Posts about books that I’ve read.
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…]
The author is a transplanted Scot, now a seminary professor and pastor in Grand Rapids, and the book’s secondary title is, “Ten Ways To Be a Joyful Believer in a Gloomy World.” The book’s ten chapters address how to achieve greater happiness as a Christian in different contexts, namely: facts, media, salvation, church, future, world, … [Read more…]
The author of this book also wrote a recent (and excellent) biography of C.S. Lewis, which I note briefly on this blogsite here. (It’s of interest that in this later book’s suggested further reading, he lists — as the three “best biographies” of Lewis — his own and those by Alan Jacobs and George Sayer.) … [Read more…]
I deliberately sought out a book in this series on one of the gospels because I enjoyed its volume on Acts (by a different author) so much. And I’m glad I did: Professor Jeffrey is unfailingly insightful and judicious. I enjoyed, for example, his periodic observations on Luke’s likely source for this or that passage; recall … [Read more…]
This book collects the Christian conversion stories of sixty people, most of them famous and all in his or her own words (with a short introduction to each by the editor). They are fairly short accounts: The book is about 400 pages long, so that’s less than seven pages apiece, minus the intro and page … [Read more…]
The author is himself a rabbi, and a young one, being only 37 when the book was published. He feels passionately that both Christians and Jews need to pay greater attention to Jesus’ Jewishness. The final paragraph of the book (184) reads: “Victor Hugo once said, ‘All the forces in the world are not as … [Read more…]