Month: January 2019

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Eight Purposeful Habits for a Spiritually Focused Life | Influence Podcast

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Every New Year, millions of Americans take time to write resolutions about who they would like to become or what they would like to do in the next 365 days. Researchers at the University of Scranton suggest that only 8 percent of people keep their resolutions. According to U.S. News & World Report, 80 percent of those resolutions fail by the second week of February. What if we’re chasing the wrong thing? What if we need new habits, not New Year’s resolutions? That’s the question I asked myself as I read Justin Whitmel Earley’s new book, The Common Rule: Habits of … Continue reading Eight Purposeful Habits for a Spiritually Focused Life | Influence Podcast

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Recommended Reading for Leaders | Influence Magazine

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I write the Read Like a Leader section of each issue of Influence magazine. In the January-February 2019 issue, I recommended these three leadership books. My recommendations first appeared at InfluenceMagazine.com, and they are posted here with permission. FIX IT! Rob Ketterling (River Valley Resources) When your church faces a problem, who is responsible to fix it? Pastors often say, “I am,” but taking responsibility for every problem results in burned-out pastors and underutilized church members. Rob Ketterling suggests a better way forward in Fix It!, one that revolves around three simple words: you, them, and God. “Define what you’re responsible … Continue reading Recommended Reading for Leaders | Influence Magazine

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The Soul in Paraphrase | Book Review

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The Soul in Paraphrase is “an anthology of the best devotional poetry in English” edited by Leland Ryken, a long-time professor of English at Wheaton College, now retired. It takes its title from a line in George Herbert’s “Prayer,” which describes praying as “The soul in paraphrase,” among other things.  The anthology presents 98 poems from “Caedmon’s Hymn” (the oldest extant English poem) to works by T. S. Eliot. Ryken’s scholarly remarks follow each poem. Ryken defines devotional poetry in both objective and subjective terms. Objectively, it “takes specifically spiritual experience for its subject matter,” which for Christian poets can include topics … Continue reading The Soul in Paraphrase | Book Review

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The State of the Evangelical Mind | Book Review

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In 1994, Prof. Mark Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which opened with this arresting sentence: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” For Noll, the word mind pointed to “serious intellectual life,” “the effort to think like a Christian…across the whole spectrum of modern learning.” The book offered a historical explanation for the scandal, outlined its effects on how evangelicals approach politics and science, and suggested that an “evangelical renaissance” might be underway. The State of the Evangelical Mind picks the story up twenty-five years later, assessing the quality of evangelical … Continue reading The State of the Evangelical Mind | Book Review

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My 14 Favorite Books in 2018

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I read many good books in 2018. Here are my 14 favorites, alphabetized by author’s last name. For each, I’ve excerpted a paragraph from my review of the book and provided a link to the full review on Amazon. If you like my review of a particular book (or of all of them), please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page for it. That will help me to achieve my #NerdGoal of being a Top 100 Reviewer on Amazon. I’m currently ranked 351st. Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally (Encounter) Popular culture and political action may have normalized transgender identity, … Continue reading My 14 Favorite Books in 2018