Crossway e-Book Sale! Every Book Just $6!

Crossway is selling all of their e-books for just six bucks a piece—until Jan 15th.

Here’s a little gem from one I picked up, Mark Dever’s The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made. I’ve been planning on buying this for some years now as a homiletical aid. Finally, the price was right!

In order to acquire a sense of the grandiosity of God’s work, the majesty of his plan, the tenacity of his love, there is no replacement for the Old Testament. Deprive yourself of this part of God’s revelation, and your God will seem smaller, less holy, and less loving than God really is.

That is so true.

I bought the following:

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Posted by on Jan 9, 2012 in Books | 0 comments

Review: Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books

Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books
Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books by Tony Reinke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.3 When 1 percent of what you read is life-transforming gold, the labor of sifting through the other 99 percent is not troublesome.

Interestingly, this is the one thought that has really stuck with me from reading Lit! by Tony Reinke. It may sound a little discouraging: are those little nuggets worth the effort? Yes, I know they are. And I think the 99% is still shaping me, even if not always in conscious ways.

Instead of providing a review, let me just share with you the other thoughts and lines that I highlighted—even if none of them managed to stay in my active memory (that’s why we take notes, after all)!

Wait! After going through these notes, I realized that there is another thought that really stuck with me:

I read books on a Kindle e-book reader for eighteen months. In those months I discovered that I could read faster and that I could read more easily on jet planes, at the park, and in bed. I could download new books instantly. Never before had books been more accessible, and never had one hundred books fit more comfortably in one hand. With all these books I found myself flipping between multiple titles at the same time, becoming quickly tired with one book and switching to another, more promising, book. About a year into my friendship with Kindle I noticed that my online reading habits were creeping into my e-book reading habits. All my distracted fragmented browsing habits began appearing as I read books on my Kindle. I noticed:

• I was less discerning with the e-books I was reading.
• I experienced a persistent feeling of being rushed.
• I found it difficult to maintain sustained linear attention.
• I rarely meditated while reading an e-book.
• I reacted to what I was reading, rather than stopping to think and meditate.
• I found myself tempted to flip to a different book unless the book arrested my attention at all times.
• I found myself browsing and skimming books….

You may be more disciplined that I am (actually, there’s a good chance of it). But in my life I noticed several unhelpful reading patterns emerge. No matter how I tried, I could not reverse them. After eighteen months I went Kindle-free, and I recommitted my life to printed books.

This, of course, caught my attention. Interestingly, his experience appears to be the opposite of Alan Jacobs’, who said in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction that the Kindle actually rescued him from distraction. Because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of an iPad, it forced him to read in a linear fashion. My own experience falls in between Reinke’s and Jacobs’: the Kindle helps me read in a linear way without distractions, and it’s great for helping me just read more, period. It’s always available and always holds something interesting—and I don’t find myself bouncing around. But I do think—and here’s where Reinke helped me—that it contributes to an overall, persistent feeling of being rushed. The Kindle makes so much available that I feel overwhelmed with it all—and I feel like I have to finish what I’m reading fast so I can get to those other things.

I believe that society will find e-readers to be good ways to read some books and bad ways to read others. Those in the gray area we may read on an e-reader for convenience. What I haven’t figured out how to do yet is rid myself of the stress of “so much to read, so little time!”

Okay, here are the other quotes I saved. Their quality may give you an indication of whether or not you ought to take some time out to read Lit!

The strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading . . . is the search for a difficult pleasure.” (Quoting Harold Bloom).

Literature is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, interpretation, creativity, beauty, and understanding. These are ennobling activities and qualities. For a Christian, they can be God-glorifying, a gift from God to the human race to be accepted with zest.

By appreciating the beauty of literature, we honor God, the Giver of all beauty.

The best Christian novelists write from a biblical worldview, one that is not afraid of digging into the soil of common human experience. O’Connor once addressed what she called “sorry” Christian fiction: Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is.

God’s “amazing grace” is especially displayed when it “saves a wretch.” To some degree, the author must paint a picture of the wretchedness of sin in order for grace to emerge in its brilliance. Thus, grace-filled literature is often not “clean” literature. In fact, God’s redemptive grace is hard to capture in “clean” fiction. This is especially true of conversion stories, because conversion is about contrast. So how much sin is required for the contrast to become clear? What type of realism is permissible in fiction? Where are the lines drawn? These are very difficult questions, and the gutters are deep on both sides of the street. On the one side of the road, we cannot merely shut our eyes to depictions of sin and evil in literature. We find depictions of evil in the Bible. On the other side of the road, we cannot affirm fiction that glorifies sin or applauds unbelief.

Christians should neither undervalue nor overvalue literature. It is not the ultimate source of truth. But it clarifies the human situation to which the Christian faith speaks.

For many of us, reading is more a matter of desire than of a lack of free time. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”

Meet David Ulin. David is the book editor for the Los Angeles Times newspaper. David reads a lot of books because he gets paid to review a lot of books. It’s David’s job. But one day David noticed something alarming—the task of reading books was becoming more and more difficult. That’s bad news for a professional book reader. The problem was not the lack of will to read, but the lack of concentration. He wrote about his experience in the autobiographical article, “The Lost Art of Reading”: Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. . . . In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.1 Ulin pointed to the Internet as a primary cause of his withering concentration. And he is not alone. In the summer of 2008 journalist Nicholas Carr published an article in The Atlantic that brought these concerns to popular attention under the provoking title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He wrote, Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . . And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The Internet offers us streams of fragmented information that must be quickly browsed as they pass.

Social media (like Facebook and Twitter) and online browsing patterns will train our minds to hunt for information in small, isolated bits. In fact “reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” writes Susan Jacoby. “What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”

The Internet is designed to encourage us to browse information, not to slowly read and digest it. Carr writes, “Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” And we like distraction. We want distraction. Distraction is how we stay busy enough to avoid the self-discipline required to read books.

Traditionally, a reader selected one book and sat alone in a reading chair. When great ideas were encountered, the reader internalized those ideas and reflected on them. If the reader encountered points of disagreement, the reader also stopped to reflect on what made the point disagreeable. In other words, traditional readers engaged with a book and engaged their thinking. This has changed with online social interaction. Now, when we come across an idea that we like, we are tempted to quickly react, to share the idea with friends in an e-mail, on Facebook, or on a blog. Or when we disagree, our initial response is to ask for the input of others. With online access to so many friends, the temptation is to react, not to ponder, and it’s a problem Kevin Kelly notices. In his article “Reading in a Whole New Way” he compares reading from a book page to reading from a screen. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it.

The point of this chapter is pretty simple: as Christians, convinced of the importance of book reading, we must periodically gauge the effects of the Internet and social and electronic media upon our lives. The concentration and self-discipline required to read books requires years of practice to build and consistent exercise to maintain. If we are careless, this concentration and discipline will erode, and we will find ourselves in a losing battle—losing our patience with books and losing our delight in reading. The skill and concentration needed to read books is a skill and concentration that’s worth fighting for.




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Posted by on Jan 1, 2012 in Books | 0 comments

Review: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft

Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If not a book for guys, at least a book clearly written by one. There wasn’t a single word about the relationship of the six guys on the raft that I noted—it’s all adventure.

My rating: 5 stars for bravery, 4 for literary merit (Heyerdahl does write well; I found myself wondering how a Norwegian native could have such a command of English, but I was unable to ascertain if a translator or editor was employed), but only 3 overall—because I felt the book was long on adventure and short on depth.

“Short on depth.” That’s not nearly as good English as Heyerdahl’s. A good vacation read. It stirred my desire to buy and read a book whose Kindle sample captivated me: 1491.



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Posted by on Dec 28, 2011 in Books, Uncategorized | 0 comments

Book Recommendations from Worldview/Apologetics Teacher, Or, Mount Calvary Baptist Church Usher Reads The Following Books When Not Ushing

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My friend Brent Cook, BJU apologetics and worldview teacher, gave me permission to post the following list. This is what he wrote to introduce it:

Several have asked for book recommendations related to the classes I’ve taught this semester. Here is a partial list I threw together last night. (“Recommendation” does not imply endorsement of all content.) I’ve also include a general section of fun reads. —B. Cook

All of the following links go to Amazon except the ten or so which were carried by Westminster Books.

Apologetics, Science, and Worldview

Philosophy

Church History

General

Posted by on Dec 22, 2011 in Books, ChurchLife, Culture | 0 comments

Make A List; Check It Twice

This is a good time of year for me to remind you and you of an important principle: don’t listen to Logos when they let their marketing folks write the following:

The sheer volume of content in Logos base packages makes them incredibly valuable.

There’s a fundamental error here—or at least a faulty assumption: quantity and quality are not the same thing, even in products from an excellent company like Logos. In a given year I use a relatively small percentage of my Logos resources. Here’s what I use most frequently:

  • Commentaries
  • Bibles: ESV, NIrV, GNT, BHS
  • Commentaries
  • Bible Dictionaries (like the NDBT, NDT, NBD, etc.)
  • Commentaries
  • A number of journals
  • Systematics (like Grudem and Hodge)
  • Assorted individual books (Piper, Schreiner, Levinsohn, etc.)

The money I spent on the above resources also purchased for me a great quantity of other materials, much of which is simply of lower quality than the stuff I do use. I simply don’t have the time or inclination to check everything my library has to say about a given passage—much as it would be a waste of time to check everything my school’s library says about it. When I have top-level resources, I don’t generally need to check low-level ones. So I’ve “hidden” the following resources:

  • The Pulpit Commentary (not helpful; out of date)
  • Semeia (typically too liberal and arcane)
  • Wilmington’s Bible Handbook
  • Wilmington’s Book of Bible Lists
  • Preach for a Year #s 1 and 2 (sermon outlines; yech)
  • Bob Utley’s various commentaries

There may come a time when introductory level works are useful for me if I teach a discipleship class, but for now the NICOT, NICNT, NIGTC, NAC, WBC, TOTC, PNTC, and BST series (plus a few more) are more than adequate for my research needs. I paid good money for what I use, but I paid for quality, not quantity. Don’t get a baseball-card mentality when it comes to buying books. Your collection’s value may actually decrease with size; it can be hard to wade through junk.

So make a list of what you’ll actually use and check it twice against “analog” book prices before you buy. Your list will likely look different from mine (for example, I use BDAG and notes in BibleWorks, not Logos), but you’ve got to make one or you may waste money.

Posted by on Dec 13, 2011 in Bible Software, Books, Tech | 0 comments

Grudem on Selfishness

I think the following comments from Grudem’s Systematic Theology are very insightful—and needful for preachers. It’s easy to preach so hard against selfishness that one erases part of the image of God!

Other definitions of the essential character of sin have been suggested. Probably the most common definition is to say that the essence of sin is selfishness.1 However, such a definition is unsatisfactory because


  1. Scripture itself does not define sin this way.

    2. 

  2. Much self-interest is good and approved by Scripture, as when Jesus commands us to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:20), or when we seek to grow in sanctification and Christian maturity (1 Thess. 4:3), or even when we come to God through Christ for salvation. God certainly appeals to the self-interest of sinful people when he says, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11). To define the essential character of sin as selfishness will lead many people to think that they should abandon all desire for their own personal benefit, which is certainly contrary to Scripture.
    

    3. 

  3. Much sin is not selfishness in the ordinary sense of the term—people can show selfless devotion to a false religion or to secular and humanistic educational or political goals that are contrary to Scripture, yet these would not be due to “selfishness” in any ordinary sense of the word. Moreover, hatred of God, idolatry, and unbelief are not generally due to selfishness, but they are very serious sins.
  4. Such a definition could suggest that there was wrongdoing or sinfulness even on God’s part, since God’s highest goal is to seek his own glory (Isa. 42:8; 43:7, 21; Eph. 1:12).

Likewise, Jonathan Edwards asked, “[Why] make any promises of happiness, or denounce any threatenings of misery, to him who neither loved his own happiness nor hated his own misery?” (Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey, vol. 8 in WJE (New Haven: Yale, 1989), 254–255.) In the same work, Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards lists multiple passages of Scripture in both testaments which motivate good deeds with offers of reward:

“What is bestowed in doing good to others is not lost, as if a man throws what he had into the sea. But see what Solomon says, Ecclesiastes 11:1, ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it….’ What is so given is lent and committed … to the Lord, who no doubt will pay. Proverbs 19:17, ‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.’ He will not only pay, but with great increase. Luke 6:38, ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you.’” Ibid., 216.

We who care about our own and others’ sanctification have to draw the line between selfishness and a biblically oriented self-interest, a self-interest which points ultimately to God, the only one who can satisfy the desires He created in us.

Our hearts are restless, until they find rest in Thee.

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Posted by on Dec 8, 2011 in Books, Theology | 1 comment
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