In my personal library I have two entire sections devoted to Churchill’s own works and books about him. The most massive biography of Churchill is the multi-volume official biography written by Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert. In recent years, significant single-volume biographies have been written by both Martin Gilbert and Roy Jenkins. Shorter works have been written by historians such as John Keegan. Those who love Churchill cherish the two volumes written by William Manchester, and lament that the third volume will never be written. Biographical studies on Churchill have been offered by figures ranging from Lord Moran, his personal physician, to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Yet, until now, no shorter biography has done Sir Winston justice. Until now, that is, for the publication of Churchill by Paul Johnson fills that lamentable gap in the literature.

Johnson is a well-known British historian and a man of ideas. His books have their own honored place in my library, ranging from Modern Times and Intellectuals, to his History of the American People. With Churchill, he succeeds where others have failed. He captures Winston Churchill in under 200 pages of elegant and clear prose. The reasons for Johnson’s success are these — he knows how to write, he knows the history of the era, and he knows Winston Churchill. Johnson never gets over his admiration for the great man, but he sees him in honest and very human terms.

Johnson is a master of the English language, as was Churchill. Noting Churchill’s famous oratory — one of his major weapons of warfare — Johnson remarks that “he switched it on to its full power just as Hitler switched his off.”

Johnson traces Churchill’s life from his rather tragic childhood to the glory of his funeral service, an occasion of Britain’s most severe mourning. He deals honestly with his shortcomings, character flaws, and setbacks. But he never loses sight of the man’s greatness, nor the importance of his place in history. Paul Johnson’s Churchill is now the first book I would recommend to anyone who would ask why Winston Churchill still matters. Lest anyone miss the lessons of the biography, Johnson offers five important lessons from Churchill’s life in an epilogue. Churchill will please those who know little about Winston Churchill, as well as those who know a great deal.

An excerpt:

In his ninety years, Churchill had spent fifty-five years as a member of Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He had been present at or fought in fifteen battles, and had been awarded fourteen campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He had been a prominent figure in the First World War, and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over five hundred canvases, more than most professional painters. He had reconstructed a stately home and created a splendid garden with its three lakes, which he had caused to be dug himself. He had built a cottage and a garden wall. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, an Elder Brother of Trinity House, a Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a Royal Academician, a university chancellor, a Nobel Prizeman, a Knight of the Garter, a Companion of Honour, and a member of the Order of Merit. Scores of towns made him an honorary citizen, dozens of universities awarded him honorary degrees, and thirteen countries gave him medals. He hunted big game and won a score of races. How many bottles of champagne he consumed is not recorded, but it may be close to twenty thousand. He had a large and much-loved family, and countless friends.

Americans tend to jump from the Revolution to the Civil War with little concern for the period Wood so thoroughly covers in this volume. And yet, America came of age during those years, developing political habits, establishing a national identity, and claiming more new territory than had been claimed during the entire colonial period.

During this period, America left behind its British identity and forged a new American ideal. It was the Age of Jackson and of the notion of the average American as “a new man.” It was also the age of the Second Great Awakening and the transformation of American Christianity. As Wood notes, many of the changes that occurred on the American religious landscape during this period continue to be determinative today.

Empire of Liberty is an important work that is both encyclopedic in scope and incisive in judgment. His treatment of religion during this period, though theologically thin, is genuinely interesting. Evangelical readers should supplement Wood’s volume with Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Religion and Iain Murray’s Revival and Revivalism.

An excerpt from Wood:

This Second Great Awakening was a radical expansion and extension of the earlier eighteenth-century revivals. It was not just a continuation of the first awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It was more evangelical, more ecstatic, more personal, and more optimistic. It did not simply intensify the religious feelings of existing church members. More important, it mobilized unprecedented numbers of people who previously had been unchurched and made them members of religious groups. By popularizing religion as never before and by extending religion into the remotest areas of America, the Second Great Awakening marked the beginning of the republicanizing and nationalizing of American religion. It transformed the entire religious culture of America and laid the foundations for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations unique to Christendom.

I am a dedicated Kindle user, and have been for some time. The e-reader will not replace the printed and bound book (see my article on the Kindle), but it will become the technology of choice for reading many types of printed material and many books as well. My Kindle DX is loaded with good material and is always close at hand.

The Nook is a very handsome e-reader, very similar in appearance and functionality to the smaller Kindle models. It is actually very much like the Kindle in most respects, with the same screen and basically the same technology. It does have a color screen below the main reading screen — a very handsome addition that is both a navigation system and a catalog of your books on the Nook.

Before a long trip during the Christmas season, I loaded my Nook with several titles ranging from spy thrillers to serious theological works and literature. On a long flight, I read The English Assassin by novelist Dan Silva. As with the Kindle, I found that reading this kind of book on the e-reader is actually a delight. I soon forgot that I did not have a codex in my hand.

The Nook has access to the huge inventory of digital books at Barnes & Noble, including many free books that are in the public domain. You will not run out of reading material.

At the same time, I wish Barnes & Noble had more titles available. Another complaint is that the machine is rather slow compared to the Kindle. I did not find this a major frustration, but it is noticed. B&N promises to fix that issue with a software update — rather standard fare for a new technology.

Battery life seems less than my Kindle, but is very workable. With the unit turned to “airplane mode” you can read for days between charges.

I do like the Nook. It is good for Amazon to have competition for the Kindle. Do I think the Nook will displace the Kindle? No. Amazon has been at this longer and the Kindle is a really fine technology. Nevertheless, the Nook is really handsome and may over time reveal advantages not yet fully appreciated.

We are living in a remarkable era of human history, with the experience of reading changing (quite literally) before our eyes. You will know this for a fact when you read a favorite book on your Nook.

There is something special about most books and the experience of reading them. The physical reality of the book, including its cover, paper, typeface, and design are part of its charm. Books are wonderful to behold, to sense, to hold, and ultimately to read. As a technology, books have survived the test of time. They do not need batteries, they hold up well with a minimum of maintenance, and, unlike a computer, they never crash. Books are almost perfect as a combination of design and purpose. Who could ask for more?

I do. The printed book is superior to almost every imaginable technology in any number of respects, but not in all. The digital revolution has reached the world of books, and things are forever changed. I was an early adopter of the Kindle, Amazon.com’s almost iconic electronic reader. My first Kindle was bought soon after the technology became available. I purchased a few books and intended the Kindle to operate as a supplement to my library of printed books. I did not expect to spend much time with it, but I saw the advantage of instantly-available books that could be carried in my briefcase by the hundreds.

Now, I travel with an unreasonable number of books inserted throughout my luggage, but I cannot stash more than a few. The Kindle allows me to carry hundreds, and eventually thousands. Even as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT predicted the shift of all information from atoms to bits, the Kindle allows this transformation for the book. Writing in The New Republic, Anthony T. Grafton predicts that “electronic reading will move from being one of the ways we access and consume texts to the dominant mode.”

I am not sure of that when it comes to books, but it is already true for any number of other published formats, ranging from newspapers to academic journals. I cannot imagine that the Kindle (or any similar technology) will replace the printed book in affection or aspiration, but it has already become a means of transcending the material barrier when it comes to books.

Put bluntly, I seldom leave home without my Kindle. It rides in my briefcase, holding more books than I could ever carry and ready for more.

I started with the original Kindle, then switched to the Kindle 2, and upgraded to the Kindle DX. I eagerly recommend the Kindle DX as the state-of-the-art Kindle. Amazon now also offers a Kindle that can be used to purchase books internationally.

Some thoughts:

1. Do not think of the Kindle as replacing the book. Bury that thought. Bury it deep. Then go and hold a favorite book in your hand. Enjoy. Then pile 50 of your favorite books and carry them with you all day, through airports, onto airplanes, checking into hotels, sitting in meetings, reading in bed at night. You get the point. You sit (gloriously) in a library. You take a Kindle in your briefcase.

2. Yes, you really can read books with this thing. The experience is not identical to reading a printed book, but it is very satisfactory for most books, magazines, and newspapers. The screen technology makes the Kindle look much like a printed book with type on a page. You will gain a feel for reading on the Kindle quite quickly.

3. The ability to purchase and receive books almost instantaneously is nothing short of amazing. I recently needed a couple of books for an article I was urgently writing in a New York City hotel room at 2:00 AM. No worries. I had both books on my Kindle within five minutes.

4. My Kindle holds dozens of theological classics, Bible translations, and seminal works of theology, history, and philosophy. It also holds a great deal of literature, including novels. I find reading fiction particularly profitable on the Kindle. I tend to forget the technology and just get lost in the book. I also have dozens of biographies, books on current events, and books by favorite authors on my Kindle.

5. I purchase and read some books on the Kindle, knowing full well that I probably do not want to maintain them in my permanent library collection. The Kindle is glad to hold them for me. You can often request a sample chapter to see if you want to purchase the book. I generally find myself hooked.

6. I really like the ability of the Kindle DX to receive and display PDF files and the ability of all Kindles to receive my own files as books. I can send a manuscript to my Kindle by email and it is there for the reading whenever I need it. That is extremely helpful.

Will the Kindle and its digital competitors replace the printed book? I think not. Indeed I hope not. I think most of us will reserve a special pride of place for printed books. Think not of replacement, but of supplement. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bazos recently told The New York Times Magazine: “For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.”

That stunning figure tells the story. Digital books are here to stay, and sales will only grow. You are probably reading these very words on a screen. That ought to tell you something.

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I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

I will be trying out the Barnes & Noble e-reader, the “Nook,” in coming days. I’ll let you know what I think.

On June 12, 1987, President Reagan delivered the 1,279th speech of his presidency. He stood at the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall and called for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to take down the wall.

Well into his speech, the President said:

We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

“Tear down this wall.” Those four words, now so memorable, were words with effect. Just over two years later, the wall fell, torn down by a people tasting freedom.

In Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War, author Romesh Ratnesar, deputy managing editor of TIME magazine, tells the story of that speech and its delivery.

That story is nothing short of amazing. Ratnesar’s book takes the reader into a feverish debate at the very top levels of the American government. He tells of diplomats and other figures who sought at great length to prevent the President from speaking those four words. The diplomatic establishment feared that the President’s ultimatum would “embarrass” Gorbachev.

Ratnesar takes the reader into the times, into the White House, and into the mind of President Reagan. The book is a fascinating historical account. Leaders will be especially interested in Tear Down this Wall for its lessons in the strategic importance of words, a message, and the power of the spoken word.

From the book:

Reagan loathed the Wall. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was taken to an eighth-floor office overlooking it and told the story of Peter Fechter, the youth who had been gunned down by East German police in 1962 as he tried to crawl over. The authorities left Fechter unattended for nearly an hour, while he bled to death. “Reagan just gritted his teeth when he heard all of this,” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime aide who was with Reagan that day. “You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look and some of the things he said that . . . he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go.

From a Christian worldview perspective, this is actually quite understandable. Our Creator gifted us with a moral sense and the capacity of conscience. At some very early age, sin becomes an active part of our consciousness. As we grow older, we grow more and more aware of our own capacity for wrongdoing. The spectacular evil represented by notorious criminals becomes a fascination hard to resist. This can be healthy if a closer look at crime and criminality brings greater moral discernment and deeper insight into the reality of human depravity. On the other hand, a preoccupation with criminality can reflect a fascination with evil that must never be granted.

Millions of Americans have gone to see the movie “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis of the FBI. In the course of the movie, viewers are reminded of the gangster era of the 1930s and notorious characters including Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and a host of others. But, whereas the movie reduces the story of this era to only a handful of its most famous personalities, the book upon which the movie is based offers far more.

The movie is based on Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough. I put the book in my stack for summer reading and, once I had begun reading the book I could hardly put it down.

Burrough drew his research directly from the records of the FBI. He takes his reader right to the scene of the crime, so to speak, tracing the rise of these infamous gangsters and placing the era within its own fascinating historical context. By the time the reader finishes the book, Public Enemies has offered a short course in America during the Great Depression, the rise of America’s most famous gangsters, and the emergence of the FBI as a respected law enforcement agency.

“When one looks back across a chasm of 70 years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric,” Burrough writes. An entire generation of Americans knew these gangsters as contemporaries, but the passage of time has obscured their history. As Burrough writes, “After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time.”

The cultural and historical context of the gangster era is truly interesting. Before the rise of these criminals, Americans associated organized crime with immigrants and cities. But the stereotypical gangster of the 1930s was raised on a farm with what most Americans had assumed to be typical American values. They had names like Barker, Floyd, Nelson, and Dillinger. They were home-grown criminals.

Burrough also points to the context of the Great Depression and the fact that so many Americans blamed the banks for their own economic distress. When the gangsters started robbing banks, many Americans saw them as modern versions of Robin Hood. But when the scene turned ugly, with bodies strewn from one crime scene to another, Americans demanded action.

At this point J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI enter the picture. Burrough traces the rise of the FBI during the “war on crime” declared by Hoover. As his careful telling of the story makes clear, the emergence of the FBI as a credible national law enforcement agency was anything but inevitable. The states did not want a national police agency and the structure of American law made the formation and functioning of a national law enforcement agency extremely difficult. When FBI agents first began investigating the gangsters, they were not even allowed to carry guns. As Burrough demonstrates, it was the gangsters who made the FBI what it is today. The FBI owes much of its current stature to these early years when its first agents transformed themselves from incompetent investigators into skilled crimefighters.

Burrough tells the story in such a way that the reader will understand why these infamous gangsters appeared as such glamorous figures to the public. Yet, as the story unfolds the gangsters lose their glamour as the evil and murderous violence of their crime spree shocked Americans into understanding evil in a whole new context.

Bryan Burrough tells the story well and documents his account with care. Readers will be fascinated with the twists and turns of the story and with the sheer audacity of figures on both sides of the “war on crime.” Beyond this, the details reveal just how far this story reaches into our history. I was fascinated to learn that J. Frank Norris, one of the best-known fundamentalist preachers of Baptist history, had once sought to negotiate the surrender of pretty boy Floyd to the FBI. Similar surprises abound within the book.

An excerpt:

The spread of bank robberies was the result of technology outstripping the legal system. Faster, more powerful weapons, especially the 800-bullet-per-minute Thompson submachine gun introduced after World War I, allowed yeggs (gangsters) to outgun all but the best-armed urban policeman. But the greatest impetus was the automobile, especially new models with reliable, powerful V-8 engines. While a county sheriff was still hand-cranking his old Model A, a modern yegg could speed away untouched. A Frenchman may have been the first to use a car to escape a bank robbery, in 1915; one of the first Americans to try it was an aging Oklahoma yegg, Henry Starr, who used a Nash to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas, in 1921. The practice caught on.

Thinking this week about Fathers Day, I was particularly reminded of significant memoirs that relate to fathers and sons. One of the most touching of these was written by J. R. Moehringer. His memoir, The Tender Bar, is one of the most elegant and moving accounts of father loss to be found anywhere in modern literature. J. R.’s father disappeared when he was an infant, but the boy grew up in New York City listening to his father’s voice. His father was a prominent disc jockey whose voice came through the radio. Listening to the radio, the boy was filled with a hunger those represented by “The Voice.” Looking for father figures, he found his way to the local bar, where he began to hang around with the men who frequented there.

J. R. Moehringer came to understand that his father was a man of talents, “but his one true genius was disappearing.” The men at the bar, on the other hand, tended to come around and hang around. They befriended the young boy and became, in the main, the only positive adult male influences in his life. They taught him both honorable and dubious male habits and introduced him into the world of men.  Speaking of one particular summer, he reflected: “Everything the men taught me that summer fell under the loose catchall of confidence. They taught me the importance of confidence. That was all. But that was enough. That, I later realized, was everything.”

I was deeply moved by reading The Tender Bar and the story of this young boy who so desperately wanted his father, even as he listened to “The Voice” on the radio. Moehringer’s experiences with the men in the bar, though formative and hugely important to him, could never replace the authentic role of his father.  How many boys are still listening in hope of hearing ‘The Voice” of their fathers?

Another important memoir on fatherhood, written by a son, is Closing Time by Joe Queenan. A well-known author and contributor to leading newspapers and magazines, Joe Queenan is a professional writer who brings great skill to his memoir. In Closing Time, Queenan offers a grim, humorous, touching, and haunting story of his coming-of-age in Philadelphia during the 1960s. He offers some sweet reminiscences of times with his father, including a break-neck trip in a delivery truck through the streets of Philadelphia. Nevertheless, most of his account is about a man who is deeply tormented by alcoholism. Queenan was abused in both body and soul by a father whose presence was more often than not a threat to his family.

Queenan traces his father’s decline through a series of jobs he could not hold and through neighborhoods of one or another sort of trouble. “My father got broken when he was young, and he never got fixed. He may have wanted to be a good father, a good husband, a good man, but he was not cut out for the job. He liked to drink, but unlike some men who liked to drink, it was the only thing he liked to do. Among our relatives, he had a reputation as a happy-go-lucky fellow who, once he got a few beers in him, would turn into the life of the party. He was not the life of our party.”

Closing Time is a moving book and I learned a great deal about Joe Queenan, Philadelphia, and life as a boy there in the 1960s. Given the chronological overlap of our lives, I could not help reflecting on the fact that my boyhood was so different than his. Reading the book made me all the more thankful for my own father and more greatly concerned for the many children, both boys and girls, who knows such pain at the hands of an abusive and/or alcoholic father.

After reading those two memoirs, one may wonder if many sons are moved to write memoirs about their appreciation and affection for fathers. At this point, it is good to remember that literature favors disaster over peace, conflict over calm, and, in a general sense, pain over pleasure. A father doing a good or adequate job as father does not make for the kind of character and plot that drives so much literature. Furthermore, too many writers in our own day would be frankly embarrassed to write a memoir in which they honor and celebrate their fathers. It simply isn’t done.

That is what makes Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Paul Clemens such a refreshing surprise. Clemens, who grew up in one of Detroit’s transitional neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s, saw the city transformed before his eyes and came to know his father as the great Gibraltar that held his family together. Clemens’s father appears as a normal dad in the context of his working-class neighborhood. Dads were just there and they did what they had to do for their families. They may have been short tempered at times, but they were occasionally capable of much fun with their children and they showed their absolute dedication to family by the fact that they gave themselves to such hard work under such difficult circumstances. More often than not, they were tired to the bone, even as they had to patch a wall or discipline a son.  As Paul Clemens relates, fathers in his neighborhood demonstrated a central task of manhood by doing what, under almost any circumstance, just had to be done.

He writes: “Families were fundamental to the way the area was organized, which is not to say that anyone spent much time getting sentimental over them as a concept. Families were viewed like most other things in this life, which is to say as sometimes dreary and ultimately disappointing, but preferable to a long list of even less desirable alternatives. . . Though they cursed aloud while doing so — and, internally, likely cursed the days they’d wed our mothers and fathered us — the men in our neighborhood, whether in hats and gloves during the dead of winter, or sweating and swearing up a storm in the middle of the summer, somehow manage to fix broken carburetors, replace drafty windows, and keep basement furnace is going a little bit longer, while their wives bought box after box of whatever was on sale and saw to it that their children didn’t waste all their money at McDonald’s. . .”

In his own way, in Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens demonstrates a model of respecting and honoring his father while telling the story, warts and all. His book is unique in being both gritty and sweet. I would suggest that Christian men — and fathers in particular — would do well to read this kind of literature. These secular memoirs, filled with both pain and promise, tell us a great deal about the world around us and, at the same time, remind us of our own calling — even as we hear that voice through words of pain.

Happy Father’s Day.  Let’s be sure our children hear our voices and know our love.

A few comments have raised issues or questions.  Why no fiction?  Well, that is a horribly difficult genre to recommend in the same sense that I can recommend many non-fiction titles.  I will mention a recent novel below, but a recommendation is something else.  I find recommending fiction to be excruciatingly difficult.  I read several dozen novels a year, enjoy many of them, and would gladly recommend a few of them . . . if I knew what kind of fiction you like to read.  I like many forms of fiction and have a collection of favored authors.  I probably learn more by reading fiction than by reading much non-fiction.  Still, the great challenge vexes.

With Fathers Day looming, I read Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis.   Lewis is a well-known author who, like others before him, decided to reflect on fatherhood.  Nothing very profound appears here, but Lewis’s secular bemusement about what he is supposed to feel toward his young offspring is often fun to read.  His language is bracing, but he is onto something when he asserts, “Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learned behavior.”  Sadly, it is a behavior some men never learn.

Home Game is often funny, and the diary Lewis keeps after the birth of each of his three children is never boring.  He affirms the fact that the experience of parenthood makes a man grow up (something many men are reluctant to do).  My favorite line in the book, and one I know will be appreciated by my colleague Russell Moore: “School-age children are the rats of our time.”  His reference is to the fact that rats supposedly carried the Bubonic Plague and the Black Death.  As Lewis continued:  “After a day of happily swapping germs with their peers, my children apparently returned home with what felt to them like a mild cold, and kissed their baby brother — who promptly lost his ability to breathe.”   Don’t worry; he regained it.

In Republican Leader, John David Dyche offers the only significant biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell yet to appear.  Dyche does a good job of capturing McConnell in his essence — a master politician.  The most interesting part of the book for me was his recounting of McConnell’s boyhood and years as a college student.  The author’s account of McConnell’s political rise — and especially his campaigns for the U.S. Senate — is riveting.  Republican Leader will be of particular interest to Republicans (what a brilliant observation) and Kentuckians, but anyone interested in contemporary American politics will find the book both interesting and useful.  I wonder, would a biography of Sen. Harry Reid be as interesting?  I’ll be on the lookout.  In the meantime, I am on the hunt for a really good biography of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Reading Republican Leader also reminded me what a lousy politician I would have made.  While every position of leadership is political in some sense, electoral politics requires what we might call a certain “flexibility” on the issues that I would find impossible.

In City of Thieves, novelist David Benioff has written a masterful work of contemporary fiction.  The plot of the book is absolutely brilliant, his characters are so authentic that they seem to jump off the pages, and the dialogue is spare.  Benioff takes the reader into the heart of despair as the Wehrmacht strangles Leningrad.  A 17-year-old Soviet patriot, Len Beniov, finds himself facing execution when he, along with a slightly older young man, are given a choice:  Find a dozen eggs for the colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake, or be shot in the back of the head.  So . . .  they go after the eggs.  Their determined search for the eggs becomes a journey into human depravity and lingering hope.  No one reading this novel will escape being moved by the account of horrors within and without Leningrad — and within and without the human heart.

City of Thieves is brutal, and is not for the faint of heart.  It glides very close to nihilism, but pulls back.  It is one of the most thought-provoking coming-of-age novels I have read in years.  I thank the eager salesperson at Borders who recommended it to me.  One interesting aspect of the book:  Supposedly, it is loosely based on Benioff’s own grandfather’s experience as a teenager trapped in wartime Leningrad.  After spending time with his grandfather (then living in Florida), Benioff told him that he needed clarification of parts of the story.  “David,” said the grandfather, “You’re a writer.  Make it up.”

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So, what are you reading?  Please recommend what I otherwise might miss.  Disagree with a comment above?  Let me hear that, too.  Read on.

Now, more than a quarter-century after his death, fifty-six previously unpublished sermons on John 4.  The sermons, preached in 1967 and 1968, represent Lloyd-Jones at his best.  Living Water: Studies in John 4 [Crossway] is a gift to us today.  If you have not started your collection of writings by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, start now.  Living Water is a good place to start.

An excerpt:

Now I want to add a few words here as an aside.  I am speaking to people who in name, I have no doubt, are evangelical people and evangelically minded.  I think the greatest charge that can be brought against evangelicals in the last ninety years or so, since the 1870s, is that we have grievously failed at this point.  We have tended to reduce this glorious gospel, and the life that it gives, to just a question of forgiveness, as if everything happens when a person makes a decision, as though that is the beginning and the end of the gospel.  The glory, the bigness, the greatness, the complete intellectual satisfaction, has not been preached and expounded as it should have been.  Indeed, evangelical people have often been charged, and I am afraid it has been a true charge, of being afraid of the intellect.

Cheever was also a man of great sadness and tremendous insecurities.  In Cheever: A Life, biographer Blake Bailey provides a 700-page account of Cheever’s life and work.  What emerges from this biography is a portrait of a deeply troubled man whose consuming goal of literary recognition looks nothing less than pathetic.  He was also a man tortured by his ambiguous sexuality and demons from his childhood and adolescence.  Readers of Cheever’s fiction will find the book fascinating and troubling.  Christians will find in this biography ample reminder of the way that all art is compromised by sin, seen and unseen.  Cheever: A Life also offers a portrait of the American literary establishment of the twentieth century.

An excerpt:

Cheever was at once the most reticent and candid of men.  “Life is melancholy,” he said, “which isn’t allowed in New England.”  Mortality and bodily functions and so forth were not big topics of conversation in Cheever’s childhood home, nor was anything else that adverted to human frailty or might lead to a quarrel:  “Feel that refreshing breeze,” his mother would say when the mood turned tense, or perhaps she’d call attention to the evening star.  “If you are raised in this atmosphere,” remarks the narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother,” “I think it is a trial of the spirit to reject its habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence, and it seemed a trial of the spirit in which Lawrence [the narrator’s brother’ had succumbed.”  A part of Cheever had succumbed as well, while another part roared its defiance to the world.  On sexual matters especially, Cheever was almost insistently forward.  He would answer fan mail with ribald anecdotes of the most intimate nature, and rarely hesitated to discuss a mistress or some other indiscretion with his children.

In The Church: The Evolution of Catholicism [HarperOne] Professor Richard McBrien of the University of Notre Dame offers a very helpful guide to these controversies and to the evolution of Catholicism in the modern era.  He directs his primary attention to issues of ecclesiology with his church, and he offers a well-written guide that should be of interest to evangelicals seeking to understand what the Roman Catholic Church now teaches on a number of crucial issues.

McBrien is himself no stranger to controversy, and he is often criticized by more conservative Catholics.  His more liberal reading of recent Catholic history (see especially his analysis of Vatican II) is most interesting.  On several points of his analysis, I found him to be very insightful and helpful in summarizing.  As is so often the case, understanding the Catholic arguments helps in the task of sharpening evangelical arguments.  As in the sixteenth century, the issue of the Gospel remains central.

This excerpt serves to illustrate:

Ecclesiology has already begun to respond to this new situation.  There is a greater effort now to relate Christianity to the other great religions of the world and to develop new understandings of the availability of salvation, not only outside the Catholic Church, but outside the Body of Christ as a whole.  Ecclesiology has begun to assume an interfaith as well as an ecumenical character.  This development, of course, has not been without controversy thus far, as the many debates about Dominus Iesus, the document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in September 2000, dramatically illustrate.  But this is the way the world and the Church are moving–in a global and multicultural direction–and so inevitably are the Church’s ecclesiologies.

Nichols and Brandt have done the church a great service with this book.  I especially appreciate the combination of source readings and evaluation found in the book.  It is accessible to students at any college or seminary level, and will help interested laypersons to understand what is really at stake in terms of modern challenges to biblical authority.  Finally, I appreciate the fact that Nichols and Brandt draw conclusions, rather than to simply trace patterns and make vague suggestions.  They, too, understand what is at stake.  Their coverage, we should note, continues into the postmodern era.  The readings are chosen very carefully and make for fascinating reading, even when the texts have been read before.  This is a truly important book.  Ancient Word, Changing Worlds should find its way to every pastor, seminarian, and educated layperson’s book list.

An excerpt:

Whichever approach, higher criticism starts with the presupposition that the Bible or even particular books of the Bible are composites, made up of various strands.  From the perspective of higher criticism, authors of biblical books function more like editors who cleverly and creatively weave the strands, coming from a variety of sources, together.  Advocates of higher criticism see their task as teasing the strands apart.

Among the books released in honor of the Calvin anniversary is John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, edited by Burk Parsons [Reformation Trust].  The book is a compilation of essays by well-known pastors and theologians.  Contributors include Sinclair Ferguson, John MacArthur, Philip Ryken, Steven Lawson, Jerry Bridges, and Eric Alexander, among others.  The essays are insightful, and will be particularly helpful to those who need a good introduction to Calvin the man, the preacher, the Reformer, the theologian, and the follower of Christ.

This is among the best introductory volumes on Calvin yet released for the 500th anniversary celebration. Multi-author works can be ungainly, but this work allows each of the contributors to write with his own style and on a subject that makes sense for his expertise.  John Calvin:  A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology is a good place to start an anniversary reading project.

An exerpt:

On September 16, 1541, Calvin returned to the pulpit of St. Peter’s after his three-year exile in Strasbourg.  An expectant and overflowing congregation assembled.  What would he say?  How would he address through this first sermon the injustices that had been perpetrated upon him, the lessons God had taught him, and the contemporary issues of Geneva?  Ascending the newly constructed high pulpit, he opened the Word of God and began expounding the next verse in the text he had been preaching prior to his banishment.  This extraordinary action clearly announced to all assembled that the church was to forget what lay in the past and press ahead.  But it simultaneously affirmed Calvin’s pastoral commitment to the primacy of preaching in general and the importance of expository preaching in particular.

From “The Churchman of the Reformation” by Harry L. Reeder.

An excerpt:

It is impossible, however, to relate salvation to the Kingdom without addressing fissures within the reformist wing of evangelical theology over the definition of salvation.  The first has to do with the growing reluctance, especially within the reformist wing of evangelical theology, to articulate salvation in terms of the necessity of explicit faith in Christ.  The inclusivist position, which is held by theologians ranging from Clark Pinnock to John Sanders to Stanley Grenz, holds that salvation is universally available only through the atonement of Christ, but that this salvation may be apporpriated through general revelation.  When, however, inclusivist evangelicals argue that the salvation of the unevangelized can come about in the same manner as that of the Old Testament believers, they ignore the Kingdom orientation of biblical soteriology.

Bascomb has written the only full account of Eichmann’s capture and its aftermath. He tells the story with great skill, and he sets the record straight on a number of questions.  The most interesting fact about the search for Adolf Eichmann in the years after World War II is the fact that he was not even on the top list of wanted Nazi criminals at the war’s end.  Eichmann’s central role in administering the “Final Solution” and the murder of millions of Jews in Germany and central Europe became evident only in the years after the war.

Eichmann’s eventual capture and arrest owed much to a German prosecutor, who sent Israeli officials word that Eichmann was living in Argentina with his wife and sons.  From there, the Israelis took over the investigation and search.  Bascomb writes the story like a spy thriller — which it certainly is.  But this story is much more than a thriller, it is a much needed reminder of the necessity of moral judgment, legal justice, and personal accountability.  Bascomb’s account of Eichmann’s capture is an adrenalin-laced read.  His account of Eichmann’s trial in Israel is shorter, but very important.

Eichmann was executed in Israel on May 31, 1962.  He was the first and, so far, the last person executed after trial in Israel. Hunting Eichmann serves as a reminder of why the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann remains one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

An excerpt:

Nobody moved.  The members were rooted to their seats, either unsure whether they had heard the prime minister correctly or that what he had said was true.  Slowly, people realized the enormity of the statement, and it was as if the air had been knocked from their chests.  “When they had recovered from the staggering blow,” an Israeli journalist reported that night, “a wave of agitation engulfed the hearers, agitation so deep that its likes had never been known before in the Knesset.”  Many went pale.  One woman sobbed.  Others lept from their seats, needing to repeat aloud that Eichmann was in Israel in order to come to terms with the news.  The parliamentary reporters ran to their booths to transmit the sixty-two-word speech, which had been delivered in Hebrew. . . .

Eichmann. Captured.  That was all anyone in the chamber heard.  Eichmann.  Captured.  Within hours, all of Israel and the rest of the world would be as captivated by the dramatic announcement.  The stage was set for one of the century’s most important trials.

Niebuhr famously set his analysis in the context of five different models of understanding the relationship between Christ and culture.  His approach represented the dominant position of the Protestant “mainline” of which Niebuhr was so much a part.  Carson takes a new look at Niebuhr’s five types, but he sets his own analysis upon a foundation of biblical theology.  This is very helpful and exceedingly healthy.

In the course of Christ & Culture Revisited, Carson takes on a host of issues, including the thorny issue of church and state and theological tensions within the Christian tradition.  Throughout the book he is rigorous and clear-headed.  Carson does not settle all the thorny issues, but he does settle the discussion into a much healthier framework. Christ & Culture Revisited is an important book for our times.

An excerpt:

These biblical realities make for a worldview that is sharply distinguishable from the worldviews around us, even where there are overlapping values.  We cannot embrace unrestrained secularism; democracy is not God; freedom can be another word for rebellion; the lust for power, universal as it is, must be viewed with more than a little suspicion.  This means that Christian communities honestly seeking to live under the Word of God will inevitably generate cultures that, to say the least, will in some sense counter or confront the values of the dominant culture.  But to say the least is not enough.

Lukacs explains that the Last European War began in September 1939, whereas the Second World War began in December 1941.  In this book, Lukacs (born in Budapest, Hungary in 1924) helps to explain how Europe found itself in this cataclysm just two decades after the end of World War I.  One fascinating aspect of Lukacs’ argument is his insight that Europe would be eclipsed by the United States as the Last European War would give way to the Second World War — and both the allies and the Axis powers saw this. This realization, Lukacs argues, largely explains Hitler’s timetable.

Along the way, Lukacs tells the story of the war’s early years with skill and style.  He reveals an uncanny understanding of the personalities and dynamics that led to the war, and he takes ideas seriously.  Lukacs is also quite ready to confront established theories about the war and settled opinions about its causes. The Last European War, first published in 1976, is now available in a new edition from Yale University Press.

An excerpt:

The French, unlike the English, feared death more than they feared defeat.  But this statement, so cruelly condemnatory at first sight, must be qualified to a certain extent.  The English, who had not been conquered by an invader for nearly one thousand years, knew in their bones that their defeat would mean a kind of death for England, that its effect would not be temporary.  The French, on the other hand, knew in their heads, if not in their bones, the memory of national defeats together with the memory of their national recoveries. Still, in 1940, they gave up too easily.

This short book is filled with insight and inspiration.  Dr. Akin, who serves as President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, offers biographical portraits of William Carey, Adoniram (and Ann) Judson, Bill Wallace, Lottie Moon, and Jim Elliot.  Of these, Dr. Akin writes:  “All of them suffered and experienced trials and the testing of their faith.  Some were even martyred.  Yet they persevered.”

The world really was changed by the service and witness of these Christian missionaries, and readers will risk a changed perspective and a challenged heart by reading this book.  It’s a risk you ought to take — and to pass along.

Gura, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offers a pleasing and stimulating combination of historical analysis and the study of ideas.  In addition, he is a good writer whose style will keep readers attentive and interested.

In essence, Transcendentalism was a movement that transformed American individualism from a reflex into a religion.  As Gura explains, “Transcendentalism thus was another in a long line of attempts to redirect the still incomplete American experiment, in this case by anchoring it in the sanctity of each individual’s heart.”

The Transcendentalists included, most famously, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with Margaret Fuller.  They were associated with Unitarianism, Harvard University, Boston, and the early history of the American republic.  They were eccentrics — but eccentrics with vast influence, then and now.

Gura adds spice to his narrative, citing Annie Russell Marble (who knew the Transcendentalists first-hand) as “a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.”  Nevertheless, the movement was hugely influential in moving the center of meaning into the realm of the individual consciousness.  Traditional theism gave way to panentheism and a vague spirituality. The path was set for the development of individualism as a total worldview — and for the shaping of the American mind.

Gura’s American Transcendentalism is a book that helps to explain the present, as well as the past.

Just in case anyone might miss how to apply this, C. J. and his team go right after major temptations inherent in worldliness.  Craig Cabaniss writes about worldliness and media with good insight.  To no surprise, Bob Kauflin goes after music, bringing the same theological insights he brings to his music ministry.  Take this zinger, for example:  Bob warns that a sign that music has become an idol is when our passion for Christ has waned but our passion for music has not.

Dave Harvey writes about worldliness and “our stuff.”  (Loved his warning about “virtual giving.”)  C. J. then turns to worldliness and dress, offering good and much needed advice, and Jeff Purswell then concludes by talking about the Christian’s right understanding of the world.  We are not here by accident.

Worldliness offers other good features, including a foreword by John Piper.  Most importantly, the book is Gospel-centered and avoids both legalism and antinomianism.  It is also well-timed for the Christmas season.  Read it, savor it, ponder it . . .  and then give a copy to someone else.

In Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It, Duin argues that “many, many evangelical Christians are slipping out or barely hanging on to their churches.”  Those words are sure to gain attention.

Duin backs up her argument with a solid mass of statistics.  Church attendance figures are misleading and bloated when supplied by churches themselves.  Statistics often cited to comfort church leaders are based on overly optimistic and dated reports.  The more current and research-based numbers are scary.  The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago estimates that church attendance has fallen from 41 percent of the population in 1971 to 31 percent in 2001.  At those rates of decline, no one will be attending church in 2031.

Of course, statistics are of real but often limited value.  Duin then goes on to offer reports laced generously with reflections on her own experience.  That blending of the personal and the professional is what makes the book interesting — and what makes it perplexing.

Just about any evangelical reader will find much here that seems real and sufficiently scary.  Most will nod in agreement when Duin points to certain trends and practices as contributing to the decline in church membership and attendance.  Critics of the mega-churches will find criticism here, as will critics of the seeker-sensitive movement, Reformed theology, and just about everything else.  Duin laments the lack of strong biblical preaching and teaching, but she also argues that many of the “teaching” churches lack a real connection with the problems of people in the pews.  She laments the mainstreaming of the Charismatic movement and relates her own very diverse background in basically unsatisfactory church experiences.  She is especially outraged that women are overlooked, under-appreciated, and often taken for granted.  Double that for unmarried women and single mothers.  She seems to oppose complementarianism but never actually declares herself.  This much is clear - she is not happy (and that goes for many of her friends and family members as well).

She wants churches to think “out of the box” and to engage the real needs of their own members.  She wants churches and church leaders to know that single people need help getting married.  She wants less fluff and more substance,  But, honest to goodness, I have no idea what the church she is seeking would look like.

Should church leaders read the book?  Yes.  Quitting Church will force pastors and church leaders to ask some very basic questions about the church — and about their churches.  There is a lot to think about here.  She speaks of people who “need sermons on unanswered prayer” who instead are confronted with “PowerPoint presentations on attaining breakthroughs.”  She offers anecdotes sure to arrest your attention.

Just be aware of the participant/observer tension found throughout this book, and read it as if you are in a conversation with a religion editor for a major national newspaper.  Listen, think, and take notes.

An excerpt:

My research suggested that people are simply not being pastored.  Often ministers are out of touch with what’s happening on the ground, as they are surrounded by a wall of secretaries and voice mail.  Congregants have to wait up to a month for an appointment, if they can get in at all.  Once-a-week home Bible study groups lack depth and theological know-how for help with the serious problems many of us face.  Many churches refer people to professional counseling that costs at least seventy-five dollars an hour. Those lucky enough to have a health plan that pays for counseling usually find the only counselors on approved HMO lists have no concept of a Christian worldview.

Born in the old Russian Empire in 1898, Golda Mabovich migrated to America as a little girl, settling with her family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  As a girl and young woman, Golda became urgently committed to the Zionist cause and moved to what was then known as Palestine in 1921 with her new husband, Morris Meyerson (she later Hebraicized her name to Meir).

When Israel emerged as a new nation in 1947, Golda was already recognized as a major figure in Zionist ranks.  She later moved through a succession of offices and responsibilities in the Israeli government, serving as Foreign Minister before becoming the nation’s first woman Prime Minister in 1969.

American readers of Golda, a new and fascinating biography of Golda Meir by Elinor Burkett (Harper), are likely to remember Golda’ starring role in history, especially on the international stage.  In a sense, Golda Meir’s leadership role cemented Israel’s special place in the American consciousness.  Even President Richard M. Nixon seemed to melt in her presence, and Israel got what the nation needed from America — vast financial support, overt and covert political support, and the sale of advanced American armaments and weaponry.  This was a grandmother who did business.

Less known to most Americans, but essential to this story, is Golda Meir’s political liberalism, her early decision to abort a baby (”her Zionist obligations simply did not leave room for a child”) and divorce from her husband.  Her story is instructive at many levels, telling the story of modern Israel through one woman’s role and legacy.

Her story is also a personal and national tragedy, as her legacy continues to divide the nation.  I found Elinor Burkett’s biography of Golda Meir to be most helpful in understanding the cataclysmic and chaotic events of Israel’s history, the internal divisions that existed in Israel from the beginning, the nation’s quest for a unified identity, and the socialist experiment that many intended the new nation to become.  On every page the backdrop is the young nation’s brave fight for survival.  The story of Golda Meir is often not pretty, but it is never boring.

An excerpt:

Her people adored her for all the wrong reasons — for how safe her towering strength made them feel and for the aplomb her edgy wit lent them — rather than because they heard their own hopes and dreams reflected in her exhortations about socialism, equality, and self-sacrifice.  While she was celebrated across the planet as the first personification of strong female political leadership, on the most pressing international issue — the alarming rise of terrorism — she was cast aside as a Cassandra despite what history has shown to be her prescience.  In her every attempt to move Israel toward peace, she was hemmed in — by the great game between the United States and the Soviet Union and by Israel’s political landscape as much as by her own obduracy.

And despite the reality that her nation’s political paralysis constrained her from accomplishing much of what she longed to do, she was nonetheless forced to stay in office well beyond her time because there was no other way for her to protect a nation at risk, from its neighbors, its refugees, its economic precariousness, and its own contentious divisions.

A woman of greater wisdom might have resigned and let the younger generation battle it out, no matter the cost.  A leader of foresight might have told her people everything they didn’t want to hear, that the situation was not sustainable, that a dozen problems were woven into the national fabric, and that they were living on quicksand.  A creative prime minister might have devised new approaches to everything from ethnic divisions to peacemaking.  And an innovator might have burst the bubble of arrogant self-consciousness by explaining that the political system was ossified or acknowledging that Israelis were not, in fact, the new superheroes.

Now, in Who’s Your City?, Florida takes a closer look at the importance of place.  The jacket for the book declares that where you live is “the most important decision of your life.”  Well, book jackets are made for exaggeration, but Florida’s argument is important nonetheless.

Florida describes the world as “spiky.”  He provides visual evidence for his theory by the use of graphs that identify concentrations of “cultural creatives” by means of relative spikes off of the global image.  Thus, regions such as the North East corridor and Silicon Valley show up as huge spikes on the map.  The point is very clear — these creative individuals are unevenly distributed around the world, and even around the United States.

Furthermore, Florida shows how that these “cultural creatives” cluster themselves together and now choose where to live in terms of the culture they prefer and the amenities they demand.  Some communities will be winners, but most will be losers.

Beyond all this, cultural creativity is clustered now in giant mega-regions such as greater Paris and the technology-rich cities of the Pacific Rim, as well as in huge regions of density within the United States.

One of the key insights of the book is that many people now choose where they want to live as a first decision — even before career and other choices.

Florida’s work is not without its critics, but the basic argument he presents is difficult to refute.  For the intelligent Christian reader, the book raises several issues.  The clustering of creative populations seems to correlate with areas evangelical churches have found difficult to reach.  The creatives are clustered in more secular regions of the nation.  All this should be underline one major aspect of our Great Commission challenge in America and around the world.

An excerpt:

As the most mobile people in human history, we are fortunate to have an incredibly diverse menu of places–in our own countries and around the world–from which to choose.  That’s important because each of us has different needs and preferences.  Luckily, places differ as much as we do.  Some have thriving job markets, others excel at the basics, like education and safety.  Some are better for singles, others for families.  Some are more about work, some play.  Some lean conservative, others liberal.  They all cater to different types, and each has its own personality, its own soul.

In Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 (Belknap Press), historian Christopher Clark traces the emergence of Prussia as a global superpower and its collapse into national non-existence after World War II.  Clark tells the story very well, explaining how Prussia, originally just one among several German kingdoms, emerged as the organizing center of a unified, ambitious, and militaristic Germany.

Along the way, Clark offers insights that help to explain the unfolding history of Europe and points to the coming debacles of World Wars I and II — both wars forever linked to Prussian militarism and expansionism.

An excerpt:

On 25 February 1947, representatives of the Allied occupation authorities in Berlin signed a law abolishing the state of Prussia.  From this moment onward, Prussia belonged to history. . . .

Law No. 46 of the Allied Central Council was more than an administrative act.  In expunging Prussia from the map of Europe, the Allied authorities also passed judgment upon it.  Prussia was not just one German territory among others, on a par with Baden, Wurttemberg, Bavaria or Saxony; it was the very source of the German malaise that had afflicted Europe.  It was the reason why Germany had turned from the path of peace and political modernity.  ‘The core of Germany is Prussia,’ Churchill told the British Parliament on 21 September 1943.  ‘There is the source of the recurring pestilence.’  The excision of Prussia from the political map of Europe was thus a symbolic necessity.  Its history had become a nightmare that weighed upon the minds of the living.

Now, in The Courage to Be Protestant, Wells offers what amounts to a fifth volume in his series–a capstone to his argument.

In The Courage to Be Protestant, Wells bravely criticizes those who would offer theological and spiritual reductionism in the name of marketing as well as those who would steer the Evangelical movement toward the postmodern embrace of the “Emergents.”

Looking at present-day Evangelicalism, Wells sees shrinking doctrine and a disappearing church.  It takes no courage to “sign-up” as a Protestant, he argues, but it takes considerable courage to believe and act as a Protestant.

The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World is must reading.   After reading this book, go back and read Wells’ previous four-volume series.

An excerpt:

Traditional Christian faith holds to the outside God who stands over against us.  He is known not because we have discovered him, but because he has made himself known in Scripture and in Christ.  We are not left to piece together our understanding of him.  He has unveiled and defined himself for us.  He has broken his concealment.  He has come into view and has told us who he is and how we are to live.

The inside god of this contemporary spirituality is different.  He emerges out of the psychology, the inner depths, of the seeker.  He is known through and within the self, and we piece together our knowledge of him (or her, or it) from the fragments of our experience coupled with our intuitions.  In so many ways this god, this sacred reality, is indistinguishable from how we experience ourselves.

I discussed this important book with author David Wells on the June 5, 2008 edition of The Albert Mohler Program [listen here].

The concept of multiple intelligences is both helpful and transformative, broadening the concept of intelligence to cover, for example, emotional intelligence as well as the knowledge of facts and concepts.  It takes little reflection to recognize that a failure to develop emotional intelligence can doom an individual to ineffectiveness — no matter how much knowledge the person possesses.

In Five Minds for the Future, Gardner points to five different modes of thinking, described as minds, that will be vital for effectiveness and success in the future.  It is no accident that the book is published by Harvard Business School Press.

Gardner describes the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind as five essentials for the future.  Christian readers will gain a great deal from reading Gardner’s book.  Much of what he has to say is immediately applicable to life, to ministry, to education, and to parenthood.  Christians will want to say more than Gardner says in many respects, but his analysis of these five minds should be very helpful to the reader.

As a matter of fact, I found the book immediately relevant to my responsibility as an academic president — and to the work of the Christian ministry.  His secular analysis should lead to good biblical reflection.  As I read his layout of these five minds, I thought of Paul’s instruction to ministers in 1 and 2 Timothy.

Five Minds for the Future will help parents to think about their children in a new light.  The Christian parent must aim for more than is found in Gardner’s secular analysis, but certainly not for less.  The same is true for the Christian educator.

An excerpt:

When one speaks of cultivating certain kinds of minds, the most immediate frame of reference is that of education.  In many ways, this is appropriate: after all, designated educators and licensed educational institutions bear the most evident burden in the identification and training of young minds.  But we must immediately expand our vision beyond standard educational institutions.  In our cultures of today–and of tomorrow–parents, peers, and media play roles at least as significant as do authorized teachers and formal schools.  More and more parents “homeschool” or rely on various extra-scholastic mentors or tutors.  Moreover, if any cliché of recent years rings true, it is the acknowledgment that education must be lifelong.  Those at the workplace are charged with selecting individuals who appear to possess the right kinds of knowledge, skills, minds–in my terms, they should be searching for individuals who possess disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful, and ethical minds.  But, equally, managers and leaders, directors and deans and presidents, must continue to perennially develop all five kinds of minds in themselves and–equally–in those for whom they bear responsibility.

The bar mitzvah celebration has roots in medieval Judaism, but it became an important part of American Judaism only in the twentieth century, Oppenheimer explains. “The typical bar or bat mitzvah ceremony–the religious part, anyway–is quite simple. A boy of about thirteen, or a girl of about twelve or thirteen, leads a portion of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service and reads aloud some of the Bible portions assigned to that week,” he summarizes. “The event is supposed to mark the moment when a young Jew assumes the responsibilities of religious adulthood.”

The big problem is that few people really seem to believe that the bar mitzvah does any such thing. The thirteen-year-old who celebrates the bar (for boys) or bat (for girls) mitzvah is still a thirteen-year-old. Furthermore, the ceremony has been eclipsed by the celebration that follows. In wealthy Jewish communities, these parties are often outlandishly expensive. Oppenheimer provides an insider’s perspective on this transformation of the tradition.

Reading Thirteen and a Day is an introduction to many of the issues facing contemporary American Judaism and a truly interesting historical and sociological analysis of a familiar ritual. Christians reading the book are likely to think about how we conceive of early adolescents and the transition to adulthood — and the challenge of instilling a clear identity within our own children.

An excerpt:

The popularity of the b’nai mitzvah is not the result of their usefulness. There is no strong evidence that the bar or bat mitzvah will reverse Jews’ low birthrates or counter religious indifference. While committed Jewish families see b’nai mitzvah as necessary to raising a good Jewish child, that is no way to account for adult b’nai mitzvah–and what’s more, it’s no way to account for the enthusiasm of the children themselves, whose excitement has little to do with abstract notions of Jewish survival. B’nai mitzvah cannot be explained through Torah, which nowhere mentions the ceremony; Jews are not commanded to celebrate the mar mitzvah.

Rather, they are commanded to act like Jews; to pray, to tell the story of the Exodus every Passover, to reproduce young Jews, to circumcise the boys. But as rewarding as the Jewishly lived life can be, and as fun as reproduction is, they seem to express inadequately our religious peoplehood. What evangelical Christian express by being born again, or Mormons by going on a two-year mission, Jews express through the bar and bat mitzvah. They proclaim their commitment to Judaism every time they say their prayers, but this is the only time that make that commitment with an audience watching.

One of the most interesting of these is Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. A popular conservative commentator long associated with National Review magazine, Goldberg is a very capable writer. He has a rare ability to inject humor into serious argument — and to get away with it.

In Liberal Fascism he goes after the impulse to combine utopian visions with intellectual arrogance and a willingness to coerce others into compliance. Goldberg rightly traces the modern ideology of fascism back to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and deals forthrightly with the fascist ideology of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. He then proceeds to argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies a new form of fascism — a fascism with a smiling face, perhaps more therapeutic than terrifying.

Goldberg offers solid insights in this book, and Liberal Fascism is a good introduction to many of the debates now raging with American culture. He also provides historical analysis and a sense of intellectual context. Nonetheless, the book has a major problem — its title.

Given the horrifying experience of the twentieth century, we should be extremely reluctant to use the term fascism without a direct reference to the murderous regimes of fascist Europe — and the Third Reich in particular. Intellectual credibility suffers when words are used carelessly and wrongly. Jonah Goldberg rightly complains that liberals often wrongly accuse conservatism of being latent fascism when engaged in argument. True enough, but turning the word on liberalism scarcely helps. Intellectual discourse and political debate are reduced to name-calling, and understanding is often lost. Liberal Fascism is worth reading, but the book and its argument would have been stronger and more credible without the reference to fascism.

An excerpt:

Again, it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian — or “holistic,” if you prefer — in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend “nontraditional” beliefs.

The story of Washington the city is inseparable from the story of the Founders and their heirs — and the story of the new nation. The very existence of the city is a monumental achievement, and the establishment of a new capital for the nation did not make sense to all. New York and Philadelphia (and Philadelphia even more than New York) offered amenities and cultural institutions that Washington would not have for over a century and beyond. The new District of Columbia was largely a swamp, but the Founders has a bold vision. George Washington was himself determined to see the new capital express the grandeur of the new nation’s vision and commitment to democracy. When constructed, the Capitol was the largest building in the young nation, and the White House was the largest residence. Both basically stood in bare fields.

There is more to this story — much more, in fact. Bordewich’s account takes the reader only up to the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, by that time Washington the city was a fact, and the outlines of modern Washington were already visible. Washington: The Making of the American Capital is a great story that is well told.

An excerpt:

Today some 550,000 Washingtonians live at the core of a linear megalopolis with millions of inhabitants, extending deep into Maryland and Virginia. The tacit assumption that the capital would always be a white man’s city –no one even remotely imagined otherwise in the 1790s–has also been overthrown by time: today 57 percent of the city’s inhabitants, most of the leading members of its municipal government, and a significant portion of its business establishment are African American. The skeleton of L’Enfant’s grand plan survives, adapted to the exigencies of modern life. His boulevards continue to shape (and confuse) the flow of traffic, nudging the eye toward the magestic symmetries that lie half-buried, like an elegant palimpsest, beneath the modern cityscape. The White House remains where L’Enfant put it, although a more fearful age has hemmed it in with fences, barriers, and rings of invisible security to a degree that would have profoundly dismayed Americans of the 1790s, who expected even their highest officials to be easy of access, and available to them at almost any time. The Capitol, too, remains what the Founders intended, much larger and grander than it was two centuries ago, of course, but still framed by the proportions sketched by William Thornton on the steamy island of Tortola, and more than ever a magnet to the eye, proof to all of the astonishing persistence of American democracy.

David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, takes us back to the 1960 Olympics where so many of these changes began in Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World (Simon and Schuster). Those games started just one week after the espionage trial of Francis Gary Powers ended with his conviction in Moscow. The Cold War was at its height and the old order of the colonial age was breaking up. New ideals of individualism and new ideas of the role of sports in the culture and the economy were coming to the fore. All of these changes were on stage in Rome as the Olympic Games began.

Maraniss offers here a book that surprised me at many turns, and I found that reading Rome 1960 was a good way to watch the current games in Beijing with greater insight. As Maraniss argues, the shape of the modern games as we know them now was “coming into view” in Rome.

An excerpt:

Television, money, and drugs were bursting onto the scene, altering everything they touched. Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling in Rome and could never be taken seriously again. Rome brought the first commercially broadcast Summer Games, the first doping scandal, the first runner paid for wearing a certain brand of track shoes. New nations and constituencies were being heard from, with increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women as they emerged from generations of discrimination and condescension.

The singular essence of the Olympic Games is that the world takes the same stage at the same time, performing a passion play of nations, races, ideologies, talents, styles, and aspirations that no other venue, not even the United Nations, can match. The 1960 Games came during a notably anxious period in cold war history; almost every action in Rome was viewed through the political lens of those tense times.

But China, more clearly than most nations, is captive to its history — and there is no way to understand the China we will see on television in coming days without understanding China’s more recent history. The challenge lies in finding an adequate one-volume history.

Just in time for the Olympic Games, Jonathan Fenby has written Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present (Ecco/HarperCollins). Fenby’s work is the best one-volume work on modern China I have yet found, and it is must reading for anyone who wants to understand China at this crucial moment. Fenby, who writes and explains well, traces China’s history from the Qing dynasty, through decades of war and revolution, to Mao and the rise of Communist China, to the great shifts in Chinese life and culture as China enters a global age.

An excerpt:

This book has argued that, for all the manifestations of modernity, China’s history is not another country. Now, the cumulative effects of the process launched by Deng Xiaoping are leading to a phase that could be plucked right out of imperial dynasties or from the republic. If Mao was the strong, willful dynastic founder and Deng the consolidator who saw a way of renewing the mandate, Hu Jintao can be taken as a successor who holds the keys to power but cannot turn them as his predecessors did. True, there is no organized opposition to confront the Communist dynasty, no Red Army lurking in the backwoods, no political movement marshalling resistance in the countryside. But the regime faces a different kind of risk, which again has its roots in China’s early history. Since the First Emperor in AD 221, rulers have feared losing control of major forces in society, whether they take the form of questioning officials and scholars, military commanders, or, in the last decades of empire, the modernizing gentry. Today, those impelled by the rush to the market and material self-improvement march increasingly to their own drum. Interest groups, individuals and competing power centres proliferate within the overall supposedly unified structure. State -owned enterprises join private firms in playing the stock exchange and using their positions to maximize profits. The result is an authoritarian state which increasingly lacks authority, an empire without an emperor.

The fact is that children will play.  As Chudacoff remarks, “Kids still find ways to be kids.”  In the colonial era, children were more likely to be involved in “roving about” the outdoors and improvising games.  Later generations of parents encouraged more formal play and childhood itself was more celebrated.  Over time, play would be transformed by efforts to keep young boys off the streets, to teach adult roles through gender-specific play, and to free the natural creativity of the child.

More recently, play has been redefined by the development of technologies like computer games, by concerns about gender and child safety, and by changes in family structure and parenting.  The book is thought-provoking and insightful.

This excerpt suggests how changes in family life lead to changes in play — and in the relationships between parents and children:

In the twentieth century, two related forces converged to alter the playtime of preadolescents in significant ways.  Fist, the extension of compulsory schooling filled much of all children’s daytime hours, regardless of social class, incidentally strengthening peer cultures that increasingly socialized young people in play choices.  A partial reduction in a child’s family responsibilities, resulting in part from smaller family size and the spread of labor-saving electric appliances, helped create time after school and in the evening during which youngsters could interact with their peer group or play alone with a new cornucopia of commercial playthings.  And during the first half of the century, at least, this playtime often took place away from adult supervision in private bedrooms and other secluded areas of the home.

At the same time, much of what is presented as archaeology is openly hostile to the truthfulness of the Bible, leaving many Christians wanting to know more but unsure of where to turn. The Archaeological Study Bible: An Illustrated Walk Through Biblical History and Culture [Zondervan] is the best resource for this need.  Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and Duane Garrett of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary served as editors for this project.

One of the great strengths of this project is the placement of such helpful material alongside the biblical text.  References to seals, monuments, places, and cultural artifacts are described and explained, often with full-color photographs.  The Archaeological Study Bible is a great advance and a wonderful addition to the Christian’s bookshelf.

See also my article, “How Should We Think About Archaeology and the Bible?“

The doctrine of adoption is one of the sweetest dimensions of salvation as revealed in Scripture.  Joel R. Beeke has written an inspiring and informative work on the doctrine that looks particularly to the Puritans for guidance.  Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on Adoption [Reformation Heritage Books] will educate and encourage Christians and help believers to understand the wonder of adoption and the comfort and challenge this represents for the Christian life.

An excerpt:

Above all, the Puritans use the truth of adoption to transform God’s needy children through powerful comforts.  Thomas Hooker shows how adoption comforts them in the face of their unworthiness, outward poverty, the contempt of the world, infirmities, afflictions, persecutions, and dangers.  When oppressed with sin, buffeted by Satan, enticed by the world, or alarmed by fears of death, believers are able to take refuge in their precious, heavenly Father, saying with [Samuel] Willard, “Am I not still a child?  And if so, then I am sure, that though he correct me (and I deserve it, nor will I refuse to submit myself patiently unto it) yet he cannot take away his loving kindness from me.”

The decade of the 1970s is now a generation behind us, but the cultural and political movements of that pivotal decade set the stage for so much of what we face in our current times.  In terms of national politics, two great developments stand out.  On the Left, the nomination of Sen. George McGovern became the pivotal event of the decade, even as the rise of a reinvigorated conservatism became the great event on the Right.

Author Bruce Miroff of the State University of New York at Albany takes his readers into the heart of the McGovern campaign in The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party [University Press of Kansas, 2007].  There is no way one can make sense of the modern Democratic party without understanding this campaign.  The issues of that campaign still define the Left, as do many of the individuals involved in the campaign (such as Bill Clinton).  The Liberals’ Moment should be read by all who want to understand our current political context — both liberals and conservatives.

An excerpt:

Despite the landslide defeat, the McGovern campaign bequeathed to the Democrats a talented, youthful cadre of strategists, organizers, and wordsmiths who as they aged would largely shape the evolution of the party over the following decades. Every presidential campaign brings new activists into electoral politics, and some stay for the long haul. But for Democrats, the McGovern campaign produced a more distinctive and influential generation of political operatives than any campaign since. We can identify McGovernites–a term I use descriptively, hoping to detach it from the pejorative implications it is often given by right-wing commentators. But we do not speak of Mondaleites, Dukakisites, or Goreites, and even the senior Clintonites were McGovernites further down the political road.

Many liberals would prefer to look back on the McGovern campaign with nostalgia rather than discomfort, as the last time they could feel passionate and honest as they rallied behind one of their own in a presidential election. Certainly, later insurgent liberals, who have never made it past the primaries, have not paid much heed to the electoral vulnerability of liberalism that the McGovern campaign made palpable. Yet any future campaign mounted by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party needs to grapple with these vulnerabilities. Several characteristics of the McGovern campaign that offered plump targets for the Republicans remain of great relevance today, and liberals cannot evade the problems that they pose if they want credibly to renew their claim to the party’s leadership.

Back twenty years ago the evangelical world was torn by a controversy over the very nature of salvation — known then as the “lordship controversy.”  Out of the context of that controversy Dr. John MacArthur would write one of the most important books ever to emerge from his ministry.  In The Gospel According to Jesus Dr. MacArthur got right to the heart of the matter.

The urgency?  Dr. MacArthur rightly believes that “nothing matters more than what Scripture says about the good news of salvation.”   His book was a much-needed corrective to dangerous misunderstandings of the Gospel found commonly among some evangelical teachers twenty years ago.  The release of this new edition, updated after two decades, is an alarm that these misrepresentations of the Gospel still threaten today.

I was recently asked to rank the most important evangelical books of the last twenty-five years.  In my judgment, The Gospel According to Jesus belongs in the top ten of that urgent list.

An excerpt:

The gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners.  It promises them that they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God.  Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey Him as Lord.  It promises salvation from hell but not necessarily freedom from iniquity.  It offers false security to people who revel in the sins of the flesh and spurn the way of holiness.  By separating faith from faithfulness, it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as a wholehearted obedience to the truth.

Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners.  It is not the same message Jesus proclaimed.

The moral status of the human embryo now stands as a central question of our times.  In fact, it has only been in recent times that we have even known much about the human embryo.  Now, with the issues of human embryonic stem cell research, cloning, reproductive technologies, and designer babies before us, the human embryo is now a central character in some of our most heated moral and political debates.

Now, Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen defend the human dignity of the human embryo with vigor and credible argument in Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday).  George and Tollefsen offer a sustained argument against the use and destruction of human embryos in medical experimentation. 

Robert P. George is Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Christopher Tollefsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.  They understand what is at stake in this controversy — the dignity of every single human being.

They make their case that “human embryos are, from the very beginning, human beings, sharing an identity with, though younger than, the older human beings they will grow up to become.” 

Embryo is now the essential book on this great moral question. 

From the book:

The evidence suggests, then, that at the end of the first week, the same organism that came into being at fertilization has continued to grow and pursue its important biological goals.  It does this by means of an increasingly differentiated division of labor among the cells, but a division whose original plan dates back to the very act of fertilization.  And it pursues its goals, and adjusts for difficulties, by means of communication from cell to cell.  It is, it would seem, a single organism, just like a toddler, adolescent, or adult.

________________

Professor Robert P. George was my guest on The Albert Mohler Program to discuss this book on May 5, 2008 [listen here].

The name of the Bin Laden family is now known throughout the world – a name of infamy.  But long before the events of September 11, 2001, the Bin Laden family was well established in Saudi Arabia and in much of the Arab world.  Journalist Steve Coll, winner of the Pulitzer Prize while at The Washington Post, traces the development of the Bin Ladens in a narrative that is indispensable to understanding the events of 9/11 and the challenge Osama Bin Laden and radical Islamic groups now represent.  The book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, is both important and timely.

On of the most important contributions of this book is its tracing of the history of the Bin Laden family against the backdrop of developments in the Middle East and around the world.  Furthermore, he corrects many misunderstandings in the West.  A common rationale offered for the source or motivation for terrorism is poverty — but the Bin Ladens are a family of extreme wealth, royal access, and privilege.

An excerpt:

The family generation to which Osama belonged — twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine sisters — inherited considerable wealth, but had to cope with intense social and cultural changes.  Most of them were born into a poor society where there were no public schools or universities, where social roles were rigid and preordained, where religious texts and rituals dominated public and intellectual life, where slavery was not only legal but openly practiced by the king and his sons.  Yet within two decades, by the time this generation of Bin Ladens became young adults, they found themselves bombarded by Western-influenced ideas about individual choice, by gleaming new shopping malls and international fashion brands, by Hollywood movies and alcohol and changing sexual mores — a dizzying world that was theirs for the taking, since they each received annual dividends that started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These Bin Ladens, like other privileged Saudis who came of age during the oil shock decade of the 1970s, became Arabian pioneers in the era of globalization.  The Bin Ladens were the first private Saudis to own airplanes, and in business and family life alike, they devoured early on the technologies of global integration.  It is hardly an accident that Osama’s first major tactical innovation as a terrorist involved his creative use of a satellite telephone.  It does not seem irrelevant, either, that shocking airplane crashes involving Americans were a recurrent motif of the family’s experience long before September 11.

The controversy surrounding the “Gospel of Judas” raises significant and important questions for intelligent Christians.  How are we to understand this document?  What does this text suggest in terms of theology?  How do we put the entire question into context?

An excellent guide to these questions is Simon Gathercole, a bright young scholar who serves as Lecturer in New Testament Studies at Cambridge University.  In The Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press) Gathercole offers the best available analysis of the Gospel of Judas and its significance.

The book is scholarly but accessible to any educated reader.  Gathercole addresses all the significant questions head-on and teaches his readers a good bit about the New Testament as he goes along.

His book is a needed corrective to the misleading media hype about the “Gospel of Judas” and his theological focus is greatly appreciated.

From the book:

The four Gospels in the New Testament are the only surviving Gospels which derive from the time period of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.  Unsurprisingly, as the documents which most closely reflect the time and life-setting of Jesus, they present him as he had really been remembered–as someone who lived and breathed the Old Testament and knew himself to be playing a special role in its fulfillment, rather than as a thoroughly un-Jewish figure: disembodied, detached from the world, offering not hope but knowledge. 

The Christian Church has always understood learning to be a central priority of faithful discipleship, and Christianity can claim deep reservoirs of learning, scholarship, and education.  Furthermore, the rise of the university and the spread of educational opportunity were driven by Christians and by churches who saw a commitment to learning as necessary to Christian growth, evangelism, and the inculcation of Christian truth in every new generation.

At the same time, modern education has become a seething cauldron of competing fads and ideologies.  Over against this confusion and mediocrity, many Christians have rediscovered the benefit of classical learning — learning that is explicitly grounded in the classical liberal arts in order to train students to think and to apply biblical truth to learning and to life.

Authors Robert Littlejohn and Charles T. Evans offer good counsel in Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning [Crossway].  Littlejohn and Evans have served as heads of school and address these issues from experience.  Parents will be especially interested in their description of a classical education and its benefits.  These authors are not afraid to argue for classical modes of learning, such as memorization.  Wisdom and Eloquence will help parents, professional educators, and anyone involved in education to discern the difference between educational fads and an education that matters.

From the book:

If there is a secret to the success of teaching and learning in the liberal arts tradition, it could be stated as: “Read, read, read, and read some more!”  Nothing in human experience has a more powerful effect on our cognitive, cultural, social, spiritual, and epistemological development than diving headlong into the ocean of ideas contained in the world of literature.  Herein the student gains exposure to the rich genres of lyric, poetry, and epic, of parable, fable, and myth, of monologue, dialogue, and theatrical play, of homily, epistle, and edict, of history and fiction, and of current event and fantasy (which are sometimes hard to distinguish).  Herein is fruit for the picking, ingredients for the delightful exercise of grammatical, dialectical, and rhetorical skills.

Yet, enrollment in many musical education programs is dropping fast as children and teenagers play video games, spend time on the internet, join soccer leagues, and think of music as something they buy — not something they do.  Music programs in public schools are often cut for budgetary reasons or reduced in size and scope.

Lawrence Kramer, Professor of English and Music at Fordham University in New York City has written a wonderful and informative book intended to make the argument that classical music has a distinctive and much-needed place in our culture and in our individual lives.

In Why Classical Music Still Matters [University of California Press] Kramer acknowledges the problem.  “Classical music has people worried,” he concedes.  “To many it seems on shaky ground in America.  For more then a decade the drumbeat of its funeral march has been steady.”

Kramer provides his readers with ample argument for the importance of classical music.  In so doing, he provides a concise musical education as well.  As a professor of both English and music, he is in a good position to make his case with engaging prose and style.

In the end, most readers of Why Classical Music Still Matters will be those who already believe that classical music still matters.  Still, the book will interest anyone who wants to know more about music and our cultural heritage.

An excerpt:

As I said earlier, classical music developed with a single aim: to be listened to.  Listened to, that is, rather then heard as part of some other activity, usually a social or religious ritual.  As noted earlier, too, this sort of listening involves both focused attention and active involvement.  Its attention is a form of attending; it is not just a hearing but a hearkening.  To practice it is to presuppose that listening is a discrete form of activity, of interest in itself independent of what is heard.  Listening so conceived is capable of sustaining personal, social, and spiritual values depending on how it goes, and when, and for whom.  Such listening quickly develops the ambition to get beyond the quicksilver transitory character of hearing in the moment.  It seeks to embody itself in forms that can endure and so become the “classics” upon which a culture of heightened listening depends.

The year 2007 saw the release of two important biographies of Albert Einstein.  Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson [Simon & Schuster] is my favorite work on Einstein.  Isaacson is CEO of the Aspen Institute and a former executive with CNN and Time.   His biography of Einstein is massive and comprehensive.  It is also well written and well organized.  Isaacson also took advantage of the availability of new Einstein letters and documents in his research.

An excerpt:

His tale encompasses the vast sweep of modern science, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the emission of photons to the expansion of the cosmos.  A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein’s universe, one defined on the macro side by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting.

His fingerprints are all over today’s technologies.  Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semi-conductors all trace back to his theories.  He signed the letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning that it may be possible to build an atom bomb, and the letters of his famed equation relating energy to mass hover in our minds when we picture the resulting mushroom cloud.

The other major biography is Einstein: A Biography by Juergen Neffe and translated from the German by Shelley Frisch [Farrar, Straus and Giroux].  Neffe, associated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin,  gives primary attention to Einstein’s early and most productive years and deals more specifically with Einstein’s intellectual development.

An excerpt:

Einstein was one of the most renowned people ever to walk the planet.  Certainly no other scientist has come close to his degree of fame and mythic transfiguration.  His seemingly paradoxical nature — bourgeois and bohemian, superman and scalawag — lent him an air of mystery.  He could reconcile discrepant views of the world, but he was a walking contradiction.  Einstein polarized his fellow man like no other.  He was a friend to some, and enemy to others, narcissistic and slovenly, easygoing and rebellious, philanthropic and autistic, citizen of the world and hermit, a pacifist whose research was used for military ends.

As acknowledged by his friends and his foes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the most significant Presidents in the nation’s history.  While debates over his policies, actions, and legacy will surely continue, his leadership gifts continue to impress historians across ideological boundaries.

Roosevelt’s self-understanding as a leader should be of interest to any student of the art and science of leadership.  For that reason, Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope has much to teach about the art of leadership. 

Alter, a senior editor at Newsweek, notes that just hours before FDR was sworn into office for his first term, governors in New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania ordered the banks in their states to close.  This meant that 34 of 48 states “now had no economic pulse.”  President Herbert Hoover was “a study in failure” even as he possessed a “brilliant understanding of complex issues.”  What Hoover failed to understand was the crucial role of the President as national leader.  Understanding this was Roosevelt’s great gift.  He knew that the nation needed decisive leadership — and fast.  His first 100 days were filled with a flurry of presidential actions and words.  Roosevelt aimed at hope and exuded optimism.  Hoover had declared a bank “moratorium.”  Roosevelt declared bank “holidays.”  Alter’s analysis in The Defining Moment of Roosevelt’s words and actions during his first 100 days is a great read.

An excerpt:

FDR knew the consequences of failing to seize the day.  A visitor — unidentified in the press — came to him not long after the Inauguration and told him, “Mr. President, if your program succeeds, you’ll be the greatest president in American history.  If it fails, you will be the worst one.”  “If it fails,” the new president replied, “I’ll be the last one.”

This sounds melodramatic to Americans in the 21st century, when freedom is flourishing in so many parts of the world.  But during the 1930s, democracy was on the run, discredited even by subtle minds as a hopelessly cumbersome way to meet the challenges of the modern age.

A particular emphasis upon the nature and structure of the church has been central to the Baptist vision.  In other words, ecclesiology is in many ways the chief contribution and distinctive of the Baptists.  Sadly, you would not learn that by observing many Baptist congregations.  Baptist ecclesiology has been eclipsed by pragmatism and undermined by neglect.

A helpful analysis of what must be recovered comes as Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches, edited by Thomas White, Jason G. Duesing, and Malcolm B. Yarnell, III [Kregel].  The book contains chapters on the major issues that must be addressed if integrity in Baptist congregational life is to be recovered — including regenerate church membership, believers baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and church discipline.  Contributors represent a stellar group of Baptist scholars, including, among others, Mark Dever on church membership, Danny Akin on baptism, and Gregory Wills on church discipline.

From the chapter by Gregory A. Wills on church discipline:

Southern Baptists experienced three tectonic shifts that reshaped Baptist identity and rendered church discipline implausible for both conservatives and progressives.  First, they lost confidence that Christ commanded a specific ecclesiology and based church practices on pragmatic concerns, on human standards of effectiveness.  Second, they adopted a new view of Baptist identity that led them to redefine ecclesiology and theology according to human experience, which among other things recast God in humanitarian terms and weakened their sense of the fear of God.  Third, they took guardianship of the social order, which secularized the churches and eroded their commitment to separation from the world.

These commitments so altered Baptist piety that, all things considered, church discipline seemed ill suited to advance the aims of the contemporary church.  It seemed ineffective for church growth and irrelevant for ministry in modern society.  Southern Baptist pastors finally chose relevance over obedience and quieted their consciences over the loss.

Peter D. Kramer looks at Freud’s influence in Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. Consider these excerpts:

It is impossible to imagine the modern without Freud. Consider a single area, literature. The inner monologue or stream of consciousness, in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, bears the mark of Freud’s method of psychoanalysis, with its reliance on the patient’s flow of associations. In their use of dense symbolism and wordplay, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Vladimir Nabokov pay unwilling homage to Freud’s account of the complexly encoded effects of hidden desires.

Even after the limited “modern” era of the last century, we remain Freudians in our daily lives. We discuss intimate concerns in Freud’s language, using words like ego and defensiveness. We listen and observe as Freudians. As others address us, we make note of telltale incongruities that simultaneously hide and reveal unacceptable thoughts and feelings.

Freud believed that, using sex as the dynamic force, he could explain a range of psychological phenomena, from hysteria to blighted love life to slips of the tongue. Because his simple hypotheses often failed and because the social environment changed dramatically–the brutal World War was a turning point–Freud kept modifying and adding perspectives. The result was that he developed a highly eclectic psychology.

Stripped of its underlying premises, this psychology proved workable.

The account of mind and person begins with the premise that there are grave limitations to human rationality. Our thought, emotion, and character are partly products of animal drives. These drives have a developmental history. They change throughout childhood and after. In the course of development, the mind becomes segmented. Memory stores templates of important persons and interactions as they are experienced in childhood. Inner conflict emerges. The templates and the conflicting forces lead to limitations on the freedom to perceive accurately and behave adaptively in adulthood. Distortions of perception and self –awareness have characteristic forms–the various defenses. Guided self-examination can lead to improved self-awareness and then to less stereotyped behavior.

Kramer is absolutely correct in stressing that it is impossible to imagine the modern mind without Freud. Freud’s influence added fuel to the erosion of the Christian understanding of the human being, and his legacy remains with us now. Understanding Freud’s legacy is an important step toward taking the measure of the dominant secular worldview. Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind is a good start.

The emergence of Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror organizations is a story that demands far greater attention than most Americans have yet invested. Given the importance of this story — not only for understanding 9/11, but for understanding the present — this is a matter that demands a substantial education on the part of the American public.

Lawrence Wright, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, has written what I consider to be the definitive work on this narrative. The book is riveting and authoritative — as indicated by the Pulitzer Prize it both deserved and received. In The Looming Tower, Wright tells the story with a style and energy that makes the book hard to put down.

Consider this explanation of the allure of martyrdom to young men:

Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death. Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice. The martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable than the earth itself. And for those young men who came from cultures where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins–”the dark-eyed houris,” as the Quran describes them, “chaste as hidden pearls.” They awaited the martyr with feasts of meat and fruit and cups of the purest wine.

And this section dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 within Al Qaeda’s leadership:

While they waited for the mujahideen to rise up across Muslim lands and rush to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Zawahiri gloated over the success of the operation. “there is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots,” bin Laden boasted in a prerecorded videotape on al-Jazzera on October 7, the day after American and British bombers launched their first attacks on Taliban positions. “Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” Then he issues his call. “These events have divided the whole world into two sides–the side of believers and the side of infidels. May God keep you away from them. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come.”

The Book of Job remains an enigma for many Christians. Beyond this, it has been misused as a text for protest atheism and as a pretext for much theological mischief. Robert S. Fyall offers a virtually unprecedented approach to Job in Now My Eyes Have Seen You: Images of Creation and Evil in the Book of Job [Apollos/InterVarsity Press].

Fyall does what so many other commentators and students of Job fail to do — he combines careful exegesis with faithful theology. Fyall is a professor of Old Testament at the University of Durham and a Church of Scotland minister. He looks closely at the literary imagery within the text of Job and offers keen insights.

Now My Eyes Have Seen You is released in the “New Studies in Biblical Theology” series edited by D. A. Carson. The entire series is worthy of careful attention. I have found very few satisfactory books on Job. This one moves quickly into the top ranks.

Fyall writes:

Reading and studying Job can be an alarming and unpredictable experience. Many apparent certainties disappear and familiar landmarks seem few and far between. Yet to glimpse even a little of this book’s awesome picture of God’s providence, expressed in glorious and richly resonant language, is to undergo both a chastening and healing experience. To listen to this book is to listen to the Master’s voice.

The history of African-American theology raises one key question — What happened? Thabiti M. Anyabwile, now senior pastor of the First Baptist Church, Grand Cayman Islands, answers this question in The Decline of African American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity [InterVarsity Press]. Anyabwile traces a road from biblical orthodoxy to theological liberalism in the mainstream of African-American theology.

Here are two paragraphs that tell the story very well, and in a very moving way:

Rather than denounce the Bible as fraudulent along with its white adherents, the slaves recognized that learning to read the Bible and to possess its contents for themselves was real spiritual power, whose potency was made all the more alluring by efforts to prohibit its access. So, slaves vowed to learn to read before they died so that they could read the Bible. They took advantage of every clandestine opportunity to secure lessons from favorable masters or their children, often risking legally sanctioned retribution, severe beatings and death.

By the end of slavery’s reign in America, African American doctrines of revelation were beginning to widen and make room for sources of revelation other then the Scriptures, including God continuing to reveal himself through supernatural means and interventions. This expansion of the doctrine of revelation would weaken the centrality of the Scriptures in the practice and thought of African American Christianity.

The Decline of African American Theology is a really important book — and for all evangelical Christians.

Readers will also want to know of Thabiti Anyabwile’s other book, The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors [Crossway].

Thabiti Anyabwile was my guest on Monday’s edition of The Albert Mohler Program [listen here].

Spiritual discernment is an art, a science, and the responsibility of every disciple of Jesus Christ. At the same time, we live in a culture that rejects discernment and we see churches that have failed in the task of preparing Christian believers to practice spiritual discernment. A Christian without discernment is unable to see the difference between the truth and the lie, the artificial and the real, the orthodox and the heretical, even right and wrong.

The discipline of spiritual discernment will train the disciple to aim at the good, the beautiful, and the true and to be more faithful in every arena of life.

In this confused age, Tim Challies offers help in The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment [Crossway]. Tim is a young writer and web designer who is one of the most recognized names in the Christian blogosphere. He is also a fine young evangelical thinker. The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment is a book with great promise that is both timely and substantial.

An excerpt:

Many who profess to believe in Christ affirm Christianity as a collection of truths, and even very important, life-altering truths, but not as Truth; not as a worldview that encompasses all of life. To be people of discernment, we must acknowledge the existence of both truth and error. And, just as there will always be counterfeit currency, where there is truth, there will be counterfeits of the truth. Our task as people of discernment is to separate what is truth from what is error. It is to ensure that we think of God and believe in God in ways that are consistent with how he has revealed himself to us in the Bible. Our confidence is not in ourselves, but that God has made his truth clear to us. We have confidence that God is capable of communicating to us in a way that we will be able to understand.

You will also want to visit www.challies.com.

“What’s troubling about so many of the boys I see in my practice, or the boys I hear about from parents and teachers, is that they don’t have much passion for any real-world activity,” writes Leonard Sax, a family physician and author. Sax is also a researcher who is very concerned about the way that boys are falling behind in school and in so many other arenas of life.

In Boys Adrift, Sax identifies five factors he believes are contributing to this problem. After offering a chilling description of the problem, he moves to argue that these factors include changes in the educational system (many almost appear to be calculated to cause a disinterest in learning among boys), video games (encouraging boys to disengage from the real world), medications for ADHD (blame a syndrome and give the boy a stimulant), endocrine disruptors (leading to a shortfall of testosterone in boys), and a lack of good male role models in the culture (leading to a devaluation of masculinity).

All this adds up to a “failure to launch” among many boys. Sax offers some hard words of analysis here. He argues that, in the past, boys eventually decided to grow up and become men because they wanted money and sex — and would have to earn their way to both through hard work and adult responsibility. Now, the larger culture (and many parents) allow boys access to both without the expense of growing up. So . . . why grow up?

Christian readers — especially parents and those who work with youth — will bring additional concerns and ideas to Dr. Sax’s proposals. Nevertheless, Boys Adrift is now essential reading for those concerned about our boys.