Since I ran my review of FIRST CHRISTMAS earlier this week, I’ve had a few people ask to see the list of books our family has.  So, here it is — with the caveats that there are many excellent Christmas books that are not included here (we tend to pick up books for this collection when we can get them used or cheap…) and that our kids are young (5 and under) so this lists tends to skew to that age range.

This would be an excellent opportunity for you to use the comments to tell us YOUR favorite Advent book(s).

(more…)

The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week. In this section we feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week. Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.

(Thomas) MERTON: A BIOGRAPHY.
Monica Furlong.
Hardcover: Harper and Row, 1980.
Good Condition.  Binding tight, Clean Pages, X-library copy. Minimal Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]

THE WORDS OF GANDHI.
Selected by Richard Attenborough.
Hardcover: New Market Press, 1982.
Very Good Condition.  Binding tight, Clean Pages. Minimal Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]

A HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA.
George Pendle.
Paperback: Pelican, 1986 printing.
Very Good Condition.  Solid Binding, Pages clean, Minimal Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $4 ]

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

G.K. Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,

  His hair was like a light.

(O weary, weary were the world,

  But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,

  His hair was like a star.

(O stern and cunning are the kings,

  But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,

  His hair was like a fire.

(O weary, weary is the world,

  But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,

  His hair was like a crown,

And all the flowers looked up at him.

  And all the stars looked down.

Time may well prove that John Cacioppo and William Patrick’s new book LONELINESS: HUMAN NATURE AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL CONNECTION is the most important book of 2008.  I regret only that I heard it about it so late that I didn’t get to spend the time that I would have liked with it.  LONELINESS is based on Cacioppo’s psychological research on the health effects of loneliness, and offers scientific confirmation for the intuitions that many of us have had about the dangers of individualism and isolation.  The book’s dustjacket highlights well the radical potential in this book: “Ultimately, LONELINESS demonstrates the irrationality of our culture’s intense focus on competition and individualism at the expense of family and community.  It makes the case that the unit of one is actually an inadequate measure, even when it comes to the health and well-being of an individual.”  (If anyone wants to immerse themselves in this book and write a feature-length review, I would be glad to consider it for publication.)

Although now eclipsed by economic issues, immigration has been one of the most pressing political issues of 2008 in the U.S.  Daniel Carroll R.’s CHRISTIANS AT THE BORDERS: IMMIGRATION, THE CHURCH AND THE BIBLE is one of (if not) the best resources for helping the Church to think theologically — and to do so in distinctively Christian ways — about immigration.  CHRISTIANS AT THE BORDERS is refreshing in that it does not explicitly endorse any specific political action, but rather provides a wonder historical context in which to understand immigration from Latin America, and then surveys the Scriptures to seek the light that they might shed on immigration issues.  I would love to see other books of this sort emerge that help the Church to engage faithfully the complex socio-politcal issues of our day.

After we reviewed, his lovely little book on Sr. Thea Bowman, Br. Mickey McGrath sent us a copy of his new children’s book Mysteries of the Rosary.   This book is a beautiful introduction — educational for Christians of all traditions — to the “mysteries” (i.e., stories from the life of Jesus) that underlie the praying of the rosary.  These mysteries are divided into four groups that trace the story of Christ’s life (The joyful mysteries= Christ’s advent, The luminous mysteries= Christ’s earthly ministry, the sorrowful mysteries= Christ’s arrest and crucifixion and the glorious mysteries=Christ’s resurrection)  McGrath’s vibrant, colorful paintings represent Christ with people of a different culture for each group of mysteries, which is a welcome reminder of the pertinence of the Gospel stories for all of humanity.

LONELINESS:
John Cacioppo and William Patrick.
Hardcover: Norton, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ]  [ Amazon ]

CHRISTIANS AT THE BORDER.
M. Daniel Carroll R.
Paperback: Baker Academic, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $14 ]  [ Amazon ]

MYSTERIES OF THE ROSARY.
Michael O’Neill McGrath.
Hardcover: World Library Publications, 2008.

THE NY TIMES review of
THE LOST ART OF WALKING
by Geoff Nicholson

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/books/review/Max-t.html

If golf is a good walk spoiled, then walking is a great game made dull. How sluggish locomotion is, compared with the speed at which the mind absorbs new images and information. The brain strains at the body’s tether, seethes for new scenery, new stimulation, bridles at the slow feet below. Look at that tree with such lovely orange leaves, how pretty it is. . . . A minute later: the same tree, the same leaves, still good looking. Walking is adding with an abacus, it’s space travel on a donkey.

All the same, many people do it, and clearly Geoff Nicholson, the British author of “The Lost Art of Walking,” is among them. “I’ve strolled and wandered, pottered and tottered, dawdled and shuffled, mooched and sauntered and meandered,” he brags at the beginning of this pleasant tour of the literature and lore of ambulation. “I’ve certainly ambled and I could be said to have rambled. . . . I’ve also shambled, but I don’t think I’ve ever gamboled.”

It turns out that the highly prolific Nicholson also composes novels on his feet. It’s how he keeps his productivity up. He solves plot twists and problems of characterization as he walks.
…

Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/books/review/Max-t.html

THE LOST ART OF WALKING
Geoff Nicholson
Hardcover: Riverhead Books, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

Ann Vileisis explores changes in American eating habits over more than two hundred years, and in doing so, reveals how the most basic human connection with nature-as a source of sustenance-became attenuated and indifferent, leaving consumers mentally disengaged from the world around them.

Vileisis begins her story with a return to Martha Ballard’s famous diary, reminding us that prior to the late nineteenth century, most Americans possessed intimate knowledge of the foodsheds from which their meals were drawn. To some extent, Vileisis challenges historiography that focuses on the disruptive force of agriculture, by arguing that despite its usurpations, pre-agribusiness farming provided humans with personal connections to the ecosystems in which they lived. “Yet at the same time farming changes and disrupts, it relies and rests upon nature’s rhythms” (p. 17).

Industrialization and urbanization soon lengthened the food chain and left consumers increasingly uneducated about the origins of their repasts. Factory-made foods filled daily menus, although consumers initially met them with strong resistance. The greatest strength of this book is found in those chapters that examine the five-decade campaign to elevate the supposed wisdom of government, university, and corporate experts on the nature of home economy. Vileisis highlights the inherent gender bias of this campaign which told women that the traditional kitchen knowledge inherited from their mothers and grandmothers had limited value.

…

Read the full review:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3854/is_200807/ai_n28083346

KITCHEN LITERACY
Ann Vileisis
Hardcover: Island Press, 2007.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $22 ] [ Amazon ]

Even the advent of a growing scientific basis for medical practice — which we can most accurately date from the middle third of the nineteenth century — has not lessened by an iota the degree to which medical authority has traditionally depended primarily on a well-recognized code of morality. As that authority has been in a state of decline for the past several decades, countless commentators have sought to identify the most significant of the congeries of reasons for which the steady downward slope continues. Has the profession sold its soul to science?

In a thought-provoking dissertation, Jonathan Imber seeks to convince his readers that, at least in America, medical morality — and, consequently, faith in doctors — can be traced to the righteous influence on the profession of Protestant and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Catholic clergy during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. He believes that the waning of this influence and the parallel rise of medical technology are to be indicted as having created the situation most directly leading to the loss of doctors’ authority. I would argue to the contrary: that it was always the physician’s morality, more than his technical competence, that provided the basis for his authority during the many centuries before scientific medicine began to bring the full fruits of its discoveries to ever larger numbers of patients. Moreover, that morality originated in religious principles long preceding Christianity — to a large extent, those derived from the ancient Mosaic code.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_11_27.html

TRUSTING DOCTORS.
Jonathan Imber.
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2008.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

David Fitch (author of The Great Giveaway)

is coordinating an event in Ft. Wayne, IN

on Saturday January 3, 2009

SEEDING MISSIONAL COMMUNITIES:
A LEARNING COMMONS

Last year, we did this missional conference that is a non-conference kind of thing. We gathered, had very short presentations, nobody paid, some people brought food to share, and we talked all things missional. It was encouraging and informative. I think we can do it even better this year.

So… I am calling for another meeting of the “Seeding Missional Communities Learning Commons.” This year we’ ll meet in Fort Wayne Indiana on Saturday Jan 3rd. We will meet be at the place Ben Sternke’s community gathers in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We’ll gather and discuss an array of issues including a.) the merits of missional orders as a community-forming missional/evangelistic discipline, b.) the Sunday gathering as missional, and c.) the need for a missional evangelistic tool to nurture new conversions in our communities (read about that here). Now there is very little organization being done for this. We’ll gather, have different presenters and open discussion, and some time for decompression. THERE WILL BE NO CHARGE. No one will be selling books. We’re just getting together to encourage and commiserate for the gospel.

Read the full description from David’s blog:
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/2008/12/announcing-missional-nonconference.html

There is also a Facebook invite:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507258918#/event.php?eid=39687688561

A Brief Review of First Christmas
by Alastair Macdonald

Review by Chris Smith

A couple of years ago, our family decided to start collecting Christmas books for our kids with the goal of assembling 24 of the best Christmas books that we could read one-a-day, as a sort of literary Advent calendar. Thus, I was very excited when I was sent a review copy of the beautiful new book First Christmas, by Alastair Macdonald and illustrated by Adel Nassief.

First Christmas offers a fresh, new telling of the nativity story, narrated by Zeke the donkey, who brought the holy family from “the Nazareth hills to the Bethlehem rocks” (25) and stayed with them in the stable throughout the night that Jesus was born. The story is summed up nicely in the final lines of the book:

A baby looks up 

from the manger stall

At me, Zeke the donkey,

how well I recall!

‘Twas a night to remember,

I’ll never forget

When Jesus, the Christ Child,

and I first met. (44)

As I was preparing to write this review, I took this book over to our church’s school and read it to two classes – one pre-school, one kindergarten. Both classes were enthralled by the book and its story told in a gleeful rhyme scheme (“anapestic tetrameter,” according to the promotional materials, the same used in many of the works of Dr. Seuss). Their favorite part, however, was the vibrantly colored illustrations. These illustrations, done by Adel Nassief in the traditional style of Coptic Icons, capture both the earthiness and the holiness of the events surrounding Christ’s birth. This book has an excellent appendix that describes the making of these illustrations, which would be wonderful to read and discuss with older children. These paintings are more than illustrations for a children’s book, they are icons, contemplatively painted to draw us into worship of the God whose son we celebrate at Christmas.

The story of First Christmas is a familiar one, but it is strikingly fresh in its use of Zeke as a narrator and especially because it tells the nativity story within a broader context than most nativity books for children – including, for instance, the prophet Isaiah’s foretelling of Christ’s birth and the angelic announcement of the Christ child to both Mary and Joseph. Macdonald’s spinning of this tale also does an excellent job of highlighting the emotions that underlie the nativity story: Joseph’s initial anger at finding out that Mary was pregnant, Mary’s anxiety at having to tell Joseph of her pregnancy, the couple’s nervous joking about finding refuge in a shelter, etc.

From cover to cover, First Christmas is an elegant presentation of the nativity story, one that you will want to make a part of your own Christmas traditions!

See a reading of the story here:

First Christmas.

Alastair Macdonald.
Illustrated by Adel Nassief.

Hardcover: Welcome Books, 2008.

Buy now from [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon]

Text and images from First Christmas, by Alastair Macdonald, with illustrations by Adel Nassief.   Welcome Books. Text and illustrations © 2008 Zeke Holdings, Ltd.

Books and Culture reviews a new biography of WEB Dubois.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/081215b.html

We make our heroes what we need them to be. For Edward Blum, what the world needs now is a religious W.E.B. Du Bois. Such a Du Bois would not only be a historical marker in the history of African American intellectual life, or an intriguing artifact of turn-of-the-century African American sociology, but also would offer a usable model for the religious liberal in the modern world. W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet provides more than an examination of the religious keywords within the massive corpus of Du Bois’ output. It proposes that a religious ontology for racial reconciliation might be gleaned from this survey.

Such a thesis stands strikingly against the historical consensus about Du Bois’ relationship to religion. As Blum explains, the critical view on Du Bois is that “he had little, if any” religion. To be sure (scholarship concedes), Du Bois was shaped by his boyhood church, and as an African American man he could hardly escape the institutional dominance of Protestantism. But he never attended church regularly, nor acknowledged any private practices. Moreover, Du Bois displayed open discomfort with religious expression and performance. “It frightened me at first,” Du Bois wrote of the worship practices of rural Tennessee adherents. “I thought they were going crazy.” Such evidence, coupled with a lifetime commitment to social scientific criticisms of religion, led the major biographers of Du Bois to conclude that he was an ardent observer of religious life. Religion for him, so we’ve been assured, was emphatically not a site of personal exploration or social revelation

Yet this received account collapses under the weight of counter-evidence discovered by Blum. …

Read the full review:

     http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/081215b.html

W.E.B. DuBois, American Prophet.
Edward Blum.
Hardcover: Univ. of PA Press, 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $30 ] [ Amazon ]

“Traitors to White Modernity?”

A Review of
Race:
A Theological Account.
by
J. Kameron Carter.

By Chris Smith.

Race: A Theological Account.
J. Kameron Carter.
Hardcover: Oxford UP, 2008.
Buy now from:  [ Amazon ]

Every year, the Advent season in the Church’s calendar offers us an excellent opportunity to reflect anew upon the incarnation.  As we celebrate the coming of the baby Jesus, we should pause to consider the meaning of his identity as a Jew born in a certain time and place, etc.  And if you enjoy the challenge of intricately-reasoned theological volume, J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account might be for you, as it provides precisely this sort of radical reflection upon the incarnation.  It is difficult to write a review of RACE, for on the one hand, it is intensely grueling its rigor (I spent about two months working through it and even then I felt like I was barely hanging on through every turn of his argument, let alone probing the depths of his historical, theological and literary research.); on the other hand, it warrants our attention as perhaps the most significant landmark theological treatise of 2008 and perhaps even of this decade.  Perhaps it would have been better to engage bit by bit on a blog (as David Horstkoetter has done here), but alas reviewing books is what we do here, so a review it will be.

                I, by no means, have the credentials to offer a legitimate critical assessment of Carters RACE, but allow me to at least offer you here a high-level trace of his primary arguments and then briefly make a case for why this book is well worth our efforts to read and reflect upon in our churches.

Give your friends a free subscription to The Englewood Review of Books this Christmas season, and both you and your friends will be entered to win free books!We’re giving away 25 books, with the top prize valued at over $100!

Enter now:
http://www.englewoodreview.org/?page_id=139

Full details are available on the above link…
(Contest ends at Noon on Dec 31, 2008)