Posts about books that I’ve read.
This is an extremely well-written, measured, and intelligent book. As the title suggests, it has a relatively limited aim, but the book achieves it very well. The author also wrote Fermat’s Last Theorem and much else in science; he has a Ph.D. in mathematics and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard. The author is … [Read more…]
Great title, eh? The book is okay: The basic idea is an intriguing one, namely to be alert to how God is guiding your life to be a story, a coherent narrative with a theme. Cf. C.S. Lewis’s suggested analogy — albeit in the context of God’s being outside of time — between an … [Read more…]
I noted this important exchange (477): When asked, “What Christian writers have helped you?,” C.S. Lewis replied, The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Others are Edwyn Bevan’s book, Symbolism and Belief, and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, and the plays of Dorothy Sayers. [Footnote: “Such … [Read more…]
The author of this 80-page book, which is part of a series on myths, is a Cambridge professor. The myths recounted are bloody and irrational, entertaining but not edifying, and so it seemed to me very different from Bible stories or even classical myths. It’s also much harder to see how the Norse myths would … [Read more…]
I made two notes: (1) There are lots of references to Paul’s Letter to the Romans in The Merchant of Venice; and (2) Judah was an isolated (the southernmost) and rustic tribe, and so we have another case of the last being first (see page 22, para. A.2, of the course guide): “poorest of the … [Read more…]
Ravi Zacharias is a good man, but I found this book to be disappointing — not particularly helpful in recapturing the wonder or insightful generally. Still, I liked this (46-47): In other words, if we are to understand wonder we must see that the first chronological destroyer of wonder is anything that takes away the … [Read more…]
The author of The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie gives a straightforward account here of two exorcisms he did. There’s no proof the devil here, exactly, but pretty good evidence. I’ll note here a piece in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section, “As a Psychiatrist, I Diagnose Mental Illness/Also, I Help Spot Demonic … [Read more…]
I noted a couple of passages in this young-readers book. First (178), “And, as Christianity spread across the Roman world, Christian writers and teachers drew upon Seneca’s essays.” Second (199): Unlike other fields of literature, in which the Roman imitated their Greek predecessors, letter writing was a uniquely Roman pursuit. For the Greeks, who traditionally … [Read more…]
This is sort of a slightly undersized coffee-table book (lots of white space, sidebars, illustrations), but the author is a real academic. Anyway, here’s a thought: After reading about these bloodthirsty, sex-crazed tyrants, it occurs to me that perhaps all that would have given Christianity some reactive appeal. (Also, it should caution us Westerners from … [Read more…]
This young-adult book discusses the special status the Jews had under the Romans (91). It’s interesting that they lost that status, with a vengeance, in the period when Jerusalem was destroyed, so I wonder if their fall made Christian persecution more likely, with it being viewed as just another Jewish sect (Nero’s reign was A.D. … [Read more…]