Currently Reading

Haven’t updated this in a while , so here goes:

The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life
Os Guinness

From the Publisher
The Call continues to stand as a classic, reflective work on life's purpose. Best-selling author Os Guinness goes beyond our surface understanding of God's call and addresses the fact that God has a specific calling for our individual lives.
Why am I here? What is God's call in my life? How do I fit God's call with my own individuality? How should God's calling affect my career, my plans for the future, my concepts of success? Guinness now helps the reader discover answers to these questions, and more, through a corresponding workbook - perfect for individual or group study.
According to Guinness, "No idea short of God's call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose and fulfillment." With tens of thousands of readers to date, The Call is for all who desire a purposeful, intentional life of faith.


The Importance of Being Foolish
Brennan Manning

From the Publisher
In the eyes of the world, Jesus was a fool. He did not abide by the rules of his day; the people he associated with were shunned by society; his Sermon on the Mount reads likea primer on being left behind, stepped on, and ignored. In order for us to truly be the people Jesus wants us to be, we too must learn to become "foolish."
Becoming a Christian is not a magical enterprise by which we are automatically transformed into better people. We must train to become who God intends us to be. In The Importance of Being Foolish, bestselling Christian author Brennan Manning teaches us how to think like Jesus. By reorienting our lives according to the gospel we may appear to be fools in the eyes of the world, but Manning reveals that this is exactly what Jesus wants.
In a powerful exploration of the mind of Christ, Manning reveals how our obsession with security, pleasure, and power prevents us from living rich and meaningful lives. Our endless struggle to acquire money, good feelings, and prestige yields a rich harvest of worry, frustration, and resentment. Manning explores what Christ's mind was truly focused on: finding the Father, compassion for others, a heart of forgiveness, and the work of the kingdom.

The Way of the Wild Heart
John Eldredge

From the Publisher
I can fix it. I don't need directions. I can figure this out on my own. These thoughts that erupt from a man's bravado, from his deep urge to be real man. Yet underneath this, there is a louder voice countering, You can't. You're not capable. You're weak. Many men-possibly all men-face two looming questions at some point in their life. What does it mean to be a man, and am I one?
The Way of the Wild Heart reaches out to "unfinished men" trying to understand and live their role as men and fathers. Exploring six biblically based stages, John Eldredge initiates men into a new understanding and ownership of their manhood and equips them to effectively lead their sons to manhood.


Divine Nobodies Shedding Religion to Find God (and the Unlikely People Who Help You)
Jim Palmer

From the Publisher
Don Miller meets Anne Lamott meets Brian McLaren in this tale of how God is most deeply connected to the world in the most unexpected ways through the least likely people. Jim Palmer, founder of a small, innovative emerging church, shares his compelling journey to authentic faith as it is intersected by the oddest of characters. Each chapter gives the reader permission and freedom to let go of "Christianity" as religion in order to embrace Christ.

Currently Reading

Living on the Devil’s Doorstep – From Kabul to Amsterdam

Floyd McClung

Living on the Devil’s Doorstep is a dramatic example of the difference one family can make when they are willing to trust God and walk in obedience to His call on their lives.When Thousands of young people checked out on Western society and sought enlightenment in the East, Floyd and Sally McClung set aside the comforts of American suburbia and settled first in Afghanistan and later in Amsterdam.In Kabul, Afghanistan, a key stop on the hippy trail and finally in Amsterdam the start of the trail many young people followed in the 1960’s and early 70’s, the McClung’s committed to meeting the penniless, the drugged, the sick, and the disillusioned right where they were.

Why We Want You To Be Rich - Two Men One Message

Donald J. Trump and Robert T. Kiyosaki

with Mededith McIver and Sharon Lechter

Interesting concept as Kiyoskai begins each chapter with his story-telling style while Trump finishes with a brief post-script expounding more concisely on the topic. Found the book in the library and would not suggest spending dollars for it.

The PAPA Prayer – The Prayer You’ve Never Prayed

Larry Crabb

Dr. Larry Crabb has written his most practical, user-friendly book to date with "The PAPA Prayer." He uses PAPA as his acrostic or acronym to develop a four-fold model of relational prayer. P suggests: "Present Yourself to God," A is for "Attend to How You're Thinking of God," the second P relates to "Purge Yourself of Anything That Blocks Your Relationship with God," and the second A teaches readers to "Approach God As the `First Thing' in Life."

Here and Now

Henri J. M. Nouwen

Most touching is Nouwen's account of his near-fatal accident when hit by a car while walking over ice to help a handicapped boy. Nouwen goes through many emotions: real anger when gas station attendants refuse to drive him to the boy, a realization that the accident has given him a new pespective on his life, peace in the face of death but also the realization that "it was not love that kept me clinging to life but unresolved anger." When he does survive, he asks, "Why was I asked to return to a place where love is so ambiguous?" Brief but profound are his responses to the experience as he realizes God's call to deeper trust in God and to radical freedom. Nouwen's personal narrative is an important book for many people pondering the mystery of life and death, regardless of their religious commitments. From Library Journal

Currently Reading

The Humor of Christ
Elton Trueblood

A bold challenge to the traditional stereotype of a somber, gloomy Christ. The Humor of Christ inspires Christians to redraw their pictures of Christ and to add a persistent biblical detail: the note of humor. (From the book covers)

Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four
John Feinstein

Feinstein has long been a favorite sports writer since reading Season on the Brink. As a college basketball fan, I couldn’t help but check this book out from my local library. This book is a great look behind the scenes at the Final Four and is full of valuable insight and interesting side stories. Feinstein does a great job of really capturing the essence of the Final Four and the magnitude of the event from a coaches and players perspective blending a richness of the history and the event with the 2005 tournament.

A Primer on Postmodernism
Stanley J. Grenz

This has long been on my “need to read” list. Grenz does a great job at providing a background leading up to and a readable exposition of current postmodern thought. His book is written in such a way that those with little to no previous background knowledge of philosophy won't be lost. (Works for me.) An excellent introduction into postmodernism Grenz takes the reader historically into an understanding of the modern thinkers who have defined postmodernism in very readable terminology. Toward the end of the book Grenz contemplates similarities between the Christian faith and postmodernism and a response in presenting the message of Jesus.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene

As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses." His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: "What is reality?" Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory. (From Amazon.com review)

Currently Reading

“The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.”

Theodor Geisel,
(aka Dr. Seuss)

A Prisoner in the Garden, The Nelson Mandela Foundation
In 1977 the South African prison authorities allowed a number
of journalists to visit the notorious Robben Island.
The intention was to persuade the outside world that
the conditions there were not as bad as widely believed.
On their tour of the island the journalists encountered a tall, thin man dressed neatly in prison clothes and leaning on a spade. The expression on his face was one of intense hostility, and his bearing was more that of prince than prisoner.

The man was Nelson Mandela, in his 13th year of incarceration on Robben Island.

Today the photograph, captioned ‘A Prisoner Working in the Garden’ by the prison authorities, forms the centrepiece of the Mandela Prison Archive, which when viewed as a whole constitutes a living record of Mandela’s 27 years in prison. It includes rare photographs and video footage, Mandela’s handwritten letters to family, friends and the authorities, his personal diaries and notes, official records, medical records and legal documents. Together they form an extraordinary picture of prison life but, even more remarkably, of a man who, together with his close comrades, never gave up the fight for freedom and the vision of a liberated country.

This book is bursting with story. The records of Mandela’s confinement are widely scattered – in conventional archives and some surprising personal collections. Readers will learn about chance discoveries and dead ends, crossing paths and painful reminders. The struggle against oppression can be seen as the pitting of remembering against forgetting. A Prisoner in the Garden documents one part of that struggle.

Emotionally Healthy Spirituallity: Unleash the Power of Authentic Life in Christ,
Peter Scazzero
The Christian faith is supposed to produce deep, positive change. So why doesn't it seem to work in "real life"? That question screamed at Pastor Peter Scazzero when his church and marriage hit bottom and every Christian remedy produced nothing but anger and fatigue. As he began digging under the "good Christian" veneer, he discovered entire emotional layers of his life that God had not yet touched. And that emotional immaturity had fed his spiritual immaturity. In this book, he unveils what's wrong with our conventional means of "spiritual growth" and offers not only a model of spirituality that actually works, but seven steps to transformation that will help readers experience a faith charged with authenticity, contemplation and a hunger for God.

You’ve Got to Read This Book!: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life,
Jack Canfield and Gay Hendricks

Canfield, the co-creator and editor of the Chicken Soup for the Soulseries, and psychologist and author Hendricks surveyed 55 leaders or a visionaries in their respective fields. Each leader introduces a simple sketch of the most influential book and how it has impacted their life. Contributors include Stephen Covey, Lou Holtz, Dave Barry, Bernie Siegal, Kenny Loggins, and a multitude of others from the fields of athletics, business, art, and politics.

The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem,
Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan

Scholars Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan join together to reveal a radical and little-known Jesus. Using the Gospel of Mark as their guide they present a day-to-day account of Jesus’ final week of life. The Last Week depicts Jesus giving up his life to protest power without justice and to condemn the rich who lack concern for the poor. The Jesus introduced by Borg and Crossan is a moral hero, and more dangerous than the one enshrined in the Church’s traditional teachings.
(Adapted from the flyleaf)

In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq,
Nir Rosen

Rosen minutely charts the course of Iraq's rapidly metastasizing sectarian conflict, which he observed up close from the immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in 2003 to the elections of January 2005. A fluent speaker of Iraqi Arabic and a freelance journalist, Rosen gained an impressive measure of access to both the Sunni and Shia resistance, dissidents and ordinary Iraqis, attending sermons at mosques and visiting tribal meeting halls across Iraq—from Baghdad to Tikrit, Najaf and Falluja to Kirkuk. The title is a reference to the Islamic idea that martyrs' souls are flown to heaven in the belly of a green bird, the book serves as a window onto the rhetoric, ambitions, strategies and historical context of the numerous violent groups struggling for power.
From Publishers Weekly

Current Readings

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx

Children of the Last Days Series - Michael D. O’Brian
Specifically: Strangers and Sojourners, Plague Journal, and Eclipse of the Sun

The Brothers Karamazov – Fydor Dostoevsky
This is the Hovel Audio recording read brilliantly by Simon Vance. Nineteen plus hours long. I had two 14 hour drives where the brothers became my companions.

The Emotionally Healthy Church – Peter Scazzero

Currently Reading - June

Currently Reading:

The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware

Kingdom, Grace, Judgment by Robert Farrar Capon

Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James A. Smith

The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor

Recently Finished:

The Mystery of Christ by Robert Farrar Capon
Father Elijah by Michael O'Brian
The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter

On Favorite Books:

In setting up this blog and entering the exciting world of blogasphere I have pondered the idea of favorite books while setting up my profile.
Someone said that the only real changes in ones self will be because of the people you meet and associate with and the books you read. I tend to agree with that assessment.
I tend to look at various points of my life through the books that I read.
During High School I read several German authors, it was sort of a deal I made with my German language teacher. I promised not to disturb her class if she let me read. After proving she did not care for my disturbances we compromised on my reading German authors. I discovered Hermann Hesse. The book I mostly remember was Siddhartha. One of the easier to read but influenced my thinking more than any other. The concept of patience was prominent.
My college years were overtaken by science fiction and fantacy. Of course, J.R.R. Tolkien, but also Isaac Asimov and many others.
Lately, (since Christmas) I have been challenged by a set of novels by Susan Howatch – The first in the series is Glittering Images.