Review: One Life

Author: Scot McKnight

Title: One Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

Description: McKnight claims that the church has traditionally emphasized the wrong elements of the Christian life, thus giving a mistaken impression of what it means to follow Jesus.   

Source: This was the freshman One Read at Southeastern University this year. I started the book along with them but took a little longer to finish it.

Writing style: McKnight is a professor at a Christian school, and that’s his voice here; the book sounds very much as though it is written to students, and examples from his relationships with various students are sprinkled throughout the book. The author continually refers to One.life, and the period there really started to get on my nerves as he referred to kingdom.life, sex.life, etc. etc. What exactly does that period mean and why is it there? Maybe you have to be under 30 to get it…

Audience: Young Christians.

Major ideas: Following Jesus might not be exactly what your church has told you.  The main distinction is McKnight’s de-emphasis of personal acts of piety and stress on bringing the kingdom of God to earth by increasing peace and justice. 

Wrap-up: This idea isn't knew, but McKnight conveys it in an engaging way. 3.5/5*

Book Review: Still

Author: Lauren Winner  

Title: Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

Description: I’ve followed Lauren Winner for at least eight years now, first in her account of her conversion, Girl Meets God, through her struggle with remaining chaste as a single Christian and as she gradually got to know the man she would eventually marry in Real Sex. So I was sad to see that this book is a result of her divorce, five years later. Not quite a memoir, the book is composed of the short essays that Lauren does so well.

Writing style: The best word to describe it is “spare.” Lauren writes that she tries to leave spaces in her writing as a result of her reading poetry, and I would say that is a pretty good way to describe the book. The essays range from about a half a page to several pages in length—not as long as in Girl Meets God.

Audience: Readers of spiritual memoir; those struggling with their faith after a difficult time, especially divorce.

Major ideas: Lauren’s divorce and the death of her mother precipitate a crisis of faith. The book is divided into three sections, tracing the feelings of God’s absence and the very gradual return of something that could be normalcy and renewed relationship with God.

Wrap-up: Lauren Winner remains one of my very favorite authors, and I couldn’t read this book without feeling sad for her in a very personal way. Her meditations on faith—or here, sometimes, the lack of it—are always insightful and memorable. The joy of Girl Meets God is absent here, but I hope she’ll return to it in time. 5/5*

Book Review: Words Made Fresh

Author: Larry Woiwode

Title: Words Made Flesh: Essays on Literature & Culture

Description: Larry Woiwode, the poet laureate of North Dakota, presents ten republished essays on Christianity, literature, and culture featuring John Updike, William Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and John Gardner.

ARC source: Library Thing Early Reviewers

Writing style: I enjoyed Woiwode’s conversational style and his unabashed defense of Christian belief as his standard. The conversation often strayed, however, and the essay ended up discussing something very different than the title subject. For example, an essay entitled “Views of Wendell Berry” ends by discussing Berry’s various publishers.  

Audience: People concerned with literature, culture, and faith. Many of the essays were earlier published in Books & Culture.

Major ideas: Unlike most writers on this topic, Woiwode is quite conservative, which comes out in his essays on guns and his views on CNN (curiously, Fox News is not mentioned). His writing centers around the Christian faith, its treatment by various writers and its preservation in contemporary culture.

Wrap-up: I wasn’t familiar with some of the writers featured in the essays (i.e. Reynolds Price), so those essays were less helpful. The best essays were those that featured Woiwode himself (on guns, home, and Bob Dylan). His essays on other writers were not as good, although this may be partially because I am used to reading academics, not writers, writing about literature. (A sad and somewhat ironic comment). The essays varied in terms of level of interest and level of writing. 3.5/5*

Book Review: Digital Disciple

Author: Adam Thomas

Title: Digital Disciple: Real Christianity in a Virtual World

Description (source):  We connect with people everyday around the world through websites, blogs, and a myriad of social networks. But do we really connect while we're isolated in the Internet bubble? In Digital Disciple, millennial, blogger, and Episcopal priest Adam Thomas explores this contradiction between connection and isolation through the perspective of one who's always known a world with the Internet. (publisher’s info)

Review source: ARC provided by publisher through Netgalley

Major ideas: Adam Thomas writes from the perspective of a digital native wondering what effect the internet (and related technologies) will have on his relationship with God. Mostly, Thomas sees a pretty bleak picture of separation, disembodiment, lack of mindfulness, and even addiction as he reflects on Tech (as he terms it) and the changes it has made in society. The solutions he offers, then, are for the most part suggestions about how to live without the internet.

Writing style: As I was reading, I was trying to figure out the audience for this book. Thomas includes definitions of really basic tech terms throughout (i.e. “google,” “facebook”); these make you think that the book might be geared for someone who knows nothing at all about the internet. But really, who is left in our society who doesn’t know what Google and Facebook are? There are a lot of books being written right now that deal with these ideas from a secular viewpoint (Lessig, Shirky, etc.); Thomas did not seem to have engaged with these authors much if at all. His few references were to the standard Christian authors like C.S. Lewis.

Take-aways: Because of my confusion about his audience (or perhaps because I was not his audience), I sometimes found myself frustrated that Thomas did not really grapple with some of the issues that he raises. In other words, I found the questions raised in the book to be pertinent and thought-provoking; the suggested solutions much less so. My take-aways from the book will be the questions: What might it mean to “do church” online? How will the internet change society, the church, and the individual believer? Does the disembodied self of the avatar deny the incarnation?

Wrap-up: I would recommend this book for the layperson who wonders about the difference between Millennial and non-Millennial believers, or about the ramifications of technology upon faith. I would not recommend the book for anyone doing scholarly work. 3/5*