The Triumph of the Lamb

I notice that Stephen Altrogge at The Blazing Center has been reading Dennis Johnson's book on The Revelation, The Triumph of the Lamb. I mention this only because Triumph is one of the best Biblical commentaries I've ever read. If you want to study The Revelation, you should read Triumph of the Lamb. That's all.

Push-Back

I've been reading John Piper's God is the Gospel (which I highly recommend, especially since it's a free download!), where Piper argues that the Gospel is ultimately a vision of the beauty and desirability of God above all other desirable things. His starting point for this:

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:4-6 ESV)

It is possible to present the Gospel in such a way that it simply compliments are selfish desires or assuages our fears, but the joy that such a gospel might bring is temporary at best. Although I suppose they may make strange bedfellows, Michael Frost seems to agree with Piper here. Frost argues:

When the contemporary evangelical church tries to present what it believes is the core message of the Bible, it nearly always does so in individualized terms, and it nearly always does so by presenting the message of Jesus as being about personalized benefit either in this world or the next.

That quote is from Frost's book, The Road to Missional. Both Piper and Frost are pushing back against the individualized understanding at the center of which is a self-interested decision to let Jesus come into our hearts. McKnight seems to be pushing back is his own way in his new book The King Jesus Gospel. The book's product description says it in a nutshell:

Contemporary evangelicals have built a 'salvation culture' but not a 'gospel culture.' Evangelicals have reduced the gospel to the message of personal salvation. This book makes a plea for us to recover the old gospel as that which is still new and still fresh. The book stands on four arguments: that the gospel is defined by the apostles in 1 Corinthians 15 as the completion of the Story of Israel in the saving Story of Jesus; that the gospel is found in the Four Gospels; that the gospel was preached by Jesus; and that the sermons in the Book of Acts are the best example of gospeling in the New Testament. In the Beginning was the Gospel ends with practical suggestions about evangelism and about building a gospel culture.

These two books are definitely on my to-read list.

A couple of really good books I've been reading . . .

George Washington's Great Gamble

I'm really enjoying this. Nelson is really good at describing warfare, both on land and at sea, without getting bogged down in tactics. This is very good popular history, full of intriguing characters like Lafayette, Arnold, Cornwallis, and Washington of course. I'm planning to gradually read forward from this book in small chronological increments, reading through American history. Oh, and btw, you can check out the author's blog here.

56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

Maybe the best book on sports I've read in a long time. I really enjoy books about the place of sports in American history, and this is a really fine one. Kostya Kennedy embeds Dimmagio's achievement in the context of its historical moment. that is to say, 1941, America on the verge of war. A really fine book that brings to mind the sights, sounds, and spirit of a time and place. The author's official website is here.

Book Rec'

My time for reading has dropped off quite a bit this summer. I'm just busy doing other things, that's all. Like practicing my accordion! But I'm gradually working my way through Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What, which was published way back in 2004. I'm just here to say, it's really good. I've got a feeling there must be people out there who will say it doesn't have enough Scripture references, or it doesn't espouse their pet doctrines firmly enough, but I think it's an amazing real-world picture of the call of Jesus. It's my first Donald Miller book. I hope to have more to say about it soon (when I finally finish it), but suffice to say for now that I highly recommend it. Miller and Spencer are definitely on the same page.

My big bro's new book!

How Green Was My Valley

Yup, so I was wandering around the library this morning, just sort of looking for the old raggedy spines tucked in among the shiny "thrillers" and who-done-its. I happen to be in the L section, and there it was, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley.

I had mentioned it yesterday as one of my favorite old books, and thought I might go back to it, so thirsty was I for something truly stirring and wonderful. Yes, it still stirs. The opening pages are beautiful, and the story unwinds in the form of serial recollections of a young man at one of life's crossroads. After every page or so I want to put it down and walk around the house wondering why they don't write books like this anymore.

Interestingly, the film version, made in 1941 and directed by the great John Ford, had its world premier in my home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Two Books

I turned on Blogger's new "mobile template" for you Fandango readers on the go. Heh. I just think that's really funny for some reason. People "on the go" are probably not reading Fandango (at least not until they settle down). But anyway, I turned it on. Just in case.

Finished reading a couple of books in the last two days. First, Frank Viola's Revise Us Again: Living from a Renewed Christian Script. "Revise" is probably not as serious a term as "reform" or "revive," but this book features a series of suggestions for change in contemporary American Christianity. It is essentially a call for the church to take a good look at itself in the mirror.

Some of the chapters are about communication styles or semantics: Christian code language (when "I'll pray about it" actually means, "go away, don't bother me with your problems"), and Christianeze. These chapters were sometimes amusing and always on-target, and I know plenty of Christians that should definitely read them, but Viola really gets going in his chapters on the Gospel, the presence of God, spiritual expectations, and the Holy Spirit. In all these cases, says Viola, some serious revising is necessary. Viola is as usual serious, engaging, and pointedly challenging. From Eternity to Here and Reimagining Church were stronger books, but Viola's work is always worthwhile.

I also just finished Tim Keller's King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. Unfortunately, my reading of this one was broken up over a period of a couple of months, and I fear that I have not really done the book justice. Keller has a way of illustrating his points with striking metaphors, and his writing is beautifully lucidm refreshingly free of Christian jargon and pop-culture references. It is apt I think to call him a 21st century C. S. Lewis in that his work is essentially one of apologetics. In King's Cross he's looking at the world through the lens of the Gospel of Mark. It is divided into two main sections: "The King" and "The Cross." What he has done, I think, is write a book about the theology of atonement that is uniquely jargon-free and aimed at an audience that he presumes to be intelligent and perhaps skeptical. Very refreshing.

Now Reading

"The Mrs." has been reading John Aiken's "Wolves" novels, or at least every one she can get her hands on. She loves 'em, and has just about convinced me that I should read them too. Here's the official website, a nice review from Strange Horizons, and an interview with the late author here (in which she says she offers a low opinion of the Narnia cycle and calls Aslan "that dreadful lion").

Me, I'm reading two novels just now. Neil Gaiman's Stardust (that's my riding the bus and lunch-break book), and also Perez Reverte's The Nautical Chart (my evenings on the couch book). I'm enjoying both quite a lot.

So what are you reading?

Out Stealing Horses

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, is a great book. Simply said, it was very hard to put down. It is not so much a story as an internal monologue, filled with reminiscence, understated regret, secrets, work, and finally the narrator's desire to simply disappear (against which he struggles not at all).

Practically every character in this book does disappear in some sense. They pass through a sort of ephemeral psychic curtain and become, to all intents and purposes, lost to their former world. The book has a slow pace with details about daily work (or even getting out of bed, walking across the floor, looking out a window) which may seem egregiously mundane to some. Yet I think it's pitch-perfect. If you know from personal experience about "disappearance," you may find this book hauntingly accurate.

On Reading

Sometimes I take on too many reading projects at once. Then sometimes, one of these reading projects steals all of my attention, to the neglect of the others.

I've been reading Tim Keller's King's Cross for a while now, but intermittently, while other books grabbed the lion's share of my attention. But I'm aware that I've done the book a disservice and so I'll probably read it again, as soon as I'm finished.

The book that occupied much of my reading time lately has been Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. For a while I thought it was boding well to be one of the finest novels I'd ever read. Robinson is a very fine writer, and there was much to like here (and I'll certainly read more of his work), but this book was ultimately unsatisfying. Fascinating, but unsatisfying.

Back to the Keller book. It's a kind of devotional commentary on Mark. So that in itself is particularly valuable to me because I'm starting to read Mark devotionally these days and to journal about it. The essence of my approach is not to assume too much as I read, but to try to read the document as if for the first time. So, for example, when Mark uses that phrase, "son of God," in his very first sentence, I want neither to pass it by unnoticed nor to assume I know exactly what Mark means by it. Instead, to remind myself, as I read, to look for Mark's own answers to these kinds of questions. In other words, letting the author, if he will, answer my question in his own time.

Well, that's an aside. Back to my reading these days. I've also been reading Paul Miller's A Praying Life. I'm finding it very helpful, but this one too I've been reading "intermittently." Both this and the Keller book I'll finish off soon though.

a=Also, just to note, I'm reading A Praying Life in ebook format, which doesn't feel quite as real somehow.

Now there are three other books I've started lately. Island of Lost Maps, Out Stealing Horses, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust. See, this is what comes of wandering through libraries in your spare time.

Random Saturday

Ah, Saturday!

And a 3-day weekend, to boot!  [Patriot's Day weekend.  It's a Maine and Massachusetts thing.]

Having our eldest, Nate, back in the house for a few days has been nice. We'll be celebrating his birthday (which was yesterday) on Monday, since he's been out "gigging" in the remoter parts of Maine this weekend.  [That way, too, we can decouple his birthday from 3 negatives: tax day, the sinking of the Titanic, and the death of Abraham Lincoln.  Sheesh!]

I'm really taking to this ereader thingie like a fish to water. I downloaded a couple of free Bible translations (ESV, HCSB) from B&N, and an old book called Bible Holiness. So it's pretty obvious, I like free stuff.

I'm sitting in the library right now. A quiet place full of printed books. But most of the people here are plugging away on computers.

It's National Poetry Month, so they've got a special display of poetry books, from which I selected Mary Oliver's Owl and Other Fantasies. Mary Oliver is one of my three favorite poets, for sure.

The downside of etexts on these ereaders: illustrations (maps, for example) are almost useless. Also, at least in the book I'm reading just now, you get a lot of typos. A lot. It gives you the sense that the makers are slipshod, careless, but I suppose it's all to be blamed on the software or something.

Still, the traditionalist's nostalgia for printed text on paper seems overdone to me. I run into this a lot among library people. But isn't it the words themselves, not the technology by which they're reproduced, which transport us? And that's why we love books, mainly. The words, conveying as they do all kinds of excitement, deep thinking, emotion, and the sense of dramatic motion . . . simply getting caught up in a story . . . these things transport us. Right?

Here's the start of a Mary Oliver poem to leave you with. The poem is called, "Herons in Winter in a Frozen Marsh."

All winter

two blue herons

hunkered in the frozen marsh,

like two columns of blue smoke. 

Three-Books Wednesday

The Art of Dying, by Robb Moll

The Cruciform Life, by Jimmy Davis

And Revise Us Again, by Frank Viola

Here's the publisher's "trailer" for the Viola book:

Like I needed another book to read . . .

I picked up Making Haste from Babylon: the Mayflower Pilgrims and their World from the new books shelf at the library and brought it home, knowing I was already reading too many books at once. Too bad.

I read the first chapter and was hooked. First of all, it starts in Maine, of all places. It starts, in fact, with a bald eagle soaring over the Maine landscape. I like that. This is one of those books in which the author simply revels in the data, pulling together a thousand disparate facts to form, it is hoped, not only a collection of facts but a grand tale. Without a firm sense of story, the author would simply be creating an erudite encyclopedia, but he has definite story-telling chops. Likin' it!

Three more for the reading list...

Artillery of Heaven, by Ussama Makdisi [reviewed at Books and Culture]

Why Jesus? by William Willimon (reviewed at Jesus Creed]

The Survival of the Bark Canoe, by John McPhee [reviewed at Looking for Church]

Books, Books, Books

Yesterday was a good day for my reading prospects.

First off, Tim Keller's new book, King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus arrived in the mail. I can't tell you how glad I am to get this one. Delighted, in fact.

Second, coming to me not in the mail but through Interlibrary Loan, two books by Stanley Hauerwas. I forget now what got me interested in him this past week. Something I'd read on a blog somewhere, no doubt. Anyway, the two books that came to me yesterday are going to be stimulating indeed. One is called Resident Aliens (written with William Willimon). I read the first chapter last night. Here are a couple of choice snips:

"The world was fundamentally changed in Jesus Christ, and we have been trying, but failing, to grasp the implication of that change ever since."

"The bible's concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth."

"In Jesus we meet not a presentation of basic ideas about God,world, and humanity, but an invitation to join up, to become part of a movement, a people."

The other Stanley Hauerwas book that fell into my lap this week, on loan from a local seminary, is his commentary on Matthew . Here's a snip from its first chapter, which should get you thinking a little about the world-shattering nature of the plan of God:

"Matthew's Gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognize that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father's refusal to save us according to the world's understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies."

That may not say it all, but it says an awful lot. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending time with these books long after I've finished reading them.

Wednesday Book Report

I haven't read a great book lately. I mean, a really great book. The last really great novel I read was They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell.

I've put down a few books lately without finishing them. Dancing in the Dark was one. I had high hopes for that one, but it turned out to be rather heavy-handed literary criticism for the most part.

So I turned to a fantasy novel I'd picked up at a library sale a while back (costing me a nickel per book or something like that): Talon of the Silver Hawk, by Raymond Feist. It was pretty awful, juvenile stuff. I might have liked I when I was fourteen, reading all those John Carter of Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Still working on the stash of books I bought from the library book sale, I have now turned to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. This fantasy has what the Feist book did not, a fascinating story, and fine sentence-making. If I like this book in the end as much as I like its beginning, I'll be reading a lot more Robinson.

Finally, I sent for Tim Keller's King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. Even just the title has me intrigued.

What I'm reading . . .

Picked this one up at the local free book emporium: Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.

Books and Movies

So I like the way the blogging has gone in the past month. I think I posted more in January than any month previously, and I liked the tone and the range of subject. I still want to post more frequently on the books I'm reading, and maybe once in a while find something intelligent to say about the movies I've been watching. For instance...

Books:

My latest novel is called Five Black Ships, the story of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe as told by his jester! Didn't know he'd brought a jester along, did you? I don't know if he really did, but the book is pretty exciting. Out of print now, only available in used copies on Amazon.

I've also started reading a couple of biographies, one about Frank Sinatra called Frank: The Voice, and the other about Mickey Mantle, called The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Americas's Childhood. I'm guessing I'll mostly just scan the Sinatra book, but delve into the Mantle biography.

I'm still reading Randy Alcorn's If God is Good, which I am liking a lot, but obviously it's not really catching me up, or I'd be much further along than I am.

Among other things I'm going to try to get to is an old book of short stories by Katherine Anne Porter called The Leaning Tower and a little memoir by the great nautical historian Samuel Eliot Morison, called One Boy's Boston 1887-1901.

Movies:

Been taking in musicals lately. This is spurred on by my desire to learning about the great songwriters. The most recent three are Funny Girl, West Side Story, and A Star is Born. West Side Story is one of the greatest movies ever made, excellent at all levels.

My favorite movie bloggers, by the way, are Macguffin Movies, Another Old Movie Blog, Out of the Past, and Classic Film Boy's Movie Paradise.

"the funny, shocking, surprising, subversive teaching of Jesus"

Will Willimon's new book, Why Jesus?, sounds refreshing indeed. It sounds like a book about Jesus that does not convert him into a theology professor, a life coach, or a therapist! Amazing!

I learned about the book from two posts by Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk (Part 1, Part 2). Mike says:

In my Christian experience, the funny, shocking, surprising, subversive teaching of Jesus has often been quenched by analysis and exposition. We’re not good listeners. It’s hard for us to stay in the moment with Jesus the Storyteller. We want the explanation, the moral, the lesson. We want the punchline to be clear, the message to be practical and edifying. We resist being left hanging. We don’t want Jesus to respond to our questions with even harder questions. We’re impatient. We want the answers so that we can pass the test. Now.

Book Chatter

I like book bloggers. I'm glad they're out there. Each one of them seems to read lots more books than I ever can in a year. Plus, I really like those book bloggers who read old books at least some of the time. In other words, they're not exclusively committed to the contemporary.

Many book bloggers feature reading challenges. That's where you commit to reading a certain number of a certain kind of book, or a series of books on a certain theme, or with a certain common thread (10 coming-of-age books, or 12 time-travel books, or one Zane Grey western per month, or whatever, or every Hugo Award novel). In other words, many book bloggers are sort of obsessive-compulsive about reading. Me too. Maybe a little.

But I'm only a part-time book blogger. A once in a while book blogger. But I read a fair amount and I do like to give myself reading challenges. Like the (currently on-hold) challenge of reading through human history by reading interlocking biographies. Now that's a challenge. I started with Julius Caesar (you have to start somewhere), and made my way through a few generations until I finally got really tired of the Roman Empire. I then amended the challenge to include novels, not just biographies, so that I could spread out a little, wandering further afield. Anyway, it's on hold. I'm somewhere in the second century. Long way to go.

Mostly, lately, the way I find novels is by wandering the aisles of my local library. The trouble there is that my local library seems to be weeding out the old books, stuffing the shelves with contemporary murder mysteries and romance novels (two forms I'm not excited about, sorry). The truth is, in many things I'm just not into contemporary.

The best two novels I read last year were William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows (1937), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). They were amazing. I'm interested in reading others like them. Glimpses into the past, congering up from out of mostly ordinary memories, the extraordinary portrait of a time and place. These kinds of books are like complicated artifacts, beautiful and strange, and strangely familiar.

My reading challenge for 2011 is simply to read outstanding books this year. I want the end-of-the-year list to be evocative of many glorious hours of reading happiness. I've seldom kept such a list in past years, not often, but I'll do so here at the blog, along with a sure-to-grow list of books I just might want to read and don't want to forget about. Because, you know, there's nothing quite like a good book.