Posts about books that I’ve read.
“Not bad,” I wrote in my notebook after reading this book. It’s not brilliant, but straightforward, well-organized, and generally believable. As you’d guess from the title, there’s lots on prayer and meditation and their importance. He advises, for one thing, just to be quiet and clear your mind. I especially liked his discussion of how … [Read more…]
Mr. Zacharias is a good man, but I was disappointed in this book. It’s not heretical or wrong — just not persuasive or on point. And he doesn’t really deliver on what’s promised in the secondary title, “How God Shapes Us through the Events of Our Lives,” namely how God weaves our destiny, etc. He … [Read more…]
The secondary title is “A Translation with Commentary,” and that’s what it is: You read the translated psalm, and then the author’s footnotes explicate the psalm and also explain some of his translation decisions. The commentary is succinct and incisive, neither philosophical nor roaming. The author is quite an accomplished scholar, and he takes the … [Read more…]
The author is “a Christian and a Lutheran” (37). The discussion in chapter one of ways to read the text is interesting and thought-provoking (some politically correct elements creep in, though). He makes the point that the themes in Genesis cannot be forgotten in interpreting Exodus and the rest of the Pentateuch. Wikipedia, by the … [Read more…]
The book had some good insights (see below), but overall I was not that impressed. There is some political correctness in it that really runs amok in the final section on environmentalism (chapters 16 and 17). Some notes: Praise psalms help us to see, as we pray them, how much we have to be thankful … [Read more…]
This is a stretch, but I’m a Wodehouse fan, so I thought I’d note that in this book he pokes fun at Constable Dobbs, who reads Robert G. Ingersoll, an American agnostic. I’ll also note that elsewhere Jeeves observes that Nietzsche is “fundamentally unsound” (from the short story “Jeeves Takes Charge,” later included in the … [Read more…]
The author is a a faculty fellow (with a Ph.D.) at Pacific Lutheran University, and it sounds like he may be a Christian. I read only pages 175-236 (“Daily Life in the Holy Land” and “The Romans Take Their Turn”); it was pretty good, but of course provides just a brief overview. Two books recommended … [Read more…]
A very enjoyable and worthwhile book (and by a likely Christian). It’s a biography of the first part of Lewis’s life — that is, through his conversion — that weaves in his contemporaneous and later writings to show his intellectual/faith journey.
Sayers was a British contemporary of C.S. Lewis’s, and a Christian fellow traveler who is well thought of by many conservatives and Christians. This book is all right, but I have to say that based on it I’m not so impressed that I’m inclined to read her systematically. She is sometimes obscure, and sometimes overreaches. … [Read more…]
This was an interesting book, stressing in particular the fact that Lewis was always a rhetorician, in the classical sense — that is, always trying to persuade people by what he wrote. There’s some academic denseness in it; here are a few notes I made: When Lewis was living with Mrs. Moore, it “almost certainly … [Read more…]