Forum Contributors Share Their Favorite Books
Each year Forum contributors read, review, or survey hundreds of books. We try to share the best of our reading with Forum readers in the form of quarterly book recommendations. However, as 2017 draws to a close, each of us look back over the year and consider what book rises to the top of our lists—the ones that stimulated our thinking, challenged our thinking, or in some cases, brought great delight. Below each contributor shares...
Recommended Books (Fall 2017)
“Words are the progeny of the soul,” states Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215).[1] As our bodies produce children for posterity, so do our souls. Just as we all wish to produce good children to build up the coming generation, Clement argues we should be careful to leave only the best words to those who come after us. In this way of thinking, “wisdom is a communicative and philanthropic thing.”[2] For this reason, Clement cautions us...
Book Review: Remodeling Youth Ministry
by Ben Campbell “For too long, YFM (Youth and Family Ministry) has suffered from pragmatic solutions to eternal problems,” concludes Talbot.[1] For the past forty years, the goal of youth ministry has been to gain students through entertainment. The time has come for a reformation and a remodeling of youth ministry. In Remodeling Youth Ministry, Christopher Talbot does an exceptional job of communicating the need to return to a...
Book Review: Old Testament Exegesis
Douglas Stuart, Old Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). Within the Christian academic community, there are many resources for the aspiring Bible student. A cursory glance at the resource section of a Christian bookstore will show myriad concordances, Bible handbooks, commentaries, Bible translations, and more. Even with these resources, bridging Bible reading and...
Book Review: Sexuality, Gender, and the Church
“We’re living and ministering in an era of swift and unprecedented change, especially regarding the definition of sexuality, gender, and marriage,” writes J. Matthew Pinson in Sexuality, Gender, and the Church.[1] Though these issues are not unique to our day, many changes concerning sexuality and gender have arisen in recent years that have forced the church to reaffirm and strengthen its historical positions. While numerous books...
Recommended Books (Summer 2017)
Reading is a sacred act of creation and memory. Our ability to use words to call worlds historic and fantastical into existence is a part of God’s image in us. When we write, we create new worlds on the page that are fully realized only when our words are incarnated in the mind of a reader. Sometimes those worlds are florid products of our imaginations that are only tangentially tethered to the real world. These creations recall and...
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