Leroy Barber
Safety has become one of the major gods of our time. Everyone is familiar with the philosophy of “Safety first!” and we do everything we possibly can to keep safety the priority. It has even become one of the major drivers (if not sometimes the main one) in our decision-making processes. There is big business in selling the many products that promise us safety. A person now needs a home alarm system, car alarms, a cell phone and insurance on everything, all to “protect” ourselves.
Steven C. Roy
“This biblical teaching about success in the eyes of God is very good news for us. At first glance, this may seem like a strange statement. After all, faithfulness to God is an incredibly challenging criterion of success. It probes deeply into our hearts. Our culture may content itself in defining success in terms of external things—money and possessions, status and popularity, power and influence, appearance and beauty—but Jesus defined success in terms of the heart. So how is this good news? After all, who among us is always faithful to God?
Gordon T. Smith
“The greatest threats to vocational thinking are three classical temptations, which essentially manifest themselves in some for[m] of the temptations Jesus faced in the desert at the beginning of his public life and ministry (Lk 4:1-13): the desire for power, the desire for material security and comfort, and the desire for fame or prestige. It is all too easy for us to make vocational choices rooted in or motivated by these powerful and subtle temptations; it is easy to rationalize our choices around each of them.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci, C.J.
“Rather than an affirmation of poverty [in his words ‘Blessed are the poor’], Jesus is exposing the dangers of wealth and privilege. This is a critical distinction because many passionate Christians are romanticizing poverty as they move toward lives of ‘service to the poor.’ By doing so they equate their ‘sacrifices’ with noble gestures of love and self-denial for the sake of the poor whom they have come to save. In so doing, while embracing a form of external poverty, they fail to grasp humility and contrition on the other side of the spectrum.
Beaudoin, Tom
Virtual Faith is an important book, if not always a correct book. Beaudoin’s stated purpose, however, is to open the dialogue on the spiritual quest of this generation’s college students, rather than to lay down the law.Beaudoin himself represents the very group he writes about: He is a Charismatic Catholic who has bones to pick with Rome, and who is one of the first ages of kids to become adults in a world that has “always” been on a New Age spiritual quest.He correctly assesses this generation’s drive for sincerity and doing whatever you do whole-heartedly.
Postman, Neil
This little book will change the way you watch public discourse in North America.
Thomas N. Finger
From the Publisher:The twentieth century has been one of unparalleled and rapid transience. It is the century that started with the telephone and will end with e-mail. Jobs and homes are now changed at the rate of a half-dozen or more in a lifetime. Air and water pollution has brought the well-being of the earth itself into question. And political revolutions have rocked the world and soaked the soil of entire continents in blood.If there is a key word for the twentieth century, it might be alienation.
Armand Nicholi
view this book on amazon.com view this book on chapters.caReviewed by Don Follis in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette
William Jordan
The Fire Farmer Meditatessee this book on amazon.com see this book on amazon.ca reviewed by Paul Grant
Griffith Edwards
Reviewed by Paul GrantThe next time you’re visiting the small city of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, seat of the sprawling Oglala Lakota reservation, take highway 407 south out oftown. The Nebraska state line – and the reservation boundary – is only two miles away. The boundary is invisible. It’s a legal reality and little more, slicing through open fields.
Donald Miller, John MacMurray
Paul Chamberlain
reviewed by Paul GrantGood and bad are all around us—the human universe we inhabit is unabashedly moral. Good is easier to define than bad, of course, because no one wants to be on the wrong side of intolerant.
John Ralston Saul
reviewed by Paul GrantGlobalism collapsed between 1995 and 2002. During this seven-year period internal contradictions in the religion called Globalism began to come home to roost: ever-increasing inequalities, surging developing-world debt, and so on.
E. O. Wilson
Dear Biologist,
Boice, James Montgomery
On September 11, 2001, many Americans awoke for the first time to an insecure world. The world was no different after the attacks, but to those who had never known terror on their own shores, it felt earth-shattering.But a rule of history is that no empire lasts forever, and no human-made peace is eternal. Even the most spectacular empires are eventually humiliated. In the 1800s, China was forced to submit to the outside-imposed presence of drug dealers in their country.
Okholm, Dennis L., ed.
This is a book that came out of a conference, which means the chapters vary in topic and style, and means that the chapters stand on their own. These are some thoughtful Christians, passionately committed to racial reconciliation.Check out Eugene Rivers’ powerful essay, Evangelical Responsibility in an age of White supremacy, and Reginald Potter’s essay, as these men tell it like it is. The last two chapters are heartwarming stories of Churches achieving racial harmony through real struggle.-Paul Grant
Rhodes, Stephen A.
From the back cover: Ride the subway or a bus in New York, London, Los Angeles, or any number of other cities around the country or around the world, and you will be impressed by a cacophony of languages, a crazy quilt of skin colors and a ceaseless array of cultural histories. Excitingly and sometimes confusingly, this is the world the church now serves.Pastor Stephen Rhodes, in whose congregation thirty-two nationalities gather weekly, fervently believes Christians should embrace the varied cultures that now surround us.
Ortiz, Manuel
To know God from only one cultural perspective is to limit him.So says Manuel Ortiz in One New People: Models for developing a multiethnic church. Written by a Puerto Rican pastor raised in a diverse Manhattan community, One New People is a book that uses careful case studies to call the church back to a reconciliation modeled after Christ’s example.
