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) [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

ChristianityToday.com recently published a list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals. The idea is that these 50 books have been extremely influential whether we like it or not. I’m currently reading #46 (which I’ll write about sometime) and if this were a list of the 50 BEST books, it would [...]

[Read more →]

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” T. S. EliotI just finished reading a book my brother loaned me called Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All Night Runner by Dean Karnazes. What an incredible life this guy is living!
Karnazes showed promise as a distance [...]

[Read more →]

“Human beings are explanation generators.”

So says Daniel Taylor in his book The Myth of Certainty (p. 22). He says that we generate explanations about what life means to give us security, and that (and this is the interesting and scary part) all explanations for life are self-verifying. That means that they all seem [...]

[Read more →]