John's December Reading

Currently Reading:

My Soul Magnifies the Lord: Meditations on the meaning of Christmas by Martyn Lloyd-Jones

This book consists of four expositions on the Magnificat - Mary's song in Luke 1. I've been reading one chapter in each Sunday of Advent.



Powers by John B. Olson

I received a copy of this as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers scheme. Stay tuned for the full-length review coming soon.

Science and Christianity: Four Views edited by Richard F. Carlson

This book is published by IVP, in apparent imitation of Zondervan's Counterpoints series. I'm reading this in preparation for a workshop I will be running at PYV Summer Camp on "Can I be a Christian and believe in science?"

The Faithful Sayings in the Pastoral Letters by George W. Knight III

I am in the middle of a series on the faithful sayings in the Aspendale evening services. Five times in the pastoral epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus), Paul says "this is a faithful [or, "trustworthy"] saying. The first one in particular is a great Christmas text: "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief," (1 Timothy 1:15)

Finished Recently:

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

Rather than being the story of Belloc's conversion (he was a life-long Catholic), this is a travel book, written in 1902. Read the book online here.

Belloc undertakes to walk from Toul (in France) to Rome. He does end up cheating, however - twice he catches a train, and twice he hitches a ride on a cart. Here is a Google map of Belloc's trip - I would love to follow in his footsteps one day. By car, of course - it's a 22 hour trip:



Dark Fire by C. J. Sansom

This is the sequel to Dissolution, which I read on my honeymoon. There are currently four books in this series of historical mystery novels, featuring a hunchbacked lawyer as the hero. "Dark Fire" is another name for Greek fire, the long-lost formula of which, in the book, has apparently been rediscovered.

Bound for Glory: A Practical Handbook for Raising a Victorious Family by R. C. Sproul, Jr.

This is the fourth and probably the best book I've read by R. C. Sproul Jr. This has some challenging things to say about Christian family life - and although I have read a fair bit on this subject, I found much in the book that I hadn't thought about before. For example, Sproul argues that a church Session can function as a sort of "court of appeal" for a wife (p. 93):

My wife and I have a dispute. We are not agreeing. I am asking her to do something she doesn't think we ought to be doing. So she goes to court. The court she comes to however, is the church, not the state. That I am not Jesus is painfully apparent. But here, in a church that is willing to exercise discipline and recognizes its rightful calling in these circumstances, she has protection.

The Old Church Book by Robin Langley Summer

This is coffee table book of churches in North America. Although it was a bit frustrating that not all the churches discussed were pictured, I was particularly interested in what it said about revival styles (Greek, Gothic, Romanesque), since they are also to be found in Australia. So, for example, when Kara and I visited Hobart last month, we saw St George's, Battery Point (left) whose pillars are clearly Greek revival. Notice the (architectural!) similarities to the United First Parish Church, Quincy, Massachusetts (right) which is one of the churches featured in the book:

John's November Reading

Currently Reading:

Face to Face: Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality by Steve Wilkins

I'm reading this with Kara. We're both keen on extending our hospitality over the next few years, and hopefully this book will help us to think theologically about the subject.

Preach or Perish, edited by Donald Howard

I like usually to have a book of preaching on the go, and this is a good one. Most of the contributions come from Sydney Anglicans, but there are a few Presbyterians in it as well.

1 Samuel by David Jobling

I've been preaching through 1 Samuel in our evening services at Aspendale, and this book has stimulated my thinking. Jobling provides us a good example of where liberal assumptions can take us in biblical interpretation - if the Bible is only a fallible record of human experience, there is no reason to believe it contains an accurate portrayal of God. Sure enough, Jobling believes that 1 Samuel portrays God as childish and irrational (p. 84). Despite this outrageous statement, Jobling raises some important questions that do need to be answered. For example, why does David remain king despite all his sin, whereas Saul is rejected after a trifling offence? Jobling puts it down to God's inconsistency, but there is a better explanation: the LORD made an everlasting covenant with David (2 Samuel 23:5), whereas he did not make one with Saul. All in all, this is a potentially dangerous book, and not one I can recommend to readers of this blog.

Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style by Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn

This is a classic example of a controversial book. It has 29 reviews on Amazon: 17 give it five stars, while 10 give it 1 star.

Kara and I are planning to homeschool our kids, and this book looks like it's going to be very useful in helping us plan a curriculum.


Finished Recently:

Aussie Pilgrim's Progress by Kel Richards

This book is almost better than the original. I avoided getting Richards' Aussie Bible, but at just $3 at Borders, this was too good to pass up. I read it to Kara, and had the dual pleasure of sharing a devotional book with her, and teaching her the Australian language.

At a couple of places, Richards makes some positive theological adjustments to Bunyan's text. In Hopeful's account of his conversion, Richards includes an explanation of the Big Swap. In the original version, Hopeful has to wait for Christ to reveal himself to him, which he does in a special revelation to his soul, but in Richards' version, all Hopeful (or "Trusty", as he is now) has to do is pray a short simple prayer and really mean it, and he has made the first step on a lifelong journey.

The Sermon on the Mount: An Evangelical Exposition of Matthew 5-7 by Don Carson

I've just finished preaching through these chapters in our morning services, and this book was quite helpful. Not Carson's best, (that would be A Call to Spiritual Reformation) but still very good.

The Deceiver by Frederick Forsyth

Another spy novel, better than the one I read last month.

Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen by Peter Leithart

As the subtitle suggests, this book doesn't just look at Jane Austen from a Christian perspective - it actually argues that her novels are Christian. It has be admitted, however, that we don't know much about Austen's personal faith.

I must confess, I did not read all of this book - just the introductory chapter, and the two chapters on the two Jane Austen books I have read: Pride and Prejudice and Emma. But Leithart has encouraged me to keep on reading through the Austen corpus. Next stop: Mansfield Park, which Leithart claims is Austen's most theological novel.

Two literary tools

I've been playing around with two book-related websites. The first is Amazon, which is so much more than just a place to buy books. I've been posting some old book reviews there - a couple are taken from my old blog, a couple are reviews I wrote for periodicals, and the rest are pared-down versions of book reviews I wrote at college. Anyway, here is my list of reviews on Amazon.


The second website I have been playing with is LibraryThing. I've listed my books there, having imported them from weRead. All the books, that is, that I both own and have read. Anyway, LibraryThing has some great tools on it, and one of them is the capacity to construct a word cloud from any given list. So, here is the author cloud of my personal library.

Kara's September/October Reading

Currently Reading:

The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by G. K. Chesterton

Mr. Pond is an odd character. He's always saying things that just don't make sense...at first. Take this from the first story, "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse" : "... Grock failed because his soldiers obeyed him. Of course, if ONE of his soldiers had obeyed him, it wouldn't have been so bad. But when TWO of his soldiers obeyed him--why, really, the poor old devil had no chance."

And then there were the two doctors who "came to agree so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other..."

I'm enjoying this book. :)

Her Father's Daughter by Gene Stratton Porter

I've only just begun this title, but expect it will be an enjoyable, if somewhat flowery read. Porter's interest in birds and plants again comes to the fore in this story of a young girl living on the outskirts of 1920's Los Angeles.

Recently Finished:

The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out by Mark Driscoll

This book took me a while to finish, simply because I found it hard to get past Driscoll's tone. I found it both overly familiar--this diminished after the first chapter or so-- and times abrasive. However, now that I've made it to the end, I find myself wanting to read it again. There are many things he says about evangelism and culture that make me uncomfortable. But this is a good thing, because I am forced to ask myself "why?".

One thing in this book that I appreciate is the emphasis on evangelism through hospitality. This is an area I would like to grow in. Here are a few other things I've been thinking over:

"The way to avoid sin is not to avoid sinners but to stick close to Jesus." (p. 40)

"As long as Christians fail to repent of self-righteousness, we will continue to speak of evengelism in terms such as outreach, which implies we will not embrace lost people but will keep them at least an arm's length away." (p. 78)

"Jesus told us that the kingdom will be filled with joy, and so we make it a habit to take God very seriously and everything else very lightly." (p. 187)

My husband has written a review which covers the contents of this book more in depth.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

A mark of a good book of historical fiction is that it makes you want to read some real history. Even better if a bit of mystery is in the mix. This book fits the bill. It's a criminal investigation held hundred of years after the suspect(s) and victims are dead. On trial: Richard III.

Overall a great read, even though I was quite irritated at some historical revisionism regarding the Covenanters. Seems a bit much to marginalise them as simply political radicals, none of whom actually died for their faith.


From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple

A travel book in which Dalrymple retraces the steps of John Moschos, a 6th century monk who traversed Byzantium in its declining years, and then wrote a book called the Spiritual Meadow . I suppose what I liked best about the Holy Mountain was how I could learn ancient and modern history simultaneously. I was fascinated by the accounts of many strange sects, such as the Stylites, ascetics who lived on top of pillars. This book gave me a greater understanding of the difficulties that Christians face in the Middle East, and of the complexity of the issues behind conflict in the Holy Land.

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis

One of the most intense books I've read. Probably wasn't a good idea to pick this up right after finishing Fahrenheit 451! Lincoln's Dreams is the story of a young researcher who meets a girl who is having very strange dreams. He soon concludes that they are not actually her dreams, but the dreams of Robert E. Lee, somehow transferred across the years (an idea I found quite disturbing). He sets out to help her, and soon finds himself in a bit of a predicament. There is a twist to this story that in retrospect I should have picked up on sooner. A very strange story.

John's October Reading

Currently Reading:

The Compass Rose by Ursula Le Guin

This is a book of short stories that seem to linger in the grey zone between science fiction and fantasy. I'm starting to develop a taste for Le Guin...

Primeval Saints by James Jordan

I've read a fair bit of James Jordan over the years (mostly on the Biblical Horizons website) and he's always stimulating. In this book he looks at the patriarchs in Genesis. My wife read it a while ago, and now it's my turn.


A Passion for Books by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

A modern classic in the books about books genre. The subtitle says it all: "A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for and Appreciating Books."

Scientific Mythologies by James Herrick

This is a true "Science and Christianity" book, but it's also "Science Fiction and Christianity". Herrick examines the interplay between science and science fiction over the past century, and some of the myths that have arisen in both. I think this book has a really cool cover:


Finished Recently:

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre

This is a gritty, "realistic" spy thriller, not at all like the James Bond books I read as a kid.

Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport by Richard Mouw

The idea of this book comes from a scene from the 1979 film Hardcore (which I have not seen) in which a Dutch Reformed elder from Grand Rapids attempts to explain the five points of Calvinism to a prostitute at Las Vegas airport. Which raises a whole lot of questions, that this book attempts to explore: How does TULIP relate to everyday Christianity? Is Calvinism more that just the five points? Do we refer to the "Reformed distinctives" when we explain the gospel to non-Christians? I really enjoyed this book up to chapter 8, when Mouw's inclusivism bubbled to the surface.

Travel with Robert Murray McCheyne by Derek Prime

Note the non-standard spelling of M'Cheyne's surname. Still, this is a solid contribution to a worthwhile series. It is a biography combined with a travel guide, which means the reader is treated to some lovely, if somewhat gratuitous, pictures of Edinburgh, Dundee and Jerusalem.

Minority Report by Carl Trueman

I heard Carl Trueman speak in Melbourne a few months ago. Hearing him was great and reading him better. This book has several shorter pieces from his Wages of Spin column on the reformation21 website, as well as four longer pieces. Two themes emerge from his writing. The first is the necessity of studying (and understanding!) church history. Not all that surprising, really, given that Trueman is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at WTS. The second theme is a bit more surprising: he critiques the "mere Christianity" popular in modern evangelical circles, which thrives at the expense of a robust confessional orthodoxy. Trueman's perspective comes out most clearly in his review of Is The Reformation Over? by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom. Thought-provoking stuff.

John's September Reading

Currently Reading:

Emma by Jane Austen

I've actually been reading this for ages. Now that my sister-in-law has started reading it, the race is on to see who finishes first.

Martin Luther's Tabletalk

I remember my old church history lecturer, Maurice Betteridge, once saying that Luther would be a much more interesting dinner companion than Calvin. Fortunately for us, some zealous disciples wrote down the stuff he said at the dinner table.

Essays on Reformed Doctrine by Jelle Faber

I'm returning to my roots with this book. This is a collection of essays from a man who for twenty years was Principal of the Theological College of the Canadian Reformed Churches, the denomination in which my Dad was once a minister. Most of Faber's essays deal with the doctrine of the Church.

An Introduction to Aramaic by Frederick Greenspahn

I'm learning Aramaic! It's the much-neglected third biblical language. Although most of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, Ezra 4:8-6:18 and 7:12-26, Daniel 2:4b–7:28 and Jeremiah 10:11 are written in Aramaic.

This is the first book I've read on computer. Luke and Amy kindly gave me their old laptop last month, and I've been using it for work. I installed a copy of my Bible software on it, and discovered that it included this book. I'd been meaning for ages to learn Aramaic, and thought this was a great opportunity.

Finished Recently:

The Sunday Wife by Cassandra King

This is one of the books discussed in the excellent Preachers and Misfits, Prophets and Thieves: The Minister in Southern Fiction, which Kara gave me for my last birthday. The main character, Dean Lynch, is a minister's wife neglected by her husband. Plenty of food for thought.

The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by Don Carson

One reason the doctrine of the love of God is difficult is that the Bible talks about God's love in several different ways. The love the Father has for the Son, God's general love for his creation, God's "salvific stance towards his fallen world," his "particular, effectual, selecting love toward his elect," and love that is conditioned on obedience. Carson deals with all these aspects in a masterful way.

The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro by Iain McCalman

The story of Count Cagliostro is a fascinating one, and McCalman tells it well. It is, in effect, a history of Europe in the second half of the 18th century, since Cagliostro's story intersects with those of Marie Antoinette, George IV, Casanova and Catherine the Great of Russia.

Athanasius' On The Incarnation

This is the edition that comes with the famous introduction by C. S. Lewis, in which he says that it is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. "If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones." Lewis also says that he tends to find "doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books." On The Incarnation is a great book to read devotionally.

John's Dustings

Since Kara has posted her list of books recently read and currently reading, I thought I'd better do the same.

Currently Reading:

Enthusiasm by R. B. Knox

This book has numerous untranslated French and Latin quotations, but it's still worth the effort. Writing from a Catholic perspective, Knox describes movements within Christendom such as Jansenism and Methodism.

The Spirit in Public Theology: Appropriating the Legacy of Abraham Kuyper by Vincent Bacote

I'm giving a lecture on Kuyper at the end of August, so I thought I'd better read some more about him.

Autobiography of John G. Paton

Paton was a pioneer Presbyterian missionary to Vanuatu. Last year our denomination had a missionary awareness day for kids, and I dressed up as him:

I'm the one on the right.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

The book is a follow-up to Guns, Germs and Steel, which I read a couple of years ago. That book made the argument that it is geography rather than biology that determines the destiny of civilisations. Which is just a secular version of Acts 17:26: "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."

Here Diamond chronicles civilisations that collapsed, such as that of the Maya, the Vikings on Greenland, or the inhabitants of Easter Island.

Finished Recently:

Heiland by Franklin Sanders

This is almost post-apocalyptic in its tone. Heiland, the protagonist, is a coin minter who works as an intelligence officer for the Tennessee Free State in its struggle against the US Government.

Christ-centred Preaching by Bryan Chapell.

Probably the best book on preaching around.

The New Faithful by Colleen Carroll

Does for the Catholics what Young, Restless, Reformed did for the Calvinists.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

This rather intense book is set in a 1964 in which Germany had won World War II.