Monday, June 11, 2007

Books From Last Week

Spent the week at the beach last week (Emerald Isle, NC). Beautiful place. Managed to plow through a couple of books, all of which were good reads. All for very different reasons! Books I read include:
  1. In The Presence of My Enemies by Gracia Burnham. Martin & Gracia Burnham were missionaries in the Philippines. They were abducted along with several others while enjoying their anniversary at a resort. Their captors were the Abu Sayef, a branch of Al Quieda that has training camps & wrecks havoc in the Philippine jungle. Gracia survived the one year of captivity; Martin was killed during the rescue attempt. Amazing story, highly recommendable!

  2. Holy Discontent by Bill Hybels. Actually heard this message a couple of years ago, and I think the audio message might be just as good if not better than the book (certainly shorter!) The whole notion of the book centers on the defining moment that spurs people to do something. We all have that Popeye moment - "I've had alls I can stands and I can't stands no more." But do we act? How do we identify our personal areas of holy discontent, feed it, fight it & follow it? Very good stuff. I think you can get the audio message, too. If you do, the following session with Rick Warren is sort of a follow-up to Hybels message, and a terrific one-two punch. You should be able to get these two sessions here. Good book, though!


  3. 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is # 37) by Bernard Goldberg. OK, so this is sort of off the charts for my usual reading. I remember looking at this when it came out, and thought it was funny. Was ordering something from Amazon a few weeks back, and needed a bargain book for a couple of bucks to get me over the threshhold for free shipping. This showed up, and it was kinda fun. Didn't know a lot of the names, but understand why they're listed. Here's a quote from the intro of the book: "And it won't take you long to notice that there are a lot of liberals on the list, which, of course, is just how it ought to be. If I were compining the list years ago, say, when I was in college, there'd be a lot of conservatives on it. But this isn't years ago, and besides, I'm smarter now than I was back then..." So you can see a little tongue in cheek, but it was interesting.

2 comments:

  1. Shame on your for mixing politics with church. People come to you for a godly opinion and you lead them in a direction of your personal political beliefs. You may think this is ok, but this is leading amercian's away from the chruch.

    Conservatives are not the ultimate religious people, nor are democrats. People who serve the lord are.

    PS. I do know you Bob. I am not an anonymous person from NYC. I am sad you would do this and more sad that some people will actually read this book and continue the agenda of seperating the chruch with the parties. Only the Christians will loose in the end. Read up on it...the numbers are dwindling and politics isn't the battle you need to fight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm sorry I confused you on two counts. First of all, I'm not Bob, so please don't confuse anything I say or do to represent him. Second, not sure I completely understand your take above. In fact, if you've read much of what I have to say in this blog, I agree with you. Of the three books I read, you seem to have a problem with one of the choices, but from what you said above, you would probably actually nod your head in agreement with much of the book. Sorry if I misled you on either of those points. Yes, I considered the source when I read the book - Goldberg is a staunch conservative and he is mostly attacking those who are very liberal (and those who mostly go against the grain of most evangelical Christians). And most of his targets have nothing to do with politics. He does take a shot at a couple of evangelicals, but I can't say that I disagree with him for his reasons.

    ReplyDelete

Feel free to comment, but please keep it nice. It is helpful if you use your name, too...anonymous comments with no names attached are generally deleted!