Review: The Paris Library

The Paris Library The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: What the Wind Knows

Image
What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon My rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm not really sure why, but I do love a good time travel novel. Maybe it's because I'm always wondering what it might be like to live in a different time, a different place. (How much of who I am is based on me and how much is based on the time I grew up in?) This book draw me in quickly. Anne Gallagher is a novelist whose Irish grandfather raised her, taught her Gaelic, told her the stories her learned in childhood, influenced her more than anyone else. He instructed her to take his ashes and spread them in Ireland after he died. She rents a boat and finds herself in 1921, spending time with her grandfather, who was orphaned in the Rising, a rebellion against the English. She looks like her great grandmother, and everyone assumes she is his mother. And she is falling in love with her great-grandfather's best friend. Harmon tells the story through the eyes of her protagonist, ...
Read more

Willard's Divine Conspirarcy: Reflections on Discipleship

Image
When I was a teenager, people who talked about discipleship focused on memorizing Scripture and understanding church doctrines. I did that, and honestly, I knew something was wrong. I was committed to serving in church, attending services, and following the rules, but I didn't love God, and I certainly wasn't interested in reading the Bible. I did it when I had to, but the idea of daily devotions or Bible reading times put me to sleep, literally. I almost quit attending church. Life was busy, and I just didn't see why it mattered all that much, and that's when I got scared. I believed Scripture cognitively, and I was afraid to walk away from that belief system. I talked Duane into attending a small non-traditional church near our home, one that met on Saturday night, one that didn't sing hymns, one where the pastor talked like a regular person, acknowledging his humanity and his need for God. Something inside me shifted, and my faith became less cognitive and...
Read more

Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our Religion and What to Do About It

Image
In Spiritual but Not Religious , N.T. Wright claims that when we take God out of the mix, we replace him with other things which we worship, and as we worship those things, they control us.  I don't have the book with me--I do so like documentation--but that's the gist of it.  Enter  Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our Religion and What to Do About It by David Zahl, which reviews some of our replacement gods. His descriptions are good, but I wish there were more on why this matters, the impact it has on our lives, and what do to about it. This lacks the depth of Wright, which I miss.  Zahl doesn't really focus on how these elements (work, sex, parenting, technology, etc.) are a form of idolatry, which I think is a miss, but he does hit on the religiosity of these things in our lives. (Hence, the title, which is pretty clever.) Today I'm reading about how work has become a religion. Seriously. During ...
Read more