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Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis © 1988 Macmillan x + 225 pages There’s always something compelling about an insider’s perspective. In Lenten Lands, we have the ultimate insider’s perspective on the home life of C. S. Lewis from Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ step-son. I bought the book to learn more about [...]

I am beginning to realise that every point in one’s life at which one loses everything is far more a beginning than an end, for one has lost merely the past, and one has yet to gain the future, and eternity itself. —Douglas H. Gresham, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. [...]

Four years ago we had a great plan. My friend Brian Lachine, my brother-in-law Nathan and I decided to paddle the entire length of the Missinaibi River from Lake Missinaibi to the Moose River into Moosonee. We were well on our way until, 50 km up river of Highway 11, Brian slipped on a portage [...]

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels © 1998 Nan A. Talese: Doubleday 291 pages For the first 50 pages I was intrigued. The next 190 pages retold a story I know very well. The last 8 pages made me want to throw the [...]

Preaching is an art in which a studied, professional sinner tells the less studied sinners how they ought to believe, behave, and serve. —Calvin Miller, Preaching: The Art of Narrative Exposition, 9.

Notes from Underground © 1864 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, trans. © 1993 Borzoi: Alfred A. Knopf 126 pages I’ve met the underground man before. After years of pastoring, I’ve seen traces of him in all sorts of people—even myself. I’ve witnessed the painfully thorough introspection that causes otherwise rational people’s thoughts to cycle through [...]

Cellular telephones … seem relatively harmless. With them, though, we separate each human from every other, and from their common humanity, by allowing them to ‘keep in touch’ (how does on not laugh?), maintaining their endless chatter at a conversational level of minimal sentience and maximum banality, feeding their narcissism while allowing them to be [...]

What Is Contemplation? © 1950 Templegate Publishers © 1981 79 pages Simple depth. That’s what I expect when I pick up Merton, and that’s precisely what I found in this little book. I should share the circumstances of my reading because they added to the experience. After feeling overwhelmed by my workload, I took off [...]

God condescends to where people are, speaks their language, and employs their ways of thinking. —Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins, 58.

Downward to the Earth © 1969 Signet 176 pages Fantasy and Science Fiction are often kept in two separate sections of the bookstore. Silverberg marries the two masterfully in Downward to the Earth. This book is essentially the sequel to Avatar. No, it’s not set in the same world, but the themes remain. In fact, [...]