I am way overdue in posting this interview with Travis Prinzi. I read Prinzi's Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds last fall and LOVED it. For those who love all things Potter, in my estimation Prinzi's work is the best book I've read on the subject. Prinzi not only brings a wealth of learning about literature, and particularly fantasy literature, to bear on the J.K. Rowling's Potter oerve, but he also thinks interdependently. He avoids merely splicing quotes and others' insights, but rather he engages other writers and Rowling from his own point of view. The questions Prinzi asks in HP & Imagination kept me riveted, and he writes in a style that is a delight to read.Read more

My mom has a wooden box—scarcely bigger than a jewelry box—which belonged to my grandmother. More than any other possession I can think of, I hope that one day that box will be passed along to me. In it are the neatly folded handwritten letters written over four brightly burning decades of my grandparents’ marriage.

My grandparents married in 1929, only weeks before the great crash that would change everything. Grandpa worked in heavy construction—building cross-state barge canals and roads with heavy machinery like the enormous drag-line that he was using the day it tipped and he was trapped below the waters of Florida’s Crystal River. That was just a few short months before they would have celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and years before I was born. Several decades later, my grandmother would follow him into the arms of their Savior after a battle with Alzheimer’s which ravaged her mind from the time I can remember her.

In that box mom keeps are letters about the ordinary days of my grandparents’ lives, passed between life-long sweethearts, laced with tender words. But still they are a treasure to me: a snapshot into the hearts and minds of two people I only wish I had known.

If you wondered what Leigh McLeroy’s book Treasured is all about, it’s like this. It’s a  window to the heart of God through the things that He might have kept in His own treasured wooden box. They are glimpses of His character that He has passed on to us through the Scriptures. The fresh olive sprig which the dove carried to Noah, the dry waterskin which sustained the cast-out Hagar, the well-sharpened knife Abraham raised above his son Isaac—these are just a few of the treasures McLeroy examines. Read more

See my review yesterday of Jared Wilson's Your Jesus Is Too Safe.

Today I'm posting an excerpt from the book in which Jared writes about the Kingdom of God.
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Full disclosure: I chased down Jared four years ago as I read the Thinklings blog and marveled at his wit, intellect and erudition. We met at a Thinklings dinner in Christmas of that year, and later I hired him to work for Docent Research Group. Jared excels at this work! Additionally this year he co-authored/ghostwrote books for Docent clients who are two of the most prominent pastors in the country. He is gold.

Lastly, in this vein of disclosure, he mentioned me in the acknowledgements of Your Jesus Is Too Safe. In truth I did nothing for him or this book other than articulate the envy that seizes me when I read his stuff.

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 Things to love about Your Jesus Is Too Safe, by Jared Wilson:

1. Jared marshals top flight biblical scholarship, owns it, and makes it digestible. 

 2. He slings the slang with the best of 'em.  His paraphrases provoke the mind and make it itch…they compel me to look afresh at biblical texts and living Jesus' teachings in my life today.

 3. Jared is funny. Page after page. Often a chuckle, at times laugh out loud funny.

 4. The focus, intensely, is on Jesus.

 You put all these 'things to love' together, and you get taken for a ride that is at turns illuminating, powerfully challenging, hilarious and inspiring. Read more

I've just read Tullian Tchividjian's new book, Unfashionable, and I enjoyed it immensely. Tchividjian (pronounced cha-vi-jin) is the new pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, FL.  (Recently Tchividjian's church plant, New City Church, merged with Coral Ridge Presbyterian and the two are now one body.) Tchividjian integrated his training in theology with the works of sophisticated social theorists, and he has poured this sparkling blend of intellectual streams through his personal experience of a being a prodigal redeemed.

The result? In my estimation Tchividjian offers a book that challenges comfortable but diffident Christians first to live vibrantly and joyfully as Christ-followers and, second, to be different for the right reasons so that the Church can make a difference in the world in the right ways.  Unfashionable's sub-title sums up the book well: "making a difference in the world by being different."

Why is Tchividjian's  Unfashionable helpful? In our moment, many American Christians fall on one  side of a divide or the other, and many castigate those on the other side. This divide is a perspective or stance about the Church's role vis-à-vis cultures in the US.  While what follows is much-tread ground, it bears brief mention: many American Christians capitulate to cool, morphing into whatever trends are "hot" in society at the moment. Likewise many other believers pull up the drawbridge and seek hermetically-sealed enclaves away from society. While Tchividjian writes piercing commentary about each side of the divide, he also offers constructive ways of thinking and living that will hopefully entice Christians on both sides of the divide to adjust their ways to a prudential, loving counter-cultural interactions with cultures.

For example…Read more

Today’s post features a conversation between Reggie Kidd and Catherine Claire Larson.  Reggie Kidd is professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary and author of With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in our Worship. Catherine Claire Larson, who earned an MA at RTS-Orlando, is a writer with Breakpoint, part of the Prison Fellowship ministry.  As We Forgive is her first book.

RMK: Thanks, Catherine, for this elegantly wrenching book. Could you review for us what happened in Rwanda, and why the stories you capture in As We Forgive became so important to you?

CCL: On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane plummeted from the sky after being hit by a missile. It became the albatross around the neck of the Tutsi people when Hutu claimed that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (a group of mostly expelled Rwandan Tutsi on the border of Uganda pressing for return into the country) had shot it down. The most widely accepted theory today is that radical Hutu, unsatisfied with the direction of peace talks assassinated the Rwandan president. Either way, the sudden streak of a missile and the fiery light of a falling plane were a diabolical kind of fireworks that night-evil’s unseemly opening ceremonies to a hundred days of slaughter that would consume the country.?   

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(continued from yesterday...)

Prelude
Secrets of the Umuvumu's ScarsRead more

Prelude
Secrets of the Umuvumu's Scars

The gash across the face of Emmanuel Mahuro, a seventeen year-old Rwandan native, is no longer an open wound. Today, like a jagged boundary line on a map, a scar juts down the plateau of his forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and up the slope of his right cheek. It is impossible to look into Emmanuel’s eyes without seeing this deep cut, a mark of division etched across his face — and the face of Rwanda — fifteen years after the genocide.

My first reaction to such scars is to avert my eyes. But to look away from Emmanuel’s scars is to look away from him. Strangely, as my eyes adjust to Emmanuel’s face, there is an impulse, not to recoil, but to follow the line of the scar across his skin. Emmanuel’s scar testifies to two realities. It is a witness to the human capacity for evil. To look at it is to hear it scream the brutality of an April that aches in the memory of an entire people. Yet his scar testifies to another truth: the stunning capacity of humans to heal from the unthinkable. To trace that scar is to discover the hope of a people who, despite losing everything, are finding a way to forge a common future for Rwanda.

Rwanda’s wounds, like Emmanuel’s, are agonizingly deep. Today, they are being opened afresh as tens of thousands of killers are released from prison to return to the hills where they hunted down and killed former neighbors, friends, and classmates. In the everyday business of life — purchasing corrugated metal for roofing, burying bananas in the ground to make urwagwa, and hauling harvested sorghum to the market — survivors commonly meet the eyes of people who shattered their former lives. How can they live together? This is not a philosophical question, but a practical one that confronts Rwandans daily.

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  Catherine Claire Larson, As We Forgive: Stories of ReconciliatioRead more

Yesterday, I briefly outlined some truths from Randy Alcorn’s book,  The Treasure Principle . Today, I’ll pick up by sharing some lessons that I learned while reading John Schneider’s book, The Good of Affluence.

The Good of Affluence

As the title suggests, John Schneider’s view of abundance is upbeat. For example, he writes, “[W]hat makes affluence a cosmic good is just that it creates freedom for human beings and, in that light, that it makes possible the proper dominion, dignity, and delight which otherwise would be impossible” (p. 103). Below I’ll to share a few (overlapping) ways that I find this book’s defense of affluence compelling.

I appreciate that Schneider celebrates humans taking creative dominion over the earth. For instance, Schneider says, “I imagine that the makers of Mercedes Benz automobiles take immense pride in the engineering and craftsmanship of these superb cars” (p. 38). I cannot help but think that, whether or not the maker consciously acknowledges God, such luxurious expressions of creativity show forth the glory of God. He’s lavished gifts in science, art, math, and mechanics to His image-bearers. Therefore, I think Schneider is right when he teaches that it is good for us to delight in beautiful cars, hotels, clothes, and other luxury goods.

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