in a fictional country club, in which the Oldest Member relates a story to a reluctant hearer. As with so many of Wodehouse’s stories, many of them involve a couple who nearly does not get together, but eventually does. In this collection, the thing that generally gets them together one way or another is golf.

    I’ve read enough P.G. Wodehouse books by now to be able to say what I liked and didn’t like about each one (which is hard, since so many of them involve such similar characters). While I found this collection entertaining, I don’t know that I would recommend it to someone who was just getting to know Wodehouse. There is, in my opinion, too much golf jargon intruding on the plots. This may appeal to an avid golfer, but I much prefer his stories about Blandings Castle or Jeeves, which are (deservedly, I think) more popular.

  • If you can’t use words properly, you shouldn’t write books

    Last week I checked the book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism out of the library and started reading. On page 15, after reading about Henry Ford’s failed attempt to start a rubber plantation in South America to provide his cars with tires, I read this paragraph:

    As a parable of empire, Fordlandia captures well the experience of the United States in Latin America. The quixotic faith that led Ford to try to remake the Amazon in an American image – a truly utopian endeavor considering that he never set foot in Brazil – reflects a broader belief that the United States offers a universal, and universally acknowledged, model for the rest of humanity. In turn, Ford Motor Company’s subsequent support of death-squad regimes demonstrates how that kind of evangelicalism easily gives way to brute coercion.

    The book went back to the library immediately. Why? Because Greg Grandin, the author, used the word “evangelicalism” in what I thought was an inappropriate way. I’ve studied Christian history, and I know that Evangelicalism is a movement within the Christian church. And while many people may not work with a very precise definition (see here for a very good attempt at defining it), I think that Grandin creates confusion by using the word the way that he does. There was nothing specifically Christian about what Ford was doing. My guess is that Grandin intended to convey the idea that Ford was zealous in advocating the greatness of the United States. If that was his intent, I would suggest he use a broader term that doesn’t have such specific connotations.

    I read a lot, and I read a lot of stuff that I don’t necessarily agree with. I even read a lot of stuff that is explicitly critical of groups with which I identify. But if I can’t trust an author to use words with care, I don’t read the book. Even if I disagree violently with what an author is saying, I have to trust him or her to use words coherently and with care. If that trust is broken, I will move on to an author who does use words carefully.

    Can you tell this is a major pet peeve? Does anybody else feel as strongly about this as I do?

  • September 2009: Books Read

    September has been a busy month – with starting to drive again and continuing to get ready for the wedding. October probably won’t be any less busy, since we’re getting married on the 24th and are busy moving stuff into our new apartment.

    1. Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski. My friend Janet, who is in my church small group and who is a current Regent student, lent me this book to read a couple of weeks ago. It is written by a young man who, in the summer and fall of 2003, left his studies at a Christian college in California to spend five months living as a homeless person. He did it, he mentions in the book, for three reasons:

    1. To better understand the life of the homeless in America, and to see firsthand how the church is responding to their needs.
    2. To encourage others to “live out loud” for Christ in whatever ways God is asking them to.
    3. To learn personally what it means to depend on Christ for my daily physical needs, and to experience contentment and confidence in Him.

    He started off by living for a month in a homeless shelter in Denver, and then lived with a friend on the streets of Washington, D.C., Portland, Phoenix and San Diego. They lived off of donations that they received from playing guitar on the streets. They made an odd pair of homeless people: they didn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs, and they only played praise songs on their guitars. Despite their difference from many street people, they seem to have been accepted by many of the people they encountered.

    It was particularly interesting for me to read about how they were received by the Christians and churches they encountered. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of Christians did not help them, and many churches either ignored them or actively tried to shoo them away. As they hung out on the campus of a large church in Phoenix one Saturday morning, a church staff member yelled at them for loitering outside the sanctuary. As they walked away, they prayed that God would change their frustrated attitudes and that God would convict the man who had kicked them out. When they went back to the church the next day for the service, the same man sought them out and apologized with tears. The powerful part about the story, I thought, is that if they had allowed themselves to be embittered and unforgiving, they would never have had the opportunity to be reconciled to that man. Yankoski ended the story by saying, “Love can’t cover wrongs if we let frustrations and failures keep us apart” (168-9).

    Even though Mike’s descriptions of life on the streets may be something that will make many Christians uncomfortable, I can’t help the feeling that he was holding back. He mentions at the outset that he has cleaned up the language out of consideration for his publisher. This reminded me of the quote from Tony Campolo that I heard many years ago: “I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” I can understand the consideration, but I think it’s a shame that a Christian publisher is more concerned about sanitizing bad words than it is about being honest about the desperate situation that many people face on the streets of America. Nevertheless, this book is a start, and I’d recommend it for all American Christians who need to be challenged to treat the poor with love, as God commands – and that’s a whole lot of us.

    2. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before (and After) You Marry by Les and Leslie Parrott. As Mary and I have been getting ready for marriage, we have been reading a few marriage books. This one, by a married couple who teach at Seattle Pacific University, could be a bit corny at times, but was very good. The questions at the end of each chapter were good conversation starters for Mary and me. I’d recommend it to Christian couples who are getting ready for their marriage and would like to talk through some of the issues of perennial conflict that might come up.

    3. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I was excited to take a look at this book ever since I saw the author mentioned in an article about driving in the NY Times. The article looked at why some people are early mergers and some are late mergers when they are approaching a construction zone. I learned a lot of interesting facts over the course of reading the book, but overall it was not a page-turner. I enjoyed, for example, reading the story of how Sweden switched from having everyone drive on the left to having everyone drive on the right, was interested to hear why people in SUVs tend to speed more, and was fascinated to find that roundabouts are safer than traditional intersections. What I didn’t like about it was that it lacked an overarching argument that Vanderbilt was building from chapter to chapter (or if it did have one, it was extremely subtle). The chapters, while many of them were interesting, could have been individual essays with no relation to one another. I learned a lot of facts while reading the book, but the book as a whole lacked focus.

    Here is my favorite paragraph from the book, from the chapter “Why You Shouldn’t Drive with a Beer-Drinking Divorced Doctor Named Fred on Super Bowl Sunday in a Pickup Truck in Rural Montana: What’s Risky on the Road and Why” –

    Grimly tally the number of people who have been killed by terrorism in the United States since the State Department began keeping records in the 1960s, and you’ll get a total of less than 5,000 – roughly the same number, it has been pointed out, as those who have been struck by lightning. But each year, with some fluctuation, the number of people killed in car crashes in the United States tops 40,000. More people are killed on the roads each month than were killed in the September 11 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, polls found that many citizens thought it was acceptable to curtail civil liberties to help counter the threat of terrorism, to help preserve our “way of life.” Those same citizens, meanwhile, in polls and in personal behavior, have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll (e.g., lowering speed limits, introducing more red-light cameras, stiffer blood alcohol limits, stricter cell phone laws). Ironically, the normal business of life that we are so dedicated to preserving is actually more dangerous to the average person than the threats against it. (271)

  • August 2009: Books Read

    1. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider. This book came out in 1977, and is regarded by many as a “classic.” The version I read was the fifth edition, updated in (I think) 2004.

    The book comes in four parts: the first part depicts the state of the world today, in which there are billions of poor people and millions of affluent people who could help. The second part shares a biblical perspective on poverty and possessions. The third attempts to answer the question, “What causes poverty?” And the fourth shares practical steps that Christians in rich countries can follow to both simplify their own lives and make wise contributions to making the world a more just and fair place.

    This was a challenging book for me. Although I don’t think of myself as affluent, I certainly live in an affluent part of the world and enjoy many more conveniences than those people who have to live on a few dollars a day. The main things that I got out of this book were 1) practical tips on living more simply, while simultaneously fostering community, and 2) a greater understanding of the economics of poverty. Lack of understanding the latter, I think, is a major obstacle that keeps Christians from helping the poor. We think that the foreign aid rich countries give to poor countries is a lot, but most actually give less than 1 percent of their GNP in foreign aid – and much of this aid is tied to their own foreign policy interests. We think that this aid is more than enough to make up for inequalities caused by things like tariffs and the abusive practices of some multi-national corporations, but it is not. This is definitely a book that all Christians in wealthy nations should read. Even if not everyone agrees with Sider’s practical proposals, the problem of poverty is something that all Christians – if they are reading their Bibles and are genuinely seeking to be more like Jesus – are called to address.

    2. Praying With the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today by Scot McKnight. McKnight was raised in a Christian tradition that had no use for daily set prayers, but as an adult he has come to appreciate and even love them. Like McKnight, I was raised in a Christian tradition that did not have set prayers (though we did recite the Lord’s Prayer and the “Gloria Patri” every week in church). As an adult, I have been more and more interested in the practice of daily prayer times as I have come to understand how deep they go in the Christian tradition.

    McKnight’s book is a quick read and it comes in two parts: the first deals with Jesus’ own use of set prayers (Jews of his time recited prayers daily, and what we call the “Lord’s Prayer” is Jesus teaching his disciples something to pray every day). The second part serves as an introduction to four prayer books: the Orthodox Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and Phyllis Tickle’s modern ecumenical Divine Hours. I would recommend this book to anyone who, like me, wants to have a richer prayer life and who is less familiar with the tradition of set prayers and how to use a prayer book.

    3. The Ascent of a Leader: How Ordinary Relationships Develop Extraordinary Character and Influence by Bill Thrall, Bruce McNichol and Ken McElrath. Throughout my time in graduate school, I felt that it was more important to spend my time reading deep theology books than leadership books. But as I grow closer to (hopefully) taking on more leadership in a church setting, and as I become more aware that it is rarely bad theology that gets pastors kicked out of churches, I’ve become more interested in leadership literature. Earlier this year I read Now, Discover Your Strengths, and I’ve just recently completed The Ascent of a Leader.

    The “ascent” the authors talk about is climbing the “character ladder” rather than the “capacity ladder.” The capacity ladder is what leaders are able to do on their own, and it comes with four rungs: discover what I can do, develop my capacities, acquire a title or position and attain individual potential. Climbing up just this kind of ladder can lead to loneliness and failure. Rather, spurred on by environments and relationships of grace, leaders should climb the character ladder: trust God and others, choose vulnerability, align with truth, pay the price and discover destiny. Once you start to climb the character ladder, you can integrate it with the capacity ladder, “leveraging our capacities far beyond what we could have accomplished without character” (143). I found this book to be a good reminder of how important character is in everyday life.

    4. The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight. I’d heard a lot about this little book in recent months, and when I was at the Covenant’s annual meeting in Portland this summer, I was able to pick it up. The title comes from a time when McKnight was sitting in his backyard and saw a strange blue bird that he had never seen before. Turns out it was a parakeet that had escaped from someone’s cage. The “blue parakeets” of the title are “oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens” (208). Issues like Sabbath, foot washing, tithing and women in ministry are blue parakeets that many of us don’t quite know what to do with: do we try to retrieve all practices from biblical times? Do we try to retrieve only what we can salvage for our day and our culture? Do we read through tradition? Or do we read in dialogue with tradition? McKnight counsels us to read the Bible as a Story. We should read this Story in order to get to know the God behind it. And we should discern through God’s Spirit and in the context of our community how to continue living that Story in our own day. McKnight provides an example of discernment in the issue of women in ministry.

    This is a wonderful book, and I hope it finds its way into the hands of lots of people. All Christians interpret the Bible in some way, but there are so few books for a popular audience on how to best interpret it. As a result, many are left thinking that the way their pastor or their immediate community interprets the Bible is self-evidently the only way. This is unfortunate.

    This isn’t a perfect book, by any means. Since it is short, and meant for a popular audience, McKnight ends up dealing with some complicated issues very briefly. As a result, I doubt whether he will convince many people who, for example, are thoroughly antagonistic to women’s ordination. But since the book is for a popular audience, and no popular book can deal with these issues in great detail, I still highly recommend it.

    5. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I have never seen the movie version of this book, and I was surprised on reading it to find that Scarlett O’Hara is one of the more malevolent and despicable literary protagonists I have ever read about – and I have read Anna Karenina. Like Anna Karenina, the real hero of this book is someone besides the main character: in Anna Karenina it is Levin (who, I’ve heard, Tolstoy modeled after himself), and in Gone With the Wind, it seems to me that the heroine is really Melanie Wilkes. But in both books, the intended hero is far overshadowed by protagonists who are such finely written, true-to-life characters that, despite their badness, they steal the show. It’s a great credit to Margaret Mitchell that she could create such a believable character as Scarlett – even if she is so believable that I genuinely didn’t like her.

    6. The Theology of the Book of Revelation by Richard Bauckham. We have been reading through the book of Revelation in our Bible study, and I have taken it on myself to do background reading and lead the discussion. Part of that background reading has been this fantastic little book (it’s only 169 pages). Bauckham, who retired a couple of years ago from being Professor of New Testament at St. Andrews, digs into the theological content of Revelation and finds that it has perhaps the most developed trinitarian theology in the New Testament. He doesn’t spend a lot of time criticizing various interpretations of the book, but it’s clear that he doesn’t think futurist or historicist interpretations do a very good job of making sense of the imagery in the book. This is a dense little book, and it doesn’t move chronologically through the text. For those who want to read it, I’d recommend reading Revelation first to get a sense of it, then read this book, and then go back and read Revelation again with new eyes.

  • July 2009: Books Read

    1. The Essential Shakespeare Handbook, by Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding. Since I went to a contestant tryout for the game show Jeopardy! in May, I’ve suddenly grown very curious about certain subjects that show up repeatedly on the show. Like Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare class in college, but there were still lots of things I didn’t know about Shakespeare’s writings. We read several of his plays, but I didn’t get the overview of all his works that might come in handy if I were ever on the show. So I decided to get that overview from this book.

    It’s a great book for the purpose I read it for. There are shelves and shelves of books about Shakespeare, but I found that not many of them are very good for getting plot synopses and character listings for all his plays. Also, not all of them have nifty color photographs, like this one. It also mentioned later stage and screen adaptations of various plays. I found it helpful for finding out information that I didn’t know about Shakespeare’s lesser plays (like The Two Noble Kinsmen, or Pericles), and also deciding which ones I haven’t read that I might like to someday (like King Lear).

    2. Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life by Douglas V. Porpora. I picked this book up for free from the religion editor of the LA Times eight years ago. I had never heard of Porpora, but something about the title and a few pages I read stuck out to me. After sitting on my shelf for eight years, I decided to pick it up and see what it was about.

    Porpora, a sociologist who teaches at Drexel University (or did, when this book was published), sets out to affirm moral meaning in a society where meaninglessness presses in on all sides. He seeks to call us back to our human vocation – or rather, to the idea that humans have a vocation that can be discerned and fulfilled.

    While I found some aspects of his argument to be fascinating and dead-on, the overall argument I thought was weak and inadequately supported. It seemed like he meandered through a land devoid of meaning for several chapters, then mustered the energy for a final chapter that was meant to inspire, but fell flat. A big reason for this was that I thought he was not specific enough in what his call actually entailed. Will the idea of a human vocation (even if we do not know what it is) be inspiring or comforting for people who feel a lack of meaning or purpose in their lives? Porpora identifies himself as a Catholic in the book, and I was disappointed, as a Christian, that he did not enunciate the Christian vision of the human vocation. Even if he finally believes that the Christian view of human vocation is not the only one, it would have been more helpful for him to say something more specific.

    Nevertheless, the book was worth reading for some inspired passages, like these:

    The tendency is to think that belief in objective truth makes us intolerant of others’ perspectives. It need not. What belief in objective truth should make us intolerant of are those beliefs of our own we cannot justify. Unless we subject ourselves to such rigor, we entertain no critical thought and experience no intellectual growth. (21)

    Secular humanism has been attracted to Judeo-Christian morality, but it has scrapped the Judeo-Christian cosmos that underlies it without putting anything in its place. Without such metaphysical grounding, rights talk threatens actually to become the empty rhetoric that postmodernist philosophers suppose it to be. (74)

    Although atheists and agnostics rightly assess the objective evidence for God as inconclusive, they tend to forget that the objective evidence is not the only evidence anyone brings to the case. Even atheists and agnostics are also entering into evidence their own personal experience. It is just that in their personal experience, God is absent. (127)

    For Jesus, God is our moral exemplar. Thus, if Jesus’ ethic were to be formulated as a rule, that rule would not be, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but rather, “Do unto others as God does unto you.” … Without either Jesus or God as exemplars of the heroically good, the Christian ethic atrophies into a banal norm of reciprocity, what we now call the golden rule. No wonder other discourses, those of utilitarianism or self-fulfillment, encroach on it. (165)

    The real religious divide in America does not concern belief. It concerns emotional attachment to the sacred. There are those who are emotionally attached to God and those who are emotionally alienated from the God in whom they believe. (299)

  • June 2009: Books Read

    1. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller. I’d been looking forward to reading this since it came out last year, and when I was talking with my cousin (who is not a Christian) over Christmas about a book to possibly read together, I knew this was the one. Since February we have been reading about a chapter at a time, he e-mailing me his thoughts and me responding with my thoughts. It has been a fruitful dialogue, I think, mostly because Keller covers so much in this book. The first half features chapters on various questions/objections that people in North America have about Christianity (e.g., “How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?”), and the second half features chapters that examine the claims of Christianity. Keller has clearly done a lot of thinking about cultural and philosophical issues and a lot of talking with non-Christians, and it shows. I highly recommend it both for believers who want an overview of modern/postmodern Western objections to Christianity, and unbelievers who want to know what some responses to those objections are.

    2. A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society by Rodney Clapp. The title of this book says it all, really. Clapp argues that we are in a post-Christian society, and says that the church’s response to this situation should not be to attempt to reassert Christian cultural dominance but to become a culture unto itself. I bought it used, and the previous owner had written a lot of question marks in the margins, and I could see why. It’s much too short for Clapp to really develop his arguments, so I’m not too sure that it’s likely to convince many people who don’t already agree with the thesis. I enjoyed it, but wouldn’t call it a life-changing book. For those who want more fully developed thought in this area, I’d recommend the work of John Howard Yoder or Stanley Hauerwas.

    3. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch. I’m a sucker for books about culture. All you have to do, as an author or publisher, is put the word “culture” in a book title, and you can guarantee that I’ll at least pick it up and look at it. I was already familiar with the work of Andy Crouch, largely through the influence of my Sunday School teacher when I went to Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Fritz Kling. Back then (this was seven years ago), Fritz would hand out copies of the magazine of which Crouch was the editor, re:generation quarterly. I remember reading through a few issues and especially liking Crouch’s voice. One time, Crouch even came to Richmond and I went to meet him with Fritz and a group of others. I don’t remember a lot about the meeting except that Crouch talked about highways and how they were a product of and also produced culture. I thought his habit of looking behind the stuff of everyday life and wondering why it was there and what it said about culture was fascinating, and a good habit for me to develop too.

    Culture Making has talk about highways, and so much more. Crouch rejects one-dimensional Christian responses to culture, calling us to reject some, embrace some, but above all, make some. Culture abhors a vacuum, he says, so it isn’t enough for us to just pick and choose what we like and don’t like. If we want good culture(s), we need to make it. He presents a reading of the Bible in which culture is prominent, and urges us to stop trying to change the world. What we can do, instead, is start making culture in small groups (“the 3, the 12 and the 120,” he calls them) and trust God to magnify our culture-making efforts.

    It also has the story of what happened to that little magazine, re:generation quarterly. It failed, but Crouch encourages his readers to try and make culture, even if it sometimes means failure. Crouch is a good writer, and this is a good book. I hope it makes it into the hands of many Christians.

    4. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Even though many people of my generation read this book when they were in junior high or high school, I did not. Since it has been so powerful for so long and for so many people, I decided to read it.

    How can I review a book like this? I can only say that it was heartbreaking in its ordinariness. Everyone who reads the book knows how extraordinary the circumstances were under which it was written: Anne and seven other Jews hid in a secret apartment in Amsterdam for over two years as most other Jews in Europe were shipped off to death camps by the Nazis. In the end, the residents were shipped off too and only Otto Frank, Anne’s father, survived.

    Despite the extraordinary circumstances, though, the most compelling part about the book to me was just how ordinary it was. Anne was truly gifted as a writer, but in so many ways she was just like any other girl: she had conflicts with her parents, she desired romantic love, she had hopes and dreams for the future. One reason for the popularity of this book, I think, is that so many people can relate to Anne. She seems like us, or like someone we know and love. And because she is so like the rest of us, we can’t help but be chilled and saddened by the fact that what happened to her happened to millions of others, and could happen to anyone.

    5. The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. I can’t remember the first time I heard who Dorothy Day was, but I’ve been curious to read this book, her autobiography up to the early ’50s, for a while. The front of my copy of the book calls her a “legendary Catholic social activist,” and I was curious to see how she got started, what motivated her, and what led to the Catholic Worker Movement, which she co-founded.

    The book didn’t disappoint. It was a quick read, and I found her description of the movement and the people involved to be inspiring. It made me want to be a part of something like it. Her writing isn’t all inspirational, however. After all, it is called The Long Loneliness, and she is honest about the loneliness it is possible to feel in the midst of many people and in the midst of a great movement.

    One tidbit that was surprising to me was that Day was not a socialist in her Catholic Worker days. I had assumed that she was… I suppose because I had read somewhere that before she became a Catholic she worked on several socialist newspapers. She actually describes herself as an anarchist and pacifist.

  • May 2009: Books Read

    1. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I had never heard of John Irving until I lived in Eastern Europe and saw his books in all the English language bookstores I visited. His overseas publishers are apparently amazing. I picked this particular one up just before my trip to Boston, because i thought it would be fun to read a book set in New England while I went to New England. As usual, I didn’t have as much time to read on the trip as I thought (which was good), and so I didn’t finish it until early May.

    The first hundred or so pages went pretty slowly, because there were so few surprises. I had seen the movie Simon Birch, which is based on this book, and the plot of the movie follows the first part of the book pretty faithfully. It became more interesting a couple hundred pages in, when things not contained in the movie started happening. It was a bit bizarre, though, to read about Owen growing up, driving, and smoking, because from the movie I always thought of Owen as an 11-year-old boy.

    The scope of the novel was also much larger than I had realized, too. It turned out to be not only a heartwarming tale of life in small-town New Hampshire, but a commentary on the Vietnam War. All in all, it was an interesting read, and I liked how Irving kept turning the screws and leading the story to its inevitable, tragic conclusion. My only complaint is that, by the end of the story, I didn’t find either of the protagonists (Owen or the narrator, John) to be sympathetic. I wasn’t particularly rooting for them, though it was interesting to see how things eventually played out. The main reason why I stopped rooting for Owen was that he screamed at his parents for coming to see him in a nativity play, and this was never explained. He became a much less sympathetic character as a result. The reason why I stopped rooting for John was that by the end of the book he had become whiny and cynical. Maybe Irving portrayed his characters this way on purpose, to make them anti-heroes, but to me it just made the book less enjoyable.

    2. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright. This book has been very popular in the past year, and I very much enjoyed reading it. Having gone to Regent, however, this book didn’t really have any “Aha!” moments for me. I was already familiar with the (biblical, but somehow overlooked in modern Christian culture) idea that we are meant not just to go to heaven when we die, but that we are to be resurrected and the New Jerusalem will come to earth.

    I thoroughly enjoyed the book, though I wish that Wright had spent more time emphasizing the biblical roots of his ideas. He does refer to the Bible quite a lot, especially in chapter 14. He also refers a good deal to longer discussions in his heavier books, like Jesus and the Victory of God and The Resurrection of the Son of God. It’s not that I don’t think his ideas are biblical; I just think that relying heavily on the Bible for every major point would go a long way toward silencing his critics who suspect that he is saying something new and strange. But I suppose there would always be critics, even if there were multiple Bible citations on every page.

    3. The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr. This is a novel involving talking animals, and it reminded me of Animal Farm by George Orwell. Unlike Animal Farm, however, this book was not intended to be allegorical. It is just a fantasy involving talking animals, and I thought it was rather a good one. The main character is Chauntecleer the rooster, who rules over a domain that even includes larger animals. He keeps time several times a day, rather like the set prayers that monks do, through his crowing. The narrator tells us that God put Chauntecleer and the other animals in place in order to keep watch over Wyrm, a great evil force that lies deep under the surface of the earth. Chauntecleer and the other animals don’t know anything about Wyrm until Wyrm tries to break free through the agency of his minion Cockatrice, a cross between a rooster and a dragon. It is a story of good vs. evil, and culminates in a huge battle between Chauntecleer and the other animals on one side and Cockatrice and his many serpent children (and ultimately, Wyrm) on the other.

    This was a fun book to read, and I’m glad I read it. Wangerin is a good storyteller, and he kept my attention the whole time. The only complaint that I would have, if any, is that the plot moves too quickly. Significant events in the book, like the final day of battle, only take up a few pages. Perhaps Wangerin intended the book for a younger audience than me. I would recommend it for children age 11 (or so) and up.

    4. God Will Make A Way: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend. I bought this book several years ago, during the summer of 2003 between my year in the Czech Republic and my year in Hungary. At the time, I was not sure what I was going to do after I was finished teaching, and the title really jumped out to me. I never got around to reading it until just now, though.

    It is by the authors of the well-known book Boundaries, and it is about what the title indicates: relying on God to make a way when life seems hopeless or just stuck. In the first part of the book, they give several principles to live by, and in the second half they talk about how those principles play out in various areas, like dating, marriage, divorce, addiction and planning for the future. It was not a life-changing book, since much of what I read here I had already read elsewhere, but it was also not a bad book. It was a good reminder of God’s providential care.

  • April 2009: Books Read

    1. Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs by Ken Jennings. Lately I’ve had a greater than average interest in the game show Jeopardy! – largely because I took an online contestant test back in January. So just in case, by some miracle, I end up getting on the show, I wanted to know more about it. Therefore, I went to the library and picked up this book by Ken Jennings, who became famous for winning 74 consecutive shows a few years ago.

    The book does contain his reflections on his record-breaking run, but it’s more than that. It’s about the history of trivia and why so many people in our culture are obsessed with it. He includes chapters on pub trivia, on the biggest trivia contest in America in Stevens Point, WI, and on the art of composing trivia questions. I found it a fun, quick read – in part because he includes trivia questions in the text.

    Earlier this year, I read a book by another Jeopardy! champion, Bob Harris, and one interesting difference between that book and this one was in their depiction of Alex Trebek. Both Harris and Jennings portray Trebek as distant, but that’s where the similarities end. Harris thinks that Trebek is a benign presence, rooting for all the contestants but unable to be too friendly because of the required professional distance between host and contestant. Jennings, on the other hand, shows Trebek to be surly and impatient for the day’s taping to be over so he can get to a Lakers game. I suppose the world will never know what he is really like – but I’m inclined to believe Harris’s characterization. After all, somebody who volunteers his time to World Vision can’t be that self-absorbed, can he?

    2. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins. This book came out in 2006, while I was studying at Regent. I remember reading chunks of it in the bookstore while browsing, but I never bought a copy because of all the required reading I had to do. Now, curious about how this book handles the science-faith “debate,” I decided to pick it up.

    Collins is the former head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, so he of all people ought to be able to adjudicate on the mess that we are in in our culture regarding science and faith, specifically when it comes to the issue of evolution. He breaks the book down into three parts. The first is called “The Chasm Between Science and Faith,” and in it he tells his own story of coming to faith from an atheistic background, as well as briefly addressing some popular objections to belief. The second is called “The Great Questions of Human Existence,” and in it he talks about the origins of the universe, the origins of life on earth, and the human genome. The last chapter in this section was a very readable account of his own journey as the head of the Human Genome Project. In this chapter he also sets forth his case for why he thinks that evolution is the best explanation for what we find in our genes.

    Part three I found to be the most helpful given the question that I came to the book with: How does Collins view the culture war between science and religion? He says that people have four options when it comes to navigating science and faith. Option 1 is Atheism and Agnosticism. Not surprisingly, Collins finds this option insufficient. Option 2 is Creationism. Despite its popularity among evangelical Christians in America, Collins says that it has a flawed foundation. Clinging to this position makes it easy for opponents of faith to win easy victories, and it also causes many young people to turn away from faith when they discover that scientific data conflicts with Young Earth Creationism. Option 3 is Intelligent Design. I appreciated Collins’ distinction between Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID). ID is newer, and is not necessarily tied to the notion of a young earth. Nevertheless, Collins finds it wanting both scientifically and theologically. I was most interested in his theological objections, namely: it is a “God of the gaps” theory. Science can’t explain how certain things got to be complex through evolution, and so God is invoked. As Collins says, “Advances in science ultimately fill in those gaps, to the dismay of those who had attached their faith to them. Ultimately a ‘God of the gaps’ religion runs a huge risk of simply discrediting faith… Intelligent Design fits into this discouraging tradition, and faces the same ultimate demise.” (193)

    The fourth option is theistic evolution, which Collins calls “BioLogos” (clicking on the word will take you to the recently launched Web site of the BioLogos Foundation). This is the option that Collins finds most compelling, and I must admit that I find his argument compelling as well. I mean, when you enlist C.S. Lewis in your cause (as Collins does with a quote from The Problem of Pain on p. 208-9), how can you lose?

    The book closes with a chapter that is more specifically from a Christian perspective than what came before. He exhorts believers and scientists to lay down their weapons in the culture war and realize that “Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.” (233) There is also a great appendix on bioethics, particularly dealing with stem cell research. All in all, a great, readable book, and I recommend it.

    3. The Jeopardy! Book by Alex Trebek and Peter Barsocchini. This is another book that I got from the library because of my recent Jeopardy! preoccupation. It’s not a bad book; it tells you all about how they make the show and what the most successful contestants have in common, as well as giving you several questions and answers used on the show. Problem is, it came out in 1990, so it’s pretty outdated.

  • March 2009: Books Read

    Once again, it’s the list that proves to you that I’m really doing something when I’m sitting around.

    1. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey. I’ve heard about this book over the past few years, and since my church is going through the Truth Project (a DVD curriculum that trains Christians to have a biblical worldview) together, I thought I’d read a book about worldviews.

    This book has a lot in it. Pearcey studied under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri, and you can see his influence in the way that she paints with a broad brush, surveying all of western culture. She writes that secularism has pushed religion (specifically Christianity) to the margins of society, and Christians ought to reassert Christianity as public, all-encompassing truth. She spends a particularly large chunk of the book dealing with Darwinism, saying that it has begun with science but seeped through the rest of society as its own all-encompassing worldview. Then she tells the story of how evangelicals became so anti-intellectual, and expresses her desire that the trend be reversed.

    This book also has a lot going for it. Many of her insights I thought were right on. I liked the fact that she went out of her way to be irenic when it comes to dealing with culture:

    Our first response to the great works of human culture – whether in art or technology or economic productivity – should be to celebrate them as reflections of God’s own creativity. And even when we analyze where they go wrong, it should be in a spirit of love.

    I also liked it that she does not seem to have been taken in by the false notion – so widespread among evangelicals – that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

    In fact, if there is one factor especially distinctive of the second [Great] Awakening, it is a surprising lack of critical distance from the political ideology of the American Revolution. – 274

    Instead of offering a distinctively biblical perspective on the current political culture, many evangelicals [during the Second Great Awakening] virtually equated spiritual liberty with political liberty.

    And this lack of critical distance, which has a 200-year history, continues.

    One area that I think Pearcey went astray was when dealing with Christians who believe in evolution. At the end of her chapter which makes the case for Intelligent Design, she claims that those who are theistic evolutionists are pawns of scientific naturalists (not her words, but I think her sentiments), allowing their beliefs about God to be shunted off to the private realm and only accepting as real the scientifically verifiable.

    I’m not sure that this is entirely fair to theistic evolutionists, one of whom (Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project) she quoted favorably just 13 pages before. It is far from evident that theistic evolutionists all experience God as an optional add-on, living their lives settled in the “naturalist’s chair” (as opposed to the “supernaturalist’s chair” that Christians ought to be in). Unfortunately, Pearcey doesn’t really deal with them directly. Pearcey says

    Christians are called to live out their entire lives, including their scientific work, from the perspective of the supernaturalist’s chair, recognizing the full range of reality. This is what it means to ‘walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), with a day-to-day awareness of the unseen dimension of reality.

    I would like Pearcey to explain exactly how scientists ought to conduct scientific research through appeal to unobservable things. Pearcey does not seem to acknowledge that it is not just naturalists who have truncated the “range of reality” available to scientific investigation. Rather, science just deals with the observable. It isn’t atheists who came up with these rules. The bad guy here, it seems to me, is not the one who conducts science based on observable facts. The bad guy is the one who then claims that facts observable by science are all there is. Theistic evolutionists don’t claim this, and so I think Pearcey ought to be kinder to them. As it is, her brief (pages 203-205) dismissal of them is likely, unfortunately, to lead to misunderstanding and alienation within the body of Christ.

    Another area where I think Pearcey went astray is in her repeated insistence that Christianity is “objective truth.”

    To bring about a restoration of the Christian mind, we would do well to follow the Intelligent Design movement in challenging the Baconian model of autonomous or neutral knowledge in every field. We must reject the presumption that holding Christian beliefs disqualifies us as ‘biased,’ while the philosophical naturalists get a free pass by presenting their position as ‘unbiased’ and ‘rational.’ Most of all, we need to liberate Christianity from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience, and learn how to restore it to the status of objective truth.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but Pearcey seems to contradict herself in this paragraph. First she says that the idea of “autonomous” and “neutral” knowledge should be challenged, and then she goes on to say that Christians should claim Christianity as “objective truth.” Part of the very definition of “objective” is that it is unbiased and neutral. Instead of trying to shout louder than naturalists that we are unbiased and rational, why not argue that naturalists are just as biased as we are, and that bias is inescapable in finite human beings? I think that this has a lot more potential to be fruitful, since it would be awfully difficult to argue that Christians are any less biased than naturalists. Bias is OK; it just needs to be taken into account.

    But I’ve rambled on enough. All in all, I thought this was a worthwhile book with a couple of weak spots. If a Christian wants to know what it means to have a biblical worldview, I’d recommend this book. I would also recommend that person to not stop there.

    2. John Stott: The Making of a Leader by Timothy Dudley-Smith. This is the first in a two-volume biography of the well-known evangelical leader John Stott. I’ve benefited a great deal from his writings, and when I saw this book in a used bookstore in Grand Rapids last December I snapped it up.

    It follows Stott from birth to approximately age 40, following him from his London childhood to his school days at Rugby, then on to Cambridge during WWII, theological studies at Ridley Hall, curacy at All Souls Anglican Church in London and finally his promotion and subsequent career as Rector of that church.

    A couple of highlights for me were reading about his “instinctive pacifism” as he was preparing to and beginning to study theology during WWII, and his deep concern for evangelism. Within his own parish he began training laypeople in evangelism and led regular Guest Services for outreach. Outside, he met and befriended Billy Graham during the 1950s, and even led a few university missions of his own, both in the UK and overseas. The book also spends some time on his lifelong interest in birdwatching.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal, and the pages flew by. The only thing I wanted more of was discussion of Stott’s theological shaping. There was some talk of why he was drawn to pacifism during his student days, but once he entered parish life there is much discussion of his actions and little direct discussion of his theological growth and deepening.