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Five Cities that Ruled the World: How Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and New York Shaped Global History © 2009 Thomas Nelson xx+236 pages This book is a rare find: a history that’s interesting to read. Wilson stands in the company of Thomas Cahill in his ability to make centuries of history read like a gripping [...]

Canoeing with the Cree ©1935 Minnesota Historical Society Press (1968) 206 pages Imagine letting your 17 and 19 year old son and friend, with no experience, paddle a canoe 2,250 miles through two countries to Hudson Bay. That’s exactly what Sevareid chronicles. The writing is simple and direct. Dialogue is interspersed with narration in just [...]

I’ve quoted from Stories With Intent here in Weekend Wisdom before, but I can’t help but go to him again this week. He has a gift for getting to the root of a parable and summing up its meaning in pithy lines. Here’s his summary on the Mother of all Parables, the Sower and the [...]

Running the Amazon © 1989 Random House: Vintage Books 279 pages This is more than a paddling story—it’s travel/adventure writing at its finest. The book chronicles the first team to paddle the entire length of the Amazon River, from its sickness-inducing heights in the mountains of Peru to the Atlantic Ocean. There are a number [...]

Reading Love Alone Is Credible is an act of meditation. Every line contains something profound that needs to be digested slowly. Here’s on such example: In the experiences of extraordinary beauty—whether in nature or in art—we are able to grasp a phenomenon in its distinctiveness that otherwise remains veiled. What we encounter in such an [...]

Cool news: I’m participating in a theo-blog tour of Philip Clayton and Harvey Cox’s new books on the future of the Christian Faith. I’ll be blogging through Clayton’s book in the near future. Here’s the press release: . . . Philip Clayton and Harvey Cox both have new books out and they are taking them [...]

The Tallest of Smalls © 2009 Thomas Nelson 28 pages I snagged this book for my two-year old son. He’s addicted to books—seriously addicted. The Tallest of Smalls is a brief story about a neglected boy who got to play with the cool kids for a while before falling (literally) back into his own insignificance. [...]

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More ©1977 Bantam (1983) 215 pages They say that you can never go home. The memories of your childhood always pale in comparison to reality. That’s true in a lot of cases, but not with Roald Dahl. He is as fascinating a story teller as you remember—and [...]

The more I study scripture, the more I realize what an idol the printed word has become in evangelical Christianity. Wright has some good things to say about this in The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture: The phrase “authority of scripture” can make Christian sense [...]

The parable of the Sower truly is the mother of all parables. It occurs in all three gospels (plus Thomas), and is interpreted in all three gospels. Jesus even gave this parable a title. In once sense, the parable of the Sower is a parable about parables. It is a story about how to hear [...]