Excerpt from:

Buyology:
Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.
Martin Lindstrom.
Paperback: Broadway Books, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Newly released in paperback!!!

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom – Excerpt

Sustainablog Review of
Scott Sabin’s new book
Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.

http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

…

For the environmentalist who doesn’t ground his/her passion, advocacy, and work in faith, Tending to Eden is replete with stories of eco-effectiveness. Plant with Purpose serves rural communities in the developing world, and much of their work focuses on replenishing depleted resources that keep farmers from producing enough to feed their families and communities.

For Sabin and his organization, that often comes down to a focus on deforestation. Whether trees are cut by large, industrial-scale timber operations or by indigenous farmers clearing land for crops, or turning wood into charcoal, the results are the same: degraded soils and watersheds that make even subsistence farming nearly impossible. Various kinds of reforestation activities serve to provide food, expand economic opportunity, and allow local residents to take a longer view towards their own survival.

Read the full review:
http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

Tending to Eden:
Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.
Scott Sabin.
Paperback: Judson Press, 2010.
Buy now:  [  Amaz0n ]

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

…
The jobs that Gabriel Thompson writes about in Working in the Shadows: A Year Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do make even the worst jobs I’ve held seem like a month at the country club. Donning workingman’s clothes, Thompson tackles jobs that, frankly, I wouldn’t even consider before reaching a significant level of desperation. In the course of picking lettuce in the fields of Yuma, Arizona, and hauling chicken parts around a processing facility in Russellville, Alabama, (among other occupations) Thompson explores this segment of American labor like a latter-day E. P. Thompson, relating their lives and working conditions with a minimum of editorial intrusion.

Gabriel Thompson’s agenda is neither one of the white man’s burden or migrant worker agitprop. Rather, he simply takes these jobs and reveals to the reader their backbreaking and often mentally stultifying requirements, at times performed in harsh (but not inhuman) environments. After weeks of picking lettuce, Thompson hasn’t gotten that much better at the job nor gotten past the pain that bending over repeatedly in the hot sun creates as much as he has “[forgotten] what it’s like to not be sore.” While working in the frigid poultry plant, he aspires to be promoted to the de-boning department, which, while more toilsome and monotonous, is less physically demanding than hauling around buckets full of chicken remains.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

Working in the Shadows:
A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.
Gabriel Thompson.
Hardback: The Nation Books, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Patricia Ward’s meticulously researched history uncovers a surprisingly extensive vein of Protestant (usually, evangelical Protestant) engagement with the mystical piety of late 17th-century French Roman Catholics. An early leader of that engagement was John Wesley, who attended to the French mystics carefully on the question of assurance and who later excerpted works of Madame Jeanne Guyon and François Fénelon for the Christian Library he prepared so his Methodist itinerants could read while they rode. In the 19th century, appreciative readers included the Presbyterian minister William E. Boardman, the moral philosopher Thomas Upham, and the pioneering holiness preacher Phoebe Palmer. In the 20th century, A. W. Tozer included several poems of Madame Guyon in his anthology, The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, and Moody Press was one of several evangelical publishers who kept her works in print.

…
Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Experimental Theology in America:
Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and Their Readers.
Patricia A. Ward.
Hardback: Baylor University Press, 2009
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

A Review of

Worshiping With the Church Fathers.
Christopher Hall.
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

[ Read an excerpt of this book here... ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Worshiping with the Church Fathers is the third volume of Christopher Hall’s four volume work on the Church in its earliest centuries.  This new volume, looks specifically at the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, the practice of prayer and the spirituality of the desert fathers.  His objective is:

To present as clearly as possible the fathers’ understanding of what worship is and what it isn’t.  I have tried to allow them to speak for themselves, to present their case and then to encourage readers to make their own decisions as to the validity of the particular patristic viewpoints.

Hall does a fine job both of achieving his stated goal of letting the Church Fathers speak for themselves and of providing enough context through which the reader can understand the writings of the Fathers.  The book’s first two chapters explore the roles of baptism and the Eucharist respectively, with a particular emphasis on the sacramental (and material) nature of both practices.  Hall explains that the material nature of the sacraments is rooted in the incarnation of Christ:

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Doulos Christou Books, we are giving away two (gently) used books by Henri Nouwen.  Both are in great shape and have clean pages!

• The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (A perfect complement to the Christopher Hall book reviewed above).
• Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons.
  (Includes fold out flaps with color reproductions of 4 famous icons)

We will chose two lucky winners, the first will get his/her pick of these books.

How to enter to win this book:

1. Announce the contest on Twitter, Facebook or your blog: I just entered to win 1 of 2 Henri Nouwen books from The Englewood Review (@ERBks ).  You can enter too: http://ow.ly/1dqri
2. Post a comment to this announcement with your name and a link to your post for #1.
3. You may enter one time per day for the duration of the contest.
4. We will pick two winners at random from the eligible contestants and notify them this weekend.

The contest will end at 4PM ET on this Friday March 5.

Today is the birthday of the late author and illustrator Theodore Geisel (aka, Dr. Seuss).

Here are two articles on Dr. Seuss  from Mental Floss magazine with stories that offer a deeper look at his life and works:

• 10 stories about Dr. Seuss’s most beloved books
• 5 stories about Dr. Seuss himself.

And here is the movie of one of our favorite Dr. Seuss books, The Lorax:

Two excellent books that are being released in cheaper, paperback editions this week.  Now would be an excellent time to read them, if you haven’t already!

Acedia and Me:

A Marriage, Monks
and A Writer’s Life.
Kathleen Norris.
Paperback:
Riverhead,
March 2010.

Our 2008 Book of the Year!

[ Read our Review ]

[Buy the paperback! ]

Beyond Biotechnology:
The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering.
Craig Holdrege and Steve Talbott.
Paperback:

University Press of Kentucky. 2010.

[ Read our Review ]

[ Buy the paperback! ]

ERB editors Chris Smith and Brent Aldrich will be speaking at Calvin College next Monday with our friend Ragan Sutterfield:

Taking Pop Culture Back to the People:
The Church as a Catalyst of Local Culture
A Lecture in the Calvin College Pop Culture Series

3:30 PM Monday March 8, 2010
Meeter Center Lecture Hall
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, MI

Free and Open to the Public.

The effects of several centuries of individualism and several decades of globalization, have served to disconnect us from our neighbors and from the places in which we live. Brent Aldrich, Chris Smith and Ragan Sutterfield will make a case that churches, as communities of God’s people guided by the redemptive mission of God, are not only essential to the reclaiming of the identity of their specific places, but can also serve to nurture a distinctive local culture that is of the people (i.e., popular). Brent, Chris and Ragan will also share stories from our own adventures in embodying this vision of the Church – Ragan as a farmer, Brent as a visual artist and Chris as a community developer and urban naturalist.

Facebook invitation (Share it with a friend!):
http://ow.ly/1d2CZ

“Hearing the Stories of the Women of the Bible
in Their Own Contexts“

A Review of
Women in the World of the Earliest Christians:
Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life
by Lynn Cohick.

Reviewed by Chase Roden.

Women in the World of the Earliest Christians:
Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life.
Lynn Cohick.
Paperback: Baker, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBook.com ]

Think of the Samaritan woman at the well from John 4 — the one who has had five husbands and who is, at the time of meeting Jesus, living with a man who is not her husband.  What is your mental image of her?  If you’re like many Bible-readers, you may think of her as a “loose woman.”  Some interpreters have even called her an outcast in her community, forced to go to the well by herself because no reputable woman would want to be seen with her.  This characterization is dead wrong, argues Lynn Cohick in Women in the World of the Earliest Christians.

As any responsible Biblical interpreter knows, it is frighteningly easy to read our own culture and values into the Bible, even with extensive practice.  The best way to combat this eisegetical tendency is to learn the true historical background of scripture, and Cohick nobly takes on the task, focusing specifically on painting a picture of the everyday life of women in the time and setting of the early church.  In doing so, she reveals a world vastly different from what most modern readers will expect.

Although the voice of women in antiquity has often been hushed to the faintest whisper, Cohick presents a mix of original research and adept synthesis of current academic work on a wide-ranging variety of topics to dig deep into historical sources to uncover echoes of these women’s stories.  Her sources are wide-ranging and often clever; she works with not only the traditional mainstays of historians such as epigraphs, civic inscriptions, marriage contracts, and contemporary accounts, but also pays close attention to small details in surprising sources, often with great reward.  For instance, when examining Jewish marriage customs, Cohick examines the way that key terms are translated from the Hebrew Bible into Septuagint Greek; specifically, she notes that the Hebrew word mohar, for “bride price” (money or valuables paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s family) is translated into Septuagint Greek as pherne or “dowry.”  This detail could easily be passed over, but Cohick notes that it represents a major change of custom from the time and setting of the composition of the Hebrew sources to that of the Septuagint audience.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Crippled by Bureaucracy?“

A Review of
Doomed Edifice:
The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry And
The Spiritual Captivity of the Church
by P.W. Baker.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Doomed Edifice:
The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry And
The Spiritual Captivity of the Church
P.W. Baker.
Paperback: Wipf and Stock, 2010.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

The new book, Doomed Edifice: The Eclipse of the Prophetic Ministry and the Spiritual Captivity of the Church by P.W. Baker piqued my interest with its promise of reflection on early Church history from a viewpoint influenced by the late social critic  Ivan Illich (click here for a delightful introduction to Illich’s life and work).  Baker is primarily interested here with the institutionalization of the Church: “the fruit of the human attempt to remedy what is considered imperfect or vulnerable… Christians [thus] chose predictable order, rule and authority instead of the spontaneous, convivial and organic” (123).  The power structures of the Church therefore came to overshadow shadow what Baker refers to as the “prophetic ministry”, a role he traces back to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament era.  Prophecy, Baker notes was the role of providing divine guidance to the people of  God.  He emphasizes that prophecy was balanced by the crucial work of discernment, a responsibility he argues that rested squarely on the local church congregation as a  whole, and not on “any single individual or to any select group of spiritual leaders” (21).

Read the rest of this entry »

The occasion of our above review of P.W. Baker’s book Doomed Edifice, seemed ideal of a release of an e-book edition of Thomas Lindsay’s classic text The Church and the Ministry In the Early Centuries, as Baker references Lindsay frequently.

You can download a copy of this e-book to your computer by clicking the DOWNLOAD button.