The moment I began to read Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux, I knew that something very special was happening; an epiphany if you like.  Heather King does not pull any punches or hide her own sins.  In fact, she hangs them out for all to see and then places them in the context of her relationship to God.  There is a bravery in this act that most writers would never dream of attempting.

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D. Mark Davis’ Left Behind and Loving It is a witty contribution to the conversation the church should be having about eschatology. The book makes some excellent points, but for a book about our [mis]understandings of the “end times”, it is surprisingly light in its treatment of the biblical text of Revelation.

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Good, Dirty Fun

The Dirty Life:

A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love

Kristin Kimball

Paperback: Scribner, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Tyler Eckel

Like clean living? Read The Dirty Life. It begins with the author, having reached the plateau of her career as a travel scribe kid at the age of 30, handling and reveling in the intense culture of New York and cocktail parties the world over. She was wondering whether this had become her life forever, whether there was more to it than keeping ahead of the game of the machinery of the city, whether her relationships would continue being the humdrum exchange of one eccentric for another. Then, on a writing assignment about young organic farmers, she met the most eccentric of the eccentrics she’d met, her now-husband Mark. Tall, strong as an ox (or a farmer), and with inexhaustible energy, she knew instantly and instinctually he was a man who could provide for her needs come hell or high water. After a whirlwind courtship they were engaged and the two set off to start their own farm.

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A Jewish Engagement with Christian Postliberalism

There was a time in the 1960s and 70s when it seemed that the Barthian impact on theology was beginning to wane.  Liberation theologies and even a resurgent liberal impulse dominated many mainline seminaries.  A resurgent political evangelicalism captivated the right.  In the midst of this, Yale was producing a new group of scholars, influenced by Barth and the ecumenical movements.  Hans Frei and David Lindbeck were the leading edge of this wave soon dubbed postliberalism.  A similar movement was burgeoning on the other side of the Atlantic at Cambridge.

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Zombie fiction has been experiencing something of a, ahem, rebirth in the last few years… if it was ever really dead at all.  From the monster movies of the 50’s to the Sam Raimi classic of 1981, Evil Dead, to the Woody Harrelson film Zombieland to the recent bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the latest runaway AMC TV show The Walking Dead there is just something about zombies that seems to resonate in our blood.

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John and Charles Wesley left a spiritual legacy that has touched every facet of Christianity.  Even those traditions that are non-Wesleyan have been affected by the fervor and warmth of the Wesleyan revivals in the eighteenth century and in the revivalists who followed in the Wesley’s footsteps.

Paul Wesley Chilcote, a professor of theology and Wesleyan studies at Ashland Theological Seminary, has given the interested reader a moving and helpful introduction to the sermons, hymns, and theological writings of these two brothers.  He begins with a brief but thorough sketch of the lives and influence of the Wesleys.  They grew up in an Anglican pastor’s home and never really cut their ties to the Anglican Church.  It was only after their deaths that what became known as Methodism moved away (or was pushed away) from the Church of England.

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To many Christians today the lack of unity among Christ’s followers scandalizes the church, but for many disciples of Jesus the depth of poverty across the globe and around the corner is equally scandalous.  It is quite natural that both realities give offense to Jesus’s followers as Paul’s lament in 1 Corinthians (“Is Christ divided?”) is later matched by his collection for the poor and his horror at people going hungry at the Lord’s Table while others feasted.  In Ecumenical Babel, a young Reformed scholar who edits the Journal of Markets and Morality for the free-market oriented Acton Institute, Jordan Ballor, looks at the ecumenical movement and shares the scandal of the division in the body of Christ, but disappointingly he seems as caught up in economic ideology as those he blasts with criticism.  While today’s ecumenical movement is undoubtedly sickly and I had guarded hopes when Ballor took Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s passionate confessional ecumenism as a point of departure, unfortunately Ballor cannot rise above a screed against his assessment of “neo-Marxism” and liberation theology with his equally ideological and baldly asserted free-market neo-liberalism (xvi, 4, 105).

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Well, here we are in 2012, another new year and another presidential election year.  The television and internet news media are already buzzing constantly about the run-up to the November elections. But with all this buzz, how often do we think about how or why we vote, or even – GASP! – if we should be voting at all.  Enter Jason Brennan’s recent book The Ethics of Voting.

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I love retellings of biblical stories, whether they be a fresh retelling of the actual story such as David Maine’s The Preservationist (about Noah) or reinventions like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  So I was excited when I received Cain by the Nobel winning Portuguese author Saramago.  Here was one of the world’s best writing about one of the world’s worst.  My excitement seemed warranted.

I was less excited than I was confused by the time I finished reading it,though.

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I’m a pastor at an evangelical church just 4 miles from Washington, DC. The majority of our people work for the federal government in one way or another. We never speak about politics from the pulpit, for two reasons. First—and most importantly—the purpose of preaching is to exhibit Christ, not talk policy. Second, we want both Republicans and Democrats to feel at home in our church.

Left, Right and Christ by Lisa Sharon Harper and D.C. Innes is a welcome book because it addresses that second point. Something is wrong if we don’t have an evangelical church in America where both Republicans and Democrats are represented. For that to happen, we have to be able to discuss political issues with grace-filled hearts and scripture-filled minds.

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