Six books for every pastor’s library

May 17, 2013 By 4 Comments
6 Books for Every Pastor

Pastors buy a ton of books, according to a new survey by the Barna Group. On average pastors purchase about forty-five titles a year, considerably more than the general population. How many books are we talking about? Protestant congregations number about 315,000 in this country, Catholic and Orthodox another 25,000. That means pastors buy about 15 million books a year, more or less. As a publishing professional, let me just pause and say thank you to all the pastors out there. My family … [Read more...]

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The God who weeps

May 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment
God's Favorite Place on Earth

Where is God when we suffer? A new book by Frank Viola says he's there by our side, suffering with us. Viola's newest, God's Favorite Place on Earth, recounts the biblical stories of Jesus' time in Bethany, the town of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, who Jesus raised from the dead in anticipation of his own resurrection. I read it leading up to Easter -- or Pascha as we call it in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which often differs several weeks from Western Easter. This year it was May 5. The … [Read more...]

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Christians suffering, dying in anonymity around the world: New book exposes their plight

March 28, 2013 By 2 Comments
Persecuted by Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Nina Shea

After gathering to protest the Muslim Brotherhood at their suburban Cairo headquarters, several of the demonstrators, mostly Coptic Christians, were dragged by Brotherhood thugs to a nearby mosque after Friday prayers and tortured. Mosque officials were apparently powerless to stop the hours-long assault, which for one man resulted in a broken skull, broken arm, bleeding in the right eye, and wounds from birdshot. I learned of the story yesterday morning, moments before attending a panel … [Read more...]

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What I read about when I read Rob Bell

March 24, 2013 By 27 Comments
Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Any book of theology that starts with a epigraph by Tom Waits is arguably worth looking at. Such is Rob Bell's What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Since the 2011 publication of Love Wins, Bell's name has doubled as a lighting rod, the controversy having merely cooled, not diminished. I have no interest in revisiting that here. Nor do I have any interest in writing a negative review of his newest, aspects of which certainly could use the discerning squint of a jeweler's eye. Here I want … [Read more...]

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3 unique resources for studying the life of King David

March 1, 2013 By 7 Comments
David and Goliath

King David is one of the most interesting figures in all of Scripture. My friend David Teems recently summed up the fascination by focusing on the paradoxes of his namesake. "Anointed as a boy, it would be years before David actually ruled anything, including himself," he writes. "If he is messy, and he is, he is also glorious. If he is a man of blood, he is also a poet of the first order. If he is untamed, if he is a bit uncivilized, he is also a man after God’s own heart." David is a … [Read more...]

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Tolkien’s son: Peter Jackson ‘eviscerated’ Lord of the Rings

January 14, 2013 By 8 Comments
Tolkien

After watching Peter Jackson's Hobbit, the usually soft-spoken Frank Schaeffer compared it to a botched circumcision. "[T]hey left everything they should have taken and took what they should have left," he said, quoting Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. "The spirit of the book has been almost entirely lost and replaced by a movie that looks as if it was made to spin off theme park rides and videogame derivatives rather than to tell the story as written in the beloved children’s classic," … [Read more...]

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Too much C.S. Lewis? Not hardly

January 14, 2013 By 30 Comments
C.S. Lewis. Arthur Strong, Wikimedia Commons.

A writer for Relevant magazine is peeved that people like C.S. Lewis. Seriously. "I'm annoyed," he said, "with the public perception and exultation that has long outlasted him." While granting that Lewis deserves credit for his academic, literary, and theological work, the writer pointed out that the Oxford don "was born in 1898 . . . a decade after the setting of Back to the Future III. Annie Oakley was still the most popular woman in America. In 1898, the ink was hardly dry on the patent … [Read more...]

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5 books to fill a gap in church history and doctrine

January 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment
stack of book

The Gospel Coalition is offering a four-year reading list to point evangelicals to "some of the key texts that have shaped the movement and its current leaders, and offer an historical sense and context to the current movement. . . ." There are some very good and useful books on the list, but I want to offer some supplemental texts. Up front let me say that these are not texts that have shaped evangelicalism. Rather, they are meant to fill a significant time gap in the GC list, which jumps … [Read more...]

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Best novel of 2012? Doug Wilson’s ‘Evangellyfish’

December 31, 2012 By 1 Comment
Doug Wilson's Evangellyfish

What was the best novel of 2012? According to Christianity Today the answer is Doug Wilson's Evangellyfish. While he's best known for nonfiction books of theology, Christian living, and education, Wilson, who pastors Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, has written a raucous and ribald novel of manners about a megachurch pastor embroiled in a sex scandal. I'm sure the book will scandalize a few of its readers, too. But as I read it, I couldn’t help but think that the outrageous tale surely … [Read more...]

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Abraham Lincoln and the ‘bastard’ Jesus Christ

December 15, 2012 By 8 Comments
Lincoln's Battle with God

Abraham Lincoln's early years were marked by a rabid antagonism toward Christianity, but he ended his life as a believer. As my friend Stephen Mansfield details in his new book Lincoln's Battle with God (published by Thomas Nelson), he was an iconoclast, a gadfly, and an intellectual bully. Well versed in the contradictions and problems with Christian scripture and doctrine, he was more than happy to bat believers around the head with these things. Lincoln even published an incendiary … [Read more...]

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