The Little Friar

Rupa Marya & Raj Patel's Inflamed:  Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice is an important book for beginning to think critically about the way in which modern medicine is practiced in places like the United States.   Colonial capitalism, which separates society from nature, subverts the holism required to understand illness, and its intrinsic relationship to our contexts, histories, cultures and environments.  Colonial capitalism, which dominates the 'other' by delineating 'otherness', is the unquestioned worldview of modern medicine because the latter was forged at a time of colonization.  It has replaced indigenous cosmologies that were cultivated over centuries, reciprocal relationships between human and the natural world, passed down through oral histories.  They argue that it is only through a return to an enlightened partnership with our exposome, the natural world, that the healing of our inflamed bodies, and inflamed planet, can ...

Joshua Lawson's Face of Addiction:  Stories of Loss and Recovery is perhaps the most difficult book I've ever read in order to provide an honest review.  The message Lawson offers is one so deeply in need of being embraced by the many communities of which I am a part.  Living as I do in Appalachia, the opioid epidemic has touched nearly every family I know -- including my own.  Two of my sisters have died from addictions that began with opioids.  They're numbers in the statistics we see on the nightly news.  They're also but drops in the larger sea of humanity touched by the epidemic.  Substance addictions are all too human.  So it's difficult to read these "stories of loss and recovery" as anything more than tragic.  That's what makes writing a review for this book so difficult.  But this book is also a beautiful account of a collection of beautiful lives. Lawson's own interest in the subject, and advocacy for those with substance a...

A Contemporary Handbook for Weddings and Funerals (by Aubrey Malphurs and Keith Willhite) has been updated by Dennis Hillman for a new generation of use.  It brings together a wealth of resources for pastors and other leaders charged with the duties to lead the worship of the people of God in a variety of contexts (weddings, funerals, Lord's Supper, baptism, Mother's Day, Christmas, child dedication, etc.).  As I mentioned, this is a revised and updated edition of a text that has stood the test of time and usefulness of pastors for years.  Here, pastors will find the best of scholarship about weddings, funerals and other events in the life of the church, mixed with a sensitivity for preaching and pastoral care in those very important moments.   Pastors never know when a crisis will hit, so having a resource such as this can alleviate some of the daily struggles pastors encounter.  This is a resource you can pull from the shelf and take with you, to use in ...