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The End of Many Books

Keep Your Kids

by Douglas Wilson

Our church is hosting a Parenting Tune-Up day this coming Sunday. The tune-up analogy works in a lot of ways. It’s not collision repair, but it’s check on some of the basic systems that keep things running.

I’ve talked about parenting a lot, and not just because I’ve been a parent for 23+ years. When I started as a youth pastor almost 30 years ago a lot of the work was thinking about family relationships, not just how any particular teenager was behaving.

Anyway, I started reading the Doug’s book, Keep Your Kids, a month or so ago. Pastor Wilson has a lot of books about the household, and I have benefited from all of them even when there’s been significant overlap.

Keep Your Kids is one of his newer volumes on the subject, and while it did have some reminders, he also deals with some more current issues as well that I found, as usual, edifying.

Maybe the thing I was most surprised by was an entire chapter on the modern usage and expectations related to EMPATHY (all rise), Chapter 3 – “Empathy and the Clowns.” The demands for affirmation of one’s sad feelings without any questions, let alone pushback, are a unique addition to parenting challenges in our social-media world. Wilson has some good warnings for parents to consider, especially not jumping into the sentimental quicksand with their kids so that they can actually help their kids back onto solid ground.

As parenting books go I’d give this one lots of stars. Is it the only one you need? No. Is it helpful for your own parenting tune-up without needing to leave your house? Absolutely. I gladly recommend it.

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The End of Many Books

Heaven Taken by Storm

by Thomas Watson

I got excited to read this book while reading He Conquers Who Conquers Himself.

I’ve read Watson’s Godly Man’s Picture a couple times, and while this one is good, it’s not as good. It had many excellent one-liners, but not as obviously building momentum.

That said, Watson was working off of Matthew 11:12, which in the KJV ends with: “the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

Go get it. It’s not for the faint of heart. So Watson: “only those who are truly determined will make it into heaven.”

It’s a book for those who believe in Christ and now need to learn to “obey all that Christ commanded.” Salvation is by faith, and Watson emphasizes that faith without zealous works is dead.

“Who will put in the effort for Heaven if they think it can be obtained more easily? But if it’s so simple, why did Christ say to strive as if in agony? Why did Paul need to discipline his body? Why does the text mention taking the kingdom by force?”

3 of 5 stars

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The End of Many Books

Phantastes

by George MacDonald

I thought I had read this before. It wasn’t too many pages in before I knew that there was no way I had. I would have remembered the feeling.

My Omnibus class read it. We talked about fairy tales, about Bildungsroman, about how C.S. Lewis credited MacDonald with baptizing his imagination.

I’m glad I finally read it, though I wouldn’t say that it wet my imagination.

PPart of the point, I accept, of this genre, is not the precise words used but the effect of the words. That doesn’t have to be a postmodern perspective, MacDonald certainly wasn’t a PM, but it’s a feature of this kind of narrative. We get that witches and wolves are bad. We get that monsters need to be killed not cuddled. We get that chasing beauty for itself will probably lead a man into a forrest of trouble. All this in Phantastes, and I wouldn’t stop you from reading it.

3 of 5 stars

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The Christian Sabbath

by R.L. Dabney

I’d been reading Dabney on preaching sermons, so I picked this up when I wanted more about understanding the Sabbath. It was much better than Chantry’s Call the Sabbath a Delight, mostly because Dabney at least offered some arguments for Sunday as Christian Sabbath rather than just assuming it. He started with reasons rather than jumping straight to rebuke.

That said, I was still unconvinced.

My purpose in this review is to express my thanks for the resource, even to recommend it for the pro-Sunday-as-Sabbath side. Shouldn’t we be able to read and appreciate arguments and even learn stuff?

There are no new points. He takes the reference to the seven-day-week of creation in the Fourth Commandment as proof that the Sabbath is a creational ordinance, so affirmed by but not limited to the Mosaic Law. He also assumes that #4 must continue after Jesus, and because we have some history of the early-centuries Christians meeting on Sundays, they must have transferred the day-of-meeting. I’d see both of those as sabbath principles but not Mosaic Covenant Sabbath proper. (Here’s the sermon where I tried to explain that more.)

Anyway, I’m glad I read it.

4 of 5 stars

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Sacred Rhetoric

by R.L. Dabney

This may now be my favorite book on preaching. Dabney deals with sacred rhetoric as both science and art, and even more importantly, as a supernatural act.

As science, he breaks down the kinds of and parts of sermons. As art, he encourages more than Bible mad-libs, but as “the rational adjustment of means to an end.” As supernatural, he doesn’t tell preachers to seek an anointing, but to seek godly character. Again and again, Dabney emphasizes that character makes the difference. For a couple examples:

If this work has any peculiarities to which value may be attached, they are these: that the necessity of eminent Christian character is urged throughout as the foundation of the sacred orator’s power.

I wish you to infer hence this most momentous of all conclusions, that the prime qualification of the sacred orator is sincere, eminent piety.

On the manuscript or extemporaneous question, he leaves no doubt: no manuscript. Ha. He says this requires more than less preparation. I find that 1) I like and benefit from the drafting process, 2) I like and benefit from more notes to review/share later, and 3) I don’t have the amount of time it would take me to compensate for a weakness in quick external processing. I’m not refusing to grow, I’m acknowledging a combination of limits.

When I was in seminary I heard MacArthur reference Dabney’s “three stages through which preaching has repeatedly passed” multiple times: 1) “scriptural truth is faithfully presented in scriptural garb,” 2) “doctrines taught are still those of the Scriptures, but their relations are moulded into conformity with the prevalent human dialectics,” and 3) “the methods and explanations conformed to the philosophy of the day, but the doctrines themselves contradict the truth of the Word.” It was edifying to hear them again and in their own contextual dress.

Highly recommended to those responsible to preach the Word in season and out.

4 of 5 stars

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Letters from the Mountain

by Ben Palpant

I only give 5 stars to books I’ve finished that I immediately want to read-to-re-finish. These books attain to the Fives. Letters from the Mountain has attained.

This book is about writing. More, it’s about the writing life. More, it’s about giving what you have to others, including, when the gift is in the form of words. Who knows if the Lord wants you to have a lot of followers? We do know the Lord blesses seeds sown. So sow more.

Palpant names this generativity. I’m a sucker for neologisms, and generativity has been growing like a weed in the leaf-mold of my mind for the last few months. Generativity is generous, living, consistent but not like a machine, appreciating beauty without being a perfectionist. Generativity comes from being honest, humble, and even out of suffering. Generativity has a “multiplying effect on others,” it is contagious, and it is “impossible apart from God’s grace.”

The format of these Letters is that of a writing dad to his writing daughter. It has a personal feel, but it also is not private, certainly not girly. My point: dudes won’t lose their man card reading this.

If I had taken the time earlier I would have posted this review before hearing Ben speak in person at our recent Raggant Fiction Festival. And now that our Festival day is done, I only recommend the book more. (You can find his three talks here.)

The only thing that has kept me from restarting my reread of Mountains is that I’ve started reading his newest book, An Axe for the Frozen Sea. Those pages are interviews with poets, and they are no less provocative toward generativity.

5 of 5 stars

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Another novel in the Omnibus curriculum, another fiction book I hadn’t read, another book I’m glad I have now.

The Jekyll and Hyde gist/twist is a cultural staple. I’m fairly certain my first exposure to the story was in “Hyde and Hare,” a Bugs Bunny version that I shared with my class.

I didn’t know until reading some background material that “Christmas crawlers” was a genre, as in, publishers kept putting out creepy/horror books for the holidays. This book got pushed to the start of the new year due to the glut in the late 1885 market, but that didn’t hurt sales at all, selling over 40k copies in six months.

Whatever I thought I thought, the plot and the format kept my attention. The two-sides of the same personality bit is true, but also not. It’s actually more one sided with different levels of exposure. That maybe makes it even more disturbing.

4 of 5 stars

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Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

Who knew? I liked it!

It was my first time. I had to read it for sake of a class I’m teaching. It’s a good choice, maybe even timely.

Does it have a happy ending? Could Shelly have written a happy ending in light of her worldview? Are men more monsters than monsters can be men?

Many people have read it, even “enjoyed” the story, but has anyone really learned from it? Since 1816 the Science Gods are no less trying to create Man in their image, or Robot Men, let alone sheep clones and AI.

All that to say, we have lost Paradise in more ways than one, and it sure can be miserable.

4 of 5 stars

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Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

I’d seen the BBC version 26 years ago. It was…fine.

Turns out, the book is actually…delightful. I enjoyed my read, and much more so than the performance adaptation.

Should you read it? Good question. There is some pleasure in it, and possibly some profit with a little effort and intentional conversation with young ladies/daughters and young men/sons.

Marital happiness IS a blessing from God, and there are no few ways to mess marriage up, before and during. Warning characters abound on these pages thanks to Austen, with a satisfying and happy ending (for at least some).

4 of 5 stars

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The End of Many Books

Broken Bread

by Tilly Dillehay

Food is a gift from God. God made men to be eaters, on the daily. He made much for them to eat, even adding meat to the menu after the fall and flood. But like almost every other good thing, our sin really sauces things up. We get fat on bitterness and self-righteousness. We too often enjoy giving other people the shakes. 

I liked almost all the parts of this book. She references so many books/authors that have flavored my thinking the last decade or so, such as Lewis and Capon, Wilson and Packer, even Piper and Rigney. 

The ladies at our church will be reading and talking about this book in the next couple months, and I am glad for it. We’re too easily guilted where we need not be, and we take too many things for granted where gratitude belongs, heaped up on the plate. 

I highly recommend this for feral and festal eating, most of all without fussiness.

4 of 5 stars