Posts about books that I’ve read.
Let’s start with the striking the cover art: It features photos of statues of Achilles and Christ, with remarkably similar (suffering, eyes heavenward) visages. And, again without yet opening the book, there’s a C.S. Lewis quote on the back cover which might have served as an epigraph: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which … [Read more…]
The author is an evangelical Protestant (53, 145) and a professor of humanities at Houston Baptist University. I recall listening to — and enjoying — a lecture series by him on C.S. Lewis, and the title of this book sounded important and its length (271 pages) reasonable. It was a good decision to get it … [Read more…]
Hugh Hewitt is a friend. I met him when we were both lawyers in the Reagan administration; since then he has continued to practice and teach law, but is better known as a political columnist and as a television and radio show host. He’s also written over a dozen books. And he’s a Christian. This … [Read more…]
In order to understand the Bible, one needs to know something of the time and culture in which it was written, and so to understand the New Testament in particular, one needs to know something of the Hellenistic age. That’s why, after reading a favorable review of this book in the Wall Street Journal — … [Read more…]
The author, an Australian, is an Anglican bishop. I sought his book out because it was listed among the “[g]ood defenses of the historical reliability of the Gospels” for further reading by Richard Bauckham in Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, and I had been impressed by Bauckham (Barnett, in turn, has a brief citation of … [Read more…]
This short (only 114 pages of text) book is part of a series on a wide variety of topics published by Oxford University Press. I sought it out because I was impressed by the author’s much longer Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (discussed elsewhere on this blogsite), which I found valuable but daunting in its length … [Read more…]
Years ago I had clipped and saved a description of this book, and recently I finally bought a used copy online (I’m not sure it’s easily available any other way; I’ll note that the copy I got had quite a few typos in it). I’m glad I did. Peter Kreeft, who is a philosophy professor … [Read more…]
The secondary title is, “An Introduction: From the Apostolic Fathers to the 21st Century,” and the author is president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Oxford (and, to his credit, he quotes Oxfordian C.S. Lewis a lot). It’s a very useful and engaging book. The chapters are: the apostolic fathers, Justin … [Read more…]
Owen Barfield was a great friend of C.S. Lewis’s, a member of the Inklings who played an important role in bringing the atheist Lewis to belief, and as I recall Lewis praised this book in particular, so I thought I should read it. The bad news, dear reader, is that I got little out of … [Read more…]
This book was originally titled, Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times, and the author, who headed the English department at Malvern College in Worcestershire, was a friend of Lewis’s and occasional attendee of meetings of the Inklings. He met Lewis in 1934 when the latter became the former’s tutor at Oxford, and remained apparently close … [Read more…]