By: Mark Petersen on October 5, 2017
Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book arrived on my doorstep, and as it emerged from the bubble-wrapped envelope, I chuckled. This used edition had the look of a 1970s era hardback with the traditional font selection, oversized white space, and garish coloured dust jacket. Likewise, the stilted language of another generation transported me…
By: Jason Turbeville on October 5, 2017
I have read some pretty dry books in all my years of college, seminary and beyond. I remember one from an Old Testament survey class where the first chapter was entitled “An Introduction To Introductions”. It took me a week to read one chapter because of the dryness, and moribund nature of the book. I…
By: Greg on October 5, 2017
Where have you been all my life! I don’t know about the rest of you but while reading this book by Alder and Van Doren, I kept wondering if I had read this in college would it have made a difference in how I read books? There are times that I start a book and…
By: Jim Sabella on October 5, 2017
One cannot do justice, in a four-day reading period, to a book so influential and impactful, not to mention that it is 600 plus pages. Besides, I am not an historian, and so a review of his methodology would be less than accurate. However, I do wish to bring a modicum of connection to The…
By: Chris Pritchett on October 5, 2017
I remember my father recommending this book to me when I went to college, 20 years ago. I did not read it, then. I thought it was oddly titled to begin with, a play on words, to be sure, but logically impossible to be of any assistance. “If I needed to know how to read…
By: Mary Walker on October 5, 2017
It is easy to mold the past into a shape that we find convenient and accessible. But the ancient world was much more sophisticated and interlinked than we sometimes like to think. …A belt of towns formed a chain spanning Asia. … Together with increasing traffic connecting India with the Persian Gulf and the Red…
By: Katy Drage Lines on October 5, 2017
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”—Hamilton, the musical After Alexander Hamilton’s death by duel with Aaron Burr, his wife, Eliza, spends the next fifty years cementing his legacy. She advocated for the building of the Washington Monument and founded the first private orphanage in New York City, in memory of her orphaned husband.…
By: Jennifer Williamson on October 5, 2017
As I read Adler’s How to Read a Book, I felt nervous that I wasn’t doing it right—as if the book might somehow know that I had not bothered to inspect its jacket cover or write in its margins. The truth is, I instinctively do much of what Adler recommends for the first three levels…
By: Dave Watermulder on October 5, 2017
I am sitting in Heathrow Airport in London, on a 30 hour return trip home from South Africa. There is a hustle and bustle around me as travelers hurry to their flights, do some shopping, sleep on the benches, or talk on their phones. My laptop is perched precariously on my lap, as I sit…
By: Jennifer Dean-Hill on October 4, 2017
Although Silk Threads is a historical account of the roads our world have carved from the last several centuries to current, there are some tragic realities that live on in our cultures today. Slavery Profits… Sadly, human trafficking is still a profitable commodity and in high demand. Whether it is the Muslim nation of yesteryears…
By: Jake Dean-Hill on October 4, 2017
The book, How to Read a Book by Adler and Doren, was especially helpful to me since it has been over twenty years since I have been in a formal learning or school environment. Refreshers on how to get what you need from a book in a short amount of time will come in…
By: Dan Kreiss on October 4, 2017
I wish I had read this book 20 years ago. I’m not sure why I never came across it but somehow I managed to complete an undergraduate and two masters degrees without actually knowing how to read, at least according to this text. I have always held books and their authors reverentially, probably more than…
By: Mike on October 4, 2017
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren’s, How to Read a Book, is a practical time saving approach that helps readers “grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually.”[1] Growing through reading is the book’s key theme. Two motivations that answer the “why” we should read books are: if we start reading we are taught about the “world and…
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on September 15, 2017
This week we read the book Visual Faith by William A. Dyrness. Throughout the book he advocates for a renewal of the arts within worship and faith culture. One of many statements that he made stood out to me: “We must become better stewards of their gifts as we allow them to expand our corporate…
By: Trisha Welstad on September 15, 2017
Apartheid has not been a subject on the top of my reading list until very recently. With the plan of visiting South Africa and the preparatory reading of David Welsh’s, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, I have a new appreciation for the leaders and the people of South Africa who persevered through decades of…
By: Chip Stapleton on September 15, 2017
In one sense, as a reader engaging with his book, Visual Faith: Art, theology and worship in dialog, the stated goal that William Dyrness puts forward seems almost ridiculous: ‘This book aims to extend and enrich a Christian conversation on the visual arts’ (Dyrness, 9). The question rings hollow because in a culture where we are constantly…
By: Kyle Chalko on September 14, 2017
I knew the word apartheid. Well, I had seen it. Turns out I didn’t know how to pronounce it properly. And that probably is a good illustration for how much I actually knew about apartheid. Going into this study, mostly naïve, I knew of Nelson Mandela, but only in the type of sense, I know…
By: Jean Ollis on September 14, 2017
In reading David Welsh’s “The Rise and Fall of Apartheid”, PW Botha’s own rise and fall of power captured my attention. Although an unlikely character to focus on (Mandela and De Klerk are certainly more notorious), Botha’s intersection between his Christian faith and leadership within the Nationalist Party (NP) prompted me to want to dig…
By: Jason Turbeville on September 14, 2017
My earliest memories of apartheid came from a movie. “Because your black”….in Lethal Weapon 2, when Danny Glover and Joe Pesci had gone to the South African consulate as a distraction the idea of apartheid hit home for me. Why would a person of color want to even go somewhere they were hated? Even the…
By: Kristin Hamilton on September 14, 2017
When I taught US History to high school students, I pointed out to them what I had learned in my art history classes – that art is a mirror of what has just happened or is currently happening in the world. That’s why many artists aren’t appreciated until long after their death, when we finally…
