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Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions © 2010 Zondervan 232 pages What happened to the millions of Holocaust victims immediately after their death? Did God consign them to eternal torture for not believing in his Son? If that question doesn’t bother you, then don’t [...]

Under Heaven © 2010 Viking Canada (Penguin) 573 pages Reading Under Heaven is like taking a visit to 8th Century China. Kay’s scholarship on the period is so thorough it seemed like I could almost smell the air and hear the din of the Tang Dynasty. This book took my estimation of Kay’s historical prowess [...]

The Grand Design ©2010 Bantam Books 198 pages Physics is one of those fields where you can’t rely on information you learned a decade ago. In The Grand Design, Hawking & Mlodinow lay out the current state of physics with an eye towards the holy grail: the Theory of Everything. Unless physics is your field, [...]

I read Cronin’s latest novel to satisfy my curiosity over the buzz its publication generated. Surprisingly, there were moments of beautiful prose. In this section, Mausami reflected on her pregnancy (in The Passage): A baby wasn’t an idea, as love was an idea. A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind [...]

So Great a Cloud of Witnesses: Profiles of 25 Christian “Greats” © 1993 Light and Life Press Canada 88 pages This slim volume (which I can’t find an Amazon link for) collects 25 small biographic sketches Shepherd wrote for Fellowship Magazine. Here are some of the people you’ll encounter: Francis of Assisi John Bunyan Charles [...]

While I find his spirituality wishy-washy and naive, Coelho still comes up with the some penetrative insights (in The Zahir): Two more divorces. Free again, but it’s just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose—and commit myself to—what is best for me.

The Soul of C. S. Lewis: A Meditative Journey through Twenty-Six of His Best-Loved Writings © 2010 Tyndale House Publishers 323 pages C. S. Lewis’ writing prowess is legendary—especially in Christian circles. His economy of language and knack for choosing the perfect metaphor to make any point made him one of my favourite authors from [...]

This chapter’s a biggie. It’s almost double the size of any preceding chapter and, given its subject (justification by faith), it’s easy to understand why. This is pretty much the central doctrine of every Protestant congregation. Let’s hear Dunn’s take on this metaphor. . . .

The Complete Peanuts 1963 to 1964 © 2007 Fantagraphics 325 pages There no question in my mind that The Peanuts is the most lasting comic strip of the 20th century. Sure, The Far Side was good for a laugh. Calvin and Hobbes was trendy for a time. The Peanuts have staying power. While reading through [...]

Here’s the last of six posts from Peterson’s Practice Resurrection on the nature of clichés: A cliché is a word or phrase that can be literally both accurate and true, but the personal, relational meaning has leaked out.