The Little Friar

J. Webb Mealy's Bad Place:  Or, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Hell, But Were Afraid to Ask  is a book I so wanted to read and enjoy.  The thesis of the book is one with which I agree:  Christians have so misunderstood the New Testament notion of "hell" as "eternal conscious post-mortem punishment", a notion that requires a drastic re-reading from the biblical text in order to sort out.  What I found in this book, though, is a clear thesis -- a correct thesis -- in search of a depth of scholarly treatment.  There just simply isn't much to this book.   The writing is mediocre.  The conclusions are overdrawn from the evidence presented.  Too often the author stacks the deck in favor of his own conclusions without the clear evidence to support those conclusions.  This is sad, because I think the evidence is there in the biblical text.   What this book ultimately needs, then, is a much better editor, to help t...

Sam Hastra and Sam Cocar's Practicing the Monastic Disciplines:  Finding Deep Spirituality in a Shallow World  is not what readers would most likely expect from its title.  This isn't an academic tome on classic monasticism.  Instead, it's a very practical, very pastoral, extremely modest handbook on becoming a follower of Jesus in a world so insistent we follow other leaders.   In this delightful little book, the authors work together to craft short chapters that highlight how the desert mothers and fathers -- those Christians who lived and prayed in the mountains of the Mediterranean East in the fourth century -- "wrestled with many of the same issues we wrestle with today".  These women and men were not attempting to earn their salvation (as, sadly, most Protestants envision them).  Instead, they were working out that salvation in a divisive and distraught world.  These were soldiers of Christ who fought the principalities and powers of th...

David Ritchie's Why do the nations rage?  The demonic origin of nationalism  gives us a timely account of the biblical connections between "the nations", "the powers and principalities" and "idolatry".  With a pastoral heart and a keen theological mind, Ritchie writes a book that every Christian in America needs to read.  He explores what is perhaps the problem of life in America for faithful followers of Jesus Christ:  The idolatry of Nationalism. The biblical realism of Ritchie's account is one that theological conservatives will find speaks a language they can understand.  And the crisp theological critique of what St Paul calls "the principalities and powers of this world" echoes the biblical drama of salvation that centers on Jesus Christ -- in a way that modern theological liberals will find engaging.  In short, the religious fervor that betrays so much modern American nationalism will find in this book a deep and abiding critique t...

Jason Porterfield's Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace throughout Holy Week  focuses on peace issues of Holy Week in a way that most books about that highly significant week do not.  He takes the lament of Jesus, recorded in Luke 19.41-44 as "the interpretative key to Holy Week" (page 21).  Thus, Porterfield asserts, "We desperately need to recover the radical vision of peacemaking that Jesus embodied throughout Holy Week" (page 23). In chapters two through seven, Porterfield describes what happened on each day from Palm Sunday to Good Friday and also lists "lessons in peacemaking" from Jesus' actions and words on each of those days.  The final chapter deals with Saturday and Easter Sunday under the title "Peace Be with You".  Porterfield concludes the chapter, and the book, by addressing his readers directly.  He encourages us to consider how we may implement any insight we've gained through reading Fight Like Jesus .  Since the...

James Calvin Davis' American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture offers some reflections -- most in the form of sermons -- on one of the most vexing questions that has plagued my own ministry:  Do we want the parish to celebrate secular holidays as part of our liturgy?   It's never been a simple question, precisely because American culture is so pervasive.  We live and breathe it for seven days a week -- and we don't leave that air when we walk into a worship service on Sundays.  So not acknowledging secular holidays (holy-days) is a difficult task, and one likely to be met with lots of resistance in the parish.  Trust me, I know.  I've lived that resistance for decades.  Like most other pastors, I've insisted that the Christian liturgy is reserved for Christian holy days.  We have a Christian calendar that follows the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (including Jesus' continued life in his Church), thus i...

I'm hearing a lot of talk about "thoughts and prayers".  And then I see push back in a variety of ways -- heck, I'm among those pushing back. I also think most of the criticism directed at "thoughts and prayers" isn't religious but political.  And as political criticism, you can be sure I sympathize with the objections -- I've even posted a few.  I hate American civil religion as much as my atheist and agnostic friends.  Specifically, those, like me, objecting to the uselessness of "thoughts and prayers" are directing those criticisms toward political leaders who send statements of concern, condolences and solidarity out on social media and who are perceived as taking no material, political action to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.  For example, politicians send out "thoughts and prayers" to the families of Uvalde but take no meaningful action on gun control.  Yeah -- they make my blood boil. The problem here,...

Pam Urfer's Candlelight Revolution  provides a view to daily life in the Cold War.  When the Soviet Union began to crumble -- with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 -- the effects of the suffocation and extermination of human thriving that had named the period came into a clearer view for those in the West.  But for those in Germany and the Soviet Union, life had been named mean and hard for a long time.  Urfer captures the struggles of that daily life in a compelling narrative. ___________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this brief review.

Some years ago, I attended the funeral mass for a child of a family I barely knew-- a child who had died as the result of parental neglect.  Most of my readers know that I barely suffer from the urge to appear "religious", and hardly ever utter empty words.  So sometimes I'm inevitably tempted to slightly modify the written prayers of the BCP.   Such was this occasion.  When we reached that point in the mass when the congregation prays the Lord's Prayer:  ... and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those against us. I added the words, "The bastards". I didn't realize at the time that I'd said it aloud, but the lady sitting next to me tugged my sleeve and firmly instructed me to be quiet and not to be disrespectful. But actually ... isn't that exactly  what our Lord is asking us to pray, and to do?  To forgive the bastards who did the injury.  To forgive those we think of in such terms? I've been thinking of that recently, because the Spirit ha...

 The following article was written for a Christian publication for May 2022.

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 ...

Every year, I see memes making their rounds on how Christians stole Christmas from the pagans.  These memes recur around the Christmas season, and tend to reinforce ideas that question the very historicity of Jesus himself . So let me lay it out plain:  No, Christmas did not begin as a pagan holiday.  In fact, to claim as much is to deny the very history folks want to lay claim to.  In some ways, the following is going to be a rant.  But rants are quite probably the only (and certainly the best) response to such silliness. The Christmas tree is pagan. What if I told you that most Christians throughout history did not celebrate Christmas with trees?  Christmas trees have started to spread all over the world, but that is a recent development and not something most Christmas-celebrating Christians would have even heard of for most of history.  Christmas trees were a purely localized phenomenon for a long time. And it's not like pagans invented trees...

J Chase Davis' Trinitarian Formation:  A Theology of Discipleship in Light of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit develops one of the strongest theologies of discipleship I've read in recent years.  He offers readers a " Triperspectivalism" that balances doctrinal, devotional and dutiful perspectives about discipleship into a clear view of all the ways in which the theology of the Trinity informs and forms the church's ministry to make disciples.  Far from a deep theology that is disconnected from the practical concerns of disciple-making ministry, Trinitarian Formation highlights things like racial justice and the struggles of addiction as deeply theological and devotional issues. This is clearly one of the most important ministry texts for 2021. _______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Gregg R. Allison's 40 Questions about Roman Catholicism is another volume in Kregel's "40 questions" series that explores historical and foundational questions (questions 1-10), theological questions (questions 11-34), and contemporary and personal questions (questions 35-40).  It's a balanced, serious engagement from an evangelical (specifically Southern Baptist) who has spent decades researching and dialoguing with Roman Catholics. Allison is clear that one of the fundamental differences between Roman Catholics and evangelicals generally is the approach of the relationship between nature and grace.  For Roman Catholics (cf. Question 3), nature and grace are intertwined.  Put simply, for Roman Catholics, nature transmits grace.  This is particularly true in the sacramental theology that infuses the Roman tradition.  While the sin of Adam may have corrupted nature, it did not obliterate the divine grace infused into it.   Questions 11-13 will quite...

Following the Call:  Living the Sermon on the Mount Together is a companion volume to Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People ( reviewed here ), a collection of essays from various Christian spiritual writers who open up ways of reading and living Jesus' words contained in the Sermon on the Mount.  The book is divided into four sections: Kingdom Character (Matthew 5.1-16) Kingdom Commands (5.17-48) Kingdom Devotion (6.1-18) Kingdom Priorities (6.19-7.28) and explores all the beauty and grace of Jesus' words in fresh and enlivening ways.   Because our culture tends to think of Jesus' teachings as individual ethical imperatives, this book offers an added layer of criticism.  It is meant to be read in community, with others, and enacted in the lives of its readers.  This collection of 52 essays is also "essential reading" for disciples. ______________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review ...

The NIV Beautiful Word Bible has an update from its original 2016 edition.  This edition has an additional 100 illustrated verses, a larger (9.9 point) font size, and a set of matching self-adhesive book tabs that you can attach for the reader's ease in finding Bible books. The tabs, unfortunately, didn't come with instructions -- so you have to be careful when applying them and put thought into the process.  But their design is simple and adds to the beauty of the final product.  The binding is a strong soft leather over board, giving the book a strong structure, which, when opened, lays the text flat, regardless what part of the book you might be reading.   Overall, this is a beautiful text that my wife is going to treasure for years to come. I've attached some images below to give readers a clear view of that beauty. _____________________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Derek Peterson's Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes:  The Strange Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity was Written into History  reads like a detective story ... on the interrelationships between science and Christian faith.  Peterson exposes a range of myths about those interrelationships -- asking the important questions of who, what, where, when, and why we believe modern science and Christian faith are at odds with one another.  In many ways, this detective story weaves and meanders down blind alleys to bring to light just how false these myths are, and how widespread they're believed in our culture. Historians and philosophers of science have, over the past quarter century, begun to quietly leave those myths behind and tell the real story of the relationship between modern science and Christian faith.  And Peterson does a masterful job bringing their work to light and exposing the myths of conflict for just what they are.  Like a good detec...

Douglas Webster's The Parables:  Jesus' Friendly Subversive Speech offers readers an accessible yet scholarly depth introduction to the parables of Jesus from the canonical tradition.  Webster gives a thorough exposition of several of the common parables, with an echo of the parable tradition from the Old Testament, particularly the prophetic tradition. The final chapter is perhaps the most important.  In it, Webster offers some critical advice on teaching and preaching Jesus' parables in contemporary contexts.   This is a great resource and a valuable addition to any pastor's library. __________________________ I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Alan Olsan's Caspar Schwenckfeld:  Between Tyranny and Anarchy tells the semi-historical account of one of the lesser known characters of the 16th Century Protestant Reformation.  Developed from letters, pamphlets and other writings of Schwenckfeld's, the book tells the all-too-human story of real life reformers -- their hopes, dreams and fears.  It's an intriguing account for historians, but it also offers a rich account of the very roots of the Reformation in the deep biblical disagreements that formed the heart of the movement. Schwenckfeld was a nobleman born in the province that now encompasses modern western Poland, an early follower of Martin Luther.  After Caspar's own conversion, he brought Lutheranism to Poland, and quickly gained the approval of Luther himself.  After some converts began to abuse Luther's notion of "justification by grace alone" -- and over a deep disagreement of the nature of the Lord's Supper -- Schwenckfeld broke with Lu...