Reviews of important books—classic and contemporary.
For Lake, literature is not simply illustrative or instrumental to the task of diagnosing and combatting technocracy: it is the world within which we are cultivated. In the act of reading, we enter not only a set of illustrations which give us principles to live by, but also new parables which instruct, perplex, and guide us into new living. To learn how to be a new person, in other words, we must submit to the art of reading.
Collin Hansen’s describes the popular resurgence of Calvinist doctrine in the first decade of the twentieth century in three words: young, restless, and Reformed.
For a tradition that preaches of a Redemption that follows the Fall, I have encountered an uncanny amount of pro-death penalty sentiments in Reformed circles. I found myself waffling back and forth, wading through the pros and cons of death penalties vs. life sentences for many years.
Nate Pyle’s second book called More Than You Can Handle wrestles with the oft-recited platitude, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”
What is the heart of the Reformed faith?
Muller’s book deals with a phenomenon he calls “metric fixation,” an all-too-common phenomenon today where the close association we often make between measurement and improvement leads us to substitute metrics for judgment; and all too often, we end up gaming the systems that we set up.
