Indignation by Philip Roth is set in the early 50’s with the Korean War waging across the sea and the threat of the draft looming over young men like Marcus Messner, the son of the kosher-buthcher in Newark, New Jersey, who attends the city college across town and plays on the baseball team and works [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘review’
September 17, 2008
Elsewhere, Perhaps by Amoz Oz
Amoz Oz wrote Elsewhere, Perhaps when he was 27. It was his second novel. Set in the fictional town of Metsudat Ram, an Israeli Kibbutz, in a valley near a disputed border. If the desert heat doesn’t threaten their way of life than the enemies in the mountains do. The people of the kibbutz believe [...]
September 6, 2008
Home by Marilynne Robinson
Home by Marilynne Robinson is the same setting from her Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead, but told from a different perspective. This time from John Ames’ good friend the Reverend Boughton’s daughter Glory. A woman who has returned to Gilead, Iowa to take care of her ailing father. Her delinquent older brother Jack soon returns home for the [...]
June 10, 2008
Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris
The disciples, (as Rob Bell points out in this NOOMA video) at least some of them, were young, maybe 15, 16 years old. And yet God used teenagers to change the world.
The Harris brothers are rebelling against low expectations set for teens and encourage others as well. The book breaks down the myth of teenagers and [...]
June 6, 2008
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse — Part 3
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen
Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here
Part 3: Post-Abuse Recovery
Chapter 17: How to Escape a Spiritual Trap
• It’s easy to get into a spiritually abusive system, but it’s very hard to get out. The further we move away from normal the more trapped [...]
June 5, 2008
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse — Part 2
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse by David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderan
Read summary of Part 1 here
Part 2: Abusive Leaders and Why They Are Trapped
CHAPTER 9 – “Because I’m the Pastor That’s Why”
• “Leadership that demands authority because it’s in an authorial position rests upon a false basis of authority.”
• “Anyone who suggests that [...]
May 29, 2008
The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet by Rubem Alves
The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet by Rubem Alves is the most important book on the subject of Theopoetics. Unlike Amos Wilder’s Theopoetics: Theology and the Religious Imagination–which, although claims to be writing against the discursive, prosaic, and rationalistic, is written in a form that is discursive, prosaic, rationalistic–Alves’ language and metaphors are pure poetry. While Wilder marches, Alves dances.
This [...]
May 25, 2008
Holly and Human Trafficking
The movie Holly opened to limited release in April and was featured in Portland last night at the Hollywood Theatre. Holly is about a young Vietnamese girl named Holly who was sold by her family to become a prostitute in Cambodia. A wandering American, Patrick (Ron Livingston from Office Space), accidentally comes upon her and a [...]
May 21, 2008
Fallen by Matthew Raley
Fallen by Matthew Raley
Jim, the church chairman, sees his pastor, Dave, get out of a car with a woman who is not his wife. As Jim wades into the water with his confrontation of Dave’s actions he soon finds himself in the deep end of a scandal that changes from bad to worse.
Raley’s debut novel [...]
