Book Reviews

Recommended Books (Winter 2024)

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Recommended Books (Winter 2024)

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday with family nearby and gifts exchanged liberally. Many of us had wish lists filled with books, ready now to dive into a few good reads for the upcoming year. If you have not already set yourself up with something new to read, here are a few books we found particularly interesting over the past few months. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these selections will be great for personal and family reading. Most of...

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A Free Will Baptist Looks at John Piper’s All that Jesus Commanded

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A Free Will Baptist Looks at John Piper’s All that Jesus Commanded

An Overview of the Book While John Piper’s All that Jesus Commanded: The Christian Life according to the Gospels is hot off the press, it is actually a revised, second edition of his earlier work, What Jesus Demands from the World (2006). “The new title,” Piper explains, “is intended to make more clear the relevance of this book for every Christian. It deals with every command Jesus gave and how it relates to Christian living today.”[1] Indeed, the main title is a direct allusion to Jesus’ Great Commission as it appears in Matthew’s Gospel:...

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Recommended Books (Autumn 2023)

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Recommended Books (Autumn 2023)

Beautiful autumn days beckon us to spend our afternoons and evenings out of doors. Amid all the hustle and bustle of daily life, especially if you have children in school or are in school yourself, it can be difficult to devote time to reading. But good books bring extra light into our lives and open new vistas of understanding about the world around us. So we recommend taking a book out to the porch swing or a favorite clearing in the woods. Bring the young’uns with you and read something aloud together. Below, you will find reading...

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Recommended Books (Summer 2023)

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Recommended Books (Summer 2023)

The dog days of summer have been punishing this year in much of the United States. The extreme heat and, in the South, high humidity have strongly incentivized each of us to find shelter inside air-conditioned buildings. The increased time indoors before the crisp days of Autumn arrive provide us with some good opportunity for reading. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these selections will be great for personal and family reading. Most of all, we think they...

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Forming Hearts through Stories: A Review of Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigen Guroian

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Forming Hearts through Stories: A Review of Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigen Guroian

In an earlier essay, I lauded the benefits of teaching catechisms to young children. Although I still stand by that piece, I have become convinced that stories—rather than sheer didactic teaching—are central to the shaping of our inner lives, characters, and understanding of God. I suspect that memorizing a catechism without the benefit of a story-formed heart will most likely produce a meager harvest. By God’s design, stories are at the heart of the human experience. Our most fundamental, often unconsciously held beliefs stem from the basic...

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Recommended Books (Spring 2023)

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Recommended Books (Spring 2023)

Reading allows us to consult the broader wisdom of mankind as it works out ideas and beliefs in specific circumstances and reports back on the results. Authors from vastly different times and places can give us insight into the issues of our day, providing much-needed counsel to help us be wise as serpents. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these selections will be great for personal and family reading. Most of all, we think they will help to broaden your...

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Book Review of F. Leroy Forlines’s “Secularism and the American Republic”

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Book Review of F. Leroy Forlines’s “Secularism and the American Republic”

Forlines, F. Leroy. Secularism and the American Republic: Revisiting Thomas Jefferson on Church and State. Edited by Matthew Steven Bracey. Gallatin, TN: Welch College Press, 2022. F. Leroy Forlines remained committed to interdisciplinary study until the end of his life, and that is clear in his latest work, Secularism and the American Republic. This Arminian theologian of the twentieth century sought to provide Christians with a framework for understanding and doing theology in his wonderful book, The Quest for Truth, yet he did not restrict...

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Recommended Books (Winter 2023)

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Recommended Books (Winter 2023)

Arctic storms, shortened daylight hours, and rainy/snowy weather forces us indoors during the cold winter months. Even as we appreciate and enjoy the austerity of this time of year, it also encourages us to look forward to spring and resurrection. So, as we fill the longer nights with family activities and time indoors, we have great opportunities to reach for new books. Below, you will find reading suggestions from our group that come from a wide range of disciplines and topics. We think these selections will be great for personal and family...

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Recommended Books (Autumn 2022)

Posted by on 2:24 am in Book Reviews, Essay | 1 comment

Recommended Books (Autumn 2022)

Every generation undoubtedly feels a sense of dislocation, but the world seems to be growing increasingly strange. The old liberal order fashioned in the nineteenth century and bludgeoned horribly during the twentieth appears to be tottering in the early twenty-first—wars in Europe, spasmodic breakdown of social order in major cities in the West and East, COVID-19 and the ensuing social chaos and governmental overreach, and economic instability. As a result, it is tempting sometimes to be consumed with the present crises, emotionally tied to...

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Review of God in Eternity and Time: A New Case for Human Freedom by Robert E. Picirilli

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Review of God in Eternity and Time: A New Case for Human Freedom by Robert E. Picirilli

In this succinct yet erudite work, Robert E. Picirilli brings a fresh perspective to the age-old debate regarding divine sovereignty and human freedom. That debate, as Picirilli views it, is often predicated “on the concept of God as formulated in metaphysical philosophy rather than on God as he reveals himself in the biblical narrative, mutually influencing and being influenced by the race of human beings he made to bear, or be, his image.”[1] Consequently, theologians often read the Bible through the lens of whatever philosophical...

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