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Category Archives: Books in review

Global Warming Facts, Fiction, and Freedom

Global warming might be real, but that doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it.  If fact, if your actions are motivated by guilt or fear, Katharine Hayhoe and Andrew Farley would rather you didn’t act at all.
Hayhoe and Farley are the authors of A Climate For Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions.  [...]

Mad Church Disease: Compassion Meets Accountability

Is your church killing you?  If you are a pastor or other church worker, it might be:
*90 percent of pastors work more than 46 hours a week.
*80 percent believe that pastoral ministry affects their families negatively
*75 percent report they’ve had a significant stress-related crisis at least once in their ministry
*40 percent report a serious conflict [...]

Flickering Pixels: Reuniting Medium and Message

Do you control the ways in which you communicate, or do they control you?  As Shane Hipps, the Porsche advertising executive turned Mennonite pastor, writes, “Christianity is fundamentally a communication event.”  Hipps’ newest book,  Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, explains why a misunderstanding of the relationship between a communicator’s medium and his message [...]

Peace as a Positive Virtue: As We Forgive

“If they told you that a murderer was to be released into your neighborhood, how would you feel? But what if this time, they weren’t just releasing one, but forty thousand?”
-A survivor of the Rwandan genocide
As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, Catherine Claire Larson’s new book, addresses this and other questions raised [...]

The Secret Holocaust Diaries

Nonna Bannister must have seemed like a pretty normal wife and mom when she was busy raising her kids in the 1960’s. She was attractive, had a good sense of humor, was devoted to her husband and children, and was active in her church.
She was also a holocaust survivor, though she chose not to [...]

Victor Hugo Meets Wal Mart: A Review of Chris Fabry’s “June Bug”

It has been said that there are only seven different stories in existence – the books you enjoy are all just variations on these seven different themes.
I don’t know whether this is true, but I do know that it’s not uncommon for an author to copy old stories intentionally. Sometimes this is done well, and [...]