Reviews of important books—classic and contemporary.
Moonglow somehow captures the inner workings of actual memory in ways which humanize this fictional Grandfather as the linear celebrity tell-alls cannot do, for this very reason: Grandfather recounts his life as we actually recall our lives—in truthful half-starts and drawn out threads.
The Shallows and The Next Story do an excellent job of motivating the reader to consider their use of media, but it seems to me that the different approaches taken by these authors are rooted in fundamentally different pictures of what it means to be a human being.
Lila tells the story of a young woman, Lila Dahl—of her abandonment at birth, her wild upbringing among vagrants, and her eventual arrival in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, where she begins a relationship with the gentle pastor who would one day become her husband. It is a story of grace – divine and human – and of unconditional love.
The only tough part of a virtual roundtable like this book club series is figuring out how to either respond to all of the good points made or to pick from among them in a way that doesn’t neglect something valuable.
There are intentional forms of racism, but race also works as a social force that structures our perceptions, values, practices, institutions, etc. We need to distinguish between the intentional and structural varieties.
There is no question that a number of mysteries and tensions lie at the heart of the Christian faith. How should we live “in the world, but not of it”?
