• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us © 2013
• Signal: McClelland & Stewart
• xxx+446 pages

The entire processed food industry—that behemoth which generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual sales—can be summed up by the way they manipulate and market three simple ingredients: salt, sugar, and fat.

Michael Moss has done a painstaking amount of research, interviewing current and former food industry insiders and visiting (and even tasting the products of) food research labs. The result is this book: a narrative which shows how the simple human need to eat has generated a war between corporations trying to win the taste buds of consumers.

This book is stuffed full of interesting stories and facts:

• Philip Morris, the tobacco company, has acquired General Foods and Kraft (among others) and uses its marketing savvy to deflect obesity concerns the same way they deflected cancer concerns for years.
• Salt isn’t just used for taste. It covers the metallic and rotten taste of processed food.
• Through extensive research, food scientists determine the precise amount of sweetness (the “bliss point” ) to generate the greatest desire in consumers.
• While humans lose their desire to eat more sugary foods after a certain point, that reluctance is undermined when sugar is mixed with fat.
• Sugar and fat are interchangeable ingredients. A product can be marketed as “low fat” or “low sugar” by lowering the offending ingredient and replacing it with the other.

Moss has won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting—a skill highlighted in this book. His writing is compelling, shocking at times, but fair. He never sounds preachy or unreasonably biased.

If you’re concerned with what you put into your body, this is a book worth reading.

• Here and Now: Living in the Spirit © 1994
• Crossroad
• 144 pages

Do yourself a favour and order this book—then come back to finish reading my review. This book is that good.

Here and Now is a collection of Henri Nouwen’s reflections on life. Each reflection is about two pages long and they’re grouped together under larger categories like “Joy,” “Prayer,” and “Suffering”.

Any book of reflections is only as insightful as the life of the author. This is why Here and Now is so profound. Nouwen, a priest, became a professor who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. He devoted much of his life to the poor and lived the remainder of his life serving people with mental handicaps in L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

With Nouwen, there’s no pretense. What you read is the fruit of honest reflection on life. He lived what he wrote in “Who We Are” (136):

We, therefore, need discipline to keep living truthfully and not succumb to the endless seductions of our society.

Nouwen lived a disciplined truthful life apart from the seductions of society—and it shows. Here and Now will help you to see your own life-with-God in a new light.

• A Work of Heart: Understanding How God Shapes Spiritual Leader (Updated Edition)  © 2000, 2011
• Jossey-Bass
• xxv+203 pages

Once again I’m forced to write a review of a Christian leadership book and once again, I’m of two minds.

If the idea of delving into scripture to mine leadership qualities doesn’t bother you, then this book is one of the best that I’ve read.

McNeal begins by examining the lives of Moses, David, Paul, and Jesus to see how leadership qualities are evident in their lives. McNeal rightly emphasizes the importance heart-formation through remaining close to God and allowing him to change you.

In the second half of the book, McNeal examines six areas where the leader’s qualities are worked out:

1. Culture
2. Call
3. Community
4. Communion
5. Conflict
6. Commonplace

I was privileged to read this book through with a Bible College student in a mentoring relationship. There was always plenty of material and insights to discuss.

Here are a few of my problems with leadership books in general. The Bible doesn’t speak about leadership—shepherding and servanthood are the key metaphors.

Furthermore, the idea that there is a separate class of people who operate on a special “leadership” level seems foreign to the thrust of the New Testament. Jesus’ disciples didn’t look like people with high-level leadership qualities. They became effective once they were empowered by the Spirit.

We should examine what we mean by “leadership qualities,” too. Don’t we mean the sort of personal characteristics that make people successful in the business world today? What right do we have to dive anachronistically through scripture in an attempt to uncover these 21st century values?

On a hermentutical level, why do we assume that the personal qualities of people like Moses and David are qualities we should emulate? Scripture is the story of how God used these people—not how they were skilled enough to be used.

There you have it. If you enjoy the “christian leadership” genre, this is one of the best on the topic. If you share my reservations, leave this book on the shelf.

• Phoenix In Obsidian © 1970
• Grafton: Collins
• 127 pages

Second volumes rarely live up to the first. Setting aside some obvious exceptions (like The Empire Strikes Back), you expect sophomore efforts to lack the originality of the first. In the first volume you build the world, in the second volume you work within it.

Fortunately, Phoenix in Obsidian bucks this trend. This second book in Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series feels like a new start. While the characters still feel unidimensional, the world they inhabit is fleshed out in intriguing detail. Where the first volume focused on hack-and-slash style action, the second book is more of a metaphysical mystery.

After finishing this volume, I quickly found a second-hand copy of the third book in the series and ordered it online. Now I need to see how John Decker’s story arc ends!

• The Letter of James (Pillar New Testament Commentary) © 2000
• Eerdmans
• xvi+271 pages

Biblical scholars make a name for themselves by writing a commentary on Romans. The ability to survey the vast amount of secondary literature, follow the arguments in the text, and chart your own course are daunting. When I took a class on Romans in Seminary, I was assigned two commentaries: James D. G. Dunn (Word Biblical Commentary) and Douglas J. Moo (New International Commentary on the New Testament). While I lean more towards Dunn’s interpretation or Romans, I was struck by the depth and readability of Moo’s work.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Romans scholar also wrote a commentary on James! Those two books seem to go together like oil and water! Moo highlights the difficulty (140):

Jas. 2:24: A person is justified by works and not by faith alone
Rom. 3:28: A person is justified by faith and not by works of the law

I had to know how a Pauline scholar came to grips with the message of James.

James is famous for being a disjointed tract. While Moo acknowledges its frequent shift in foci, he does an excellent job at drawing the isolated pericopae together across the chapters and explaining how they aid in the interpretation of each other. A good example of this is how he relates the patience that James requires of his audience despite their trials (James 5:7) with the introductory comments on joy in trials (James 1:2-4).

As for the central conundrum between Paul and James—justification by works or by faith—Moo makes three points:

1. Paul’s “works of the law” is different from James’ “works”. James is speaking of any good deed, while Paul has something specific in mind. (If Moo were a New Perspective on Paul theologian, this point would be easier to make!)
2. Paul speaks of “faith” where James speaks of “faith alone”. James is criticizing the sort of “faith alone” (without works) that Paul would equally criticize.
3. Paul uses “justify” to refer to “the initial declaration of a sinner’s innocence before God” (141), where James has God’s eschatological verdict in mind.

Moo does a fine job at acknowledging the difficulty while charting a reasonable way forward.

The Letter of James is a readable commentary for the thoughtful layperson with more than enough depth to keep the pastor engaged. I’m richer for having read it.

• The Eternal Champion © 1970
• Mayflower: Granada
• 159 pages

It was only a matter of time before I started exploring Michael Moorcock’s works. Just listen to the list of people he is compared to: Tennyson, Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe, William Burroughs, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw to name a few!

The problem with Moorcock is figuring out where to start. He’s a fantasy author of well over fifty books that all tie together in a sprawling multiverse. I finally made my decision when I found the first two volumes of the Eternal Champion series at Value Village.

The Eternal Champion is a character that goes by many names and is summoned across the multiverse to lead people to war. I had two basic reactions to the book:

I was intrigued by the multiverse setting. Another one of my favourite fantasy cycles—Stephen King’s The Dark Tower—was based on the same idea. Moorcock’s lead character, Erekose for the majority of this book, is a creature of fate, pulled into different times and parallel universes. Unlike the characters in some of Moorcock’s other books, The Eternal Champion is able to recall many of his former incarnations which becomes a curse. There are some big philosophical questions raised by this plot: free will verses fate and the question of morality to name a couple.

Moorcock’s depiction of war, on the other hand, angered me. He glorified the idea of honourable warfare—that somehow being honest with your enemy makes slaughtering them okay. This is obviously my Christian worldview speaking!

In the end, I’m not sure whether I enjoyed the book or not. Since I bought volume two at the same time, I’ll keep reading and make a decision after the next one.

• A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society © 1980, 2000
• IVP Books
• 212 pages

Seventeen publishers rejected this manuscript.

Peterson recalls being informed that “there was no ‘niche’ in the market, … that it was irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary North Americans” (202). Who wants to purchase a book on Spiritual Growth with the words “long” and “obedience” in the title, anyway?

Fortunately, InterVarsity Press took a risk and published a book that spoke honestly about Spiritual Growth. Life with God is not a sprint—it’s a decade-long path of obedience. Whether or not the message is popular is irrelevant: it’s true.

This book is a meditation on the 15 Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134). Even at the beginning of his career, Peterson had a knack for taking ancient scripture with all its obscurity (Kedar? Meshech?) and making it deeply understandable and personal. As a pastor, I’m amazed at his skill. The modern applications he explores are so obvious in hindsight—but it takes someone like Peterson to point them out in the first place.

I don’t recommend many devotional works. I’m probably too cynical, but I find that most of Christendom’s best-sellers are little more than pop-psychology with a Christian veneer. This is not the case with Peterson. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction runs counter to the spirit of our age even as it aligns with God’s paths.

I suspect this is one of those books that will be reprinted in perpetuity for the life of the church.

• The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science & Religion © 2005
• HarperSanFrancisco
• 358 pages

In 1887 Adam Lord Gifford, native of Scotland, died. His will would make him famous. He willed almost half of his person fortune—80,000 pounds—to set up a perpetual lecture series at Scotland’s four historic universities: Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews. The purpose of the lecture series is to explore natural theology: the idea that God can be known outside of special revelation.

I was introduced to the Gifford Lectures when I read Stanley Hauerwas’ With the Grain of the Universe. In his lectures, he follows Karl Barth’s lead in undermining the very presuppositions of the lecture series. For Barth and Hauerwas, there is no revelation not centred on Jesus Christ. Whether you believe that or not, that has not stopped people from trying. In The Measure of God, Larry Witham highlights all the brightest lights of the lecture series from William James to Alfred North Whitehead, Reinhold Niebuhr to Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich to Carl Sagan.

Witham breaks the lecture series down in to “four acts”—four approaches to determining a natural theology:

1. Psychology
2. Material Science (anthropology, psychology, physics, sociology, and historical criticism)
3. Subjectivism
4. Pluralism

Witham’s book is very readable. I bought the book because I was interested in the topic and I knew that the knowledge would be good for me. I was surprised by the ease at which it went down. I was fascinated by the way in which discoveries in physics and quantum mechanics influenced natural theology. (Did you know that Niels Bohr, a colleague of Einstein, gave the Gifford Lectures?) I enjoyed reading about the relationships between different theologians and scholars who were previously all intellectual islands in my mind.

The Measure of God covers a lot of theological, scientific, philosophical, and historical ground in about 300 readable pages!

• The Complete Father Brown Stories © 1910, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 35, 39, 51
• Dodd, Mead & Company © 1982
• xvii+993 pages

Father Brown, if you haven’t heard of him, is a portly priest who always finds himself in the middle of a mystery—usually a murder.

As Chesterton’s alterego, he solves crimes by understanding the fundamental makeup of the human personality. Never distracted by mystical hocus pocus, Father Brown unassumingly uncovers the details and motives deemed insignificant by others.

The Complete Father Brown contains all 51 Father Brown stories written, including five different collections (The Innocence, Wisdom, Incredulity, Secret, and Scandal of Father Brown) as well as a bonus story, “The Vampire of the Village”.

Reading these stories is like sinking into a comfortable chair. If you try to sneak in a quick story while on break at work, you’ll miss the charm of Chesterton’s style. Instead, you need to take time to deliberately take in each word in his florid sentences. If you don’t rush, his style is quite compelling. Take the first sentence in “The Absence of Mr. Glass” for example.

The consulting-rooms of Dr. Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the seafront at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted French windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble. (in The Wisdom of Father Brown)

For the Christian reader, there are occasional flashes of anthropological brilliance. I stopped to reread a particularly acute observation on more than a few occasions. Take this jewel in “The Sign of the Broken Sword” for example. Here Father Brown explains to his partner Flambeaux why Sir Arthur St. Clare’s Bible reading habit doesn’t make him innocent.

Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. (in The Innocence of Father Brown)

I wish I knew a Christian sleuth today with the depth of Father Brown.

• The Complete Up North: A Guide to Ontario’s Wilderness from Black Flies to the Northern Lights © 2010
• McClelland & Stewart
• 611 pages

The Complete Up North is the ultimate book to have in your bathroom (or, if at camp, outhouse). It’s a collection of over one hundred short essays about life in Ontario’s wilderness.

The diversity of articles in this book is amazing. You learn about mammals, fish, bugs, trees, the sky and even the earth in general.

Are you curious about the variations in the loon’s call?  Have you ever wondered how far a bullfrog can jump (8-10′ on average). Have you ever considered why the Trillium is Ontario’s floral emblem? This book answers questions you never realized you had about life in Ontario.

If the essay proper isn’t enough information for you, the sidebars are full of facts and stats. As icing on the cake, each essay starts with a fine drawing of the subject.

This is the perfect gift for any armchair naturalist!