Book Notes, 2/3/10 – 2/9/10

Last week was kind of a bad week for me for reading. I didn’t work in all of the readings that I wanted to and now I’m behind.
Still, here’s what I’m working on this week:
CH 8455 ~ Still doing Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman (2006).
CH 9000 ~ Still finishing Righteous Discontent by Higgenbotham for my own edification. The Fire Spreads by Stephens last week was fascinating and I took down several good excerpts from it, particularly pertaining to women preachers in the late 19th century. This week we’re reading A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America by John A. D’elia (2008), and so far I’m loving it. D’elia is a fairly talented writer and I feel like Ladd and I have a lot in common.
ST 5102 ~ Reading the second half of Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary on Sin by Cornelius Platinga, Jr. (1995).
Other ~ Still reading The Shack and The Sacred Echo. Barely touched these ones in the last week.

Comments

Book Notes, 2/3/10 – 2/9/10 — 4 Comments

  2. I’m falling behind too, which concerns me, although I figure I can afford it since I kept up a pretty good pace through most of January. For classes I’m working on at least parts of Alister McGrath’s Christianity: An Introduction, Georg F. W. Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Plato’s Republic, and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Beyond that, I’m working on getting through Alexander Pruss’ The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment, William L. Craig’sAssessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (could he not have found a shorter title?), Reid Nelson and Terryl Givens’ Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals After Two Centuries, Philip Jenkins’ God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, and Ian Wood’s The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751.
    And now I’ve added A Place at the Table to my wishlist.
  3. Yeah, Chris. And I’m guessing that committing to Podcast panels isn’t helping us much, either. ;)
    How is the book by Craig, JB?
    After this week, my CH 8912 class doesn’t meet until March 17, and my CH 9000 class meets sporadically and doesn’t have a reading assignment until March 22, so I’ll get a much-needed lull in my reading load. Whew.
  4. How is the book by Craig, JB?
    Very informative, very thoroughly and forcefully argued… and also one of the dullest things I’ve ever read about such an interesting topic. Even his The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination had more zest. Of course, it doesn’t help that the format and font of the book – essentially what one would expect for an unpublished dissertation, with uneven typewriter lettering and all – exudes boredom with every character. If the book had been published by, say, Wm. B. Eerdmans, InterVarsity Press, or Oxford University Press – they all know how to make text aesthetically pleasing – rather than with Edwin Mellen Press, I imagine that the only real downside would be somewhat sluggish prose and the occasional three-page footnote.
    As far as the content goes, though, Craig makes a pretty powerful case, even though occasionally his arguments would need to be more persuasively put in light of shifting trends in contemporary scholarship (re: e.g., the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea).
    At any rate, I’ve finished Neilson and Givens’ Joseph Smith Jr: Reappraisals after Two Centuriesand Jenkins’ God’s Continent, and now I’ve instead begun Brian Davies’ The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, M. James Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the first of the two volumes of Thomas A. Kopecek’s A History of Neo-Arianism, which suffers the singular misfortunate of having the same format as Craig’s book, albeit with a livelier style somehow.
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