What Am I Reading?

Highlights Spring 2013

Creating Innovators – Tony Wagner

IN THIS GROUNDBREAKING BOOK, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators.

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership – Ruth Haley Barton

“I just want to enjoy God for myself.” With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls.

Planetary – Warren Ellis and John Cassaday

This graphic novel features the adventures of Elijah Snow, a hundred year old man, Jakita Wagner, an extremely powerful and bored woman, and The Drummer, a man with the ability to communicate with machines. Infatuated with tracking down evidence of super-human activity, these mystery archaeologists of the late 20th Century uncover unknown paranormal secrets and histories, such as a World War II supercomputer that can access other universes, a ghostly spirit of vengeance, and a lost island of dying monsters.

Highlights Winter 2012

Epic of Eden – Sandra Richter

Does your knowledge of the Old Testament feel like a grab bag of people, books, events and ideas? How many times have you resolved to really understand the OT? To finally make sense of it?

Perhaps you are suffering from what Sandra Richter calls the “dysfunctional closet syndrome.” If so, she has a solution. Like a home-organizing expert, she comes in and helps you straighten up your cluttered closet. Gives you hangers for facts. A timeline to put them on. And handy containers for the clutter on the floor. Plus she fills out your wardrobe of knowledge with exciting new facts and new perspectives.

Highlights Fall 2012

Across The Spectrum – Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy

This new edition of a popular text presents an accessible yet comprehensive primer that helps readers understand the breadth of viewpoints on major issues in evangelical theology, with chapters using the popular three- or four-views book format. The authors carefully examine positions taken by evangelical scholars on seventeen seminal issues. They lay out the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for each position in point-counterpoint fashion and discuss possible objections.

Openness of God – Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, and John Sanders

Presents a careful and full-orbed argument that the God known through Christ desires “responsive relationship” with his creatures. While it rejects process theology, the book asserts that such classical doctrines as God’s immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge demand reconsideration.

Surprised By Hope – N. T. Wright (Second Time!)

Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian’s future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today’s premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity’s most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community’s hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of “new heavens and a new earth,” revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the “second coming” of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise.

Life Together – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

After his martyrdom at the hands of the Gestapo in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer continued his witness in the hearts of Christians around the world. His Letters and Papers from Prison became a prized testimony to Christian faith and courage, read by thousands. Now in Life Together we have Pastor Bonhoeffer’s experience of Christian community. This story of a unique fellowship in an underground seminary during the Nazi years reads like one of Paul’s letters. It gives practical advice on how life together in Christ can be sustained in families and groups. The role of personal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service is treated in simple, almost biblical, words. Life Together is bread for all who are hungry for the real life of Christian fellowship.

Divergent Series Book 1 – Book 2 – Veronica Roth

One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.