Books read in 2007

1. James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paperback)
by Robert H. Eisenman (Author)
Key Phrases: killing backsliders, close family cousins, extreme purity regulations, Damascus Document, High Priest, New Testament (more...)

In the course of describing his unorthodox take on the history of activities in 1st century Judea in regard to James, Paul, etc, he presents a lot of interesting information. Learned a lot. He takes off in all kinds of off the wall directions and probably is right about some things and grossly wrong on others but it was great fun nonetheless.

2. Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)
by James K. A. Smith (Author)
Key Phrases: persistent postmodernism, pragmatic evangelicalism, incarnational affirmation, Grand Rapids, New York, Nurse Ratched (more...)

Can you be an evangelical professor/practicing Christian and still be a postmodernist? He says yes and presents good reasons for it.

3. The World Without Us (Hardcover)
by Alan Weisman (Author)
Key Phrases: world without people, world without humans, plastic particles, New York, United States, North America (more...)

When I saw this described on TV I thought it interesting but depressing. But my wife gave to me for my birthday and found out it was informative in a number of ways. Blogged about it earlier.

4. Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise (Paperback)
by Robert Inchausti (Author)
Key Phrases: antipolitical politics, New York, Dorothy Day, Jacques Ellul (more...)

This guy packs a lot of info and power into few words. Covers too much too fast but you know, I liked it. I'll be going back to it. He covers people like William Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Chesterton and Berdyaev in his first chapter on The Soul under Siege. We get Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Kerouac and Percy in the next one titled The Novel as Countermythology. I'll stop there and hope you get the picture. A compliment on the back from a U. Notre Dame prof says "Robert Inchausti writes with a sharp eye and considerable wit to argue that Christians, often from the margins, are among the most acute critics of modernity. His book is trenchant and informative enough to claim a wide audience...

5. On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals (Paperback)
by Turid Rugaas (Author)

We have a dog with a mental health problem. She thinks I am the God-Almighty Alpha Dog and cringes in my presence. She is afraid to come into the room with me. We hired a dog psychologist who prescribed Prozac for the dog and this book and lots of homework. We've spent $800 so far, the Prozac didn't work and I've given up.

6. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
by Robert D. Richardson (Author)

Great work about a great man who overcame depression of his younger years and whose happiness and productivity increased as he got older. Just the kind of thing a baby boomer likes to learn about. Seriously, this books taught me a lot about what it means to be an American of the 20th century and even provides a framework for understanding the early postmodern periond we are in now.

7. Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Centennial Books)

by Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Author) "ON MARCH 29, 1832, THE TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD EMERSON visited the tomb of his young wife, Ellen, who had been buried a year and two months earlier..." (more)
Key Phrases: divinity school address, representative men, New York, Margaret Fuller, New England (more...)

William James' dad and Emerson were friends and in order to better understand James and to get a better feel for E., I followed up with this book by the same author. Am half way through it and am learning a lot. I now understand that it has been to my detriment to have ignored biographies for so long.

8. Postmodernism: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides (Oneworld)) (Paperback)
by Kevin Hart (Author)

Great book explaining PM. I have collected several others and they all are good and different. Perhaps will blog on this later.

9. How (Not) to Speak of God (Paperback)
by Peter Rollins (Author)

Recommended by Richard Beck of Experimental Theology who blogged about it. Modernists, that includes atheists and Bible-thumping evangelicals, both could learn some lessons as they both have some wrong ideas about what it is they are (dis)believing in.

10. The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)
by Harvey Cox (Introduction), Philip Zaleski (Series Editor)

Lots of great stories. I'd never heard of Walter Benjamin whose last days it describes and since reading he is popping up all over the place. Another great story was about an Ethiopian man who was jailed for a number of years in the 70's who translated Gone With the Wind into his language for his fellow prisoners. It was the only book they in all those years were able to sneak in.

11. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Paperback)
by Dorothee Soelle (Author), Barbara Rumscheidt (Translator), Martin Rumscheidt (Translator)

She thinks so differently than I do, this German lady who recently passed away. It is such a good book, my nephew took it home with him. She descibes the mystical and comtemplative life. My nephew survived stage 4 Ewing's carcinoma and I think is mential contemplative interiority played a role in that.

12. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Paperback)
by Francis S. Collins (Author)

I read this but it just doesn't stay with me for some reason. I'll read it again. Perhaps its too simple and straightforward and makes so much sense that I don't do enough thinking and churning as I read. Do remember that he writes some good sense about Intelligent Design.

13. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Paperback)
by Anne Lamott (Author) "The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth..." (more)

What a neat find in a Walnut Ridge, Arkansas book store. Blogged about it in July.

14. Searching for God Knows What
by Donald Miller (Author) "Some time ago I attended a seminar for Christian writers..." (more)
Key Phrases: John Sailhamer, Garden of Eden, Santa Claus (more...)

Great fun. This book is very popular and even Lipscomb, a Church of Christ school, hosted a visit my him. In his first book, Blue like Jazz, his description of he and some of his evangelical friends setting up a confession booth on his college campus to confess the sins of Christians all through the centuries was one of the most creative Christian actions I've ever encountered.

15. Ideas of the great economists / George Soule
by George Henry Soule

Great book on economics from the fifties! Found it going throught my late father-in-laws' books. Being from a different era it probably is less tendentious than an econ book today. I suppose he has his axes to grind but they are different than our present ones. When it comes to economics, I don't know where the science ends and the religion begins. That's the trouble with it. However, I think I'm getting good stuff from this guy.

16. Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope by Brian McLaren

I'm reading this one slowly so I can savour it. He has a better grasp on what the kingdom of God is that Jesus talked about so much. Will probably blog about it later. I am a fan of emergent conversation. It has helped me perceive that I have a modern bias. Now, if I could just learn a new bias.

17. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond (Author) "A suitable starting point from which to compare historical developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C..." (more)
Key Phrases: big wild mammals, domesticable wild plants, archaeological hallmarks, New Guinea, Fertile Crescent, United States (more...)

Wildly popular book and deservedly so. It stays with you and affects how you see the world. Google it for more info.

18. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Paperback)
by James Hillman (Author) "You who have been privileged at some time during his long life to have attended a lecture by Henry Corbin have been present at a..." (more)
Key Phrases: anima mundi, green lion, psychic reality, Henry Corbin, Spring Publ, Cambridge Univ (more...)

Haven't been able to get into this much yet even though I bought a while back. Will stay with it.

19. What Would Jesus Deconstruct? by John Caputo
see my Dec 16 entry. This is the second in the same series on The Church and Postmodern Culture. The first by James K. A. Smith is described as entry 2 above. John's uses the famous book "In His Steps" by Charles Sheldon as the shoving off point and shove he does. John would like differ quite a bit from Smith on particulars of how to express Christianity in a Postmodern world. But they both believe it is right, necessary and good.

20. Betraying Spinoza (see below)

Described in previous post.

Betraying Spinoza

My sister-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Borders and yesterday I bought Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. It was so captivating I finished it today.

Spin found himself in Amsterdam in a world of, for that time, amazing freedom of thought and where a variety of religions co-existed. His heritage was the Sephardic Jewish from Portugal. Just a few generations earlier, his ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity. They were called converso's and had to hide their Jewishness to the extent that by the time their descendent survivors made it to Amsterdam, they had forgotten, to varying degrees, their characteristic customs. Spinoza was raised to ardently pursue the Study that is so distinctive to Jewish identity. But, the crucible of that place in concert with his personality led him at an early age, 23, to be excommunicated from that community. He added the study of Latin and an informal symposium with friends drawn from various types of Christians and ex-Christians from the Calvinists, Mennonites and whatever. The conflict and his personal circumstances and innate genius were part of the spiritual formation that helped lead us to the modern world. For this he is both admired and by some blamed.

From Chris' Blog, He Asks an Interesting Question

His website here.

Post reproduced below - let him know what you think.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Church Innovations

I have this hunch that there are some really creative and innovative things that churches are doing in this world of ours. I would like to get your participation in answering the following question:

What innovative things are churches or ministries doing?

By innovative I do not mean that the innovation has to be something necessarily new, but rather something that might be challenging or risky or require creativity. What I am looking for is outside the box efforts that might be experimental or unconventional. For example, using the church building for a junior high lock-in will fall into the not innovative category. However, using the church building as a service center for the growing population of immigrant workers in the community would be an innovative use of the building.

If it helps, below is a framework for thinking. Use it or don't. But please share as much as you know about the church or ministry you find innovative. Also, if it is appropriate (usually it will be), please provide a url or link to the church or ministry if you have it.

1. Innovative use of church facilities.

2. Innovative service in local community (within 2 miles of the central location of the building).

3. Innovative use of budget or capital campaign (ie not to build more structures for member use).

4. Innovative local cross-cultural outreach.

5. Innovative use of volunteers (not teaching Bible class or VBS).

6. Innovative work or ministry fighting poverty.

7. Innovative ministry collaborations across denominational lines.

8. Innovative staffing.

9. Innovative use of worship arts (praise team and powerpoints is not innovative. Themed art gallery of work by church members or local artists is innovative).

10. Innovative ways of telling the story of Jesus (in any context) outside of traditional use of sermons.

Finally, I would love for you to copy this post and post this to your blog (if you're feeling generous and interested in the topic). It would be really cool to share and learn from each other.

My Christmas Books

1. A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

For a positive review by Robert Bellah go here.

Inspired to buy this by After the Future.

2. The Parallax View (Short Circuits)
by Slavoj Zizek "Two remarkable stories were reported in the media in 2003..." (more)
Key Phrases: Third World, The Wings of the Dove, Bobby Peru (more...)

Francis Schaeffer - Evangelical Superstar of the 70's

I came across this article about a new book by the son of Francis Schaeffer. Be sure to read the comments. Francis authored a number of books and hit the evangelical big time in the seventies. The first ones were "The God Who is There", "Escape from Reason", and "He is There and He is not Silent". I read these three in '72 -'73. They gave an intellectual and cultural basis for a conservative Christianity and I learned a lot from them, about history, culture, and philosophy and they provided me with background for further investigations, which I'm still pursuing. However, I didn't find them convincing or complete. But, nonetheless I remember them with affection and am thankful for the benefit they provided.

What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

I read John Caputo's "What Would Jesus Deconstruct" on the planes to and from Athens. He gives a positive view of Deconstruction and Postmodernism. Defining these two things is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. But, overall I like what I read. I'm reading it again.

The Agora

I was standing on Mars Hill (the Aeropagus) looking down on the Agora on the morning of Dec 8.

A little later I walked by and this was as close as I could get.

Tastes of Greece

I think this was called Moussaka. There was eggplant, tomato sauce, cheese, pasta, etc. It was great.


These anchovies were not soaked in salt. They had a meaty taste.

The Aeropagus

Standing on the Aereopagus with the Acropolis behind me.

This stairway is one of the few indications that there were once buildings and human habitation on the Aeropagus, the site of Paul's famous sermon where he saw the inscription "To the Unknown God".

The Parthenon - Dec 2 2007

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What things went on here that shaped the lives of all of us!