I’m currently skimming and fumbling my way through The End of Poverty, a book by economist Jeffrey Sachs that I found at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit in August. I was enticed to buy it mainly because the cover advertises a forward by (St.) Bono.
I’m skimming and fumbling because even though The End of [...]

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I wrote in an earlier post about how difficult it is to work constructively against race problems since we live in racially segregated worlds. Here are a few more thoughts…
In Divided by Faith, a book on how evangelical religion interacts with the race problems in America, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith did extensive interviews [...]

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Move over, Shane Claiborne. Philip Yancey is back with a new book (Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?) which is ever so quoteable, even though I’m less than thirty pages in. It was just two weeks ago that I declared Claiborne’s book The Irresistable Revolution the most quotable of all books. [...]

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Move over, Philip Yancey and Donald Miller. I’ve found a new book to mention ad nauseam, and it’s The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. As I mentioned a few days ago, Claiborne is a 31-year-old Christian who founded The Simple Way, a faith community in Philadelphia that practices a truly different (and intriguing) [...]

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I just finished reading Illusions of innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 by Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen (1988, University of Chicago Press). This is an excellent book that most of you won’t want to read (unless you’re really into history) because it is so technical. But it is valuable [...]

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Shane Claiborne has an interesting article (part 1 of 3) today at Out of Ur, the blog for Christianity Today’s Leadership magazine. I’m currently reading Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. I like the book because, aside from a few sophomoric references, Claiborne defines “radical” in the correct sense [...]

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I still maintain my innocence regarding interest in O. J. Simpson’s salacious book deal, but if I were to write about it, I would want my post to resemble this Newsweek article based on an exclusive look at the chapter from Simpson’s book about the night of the murders.  You shouldn’t read the Newsweek article, [...]

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Each day the Internet Movie Database posts the names and photos of four celebrities who were “born today”. I don’t know when I started doing this, but I always click through that list hoping that today all the stars listed will be older than me. There aren’t many such days anymore. Yesterday [...]

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When I was young, adults I cared about lied to me. These adults weren’t my enemies. They were friends, teachers, church folks, relatives, people who cared.
The lie they told me: “You can be anything you want to be.”
It wasn’t true. I wanted to play shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, or quarterback [...]

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Ever read anything by Flannery O’ Connor, a “southern-gothic” fiction writer who died of lupus when she was 39 and I was two months old? Philip Yancey refers to her a lot, so I have always meant to get to her books. Recently I have.
Flannery O’ Connor was a devout Catholic from Georgia [...]

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