By: Jon Spellman on September 4, 2014
If I’m completely honest, when it comes to academic texts, I must admit to expending a lot of mental energy figuring out what portions I can get away with not reading while still capturing the essential message of a book. In the time spent attempting to avoid them, I could probably get those portions read…
By: Mary Pandiani on September 3, 2014
Reflecting on the title of our first book, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, my hope was to find some practical tools that would provide an efficient mechanism to get through all the anticipated, required, and copious reading. While I enjoy reading, articulating main points comes with laborious effort because of my desire…
By: Nick Martineau on September 3, 2014
I have a 5-year-old daughter and soon we will start teaching her to read. Should we even bother? I read a lot of books when I was younger but truth is I can’t even recall what they were actually about, not to mention what they were even titled. What was the point? While those are…
By: Dave Young on September 3, 2014
My first response to the title of Pierre Bayard’s book– “How to talk about books you haven’t read”—was to think it was a joke. The author couldn’t intend for us to feign knowledge we don’t possess, could he? That response got to the heart of what I found interesting as well as uncomfortable about this…
By: Jon Spellman on August 29, 2014
Author’s note. The Kindle edition of the book provides “locations” rather than “pages.” In-text citations are reflective of this. For many, the discipline of ecclesiology is neither practical nor prophetic. Rather, ecclesiology is understood by most to be primarily and essentially reflective, pondering the historical progression of the church in an attempt to understand it…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 16, 2014
Karl Polanyi first wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in 1944. Much has changed (understatement) since 1944; and yet… And yet, unfortunately, one of the things that has not changed is our need to still learn some of the lessons that Polanyi suggested were needed back in 1944 (Joseph…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 15, 2014
In the beginning…out of nothing…God created. We, created in the likeness of the Maker who makes all things, are ourselves world-makers. This is our birthright. There are those who still actively name this birthright and call us to living into its freedom, joy and responsibility. The Presbyterian Church USA works toward “renewing the church to…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
Murray Jardine leads us down a path that many have noted before, but he does a good job of it. Namely, our scientific and technological capabilities are outstripping our ability to morally process their implications before implementing them into our lives. Throughout his book, The Making and Unmaking of Technology Society: How Christianity Can Save…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
In case you haven’t noticed a significant amount of people think something is wrong with America. Now, it’s hard to believe that anyone really takes this idea seriously, because when you think about it, really think about it, what changes actually get made? Are there still uncharged inmates at Guantanamo? Do we still have the…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
In Making Room for Leadership: Power, Space and Influence, Mary Kate Morse does something amazing. She gets us outside of living inordinately inside our heads. That is, it’s not that we are overthinking things (though that can happen); instead, it’s that we have had a tendency to incorrectly be thinking about a lot of things. …
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
This blog post is being driven from reading William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire and Vincent J. Miller’s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. However, I have recently written another blog post on a related reading dealing with economics, socio-political interaction and faith. I engaged Max Weber’s The…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter is interesting. I offer that ambivalently. It’s interesting in some intriguing, thought-provoking ways and unfortunately it’s also interesting in some Orwellian, Huxleyan Brave New World kind of ways. One begins reading The Rebel Sell expecting some critique of failed countercultural…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber essentially needs no introduction. It is a classic in western culture and even more broadly known and referred to than this around the world. However, being a classic, it can be something of which people and to which they refer without ever having actually…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s by D. W. Bebbington is – as the title suggests — a text about a historical exploration of Evangelicalism in modern Britain. However, it is also about much more than this. While Bebbington specifically reviews the socio-cultural aspects of Evangelicalism in Britain,…
By: Clint Baldwin on July 14, 2014
“Current evangelicalism in the US lacks an articulate political or social theory except for a generalized patriotism.”[1] So writes Max Stackhouse, long-serving emeritus professor at Princeton. Unfortunately – including beyond the scope of simply “evangelicalism” – much of the “theology” we see applied in the public sphere today is more bafoonery than it is articulate,…
By: Cedrick Valrie on July 6, 2014
Introduction History does not happen to God. God is timeless. No matter the century, movement, or memorable decade in world history, God is turning the pages of time at…
By: Stefania Tarasut on July 2, 2014
I walk away from Terry Eagleton’s book Culture and the Death of God with one thought, “The Almighty, has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of… Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated: he has now put himself back on the agenda…” (ix) I’m also reminded of the cliché and over used quote credited to…
By: Clint Baldwin on June 30, 2014
To summarize and render a text a fairly complete injustice — God’s hard to get rid of. There you go. Done. Point is that some of the greatest minds and cultural movements have tried really intriguing ways to get rid of God, but…no dice. That is, God might metamorphosize and/or lie dormant for a while,…
By: Miriam Mendez on June 29, 2014
For some weird reason there was a song stuck in my head as I began to read this book. The song was one that, as a young child, I remembered from Sunday Bible School: “God is not dead, he is still alive—I feel God in my feet (stomp, stomp), I feel God in my hands…
By: Mark Steele on June 28, 2014
In my college days, I considered myself a mountaineer. I had ample opportunity to climb mountains like Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker and Mt. Whitney as well as climbing the cliffs of Yosemite Valley. What I liked about climbing is that it enabled me to get above the clouds and see the bigger beautiful picture of…
