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I’ve been finishing books faster than I’ve been able to blog about them… so here’s a catch-up post.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

Schlosser’s book alternates chapters between telling the story of an accident at a nuclear missile site in Damascus, Arkansas, and telling the history of the development of nuclear weapons, with a focus on the accidents and risks involved. Though it’s not his point, one can quickly conclude that it’s only by the grace of God we haven’t had a major nuclear incident in the past 70 years. A fairly thick volume, but quite readable.

*Deadly Assets (Badge of Honor, #12) by W.E.B. Griffin

Ah, W.E.B. Griffin, falling into the ‘hey, they keep giving me money when the books have my name on them’ trap. A decade ago his books were still involved and engaging; today the plot lines are thin and the margins are wide. Remind me not to bother the next time I see one of his volumes on the library shelf.

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro G. Ferreira

A fun, popular-level overview of the study of General Relativity from Einstein to the present. I finished this on an airplane earlier this week and any sense of nerdiness I might’ve had from the topic quickly slipped away as the guy in the seat next to me was reading some treatise on string theory. Nevertheless, a good survey of the topic.

A reminder that current events can make even recent books seem a bit out of date: the chapter on gravity waves talked about LIGO but was still in the “maybe someday” stage about actual detection of gravity waves… which LIGO announced earlier this month.

Water to Wine: Some of My Story by Brian Zahnd

Brian Zahnd is a beautiful conundrum of a pastor and writer. Got fired up for Jesus as a kid in the 70s, planted and led a Pentecostal church. In this book he tells, as he says, some of his story as he hit a mid-life crisis of sorts, asked himself “is this all there is to Christianity?” and then had his eyes opened to a broader, deeper, richer view of the faith.

This is a guy who on one hand sounds like a mystic - he tells here of God speaking to him through dreams where he met with and got messages from Abraham, Mother Teresa, and Karl Barth - but in the next breath is championing formal liturgy, weekly Eucharist, and use of the Book of Common Prayer. He loves the land of Israel and can speak of it in great detail, but doesn’t hold to the dispensational eschatology that traditionally accompanies that love.

Regardless, his sermons have been a great encouragement to me over the past couple years. This book rehearses familiar themes from his messages, but that’s not a bad thing.

I picked this one off the New Books shelf at the library and was intrigued enough to borrow it. The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord is a gentle sci-fi story focused on culture exploration in the same vein of the later books of Orson Scott Card’s Ender series or some of the works of Ursula K. LeGuin. The cover blurb is a little bit misleading:

A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression…

Well, yeah… that happens on the first page. The remainder of the story is a more subtle story about relationships being built between different cultures. It was an enjoyable read.

I’ve been interested in the Supreme Court ever since high school, so when I saw this one on the library shelf, I didn’t hesitate in picking it up. Last year I read a book about Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the Supreme Court; this year I learn about the first two women to serve on that bench.

Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World is giving away a bit of its bias even in the title. It’s a very nice history of these two groundbreaking women. It fascinated me to learn more about their backstories to add color to the faces you usually only see in stern portraits staring out from above black judicial robes.

It was interesting to learn about Ginsburg’s path to the court and how it paralleled Thurgood Marshall’s in many ways. Marshall was a tireless advocate for the African American cause as a lawyer before the Court before becoming a member; Ginsburg similarly championed the cause of equal rights for women. These backstories help remind us that even though the news stories about Court justices usually focus only on very recent legal opinions, appointment to the highest bench comes as the culmination of a long, brilliant legal career. These are impressive women with wonderful stories.

Author Hirshman is hardly a neutral observer here; she cheerleads for O’Connor and Ginsburg all through the volume. It’s tolerable until the last few chapters, at which point she speaks so critically and dismissively of conservative justice Samuel Alito that I nearly decided to put the book down. The opening bulk of the book, though, made it worthwhile.

I’ll be honest here: I’ve never been a big Bob Dylan fan. I like a few of his songs, but have somehow never managed to get into him as an artist. (I’ll keep trying.) Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald is a short history of the American folk music scene in the early 1960s, leading up to that night in 1964 when Dylan brought an electric guitar on stage at the Newport Folk Festival and shook up the folk music scene for good.

Dylan Goes Electric is very readable, and does a nice job of filling in the musical history of the era for people like me who have heard the names Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the like, but know very little about most of them.

Nothing too deep or too profound, but a nice snapshot of a particular short era in American folk and popular music.

Brian Zahnd, from a January 29, 2016 message titled “Silence”:

The church is not a special interest group that has to make its demands known. We don’t have to fight for our rights. That is the exact opposite of the Jesus way. The church is the new temple that is sustained by the Spirit and by lives of faith, and the church can afford to be quiet and trust because it is not dependent on anything other than the Holy Spirit. The church doesn’t have to make things happen. It can simply be that part of the world living under the peaceable reign of Christ. In fact I would highly advocate we reduce the hyperbole when we talk about ‘changing the world’. That just wears me out. ‘Change the world’? Wow, who do you think I am? I think I am far more content just to say ’let us be that part of the world that has been changed by Christ.’ Instead of changing the world, let’s just be the part of the world that is changed. And think that maybe people might notice a difference and say ‘I like that world of Christ better!’ For if there is no marked distinction between the world and us then what would be the point anyway? That’s when ‘changing the world’ becomes a euphemism for ‘getting my way’. Christ doesn’t call His church to go into the world and get its way; Christ calls His church to simply be His people in the midst of the world and living presently under the peaceable reign of Christ. So in a world that must surely be growing weary of the endless noise of ideological anger, the church is to be a haven of quietness and trust, a quiet refuge of peace, even at times an oasis of silence. The sound of the church is the sound of mustard seeds growing, and of bread rising, of lost children coming home, and what noise there is a joyful noise, not an angry noise.

I love it. Really looking forward to attending Brian’s prayer conference in April.

This one was kinda hidden in those photos I posted yesterday. But after wading through Heim I was ready for a shorter, easy read, and Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People by Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber was just the ticket.

It’s more of Nadia at her best, telling stories about her little parish in Denver and how she has experienced God at work in her life.

Nadia is a polarizing figure. Sure, you may have concerns about her attitude, language, and bits of her theology. Regardless, every time I hear or read her, I come away wishing that my faith, embrace of the Gospel, and walk with Jesus looked a little more like hers. That’s enough for me.

I don’t remember when this book came onto my radar, but it was already on my Amazon wishlist when my friend Daniel’s recommendation pushed it to the top of that list.

Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross by S. Mark Heim is a long-ish volume that rather thoroughly summarizes the arguments for the ‘scapegoat’ theory of the atonement as proposed by René Girard. My knowledge of atonement theories has been relatively limited up to this point; aside from knowing “penal substitionary atonement” (PSA) (and remembering a Desiring God pastor’s conference where Mark Driscoll declared it one of the fundamental truths of the faith that was a hill to die on), I’ve not dug into any. So Saved by Sacrifice was an eye-opening entry into a differing view of Christ’s death.

As an aside, here’s my summary of the condensed Wikipedia summary of Girard’s position:

it is humankind, not God, who has need for various forms of atoning violence. Humans are driven by desire for that which another has or wants. This desire increases to a point where society is at risk; it is at this point that the scapegoat mechanism is triggered. This is the point where one person is singled out as the cause of the trouble and is expelled or killed by the group. This person is the scapegoat. Social order is restored as people are contented that they have solved the cause of their problems by removing the scapegoated individual, and the cycle begins again. The keyword here is “content”. Scapegoating serves as a psychological relief for a group of people. Girard contends that this is what happened in the narrative of Jesus. The difference between the scapegoating of Jesus and others, Girard believes, is that in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, he is shown to be an innocent victim; humanity is thus made aware of its violent tendencies and the cycle is broken.

I also quoted a paragraph from Heim’s book in a previous blog post that was a key bit of explanation in helping me get my head around the idea.

Heim spends a good chunk at the beginning of the book explaining the theory and how representations of Jesus’ death from the very early church might support this scapegoat perspective. He then overviews how the scapegoat theory fits into readings of other books - including a really interesting perspective on Job - and then ties things up by addressing the key PSA texts (think Romans 3 - 5 and most of Hebrews) and how they might be read from a scapegoating perspective.

I’d definitely recommend this one as worthwhile reading if the topic is of interest. It was thick, but not dense - a very helpful read.