Tag Archives: Book Review

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★★★★★★"Not So Easily Washed Away"

the book says that the story is true, but it reads like made-up erotica...but maybe not. The teller of the story swings from anger to desperation, from threats to pleas.

A lot of it sounds as if it cannot be. The parts before she comes to American...maybe. There are many reports that come out of Arab parts of the world that make this story ring true.

The part where she is here? I hope these things cannot happen, but I know that they do.

The book is not well written, the writing is shallow and the characters unreal. There is a second book, but I most likely will not read it.

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★★★★★★I think this is one I'll go through here (spiritual discipline, perhaps?)

As I was reading this book, the first part seemed like it is full of "white guilt" - expanding the sin of racism to all white people in the USA by virtue of the color of their skin.

After that, Piper explores individual sins on both sides of the issue - "both" because the reality is (at this point, anyway) the big divide seems greatest between African-Americans and Americans of European descent.  There is plenty of sin to go around.

When Piper gets into the meat of the topic - WHY it is a sin and why it matters, this is an excellent book.  I also broadened to topic to include "favoritism" (not just the race kind) and it became more excellent.

by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation, (Rev. 5:9)

From chapter 6 on, the book is steeped in the Gospel.  We are all created in the image of God - to practice favoritism in any way strikes at the image.

I'm giving this 4 stars (also working on a star system... 😉

 

 

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★★★★★★I don't like to review books that I haven't finished, but this one I just can't get through. (yes, it got zero stars)

It's based on the "twelve step program" of AA, which leans heavily on Scripture.

The program itself may be great and I know people who have gotten their lives together with the help of AA. But this book (I'm not going back) is also heavily laced with

1. Arminianism
2. Finneyism
3. "Sarah Calling" (another review of a book that I didn't get through)

I got more than 2/3 done, but then it started with "the most important part of prayer is the listening."

I put it back in the cloud...

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★★★★★★"Mercury Rises" is a fun sort of tale of angels and demons and humans who are (mostly) acting with a piece of information while chasing around the world trying to stop (or start) the apocalypse.

Fiction is "mind candy" for me most of the time - meant to be fun and tasty without a whole lot of substance. This fits that bill.

Well written, characters were well defined (with some books it's hard to keep track and this book was nice in that regard)

I'm planning on reading more in this series.

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★★★★★★"Crossing Oceans" by Gina Holmes was predictable, with some curves that sat nicely with me.  Sad, yet satisfying ending.

The main character, Jenny, is dying of cancer.  Taking her daughter to her childhood home to wrap up loose ends, more than a few surprises are thrown her way.

Confronting past sins, while avoiding new; trying to make old wrongs right; confronting fears along the way and making peace with enemies.

Like a lot of fiction, this is 'brain candy' - and very tasty.  Don't expect meat and you'll be happy with the snack.

 

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★★★★★★"Forgotten God" by Francis Chan

This is a pretty basic book and Chan tells that right up front.  It is not so much that we don't know about the Holy Spirit, it's more like...we don't acknowledge Him - we don't live like His presence is a reality in our lives.

And that is the message of this book

Many times we are discouraged from being too passionate, or too giving, or too...whatever.  Do not let others discourage us from following the leading of the Spirit.

As I was finishing the book; reading the last few pages, this struck me

Galatians 5:22
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness...

Did you catch that?  I never have.

Fruit...singular.  One Spirit, one fruit, many flavors.

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★★★★★★"Everybody Here Spoke Sign Language" by Nora Ellen Groce

It was a good book, but a little "text-bookish" - a lot of research went into it and the author talked to the last living people who knew some of the deaf people on Martha's Vineyard.

Way back when...when Martha's Vineyard was first settled by people from England, they brought with them a recessive gene for deafness.  At one point, the deaf population (percentage wise) was several times the rate of deafness in the population of the rest of the country.

The deaf on Martha's Vineyard weren't considered "handicapped" - they just...were.  Groce tells several stories of interviewing people and asking about a certain person.  The interviewee would say, "oh!  they owned a boat and they were really good fishermen" and it was only when specifically asked did the person remember, "well, yes.  Come to think of it, they were deaf!"

It seems that nearly every family had at least one child and every learned sign language, both hearing and deaf.   For a couple of centuries, deafness was about as much of a handicap on the island as being left-handed.  It wasn't.

Today, deaf people tend to marry deaf people - that wasn't the way it was on Martha's Vineyard.  It was only when "deaf schools" started to be opened on the mainland and people in general became more mobile, that the deaf population on the island started to dwindle.  As people moved off island and to the island, the gene pool expanded.

It was only in the mid-20th century that the person with this hereditary deafness died - from the 1600's until the 1900's, deafness was a part of every day life - I liked reading that.

What we see as an impairment - wasn't.  Today, deaf people are sometimes treated as though, because they cannot here, they cannot understand.  There...and then, it was the off-islanders who were at a disadvantage, because they didn't understand some of what was being said in sign.

It was the Martha's Vineyard sign language that became the basis for ASL.

If you have an interest in deafness or sign language...or if you just want the encouragement of reading about an "impairment" wasn't, this is a good book to read.

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A Biblical Case for an Old Earth by David Snoke

Previous chapters here.

Chapter 2.

One of the complaints about the book in the Amazon reviews is that the book is supposed to be about the Biblical case, yet he starts with the scientific case.

The first sentence of this chapter says,

My goal is to build a biblical case, not primarily a scientific one, but I want to first review some of the scientific facts so that we can see the stakes involved.

This seems fair to me.  How can we build a Biblical case for an old earth unless we know what "old earth" entails?

The first topic is measuring the age of the universe by the distance of the stars

  • First, one could argue that the above (read the book) measurement process is wrong, and that actually the stars are much nearer.
  • Second, one could argue that the speed of light used to be much faster
  • Third, one could argue that the light we see did not actually come from stars, but was created "en route.

The problem with the first argument is that (if the universe is no more than 10,000 years old, then all of the stars would have to be within 10,000 light years of the view point (earth).  There are billions of stars and to have them all within 20,000 light years of each other (with earth at the center) would create gravitational chaos.

The second argument (the slowing down of the speed of light) is more interesting...but...

One of the books I'm reading now is "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil. On page 140 (a wild paraphrase) he writes that two physicists from Los Alamos Laboratory have discovered the remains on a natural nuclear reactor in West Africa that had a "melt down" 2 billion years ago.  There is a "constant particle" called an "alpha particle" that is inversely related to the speed of light and by examining isotopes connected with these particles, the slowing of the alphas implies that the speed of light has INCREASED. This is a minuscule change - 4.5 parts per 10 to the 38th power (no clue how to do exponents in wordpress).

The third argument (that light was created en route) is - according to Snoke - the most viable of the three.  But if we work under the assumption that things are as they appear, then the starts appear to be very far away.

This "apparent age" theory eliminates any possibility of a scientific discussion about the age of the world.

That's it for the "speed of light changing" and there's more in chapter 1...but I wanted to get this posted today... 

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Preface and Chapter 1

I'll link to this up as I add chapters - it's a good book that gives a different side to the "evolution vs. 6-day creation" debate.

"Biblical Case For an Old Earth" by David Snokes (if you buy through this link, I get a credit - hint, hint)

In the preface,

Snokes introduces the debate in a "orthodox vs liberalism" sort of way and describes how "old earthers" are often portrayed by  those who believe that the earth is (at most) 20,000 years old.

Snokes maintains that a person can be a theological conservative and accept a Biblical case for an old earth.

Chapter 1, "Starting Assumptions"

Snokes starts by telling readers that if he had not studied science, he would not have come to an old earth conclusion...tells us that his interpretation is a "possible" interpretation, not an "obvious" one.  He recognizes that his view may not be popular, and points out that:

It is illegitimate to change our view of the Bible because we want a more popular interpretation.

and then

He poses the question about whether or not it's okay to ever allow experience, history, or science affect or alter our understanding of the interpretation of Scripture.

Examples he used were Galileo...do we allow our understanding of science to affect our interpretation of Psalm 93:1?

Does history tell us that "king" in Daniel 5:1 refers to a viceroy, a "lesser king", and not the foremost ruler of an entire country?  Would we have that understanding, if we didn't have history?

There is a legitimacy to allowing experience to affect our interpretation...that does NOT mean that we should change our interpretation to bow to the prevailing views of culture in order to be with the "in crowd."  It also does not mean that we need to get onto the "slippery slope" and we can avoid that by clearly laying out the boundaries - what is negotiable and what is not.

we would do well to remember that science was founded by Christians who insisted that God is not a great deceiver, that the natural world is ordered by a good God, and that we must reject superstition and hearsay; moreover, that we must subject all truth claims to rigorous examination, even claims of honored church leaders from generations past...

Question: is it legitimate to allow your experience with purported miracle workers to affect the way you interpret passages like Ephesians 4:11 AND 2 Cor. 12:12 that seem to promise signs and wonders?

My answer...maybe not, but it is certainly wise to allow Scripture to judge whether or not a miracle worker is merely "purported."

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From "The Parables of Jesus: Entering, Growing, Living, and Finishing in God's Kingdom" by Terry Johnson.

We know that Jesus taught with parables (not the only way He taught, but (Johnson says) that whenever it is recorded that Jesus taught, He included parables.

He gives 5 related by slightly different definitions of "parable".

(1) "wise sayings of a pictorial kind" (Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, 354)
(2) "A story taken from real life (or a real-life situation) from which a moral or spiritual truth is drawn" (J.M.Boice)
(3) "an earthly story with a heavenly meaning" (an old Sunday School definition)
(4)"examples of popular story-telling that are meant to evoke a response and to strike a verdict" (A.M.Hunter, Interpreting the Parables")
(5) " a comparison, a putting of one thing beside another to make a point" (Robert F. Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom)

The parables are interesting because they sometimes turn what we "know" upside down.

"bad people are commended, good people are scolded and unanticipated pople are rewarded and punished" (p.16

The parables illuminate those with the key, but obscure it for those who do not. The disciples had to ask about the parable of the sower.

Johnson says,

Jesus' answer is that parables are uniquely suited to the central principles of redemption in that they in fact both reveal the truth and veil it. They are illuminating for some and at the same time obscuring for others.

  • do the definitions make sense?
  • why would Jesus use a confusing method of teaching?