A Mind for God by James Emery White is a book that I wished I could write. It makes a solid case for the active life of the Christian mind. Christians are often (and sometimes fairly) caricatured as backwoods simpletons who eschew logical thought in exchange for the ease of lazy faith. White describes the need for Christians to crave to develop our minds for the glory of Christ. We ought to seek to deeply understand our faith, our culture, our world. Living passively, whether a Christian or non-believer, is a wasted life.

The first step to engage our minds is simply to read. White makes a passionate plea to read often and read broadly. He tells an interesting story about a family trip to Disney World when, during a calm period between visits to the park, his family sat in the lobby reading books for an hour or so. A passerby commented that she wishes her family would do this ritual. His solution is simply to create the habit of reading. How often do we carve out time to intentionally read? I think of all the distractions and responsibilities that vie for my attention which take away my reading time. I need to heed White’s advice to make reading a priority in my life over television, the Internet, and other trifles. My favorite chapter in this book is titled, “The Library as Armory.” This puts reading and books in their proper perspective in our lives. Too often, we arm ourselves with pop-culture foolishness, and those weapons will never win a war. Reading hard books provides the proper training needed to interact with our culture today.

Another aspect of this book that I appreciated is the chapter titled, “Sacred Thinking.” In it, he describes the art of self-reflection between what we read and other areas of our life. It is incorrect to think that our thinking is compartmentalized. What we watch on television, what we read for pleasure, what we discuss over coffee, and what we hear in the Sunday sermon are not distinct areas of study. Do we allow ourselves time to contemplate how these areas fit together or how they are incongruent? This self-reflection is important in all circles, Christian or non-Christian. It’s an aspect that I want my students to do in a variety of readings in class, and I should do it with what I read as well.

The appendices are worth the price of the book alone. White offers three book lists to begin our quest toward a mind for God. The first list is “Ten to Start,” books that offer a basic overview to reading and to the Christian faith. Adler, Lewis, Packer, etc. The next is called “Twenty-Five Books Toward a Christian Worldview.” The third is “Entering the Great Conversation,” a compendium of great books that offer a broad education in world literature. These three provide readers of all levels to begin their diet of important texts to develop their minds for God.

I recommended many of the books on this list, but A Mind for God is really one of the best for an introduction to the importance of reading, learning, and thinking. If you are like me, you’ll appreciate the reminder to read and think more.

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Life as Vapor is 31 meditations on faith by John Piper.  Normally I am not a fan of devotional books.  They’re usually trite little pieces with a Scripture verse (taken out of context) and then a short little feel good story (think Chicken Soup for your soul books).   This is not the case for this book, nor did I expect it to be given the author.

If you’re not familiar with John Piper, you should be.  If you’ve ever tried to read one of Piper’s more lengthy books (like Desiring God), but found that your brain began to hurt because of the level of depth and insight by Piper, well join the club… but don’t give up!

I would highly recommend anyone to read this book, especially if you’re just beginning to get your feet wet with the works and thoughts of John Piper.   I believe John Piper stands head and shoulders above all the other pastors and theologians in our generation.

Even in these short 4-5 page devotions, the reader is brought into the depth and riches of God’s sovereign grace, and he or she will be reminded of the brevity of this life and encouraged to live in light of eternity.

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If you’re a fan of the NBA (as I am), then this would be a good book to read for you to learn how and why the NBA is so popular today.  If you’re a fan of either the Lakers (as I am) or Celtics, then this is a must read.

When the Game Was Ours traces the rise of two of the greatest players in NBA history – Bird and Magic.  Though their personalities were different, (with Magic being the outspoken man with the smile that fills a room, and Bird being the introverted, beer drinking, poor kid from French Lick, Indiana) both men shared a passion and dedication for the game of basketball that may be only matched by two other great NBA players in history – Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant.

These two rivals began squaring off and pushing one another to greatness from their early days in College. In 1979 they met in the NCAA championship game, where Magic got the best of Bird and a championship for his Michigan State team.   The following year, both men went to the NBA.

This book was not only a biography of these two men, it was also a personal journey down memory lane for me.  As a child of the 80′s (born in 1975), my earliest memories of basketball revolve around loving the lakers and hating the celtics.  As games and events were retold, I found myself reaching back into my own childhood memories of these events

By the end of the 80′s, Magic Johnson would win five NBA Championships to Bird’s three NBA Championships (yes! Lakers!).

Beyond the games, shots made and missed, and the epic battles, this book was a great inside look at the men and their lives.   I was once again impressed with their competitive spirit, passion, and commitment to excellence that is so rare today, save Kobe of course.  These men hated losing, and thus they despised, yet respected their biggest rival.

Larry and Magic are also almost exclusively responsible for resurrecting the NBA, which was suffering from low ratings and a bad public image before their arrival.

The other thing that is perhaps most impressive about both men is their ability to dominate and control the game while only taking 8-10 shots – something Jordan could never do.  Larry and Magic were the consummate team players.  If it had not been for their rivalry, they each could have one 7-8 championships (Jordan had no real rival in the 90′s)

Perhaps the most engaging part of the book was the detailing of Magic’s HIV virus, it’s impact on him, the game and really the world.  Magic has been a great catalyst in the world to bring about HIV education and public knowledge.  Unfortunately for him, and for the Lakers, when he reported this to the world, the ignorance of the other players, and even his teammates forced him out of the game he loved.  A year later he tried to make a comback, but during a preseason game he got scratched on his arm and started bleeding.  The crowd went silent, and the opposing team did not want to go back on the court. Saddened, Johnson was forced to retire again… Five years later he made one more comeback at the age of 35…Unfortunately, his younger attention hungry teammates did not embrace him well… he played only a dozen games before the end of the season before he retired.

I believe Magic Johnson is the best and most complete basketball player of all time… and this book only helped to confirm that conviction.

Let me conclude with just one stat line from one game:

Game  6 1980 Finals versus the 76′rs (as a rookie filling in at center for the injured Kareem Abdul Jabbar):  45 points, 15 Rebounds, and 7 Assists.

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Originally written in 1967, Spiritual Leadership has become a classic in the realm of Christian leadership.   I first read this book a few years ago with some other men. I remembered being convicted and encouraged by Sanders solid biblical exhortations and guidance.

This time I listened to the audiobook version (as it was the free book of the month on christianaudio.com a few months ago).   While I was once again convicted and encouraged by the book, I would not recommend the audio version.

This is a book that would be best read slowly and with another person or group.  As I drove down the highway, I heard good point after good point on leadership practice.  However, these kind of points are best read, then meditated upon, and preferably discussed with others for both personal and corporate application.

Final conclusion: This is a solid book to read… grab a friend and go through it together… don’t listen to it.

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In a satire against the optimism of Leibniz, Candide has its young philosopher traveling the world searching for his love and attempting to see if his tutor Pangloss is correct in that this world is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created.

The story begins as Candide is expelled from the Edenic castle in Westphalia for his scandalous kiss to the baroness, the fair Cunegonde. He travels across continents meeting a variety of common people and royalty; priests and sinners; wealthy and poor. Candide continues to struggle with the question of whether Pangloss (and ultimately Leibniz) is correct that this world, the one filled with greed and murder and hypocrisy and cruelty, is the best possible one out of the mind of God. He fights with what he believes and what he sees, and cannot justify the two. Candide is left to “cultivate his garden” rather than waste any more time thinking through these issues.

For the Christian, this book explores one of the key objections to a theistic faith: how can a good God allow suffering in this world? While that question is not specifically addressed, is it at the heart of Candide’s uneasiness. What happens when our world is filled with pain, disappointment, and horror? Can we reconcile a God with our life experience? This is a topic that Christians must not only address to those around who question the claims of Christianity, but we must also have an answer for ourselves when the horrors come.

It would be the height of hubris to state a simple answer to this issue, but we must begin our search for one in the gospel itself. We must remember that God the Father knows suffering and murder, as his Son hung on the cross to die for the sins of the world. He watched as Jesus was tortured and killed to become the payment for sins that we not his own. When we are trying to justify a good God with suffering, our question must begin with God himself. Candide met a cast of characters spewed from the bowels of humanity, but never discussed sin.

Christian doctrine teaches that Adam’s sin brought this world from perfection to the wastelands with people corrupted in the downward spiral. Leibniz’s optimism is wrong: this world is depraved and men have the capability to act like animals to one another. Candide’s observations should bring us back to the God who has provided his Son as a sacrifice to restore humanity to our true image-bearer state. The murderers, the rapists, the thieves in Candide’s journey point us back to a God, one who is perfect because we see that man is not. Corrupt men in the world show a moral structure beyond us that defines what corrupt men act like.

Candide’s decision to focus only on his own garden shows a hopelessness that Christians ought not have. Even in the light of pain and difficulty, we should see our “gardens” in light of the larger garden, the only that has the Tree of Life swaying. Because of this, we can have hope in that other world that is the best of all possible worlds.

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Take Francis Chan’s living-on-the-edge-by-faith message in Crazy Love and combine it with John Eldredge’s be-a-real-man-and-go-skydiving-for-Jesus philosophy in Wild at Heart. Shake in some quotations and discussion questions, and presto! You now have Wild Goose Chase.

I’m sure that Francis Chan, Mark Batterson, and John Eldredge are all a bit offended at that recipe. I can almost picture Eldridge sharpening one of his Braveheart swords now. But as I read, it felt like those two books, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. I agree that we must avoid the comforts of “safe faith” and also that we should live out our God-created masculinity. Even though it is familiar ground, I enjoyed this quick read.

Batterson frames his book with six cages that we put ourselves in that prevents us from partaking in the “wild goose chase,” supposedly what the Celtics call the Holy Spirit. These cages are ones that we can all relate to: cages of responsibility, routine, assumptions, guilt, failure, and fear. While the image of the “wild goose” is too flimsy (and tiresome) to use as a conceit throughout, the cages provide a better structure for the message.

Like the other two books I mentioned, Wild Goose Chase is filled to the brim with anecdotes about people who are on this chase, or ones who are not pursuing it. These were the strongest parts of the book. Another strength was the end-of-chapter discussion questions. These are useful to reflect over the reading privately, or to use as discussion starters.

I’ll end with one of my favorite images in the book that I hope I remember: Batterson writes about the majesty of a bus ride through Ecuador. Driving at 12,000 feet and above the clouds, he was in awe of the mountain peaks. These are the places on earth that the Celtic Christians referred to as thin places, moments in our lives where heaven and earth seem to touch, “the natural and the supernatural collide.” It’s a great image, and helps me to look for these thin places in my own life.

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Written in 1664, Tartuffe tells how a conniving, smarmy man weasels his way into the hearts and home of Orgon’s family. Using religious phrases and trite retorts, Tartuffe gains the admiration of Orgon, the paterfamilias, much to the disbelief of the rest of the family. The action of the play is how the family attempts to show Orgon Tartuffe’s true nature, which includes scheming, hiding, and shouting. The play is a prime example of a French farce, but it often felt like an episode of Fraiser in rhyming couplets.

Moliere attempted to point out the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in his day, and he was successful. In its day, the play was attacked for its anti-Catholic sentiment. Modern-day readers will not think it is that controversial since we have been raised by television-evangelist, con-artist types as duplicitous villains.  A sneaky, sweaty, oversexed religious guy as a caricature is old news.

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The Confession is the latest legal thriller from accomplished author John Grisham.  I’ve read many of Grisham’s books and have enjoyed almost all of them.  In this book I found that in some ways I was more engrossed and captivated by the story than any other Grisham book I’ve read,  and at the same time, very much turned off by Grisham’s blatant political agenda in the book.

This is the second book that I’ve read of at least three books that Grisham has written about the death penalty.

The basic premise of the book is that a white girl in a small Texas town goes missing.  After no evidence is found, the police receive a ‘tip’ that it was a young black classmate of the girl.  During the interrogation the detectives manage to force a confession out of the boy, who is subsequently convicted and sentenced to the death penalty.

Meanwhile, the real killer is free.  Days before the scheduled execution, the real killer begins to come forward with his own confession…  The bulk of the book takes place during these tense last hours.  From this standpoint, I was enthralled by the tension and the storyline (I don’t want to give away anymore details, as it may ruin some of the tension for potential readers of the book).

However, it is clear that Grisham is trying to blast the ethics of capital punishment… along the way, he uses the most common arguments put forth by liberals: the fallibility of the criminal justice system, “excessive” governmental power, the insufficiency of revenge as a motive, and most predominantly in the book –  the possibility of executing an innocent person.

Various Christians and pastors are predominant throughout the book – and as a pastor myself, I was intrigued to see how their views were represented.  Sadly, Grisham does a very poor job on this crucial element of his book.

In this entry, I do not have the time or space to give a more balanced, thoughtful, and in-depth view of this sensitive issue.  However, for anyone interested, I would highly recommend  J. Daryl Charles article “The Ethics of Capital Punishment” found here: http://www.equip.org/articles/the-ethics-of-capital-punishment

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Like most people, I was aware of the folklore surrounding Pirates and their tendency to say “ARRRGHHH  Matey!”… and I’ve both rode the ride and seen the movie Pirates of the Caribbean… I even read Michael Crichton’s latest book Pirates: Latitudes earlier this year…so I figured I knew pretty much all I needed to know when it came to pirate history… Apparently I was wrong.

In this book Colin Woodward takes the reader back in time to the golden age of Piracy in the early 1700s.   Though the book is specifically focused on how the pirates of the Caribbean rose and fell, I found it to be a very interesting snapshot of world history at the time.  Along the way you see the tension and wars between the English, French, and Spanish as they all seek to expand their empire in the new world, as well as the impact of the slave trade around the world at the time.

The book principally follows a few of history’s most notorious Pirates such as Samuel (“Black Sam”) Bellamy, Edward (“Blackbeard”) Thatch, and Charles Vane.

In that day, the aforementioned governments often hired privateers to plunder and cut off the trade routes of their rivals.   Aboard these ships, as well as the official government military ships, conditions were brutal.  Many young men were ‘pressed’ into serving aboard the ships, where they suffered from a variety of diseases and malnutrition, as well as much abuse from the captain and officers of the ship.

Not suprisingly, many of these forced workers rebelled and turned to piracy.  In fact, on board the pirate ships, conditions were much better for the men and the freed slaves.  Each of the men were able to vote on decisions, and the plunder was almost evenly distributed amongst all the pirates (as opposed to the very heavily weighted dispersal of the privateers and government ships for the king and the captain).

For about 12 years, the prirates were able to find refuge and establish a ‘pirate republic’ in the Bahamas.   Back in England, the legend of the pirates began to grow and receive much support from the general public.  The pirates were seen as men (and in a few cases, women) who stood up against the tyranny of the Monarchy.

I did enjoy the book… though it was probably too much detail and too long of a read for my interest level in Pirates.

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On a recent family road trip to Western Colorado we listened this book on cd as a part of our children’s homeschool curriculum.  While the intended audience of the book is for children, I thoroughly enjoyed the the recap of the history.

In volume 1, the book covers the time of the earliest nomads up until the fall of the Roman Empire.  The author and the audio narrator do an excellent job of making history come alive and seem relevant (which it is!).  The colorful retelling of major events and people kept the attention of my children and myself… as soon as we got in the car each time, one of my kids would say, “Can we please listen to the history book!”

A few minor complaints I have of the book are that it seemed very heavily weighted toward western civilizations… with only cursory details given about what was taking place in such places as Africa, east Asia, and the Americas.   I’m told that in the subsequent volumes of The Story of the World, the author goes into more detail in these areas of the world.

In conclusion, if you have children, I would recommend going through this book with them to give them an a good overview of history.  If you’re interested in a more ‘grown-up’ retelling of history, Susan Wise Bauer also authors a book entitled The History of The World.

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