This book was recommended to me by my friend Christine, who always seems to be me to be an amazingly mindful and “together” parent, so of course I wanted to read it. It applies the same principles you would find in Zen Buddhist meditation practice to parenting. Given my interest in [...]
This was my one “heavy” book on this year’s Lenten reading list — a series of moderately scholarly essays by various evangelical writers and thinkers exploring whether there’s a place for Christian apologetics in a postmodern society.
Dry though it may be, the question interests me. This Lent I’ve been reading a fair bit about other [...]
One thing I find as I read through my LentBooks is that I keep making links and connections between them. In The Year of Living Biblically, there’s a point where Jacobs starts to study the New Testament and wonders if he can get anything meaningful out of it if he doesn’t believe in the divinity [...]
Like N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian, Chris Blake’s Searching for a God to Love is one writer’s attempt to explain what Christianity means to him and to try to make it attractive to doubters and seekers — or to “unbelieving believers,” as Blake calls them. Also like Wright, Blake deviates from the trail blazed by C.S. [...]
A.J. Jacob’s The Year of Living Biblically is one of the books I was “saving” for Lent, knowing that I’d enjoy it. In case you haven’t heard of it (and you probably have, because it’s getting a lot of hype), it’s Jacobs’ story of the year he spent trying to follow every [...]
N.T. Wright is one of those writers who has had a major shaping influence on my life and thinking. At a time when I was reading a lot of Biblical criticism and questioning whether it was possible for an intelligent, educated scholar to take the Gospels seriously as history, someone pointed me towards his [...]
Like lots of Westerners, I probably don’t know enough about Islam. I read No god by God (recommended by Catherine) in hopes of correcting that deficiency. It was a good choice.
Reza Aslan is a young, Iranian-born-but-living-in-America, scholar of Islam. I have no idea how other Muslims regard Aslan or this book, but he seems [...]
When was the last time you read a business book that ends with the author’s business going bankrupt and being sold off to the highest bidder? When was the last time you read a book about Christian ministry that ends with the ministry collapsing in disarray and being sold to a non-Christian company? In other [...]
This is a book I’d heard about for awhile and was anxious to read. It’s the story of three women — one Muslim, one Jewish, one Christian — who began meeting together to talk about their three faiths, to explore differences and find common ground. Ranya, Suzanne and Priscilla didn’t know each other [...]
The first book on this year’s Lenten reading list is one I picked up in a store a few weeks ago and saved for Lent. McLaren’s subtitle is: “Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope,” which sounds like everything I want to read about.
However, the book wasn’t nearly as thought-provoking or inspiring [...]
