Tag: Book Reviews

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A Review of a Minister’s Call for Christians to Think

Piper, John. Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God, 2010.

A pastor of over 30 years with a fervor for solid, Biblical exposition, John Piper adds to the pile of evangelical books calling for the renewal of the evangelical mind. Piper’s ministerial thesis has been something he calls Christian hedonism, which claims that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. In this book, Piper explains the role thinking provides in glorifying God and allowing us to be truly satisfied in Him. The book will work best if you approach the chapters as devotional sermons. This is not a work of scholarship so much as an exemplary book of Bible study. If you want to know the answer to the question, “What does the Bible say about the life of the mind?” you’ll get answers. If you’re on board with Piper’s general theology and specific thesis about God’s glory and our satisfaction, you’ll find his discussion even more illuminating. I recommend the book as a great starting place to consider with prayer and humility how the Bible directs us to love God with “all our minds.”

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A Review of a Classic Russian Novel

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment, 1864.

A deeply philosophical and religious novelist dedicated to understanding human nature, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote this massive tale of sin and its consequences in 1864. Dostoevsky sets the story of poor student who commits murder in the crowded, dissolute streets of St. Petersburg but folds into the novel the social, political and economic issues of 19th Century western culture. Even 150 years after its publication date, this is still a gripping read. The book is the starting point for an imaginative account of what happens when humanity tries to conceive of ethics apart from God. Or, you can combine it with philosophy of Charles Taylor for insight into the disenchantment that accompanies the secular age. Conversely, you can read it as a story of redemption and resurrection, a backstory for a criminal like the thief on the cross who asked Christ to remember him. I recommend the novel as a seminal volume for understanding the internal and external consequences of sin.

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Why Team Success Is Hard To Sustain

Halberstam, David. The Breaks of the Game, 1981.

A Harvard-trained journalist who made his bones chronicling the Vietnam War, David Halberstam was the first high-profile journalist to spill ample amounts of ink on the NBA. His classic The Breaks of the Game is the result of a year, the 1979-1980 season, spent with the Portland Trail Blazers who had only a few years earlier been league champions. Through the story of one team, Halberstam was able to offer a view of the entire professional sport at what, nearly 30 years later, was a crucial moment in that sport’s history. Halberstam’s book profiles too many players, coaches, and executives to have one real protagonist. In fact, the man on the cover of the current edition of the book, Bill Walton, isn’t even a Blazer during the season Halberstam covered. Yet Walton’s legacy, especially his contribution to the Blazers’s championship in 1976-1977 championship, hangs over the entire book like a thick fog. In addition to Walton, Halberstam spends considerable time covering, among others, the Blazer players Kermit Washington, Maurice Lucas, Larry Steele, and Billy Ray Bates; coaches Jack Ramsey and Lenny Wilkins; as well as Blazers GM Stu Inman and owner Larry Weinberg. In Halberstam’s hands, the season encapsulates the conflict of sports and business, the tensions of individual and team success, and the turn-on-a-dime nature of professional heartbreak or jubilation. This is the best sports book I’ve ever read.

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How Do You Think Well?

Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 2017.

Alan Jacobs, an English professor in the Baylor University Honors Program, provides hope for those who wish to think more soundly in these contentious times through this short, lively manual on the way we make decisions. Jacobs engages with the experts on the topic (chiefly Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt), pulls specific examples out of the recent past to illustrate his points, and even provides a compelling checklist for thinking well. As Jacobs contends, part of good thinking is merely diagnostic: knowing that you have a thinking conundrum. If you can internalize a few more of Jacobs’s recommended best practices, you’ll be glad you read the book.  

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The Novel Is A Circus

A novelist is a circus impresario, someone who puts on a grand performance for the reader. The chapters are tents, the characters the circus performers and the narrator a kind of ringmaster. How can you measure one circus against another? For that matter, how can you measure one circus performer against another? What matters is that the audience keeps wanting more, keeps wanting to come back because they sense, albeit dimly, that what they’re witnessing is truly fantastic, something spiritual not just material.

Erin Morgenstern pursues this metaphor throughout her novel The Night Circus. Why night? Probably because the circus is a waking dream, and fiction, Morgenstern’s analogue for the circus, is the mirror image of the daytime and “real life.” In 1870s Victorian England, two magicians challenge one another to a contest via their students. They’ve done this before. The man in gray, Alexander, seems to have won the past few. But now his opponent, who goes by the name Prospero, has his daughter as a student. Alexander claims Marcos from an orphanage as his pupil. Prospero and Alexander set to work training their respective students, and the novel recounts the outcome of their battle.

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