home again, home again...

I got back last night about 10:30 from another quick trip to Wichita, this time for DER Orientation. I can now officially function as a DER Candidate, which is, essentially… well, nothing from an official standpoint. I just get to review lots of stuff with the hope that as I learn and become more proficient, I can be appointed a full DER. It’ll likely be at least a year.

One upside to the trip was the time to do some reading. I should do full BookJournal posts on each of these, but I’ll summarize here now just to summarize. (Helpful, no?)

On the way down, I finished reading Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Brilliant. Maybe even better than Ender’s Game. That man knows how to write. (More on that later.)

After that, I finished up N.T. Wright’s What St. Paul Really Said. I thought it was also brilliant. His interpretation of Paul’s themes of justification, the righteousness of God, and the Gospel make a lot of sense. I went back and read through Romans after finishing Wright, and there were several places where lightbulbs went on. I’ll have to ponder this some more. One thing that bothers me a bit is his conclusion (and I’m putting it very roughly here) that Christ’s being Lord will result in the Church working to establish His kingdom here on earth. As I understand it, this is a pretty typical amillenial Reformed view of the end times, and I guess I just can’t get my dispensational brain around it. If any of my readers could suggest some good reading in that area, I’d be grateful.

The reading list isn’t done yet, folks. After N. T. Wright, I headed back for some fiction. So I read The Bourne Legacy, which is a new novel by Eric Lustbader written around Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne character. It was a pretty good book. The writing style was more like a contemporary spy thriller and much less like Ludlum, which was weird. But otherwise the story was good and appropriately muddled. Finished that book as we were pulling up to the terminal in Chicago on the way home.

Then I went back to non-fiction. Some time ago, Keith had recommended Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card as an excellent volume on how to write fiction. He was right, it is excellent. I’ve always had fleeting thoughts of doing some writing, but never really applied myself to it. (Who has the time?) But if I ever were to start, this book would become a primary text for me in helping develop good characters and plots. Card has good insights into what makes fiction work, and he expresses them fairly simply and with some good examples.

Now I’m back home and trying to catch up from missing a day and a half of work. Good times.