Interesting book that popped up on my radar. If you're absolutely unlike me and prefer something not in the heavy, nonfiction category, this sounds like it might be interesting.

The Sunday Brunch Diaries Norma L. Jarrett. Broadway/Harlem Moon, $12.95 paper (302p) ISBN 978-0-7679-2143-5

Channeling Tyler Perry's tragicomic sensibility (there is even a Madea figure), Jarrett delivers the goods in this light, entertaining follow-up to Sunday Brunch. Five women, all lawyers and longtime friends, live the good life--both materially and spiritually--in Houston. Capri is an NBA wife who isn't thrilled with the limelight; Lexi is a newlywed; Jewel is dealing with "baby mama drama"; Angel has just begun attending Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church; and Jermane struggles to help her husband deal with a professional and personal crisis. While tragic circumstances ensue, Jarrett keeps the humor coming and always emphasizes God's power to redeem even the worst situations. Jarrett definitely does not disappoint readers who enjoy escaping into a world of beautiful people who wear designer clothes, eat at fashionable restaurants and live in luxury homes. While this novel is arguably by, for and about black women, a much wider audience is sure to delight in getting to know this fun group of Christian characters. (Sept. 9)

[Amazon]

» Eugene Peterson's latest in his spiritual theology series, "Tell It Slant." Due Oct. 15th, this is probably the most eagerly awaited book I see on my short-term horizon. Reading the first three books in this series was a blast and Peterson is a fantastic read. There's an audio series available that offers a preview of the book. I'd be a little more tempted if the pricetag was a shade lower. Then again, I'll most likely cave and give it a listen anyway. One drawback I found to Peterson's series is that they take a while to ease into, but once you're in, it's hard to put the book down.

» Yet another Rob Bell book: Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile. Again, there's audio if that helps. I'm trying to remember if I've previously downloaded this before. Kinda sad when the memory slips like that. Either way, the book is out Oct. 1 and I'll be sure to pick up a copy. So long as I remember.

» I've previously mentioned the promise of new tunes by Lincoln Brewster. But the first tune, "Today is the Day", is already available for download if you care to pick it up.

» No idea when Chris Tomlin has new product out, but he's already got a new tune for sale - "Jesus Messiah".

All that aside, I think I'm settling my upcoming books of the month as follows:

Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back (Ken Wilson)
Thanks to Ken shamelessly plugging his wares after I noted my appreciation of his series of lectures at Vineyard-Ann Arbor. I don't exactly consider it "shameless" when the product is good.

Acts for Everyone, Part 1
I tend to vacillate on which of Wright's commentaries to pick up next. Thus far, I'm rationalizing this as not caving in to buying his Luke commentary until I've gotten all of Greg Boyd's sermons on Luke. But this is the next best thing. There's still an occasional temptation to pick up the Prison Letters edition instead ... or to head over to nonfiction and pick up something there for a change of pace. But so far, I'm doing good to stick with this plan for a solid week. That's like a record for me.

Well, I've postponed as long as I possibly can till getting a book for this month. And if I dare say so, I've also masterfully solved my Tom Wright commentary issue from a previous post. I've opted to get "Mark for Everyone." I can't recall what it was that led me to just a brief random read in Mark - specifically at Mark 7:24. Since then, I've been on a kick to read through more of Mark and start thinking a little outside of Luke as my default Gospel reading. So I don't have to worry about reading ahead of where Boyd is in Luke or where Bell is in Philippians. Totally new material.

And I'm also picking up some history reading: "The Candy Bombers", by a good acquaintance of mine - Andrei Cherny. I'll probably burn through that one, but I'm hoping that reading through Wright's commentary on Mark might lead to a little blogging on the subject here.

Keep hope alive.

Just to keep up with the times - and since I enjoyed Shane Claiborne's "Jesus for President," David Swanson has part two of his review posted over at Out of Ur. (Part one is located here)

If there's only one graf to take away from it, I'll recommend this one:

The authors point out that these earliest Christians fully expected to be persecuted by the empire. "The powers would drag them before governors and courts, beat them and insult them, feed them to beasts, and hang them on crosses. And hate his followers is what the world did- at least for the first couple of hundred years." Claiborne and Haw think American Christians have avoided persecution not because we live in a Christian nation, but because the church is content with the government's Christian veneer.

I've felt for some time that the biggest challenge we face as a church today isn't persecution - some real, some hyped for fundraising purposes. Instead, the biggest challenge is the deception that we've won and we should take over and dominate by a means other than that which we profess to live by ... the teachings of Jesus Christ.

So I'm in a bit of flux right now regarding a good book or two for the month. I've been tempted to dive into N.T. (Tom) Wright's Bible commentaries, starting with Luke for Everyone. But as tempting as that is, there's also a side of me that seems to think this wouldn't really be much in the way of "new" reading material. Not that I'm anywhere near a fraction of Wright's scholarly self, but I make it a habit of reading Luke all the way through at least once a year, as well as Brennan Manning's "Ragamuffin Gospel", which adds a great deal of texture to any appreciation of Luke. And on top of that, I regularly listen to Greg Boyd's sermons ... where they're going through the book of Luke verse by verse. So my fear is that picking up Wright's commentary would be like trying to fast-forward that.

So why not pick up the Prison Letters version, which Rob Bell recommends as he goes through Philippians verse-by-verse? Again, I hate to feel like I'm taking a short-cut. It seems like it might deflate some of that enthusiasm I get on Tuesday for the possibility that Bell's sermon will be posted online.

It might help if I found a copy of some of the commentaries at a good ol' fashioned brick & mortar bookstore. But no luck as of yet. I've tried reading through the above books online to the extent that's possible. But nothing conclusive that's just sending me scurrying to Amazon, looking to give them more of my money. So the first week of a perfectly good month is up, I'm just about to finish a political bio tonight and have yet to focus on what's next. For you normals out there, this is sorta like a deep sea diver being underwater and realizing his oxygen might run out before he has time to get to the surface. I know ... I should probably seek help. Later. Maybe.

For now, here's a handful of possibilities that I'm just sorta thinking out loud (or via blog, as it were).

» Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Charles Marsh)
Kudos to New Republic writer Damon Linker for turning me onto this one. I've probably skimmed past this a few times already, but Linker adds some great context that piques my interest. Even better, he notes a few imperfections of the book in his opinion - and they're ones that would likely bother me while reading, too. But the author, Marsh, seems to begin with the type of background that I'm inclined to appreciate as he restates a rather classic case of separation of church and state. Marsh is an evangelical with all the street cred any evangelical could hope for. He seems to go through enough history on the topic (Reinhold Niebuhr and Deitrich Bonhoffer are always classic examples), but it does seem as if Marsh risks making too much of a parallel to the church in Nazi Germany to the American church of today. Then again, depending on your point of view, that might be splitting hairs.

» Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor (Robert Lupton)
Selling point #1 comes from Shane Claiborne's endorsement of the book. But it's also a topic that I've not found many good choices on. It's not at all uncommon to think of missions as something to do overseas or miles away ... but it looks like Lupton might have captured some good ideas for dealing with the mission field in our own backyards.

» Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (G. K. Beale, D. A. Carson)
At 1239 pages, this would seem to cover my fix for some commentary more than adequately. The downside? ... I doubt I'd make it through this in a month.

» Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate (Jerry Bridges)
Short, brief, and to the point ... I think the author deserves a lot of credit for broaching a topic that doesn't seem to get covered a lot.

Just some possibilities. Eventually, I'll have to break down and pick something up.

Great video clips of Fellowship of the Woodlands' Kerry & Chris Shook. I may not be enough of a fan to rush out and pick up their book, but if you feel moved to do so, here's a good place to start.

Kerry & Chris Shook interviewed by On Faith's Sally Quinn

Well, it's been fun to work in a little blogging this week. I may have to give this a try next week and maybe even reconsider the video plan, having those over the weekend. Stuff to mull over during the weekend.

One item I've been a bit too slow with, however, is tracking along with some of my reading. David Swanson reviews Shane Claiborne's & Craig Haws' "Jesus for President" at Out of Ur so I get a hall pass for my oversight. Swanson promises a few more parts to his review, so stay tuned.

One of the questions Swanson raises is whether Claiborne & Haws overstate the case by which American churches have fallen away from some of the more difficult teachings of Christ and toward (at worst) a love affair with political power or (at slightly less worse) a comfort with the status quo. I think it's an easy case to suggest they do at times, but that doesn't negate the need for their voices to shatter several of the preconceived notions of what it means to be a Christian in America - a wandering refuge in a culture that suggests you, as a Christian, have all the power you need if only you bow to the sword of the state instead of the cross of Christ. That's a point worth going off on a rant not unlike Boyd's analysis of Mike Huckabee's claim to want to amend the US Constitution to God's standard.

But rather than do that, I'll leave one final coda on this book that stood out with me.

(pg. 308)

Conversion
It's a shame that a few conservative evangelicals have had a monopoly on the word conversion. Some of us shiver at the word. But conversion means to change, to alter, to make something look different than it did before - like conversion vans or converted currency. We need conversion in the best sense of the word - people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imaginations, who no longer conform to the pattern that is destroying our world. Otherwise we have only believer, not converts. And believers are a dime a dozen nowadays, What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but enact it.

Just a snippet of text here from Shane Claiborne's "Jesus for President." It's a phrase that just caught my attention as I made my way through about half of the book today ...

(page 100)

Sowers must not become discouraged easily. the disciples were constantly butting up against Jesus' thoughts about the way God's reign comes on earth. "It will never work that way!" you can hear the disciples thinking at almost every encounter. They thought the kingdom would come quickly, like the apocalypse, as almost all revolutionaries from Marx to Guevara have insisted. But Jesus' revolutionary patience claimed that another kingdom is coming - one that you can participate in but cannot build, a seed you can plan and water but cannot make grow. You can't drag the kingdom of God into the world. But you can't stop sowing the seeds either. Sow them everywhere!

Emphasis mine. It's that patience that seems to be a lost artform of sorts for me in particular at (lots of) times. The concept of a "revolutionary" patience just seems to emphasize how vital and necessary it is, though.

Congrats to Minnesota's Greg Boyd, who with Paul Eddy, win an impressive accolade for their book, "The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition." It seems the only book on CT's list that I've picked up is Eugene Peterson's "The Jesus Way." And I heartily second CT's recommendation.

It doesn't look like I'll make it through their list anytime soon, though. Rob Bell has sufficiently piqued my interest in picking up some of NT Wright's "For Everyone" Bible study series. "The Prison Letters" and "Luke" look like good places to start. I may just as well break down and consider that my next reading kick to go on and pick up a few more after that. Bell's working through Philippians at an enjoyably snail's pace ... and Boyd has been doing the same with Luke since I started listening to him.

Speaking of NT Wright, there's a little Q&A with him over at Preaching Today Blog worth checking out.

Believe it or not, I'm still alive and kicking. Just recovering from a nightmarishly busy week or two. The day job does entail a good bit of political work, so all the kicking I took from that and other clients has kept me busier than normal.

At some point, coming up, I'll start putting down a few thoughts on Phil Cooke's "Branding Faith," which covers marketing and ministry. Let's see ... as an a) Christian, with b) a Marketing degree, that's gotta be speaking to me loud and clear. Short version: Yep, it does.

On the way to my mailbox is "Jesus for President" by Shane Claiborne. Shane is rarely boring, even if you disagree with him. And it's the last book I intend to read on genre of faith & politics for a while. Afterwards? I'm not entirely sure yet. John Eldredge has a new book out, but I have to confess to diminishing returns reading his work. Truth be told, I'm a bit in the mood for some church history and Bible history books. Unfortunately, I don't start off on that route with a good list of preferred authors. This and this look like tempting dips of the toe into the genre. I may finally land on a book by NT Wright while on this kick. Of course, I may just as easily pick up something that delves heavily in the Constantinian moment of church history and find myself right smack dab in the middle of some more faith & politics rants.

If anyone else has some other recommendations, I'm all ears.

A little spending splurge to note here. I've been itching to pick up a Message Bible ever since making my way through Eugene Peterson's series (so far) on spiritual theology. Mission accomplished. Coulda saved some bucks ordering online, but this one looks like it's worth the cost of instant gratification. I don't recall ever opening a Bible at Genesis and just feeling like I'm ready to burn through the entire thing from start to finish, but Peterson makes for an incredibly readable paraphrasing of the Bible and sets up each book nicely as well. My other option was to replace a lost NIV Study Bible, which I still miss. But the way Peterson illuminates with his reading, I'm missing that study Bible a bit less now.

Another impulse buy ... the new Stellar Kart CD. Doesn't really go on sale till Tuesday. I would have waited till then to just get the MP3s off of Amazon (seriously, who uses a CD player anymore?). But once more, instant gratification wins out. Still making my way through an initial listen, so the only song I've got in heavy rotation already is the released single: "Jesus Loves You" ... which IS available on Amazon already.

(pg. 114)

... as we search for the whole truth about someone, we will be able to see more clearly how God would have us vote.

This might seem a minor point to finally locate an issue I take with Hunter's view. But I believe there's something that underscores this point. Namely, that it's remarkably difficult and often impossible to arrive at an understanding of "the whole truth" about an issue or a person. Similarly, I'm thoroughly convinced that if we do so (or, more accurate to my understanding, as we begin to approach that point), I'm even less sure that clarity is what we get.

"The whole truth" is something that I argue isn't in our realm to understand. It's in God's. That leaves us struggling to decipher the clues we're given. And no matter how many you have, it's not enough to claim the whole truth ... regardless of what the bailiff made you swear to on a Bible in a courtroom.

Making my way a tad slower in the second half of the book, but I'm hoping to put it to rest this weekend. This exception aside, it's a remarkably great read and certainly very thought-provoking whatever your political views. I'll probably feel compelled to wrap up with some litany of things I disagree with about Hunter's thesis, so for now, let the plaudits be duly noted. Even in disagreement, Hunter is a model of civility, understanding, and compassion. That's evident in his sermons and public appearances ... so no great surprise to see it on full display in his writing, as well.

Making my way through Joel Hunter's "A New Kind of Conservative" this week. It's a great read for my taste and I offer that as one who agrees with Hunter about as often as I disagree with him. I went into this book thinking it might illuminate a bit more of Hunter's worldview for me, but I'm finding myself with even more questions. In particular, I'm finding it next to impossible to square this book with his overt support for Mike Huckabee in the Presidential race.

Not that I begrudge anyone for supporting whomever they want or agree with or has the best hair ... but the following snippet would seem to stand in stark contrast to Huckabee's call to amend the US Constitution to "God's Standard." That seems to be a bit too reminiscent of what the Pharisees attempted. And like Pastor Boyd, I'm curious what that'd mean for the Second Amendment. Hunter's writing (at least through the first half of the book) is very much of the same thinking that Boyd wrote about in "Myth of a Christian Nation." Maybe I'm in store for an interesting twist in the second half, but there's more than just Hunter's support for one Presidential candidate that has me wondering still about how he fits his worldview into the case he's made thus far.

(pg. 35)

The basic assumption among many evangelicals is that a strong reason that the Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah is because He did not bring political change. These are the same evangelicals who, after they have called the Jews ignorant, want Christ to reign politically!

To Hunter's credit, I think he begins to fill in some of the blanks I had from Boyd's book. And as a slight tangent, his sermon this past weekend (like most others) is well worth a listen.

ADD-ON: Here's Joel Hunter on the 2008 elections via PBS' Religion & Ethics program ...

Just cracked open EJ Dionne's "Souled Out" on the way home. Looks like a brisk read with plenty of food for thought. Still, it figures to be an odd read. Politically, I tend to be of a more-or-less similar mind to Dionne. From the tangent of faith, however, our views are more notably different ... at least in spots.

Pg. 2-3

The title of this book can be read in two ways. It speaks to our country's exhaustion with a religios style in politics that was excessively dogmatic, partisan, and ideological. It is a style reflecting a spirit far too certain of itself, and far too insistent on the depravity of its political adversaries. Linking religion too closely to the fortunes of one political party, or two one leader or group of leaders, it always a mistake. It encourages alienation from faith itself - where, after all, did Voltaire come from? - by turning a concern with the ultimate into a prop for temporal power. It distorts great traditions by requiring their exponents to bob and weave in order to accommodate the political needs of a given moment or the immediate requirements of a given politician. Thus do great traditions drain themselves of their critical capacity. I do not for a moment pretend that this tendency is unique to political conservatives. The Left is also quite capable of using, and distorting, religion for its own purposes. But for more than a quarter century, it is the political Right that has used, and I believe abused, religion. A great many people - including a great many religious people - have had enough.

They have had enough for the reason embodied in the other sense of the title: reducing religion to politics or to a narrow set of public issue amounts to a great sellout of our traditions. It is common to speak of religion as "selling out" to secularism, or to modernity, or to a fashionable relativism. But there is a more immediate danger, particularly in the United States, of religion selling out to political forces that use the votes of religious people for purposes having nothing to do with a religious agenda - and, often enough, for causes that may contradict the values such voters prize most. It is a great sellout of religion to insist that it has much to teach us about abortion or gay marriage but little useful to say about social justice, war and peace, the organization of our work lives, or our approach to providing for the old, the sick, and the desperate. Religion becomes less relevant to public life when its role is marginalized to a predetermined list of "values issue," when its voice is silenced or softened on the central problems facing our country and our government.

I mentioned before that I had broken in a copy of Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis." I can proudly claim that it's been properly read through. I'm now gradually making my way through the five-part sermon series that sorta laid the groundwork for the book. Actually, I'm pretty certain that I stumbled onto it by coincidence. Just a great foundational series to soak up. I can't recommend it enough.

And believe it or not, I spent a fair portion of time last night trying to find some snippet of "Velvet Elvis" to quote at length. Seems that I remember more than a few points along the way jabbing me that "this might be a great clip for the blog." But my lasting sentiment from the book is that you have to read it as much for the style and flow that only Rob Bell can provide. Listen to him a few times (or catch enough NOOMA videos to get the drift) before reading and it helps the read even more.

There's one point in the sermon series - I think the final part - where Bell mentions how we've gotten off track in expressing God's work here as if the Bible starts at Genesis 3 (The Fall of Man) instead of Genesis 1 (the part where God says things are ... good!). I think I've successfully mastered my new MP3 player's rewind mechanics in order to take that point in a bit more.

Great stuff, I have to say. So just read the whole thing ... or listen to about 4 hours of Rob yakking. Your call.

Now, Rob's second book is "Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality." I read the first chapter and flipped through the book on a lazy day. Fear not - not a great deal there that'd make anyone blush. But, for me, it's not necessarily a topic that I'm ready to go drop a lot of my allowance on at the drop of a hat. Still, it's kinda tempting now since "Velvet Elvis" was such a great read. The sermons actually touched a bit on this topic as well. Again ... your call. I'm probably on podcast overload (not to mention work!) for a while as it is. Maybe I'll remember to do some audio snippets.

Greg Boyd does a convincing job of piquing my interest on Jacques Ellul, who's written up a storm back in the 70s and 80s ... and on topics that I'm sure I could comfortably dive right into the deep end with. Alas, I've already gotten my hands full with my Taylor Branch trilogy that I'm painfully making my way through. Seriously ... what started off as my December plan has now morphed into coinciding with Black History Month. And here we are on MLK's birthday, no less! Maybe I should go ahead and try cracking into Chapter 6 before turning in for the night. One passage that I was struck by on the ride into work this morning, though:

page 203:

E Frederic Morrow marches in Eisenhower's second inaugural parade on January 20, 1957. Later that day, by special invitation, he and his wive became the first Negroes ever to sit in the presidential reviewing stand. Clare Boothe Luce - the first female ambassador in US history, and wife of Time founder Henry Luce - introduced herself to King in a fan letter that January. A Republican globalist who had just returned from duty in Italy, she wrote King that "no day passed but the Italian communists pointed to events in our south to prove that American democracy was a 'capitalistic myth.'... Our enemies abroad have profited greatly from the efforts of these Americans who would deny their own Constitution. No man has ever waged the battle for equality under our law in a more lawful and Christian way than you have."

Make of it what you will, but in reading Boyd's summation of Ellul's "Anarchy and Christianity":

In Ellul's estimation, it's not appropriate for Kingdom people to either support or revolt against governments. This gives them too much credit. Rather, following the example of Jesus, we should ignore them as much as possible, put up with them as much as we need to, and stay focused on living out the radical Kingdom. If we do this, then we, like Jesus, will find ourselves revolting against the government (and culture). We are, most fundamentally, called to be non-conformists. Our service to the world is the way our counter-cultural lives expose the invalidity of all forms of government by manifesting the reign of God.

From the early snapshot of King and the Civil Rights movement, those two items really seem to gel wonderfully.

I'm finally getting around to making some headway into the massive reading ahead for me. Step one was putting the smallest book before me to rest this weekend: Francis Collins' "The Language of God."

The book doesn't seem to have taken off among Christian book circles and in reading it, it's unfortunately evident why that might be. Collins is a scientist by trade, and a notable one at that. He led the team that helped map the human genome. He also writes in this book that evolution and Christianity are not and should not be viewed as competing belief systems. He also refutes the Young Earth Creationist viewpoint in this book. But Collins is also a Christian of the evangelical stripe. And he covers his bases rather well in describing how one shouldn't rest their faith on those principles.

I have to admit that reading this is, in a sense, depressing for me. Depressing because, all throughout, Collins acknowledges the support those views have within Christian circles - and how particularly strong those views tend to be among evangelical Christian circles. His arguments along these lines are persuasive, but I guess I'd have to count myself as predisposed toward sharing them in the first place. Again, that's part of what makes the book such a depressing read. It seems no matter how compelling an argument might exist to the contrary, the more expansive breadth of Christian culture has proven far more difficult to break through.

Collins' larger point is that faith and science should not be viewed as competing entities and offers ample support for how they can be viewed not merely as supportive of each other, but Collins adds his argument that the practice of science should be seen as a form of worship. In this regard, it becomes an encouraging read (for me, at least) that there are people out there like Collins. He also lends a shout-out to the American Scientific Affiliation - a group of Christian scientists who explore the intersection of those two realms in far more detail.

Another side of Collins' book is as an apologetics read. I've written before about how I tend to not really find much interest these days in that topic. And perhaps that is reinforced by my lack of enthusiasm for reading through Collin's version as it's woven throughout the book. Collins does at least remind me of why I think I'm so down on apologetics lately. I think it's due to my view that the arguments that sway each of us are far more personalized than other topics for reading. I had this copy of the book with me while dining with our movie night group over the weekend. Invariably, I had a handful of people tell me about seeing Les Strobel, plugging his DVD on the Case for Christ as a means of demonstrating hipness with the topic. No offense to Strobel - I've seen interviews and his DVD does indeed seem impressive. But I still view it with all the excitement of procuring an encyclopedia. Great if you need one, and I highly recommend we all have a set somewhere. But the material that moves each of us, I believe, tends to be rather customized to our own unique situations in life. I say that not to dissuade anyone from picking up a book on the topic if they feel compelled to do so, but I'm just at a lull with that genre at this point. Is that being too pessimistic? I hope not. Apologetics are an important genre, I'm just not one to read a new book on the subject every month or so.

Where Collins touches on the more technical aspects of his trade, it tends to be limited in order to keep the book commercially palatable. I'll count it as a minor criticism that he doesn't elaborate more on those topics. The book only clocks in at 272 pages. Surely a few more could have been devoted to exploring the actual science that Collins is expert in while still keeping it aimed at a commercial audience. But maybe I should just turn that into a hope that Collins devotes another book toward the topic in greater detail for non-scientists like me.

For a free sample of Collins, there's this great Washingtonian article, this segment of a CNN interview with Collins, and a lecture audio from the ASA. I recommend them all.

I've more or less zipped through the remainder of Yancey's "The Jesus I Never Knew" and enjoyed every last turn of the page. I've noticed that much of my reading has been among books written in more or less within the past five years. So this one ranks as a relative throwback as it was written in the mid-90s.

What's oddly coincidental about this read was that, as impulsively as I picked it up and served my time for Amazon to come through with my latest bounty, it somehow managed to seque into my next meme rather deftly. Chapter 13, in particular, discusses what Yancey views as some of the mistakes we've made in recent church history of trying to do the kingdom. And while this discussion goes far further back than even this book's printing, it's remarkable how much of the following could very well be said of today's church.

With that, I'll turn it over to Philip Yancey below the fold. I've now got about 2000+ pages of reading from Amazon in front of me and I'm chomping at the bit to dig my way through it. Loads of new material to start blogging once the figurative digestion process is underway. Don't say you weren't warned.

Don't look now, but ... well, go ahead. Look. Now.

And then wait about a year!

No information on the publisher's site and clearly, the books aren't aimed at my demographic.

Another lengthy outtake here from Yancey's "The Jesus I Never Knew." This absolutely floors me with it's brilliance and among the things I might want to be thankful for today is that my Amazon kit didn't make it here by the holiday. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to start reading four new books at once while I'm still in the double-digit page numbers of an otherwise magnificent one.

Anyways, I quote at length, so read below the fold ...

ADD-ON: The thought occurred to me that this may as well also be properly labeled as yet another precursor to whatever grand blogging I've got to do pertaining to these items. So consider this entry to be something like v0.80

Reading this, I'm reminded of how well Eugene Peterson covered some of this same ground in "The Jesus Way." In the end, it's telling that Jesus decided not to operate merely within one or all of the various cultures listed below in an effort to refine whichever might be deemed "close enough" and in need of just some minor tweaks to get things right.

Yancey breaks these down in order to pose the question of which side he's be on in if he were in the first century ... and whether he'd recognize Jesus as a threat the way each of these cultures did. I think another way of reading through this is to try and recognize where we identify our modern culture in each of the first century Jewish groups ... and also where we recognize a part of ourselves in each.

What? You thought I was going to leave you with some pleasant, touchy-feeling Thanksgiving Day sentiment? Anyways, read on below the fold ...

An early reminder of what it is that I love about Yancey's writing. This didn't take long to get the gears going ...

(page 23)

The more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him. He said little about the Roman occupation, the main topic of conversation among his countrymen, and yet he took up a whip to drive petty profiteers from the Jewish temple. He urged obedience to the Mosaic law while acquiring the reputation a a lawbreaker. He could be stabbed by sympathy for a stranger, yet turn on his best friend with the flinty rebuke, "Get behind me, Satan!" He had uncompromising views on rich men and loose women, yet both types enjoyed his company.

One day miracles seemed to flow out of Jesus; the next day his power was blocked by people's lack of faith. One day he talked in detail of the Second Coming; another, he knew neither the day nor hour. He fled from arrest at one point and marched inexorably toward it at another. He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his disciples to procure swords. His extravagant claims about himself kept him at the center of controversy, but when he did something truly miraculous he tended to hush it up. As Waler Wink has said, if Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

Two words one could never think of applying to the Jesus of the Gospels: boring and predictable. How is it, then, that the church has tamed such a character - has, in Dorothy Sayers' words, "very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him as a fitting household pet for pale curated and pious old ladies"?

A minor vent here .... But my last Amazon shipment doesn't seem to be moving at record speed. Again, possibly due to the fact that I picked up three books from the scratch & dent section. And certainly not the end of the world. But as it stands, my "Book Fast" looks like a month-long ordeal now.

Now, I'm told that when you fast, whatever it is that you're fasting from should end up looking, tasting, smelling, whatever ... better. My only real fast is to take a 6-week sorta fast from soft drinks. Basically, I just limit myself to one gulp a day and usually a smaller size drink than normal, at that. Last time I did it, it was far easier than I had anticipated. Something to remember as I approach the time of year to do that again.

But this whole "Book Fast" does not strike me the same way. Probably because it wasn't by design. Amazon is showing my package waiting to be picked up in Fernley, Nevada ... for the past 4 days. Maybe it's in transit and I'll have it today for all I know. But since it's shipping at book rate, probably not. Best case scenario is that I've got some good reading to do over Thanksgiving. Likely scenario is that I end up with my next purchase in hand before I ever see the four books I'm presently waiting on.

With that in mind, I'm altering my plan a bit ... picking up the CD of Brennan Manning's "Ragamuffin Gospel" to peruse next month. I figure that way, I don't end up trying to cram 5 or 6 books into my holiday shopping schedule. Besides, I may splurge a bit at the end of the year to make up for the now-skipped Tony Dungy book from my library.

On a side note, I managed to listen to the podcast of Donald Miller speaking at Rob Bell's church in Michigan. I'm a fan of Miller's but I think I'm going to have to regretfully skip his next book. The message he's been giving to a few churches is based on this book and while it has some snippets that speak to me, I can't help but think I'd find his next book a bit outside of my terrain. Even worse, I skipped his last book for much the same reason.

Anyways, vent now over. I'm officially going to enter this second half of the month looking forward to listening to my Ragamuffin Gospel and reading new stuff ... eventually.