We are offering a completely free eBook version of ERB editor Chris Smith’s new book, Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities: 50 Ideas For Connection in a Disconnected Age!  This book aims to offer practical solutions that by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit may help move us away from the disconnectedness that often overshadows our lives, as churches and individuals.

We’d love any help you can give in spreading the word about this new ebook – online, but especially with others in your churches.  You can use the Facebook/Twitter links to the left, or the “Share This” button at the bottom of this post!  Thanks!

A brief preview is included below, but you will have to click this button to download the full eBook (PDF format – 10MB):

[ As a PDF, this eBook should be readable on your Kindle.  We'd love for anyone to leave a comment noting whether it works on their Kindle!]

Growing Deeper In Our Church Communities – Chris Smith

“God: Initiating and Sustaining Conversation“

A Review of
An Unsettling God:
The Heart of the Hebrew Bible.
by Walter Brueggemann.

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

[ Read an excerpt of this book here ]

An Unsettling God:
The Heart of the Hebrew Bible.
Walter Brueggemann.
Paperback: Fortress Press,  2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Walter Brueggemann’s An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible describes first of all a God-in-relation, YHWH understood as he is in dialogue, most especially with Israel, but also with human persons, the nations, and all of creation. Locating God’s primary identity not in unilateral commands or creeds, but rather as an engaged dialectical partner, Brueggemann identifies God’s covenanting act as one in which he is an “available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon” (9).  Indeed, the agency of Yahweh is seen to be inviting a reciprocal act of participation and conversation from the dialogical partners, suggesting that the response of Yahweh’s chosen people – in attentiveness and discernment – extends the possibilities in the work of reconciliation.

Israel’s identity then, as a people, is also best understood as it is in relation: “If we are to identify what is most characteristic and most distinctive in the life and vocation of this partner of YHWH [Israel], it is the remarkable equation of love of God with love of neighbor, which is enacted through the exercise of distributive justice of social goods, social power, and social access to those without leverage” (29). The demands of justice and holiness are fulfilled within the gathered community of Israel, as they are in relation themselves and with Yahweh. God, as characteristically in relation, places Israel, and consequently all of creation, into a dynamic role in the narrative of God-in-history. In fact, God’s dialogue partners are “invited, expected, and insistently urged to engage in a genuine interaction that is variously self-asserting and self-abandoning, yielding and initiative-taking,” (65) all of which may be characteristics of any good conversation, but when extended to Yahweh as a partner, it becomes the narrative by which God is known as embodied on earth.

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“The Heart of Our Faith Traditions“

A Review of
It’s Really All About God:
Reflections of A Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.
by Samir Selmanovic.

Reviewed by Bob Cornwall.

This review originally appeared on Bob’s blog:
http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/
It is reprinted here with the reviewer’s permission.

[ Read an excerpt of this book here. ]

It’s Really All About God:
Reflections of A Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.
Samir Selmanovic.
Hardback: Jossey Bass,  2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Being a long time participant in interfaith dialog, I know the difficulty of maintaining one’s religious identity while at the same time engaging the beliefs and practices of others with an open heart and mind.  There is a fine line that one must walk.  How does one remain true to one’s faith while at the same time honoring, respecting, and learning from the faith of another?  If we struggle with this question, consider the situation of a person such as Samir Selmanovic, a Croatian Seventh Day Adventist pastor who grew up the child of a nonobservant Muslim Father and a nonobservant Catholic mother in an essentially atheist country.  It’s Really All About God is a spiritual memoir that explores a journey that has taken a person from no faith to an exclusivist evangelicalism and on to an openness to receive blessings from a variety of religious traditions, including significant encounters with both the Islamic and Jewish faiths, while remaining true to one’s Christian faith.

While  It’s Really About God is a spiritual memoir,  it is more – it is a resounding call for people of many faiths – and even no faith — to recognize that our conversation about matters of life and faith must begin with an affirmation of our common humanity.     Whatever we may profess, at the very basic level of human existence, we share the same planet and must acknowledge that common humanity in the other.  The fact that such a book as this, one that affirms the presence of God in and every human being, is written by one who would claim to be an evangelical is all the more remarkable.  Indeed, that the book is written by a pastor from a tradition that is considered sectarian in nature is even more surprising.

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A Brief Review of

Introverts in the Church:
Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture.
Adam McHugh.
Paperback: IVP Books, 2009.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Adam McHugh has tackled a little considered question in his new book Introverts in the Church: how can introverts exist in church cultures where they are often marginalized?  As an introvert myself, albeit one feels a deep need to live life in community, I was intrigued by the idea of McHugh’s book.    Introverts in the Church is a powerful reminder of the diversity of personalities with which God has gifted us.  McHugh, an introvert himself, longs for the healing of introverts from the scars of being marginalized in church cultures that tend to favor extroverts.  One of the book’s finest chapters is McHugh’s examination of how the church tends toward extroversion, and even in some cases Christian thinkers have painted introversion as a sin (One that he quotes says: “The extrovert God of John 3:16 does not beget an introvert people.  There is a terrible tendency to make the gospel serve us, to use it as a protection against the realities of life as though Christ died to preserve the status quo” 29).  McHugh – although he clearly recognizes community as a “given” – is frank about his own struggles with community, struggles that I imagine many of us introverts have faced.   He offers much valuable advice grounded in his own experiences about how introverts can become more connected in their church communities, and also names specific areas that will be of challenge to introverts. The latter half of the book focuses on introverts in church leadership and McHugh makes a strong case that introverts offer a balanced perspective on faithfulness in the way of Jesus that is needed in many church communities.  This is an excellent book that is destined to be the primary work on introversion in the church for many years to come.  McHugh concludes this book with this well-crafted piece of wisdom that should be taken to heart by all in the church, and especially those of us who are introverts:

In order to find our place in the church we must make two movements.  We go into the desert, into the depths and riches of solitude, to listen for the whispers of God who created us as introverts and to discover the gifts we have been given.  Through Christ we die to false identities and put away inauthentic behaviors.  We honor the rhythms and practice the disciplines that give us life, energy and joy.  …   The inward movement is not the end of the journey, though we will come back to it again and again.  The other movement is toward others, toward community.  We are not ultimately called to a life of self-fulfillment and comfort but to a life of love.  We seek to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, knowing that genuine love comes out of who we are in Christ.  We are to pass on the gifts we have been given.  Sometimes we will use our words and other times we will model prayerful silence, reflective rest and compassionate listening.  As we make this movement into community, we will find that it’s not merely about us finding a place for ourselves, but it’s about God showing us where we belong and the gifts we are to others.

Here is an excerpt from a wonderful book that somehow slipped past us last year without a review:

Everyday Justice:
The Global Impact of our Daily Choices.
Julie Clawson.
Paperback: IVP Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“The Times are Nightfall”
Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one–
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal . . .

Powells Books Reviews
Joel Brouwer’s new book of poetry AND SO

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities,” wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up-to-date — meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past — a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else. But since the poet cares most about making a poem (”an emotionally disturbing structure made of words” — X.J. Kennedy), and since words are his medium, he feels the pinch, caught between the language of living a decent life (”please pass the salt” or “wanna go to the movies?”) and the explanations of that life by news anchors and expert witnesses. The saltshaker is almost always too heavy an object to lift into the imagination, and the Sunday supplement stains both the palm and the mind with a toxic petroleum derivative. So the poet cultivates both an aversion to power asserted through language and an urge to wield that power more tellingly. We have spent the past hundred years thrashing the underbrush to drive our motives into the open, but what did we gain? And so, we come to Joel Brouwer’s And So, his third book.

Brouwer’s materials are situational. His scenarios are described as if at the very moment they become visible, before any conclusions may be drawn — but the characters within them seem to have been living in this condition for hours, days, or longer. Although the poems’ microplots entail social situations, they cancel or disregard the potential for shared values or acts that may be performed together to create a third way.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

AND SO: POEMS.
Joel Brouwer.
Paperback: Four Way Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

In one of the chapters in Zachary Mason’s dazzling debut novel, Odysseus — the wily warrior and canny voyager from Homer’s epic poem — emerges as the creator of his own legend. He’s a war-weary soldier who leaves the battlefield and finds refuge outside Troy, posing as an itinerant bard, a poet who begins by singing the classics and later takes “to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many.”

“It was when I was a guest in Tyre,” Mr. Mason’s Odysseus goes on, “that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero. What good is the truth when those who were there are dead or scattered? I took to rearranging the events of Troy’s downfall, eliding my betrayals and the woman-killing, and making a good tale of it.”
…

In “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” Mr. Mason — who is identified on the book jacket as a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, as well as a finalist for the 2009 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, given to writers under 35 — has written a series of jazzy, post-modernist variations on “The Odyssey,” and in doing so he’s created an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY: A Novel.
Zachary Mason.
Hardback. FSG, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Excerpt from one of our 2009 Englewood Honor Books:

Shop Class as Soulcraft.
Matthew Crawford.
Hardback: The Penguin Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Read our review of this book that was written by Debra Dean Murphy.

Excerpt from the brand new book:

An Unsettling God:
The Heart of the Hebrew Bible.
Walter Brueggemann.
Paperback: Fortress Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

This book was near the top of our list for best theology books of 2009!
Watch for a review coming later this week in the ERB!

“Spiritual Canticle”
(Stanzas XXIV-XL)
St. John of the Cross
(1542-1591)

XXIV
THE BRIDE
Our bed is of flowers
By dens of lions encompassed,
Hung with purple,
Made in peace,
And crowned with a thousand shields of gold.

XXV
In Your footsteps
The young ones run Your way;
At the touch of the fire
And by the spiced wine,
The divine balsam flows.

XXVI
In the inner cellar
Of my Beloved have I drunk; and when I went forth
Over all the plain
I knew nothing,
And lost the flock I followed before.

XXVII
There He gave me His breasts,
There He taught me the science full of sweetness.
And there I gave to Him
Myself without reserve;
There I promised to be His bride.

XXVIII
My soul is occupied,
And all my substance in His service;
Now I guard no flock,
Nor have I any other employment:
My sole occupation is love.

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