What I’ve Learned From…My Reading This Week

Here are five insights from the various books I’ve been dipping into this week…

  1. John Calvin saw God’s three most important qualities as: lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness. From Institutes of the Christian Religion
  2. Ministers frequently fall back on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a way to determine how to serve their communities. From the article “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Is Not a Ministry Guide”
  3. Metanoia is a critical term not just for theological thought (i.e. it’s the word most often translated as “repentance”) but also for rhetoric. From The Rhetoric of Personal Transformation
  4. There’s a key distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. Ambiguity applies to a word that has more than one meaning. Vagueness refers to words where the meaning is unclear. From With Good Reason
  5. Beauty and grace are complimentary: a handshake between the aesthetic and divine. Beauty is meaningful complexity, and grace is the gift that makes our seeing that complexity possible. From What Are We Doing Here?