After four years of get our bearings as a publication, the time seems ripe to re-engage with our readers, and get to know them a little better. So, over the next several weeks, we’ll be asking some questions to learn more about the reading habits of those who read either the online edition or the print edition of the ERB… or both.

We’d appreciate if you would share your thoughts in the comments below and they will be helpful to us in shaping our content in the future.

Thanks to those who answered last week’s question: Do you read “Christian Fiction”?
[ CLICK HERE to read the answers...
AND it's also not too late to answer this question!]

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What are you reading now ?

What is the most recent book you have finished?
In twelve words or less, tell us whether you would recommend it or not and why?

Schoolchildren
W.H. Auden

From

The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Paperback: Vintage, 1991
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

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“Did I Not Bring the Philistines from Caphtor?”

A Review of

Prophetic Encounters:

Religion and the American Radical Tradition

Dan McKannan.

Hardback: Beacon Press, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]

Reviewed By Jess O. Hale, Jr.

In a presidential election year in the United States, citizens and persons of faith find themselves bombarded with spin and media messages aimed at the contradictory purposes of appealing to the ideological poles of the major party bases and to the apparently shrinking political center.  In the midst of this partisan communication, persons of faith frequently find their only options to be either the Religious Right or the Secular Left.  The media storyline often assigns persons of faith to the Religious Right of James Dobson and the Family Research Council while the other pole is left to the secular, often godless, Left.  Into this environment Dan McKannan’s Prophetic Encounters usefully reminds us that the Left is not godless or secular, and indeed has a quite natural religious expression.

McKannan provides a needed correction to the common narrative of the left as secular.  For progressive evangelicals, Prophetic Encounters paints a picture of the Left that goes beyond their pride in Finneyite revivals, abolition and Sojourners to illustrate the diversity of a Left with pagan witches and Jews as well as Unitarians and mainline liberal Protestants who faithfully labored to change American society.  Perhaps this religious impulse is a moving of the Spirit.  If so, the message of radical religion extends broadly beyond the Christian tradition, though the Christian tradition is prominent among radicals, so that religion represents leaven to the radical tradition.

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Evangelical Development?

A Review of

Walking with the Poor:

Principles and Practices of
Transformational Development,
Revised and Expanded Edition
Bryant L. Myers
Paperback: Orbis, 2011.
Buy now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Josh Wallace

Bryan Myers’ Walking with the Poor finds a fault in me and, perhaps, in broader Evangelical Christianity. It is the fault where love for God and love for neighbor ought to connect but seem to miss one another ever so slightly. Walking with the Poor constructs its framework for global transformational development over this fault, laying its foundation deeply on both sides of love. The question remains, however, whether Walking with the Poor succeeds in building a stable and sustainable framework for development over this fault.

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An excerpt from Margot Starbuck’s new book

Small Things With Great Love:
Adventures in Loving Your Neighbor.

Paperback: IVP/Likewise, 2012.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]

Watch for Karen Beattie’s review of this book in our next print issue, which will be mailed next week.  Not a subscriber?  Click here to subscribe…

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[ And now for something all together different from our usual fare... ]

Hymns Grown
in the North Carolina Soil

Review of
Hymns From the Gathering Church

Listen to and download the album at

http://music.allgather.org/

Reviewed by John Jay Alvaro.

The renewal of hymnody in non-traditional churches is both exciting and disorienting. It seems like every week a new album of hymns is being released. Many of these albums filter the hymns through their local worship team. The latest offering from the Gathering Church is not that kind of hymns album.

This is an album of collisions. The musician line up is a who’s-who of local North Carolina artists. The songs themselves come from the worshipping community at the Gathering Church, an interdenominational church plant in Durham/Chapel Hill, who meets at a local elementary school. Many of the singers are not members of the church.

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Swirls in Ink.

A review of

Of Indigo and Saffron:

New and Selected Poems.

Michael McClure.

Buy now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed By J. Ted Voigt

So maybe you’re not a beatnik.  Maybe, like me, you were born about three decades too late for the Beat Generation.  Fortunately for us, Michael McClure was born in 1932, making him just shy of 23 years old when he read with Allen Ginsberg and others at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, in a sense, kicking off what is now known as the Beat Generation.  The poems McClure read on that night are collected in his newest book, Of Indigo and Saffron, along with many (many) others, comprising a mostly chronological survey of a career spanning over five decades of drugs, travel, peace and poetry.

(more…)

After four years of get our bearings as a publication, the time seems ripe to re-engage with our readers, and get to know them a little better.  So, over the next several weeks, we’ll be asking some questions to learn more about the reading habits of those who read either the online edition or the print edition of the ERB… or both. 

We’d appreciate if you would share your thoughts in the comments below and they will be helpful to us in shaping our content in the future.

We begin with the question:

Do you read “Christian Fiction” ?

(and yes, that’s a term whose meaning is much-disputed, but here I mean fiction that is published by a publisher that works primarily within the Christian market.)

If not, why not?

If so, what are a few of your favorite authors and why do you like their work?

[ You may have noticed that we don't review much Christian fiction -- as defined above -- in the ERB.  My experience has been that most of it is not edifying in any way to the life of discipleship that we are called to in Jesus.  There are a handful of exceptions, and I'm open to the possibility that 1) I might be wrong or 2) I might generally be right, but there may be exceptions to my rule with which I am not familiar.  So please help me out here... ]

Ever-Broadening Metaphors of Common Life

The Table Comes First:

Family, France and The Meaning of Food.

Adam Gopnik.

Hardback: Knopf, 2011.
Buy now:
[ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Sara Sterley

The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, Adam Gopnik’s newest book, is a fascinating and careful study of the role of the table, and, therefore, food, in modern life. Weaving in personal stories and favorite recipes, Gopnik takes the reader on an adventure beginning with the very first food “scene” in Paris and tracing its effects throughout the Western world.

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Sonnet 2
William Shakespeare