Book Review: Simply Jesus, by N.T. Wright

    Tom Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and is viewed by many as one of the greatest New Testament Scholars alive today.  He’s written extensively on Jesus; both academic tomes and books written for people like you and I.

     Simply Jesus, looks at how the historical forces of Jewish Nationalism and Roman Imperialism collided during the life of Jesus.  Wright’s strength is in uniting seemingly divergent themes and pulling them together to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan.  

     Simply Jesus is a very accessible book and is an invaluable resource for understanding Jesus’s life and history.  Go out and read it for yourself!

Book Review: Religious Nuts Political Fanatics by Robert Vagacs

Excellent birthday gift, thanks to Carolyn for this delightful gem of a book! Vagacs is more then a fan of U2, he is a follower of their music and their theology. Religious Nuts Political Fanatics isn’t an evolutionary overview of U2’s spiritual songs; rather it alerts the reader to the sweeping Christological and Eschatological themes found throughout U2’s considerable body of work.

A vibrant Christ-centered theology emerges from the pages of Religious Nuts Political Fanatics. The title comes from a lyrical line in the song ‘New York’, from the All That You Can’t Leave Behind -2000 album. I found Chapter Four, The Babylonian State of Zooropa, to be especially compelling. This chapter explored the three albums released in the 1990’s and the emotional and spiritual discontent found within the lyrics. Achtung Baby -1991, Zooropa -1993, and Pop -1997. Just as the Babylonian exile caused many faithful to abandon God, one can argue that U2’s 1990’s releases reflected the bands spiritual exile.

Religious Nuts Political Fanatics is a great addition to the U2 scholarship canon. A great companion book which explores the personal side of U2’s theological underpinnings is Steve Stockman’s, Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2.

Book Review: Priest, by Ken Bruen

Bruen’s prose mirrors his life. Abrasive, rough, weathered. All novelists write their biography through their fiction; the character and the writer being too enmeshed to find separation. For fans of the crime noir genre, Bruen’s the master. Setting is modern day Galway, Ireland; main character is a former Garda, fresh out of alcohol detox, triggered by the accidental death of a friend’s young daughter, who he was supposed to be watching. Bruen writes like how a Guinness tastes: bitter, dark, and biting. Take this excerpt,

‘With horror, I realized I cared for more people in the graveyard then in life, which means you’ve lived too long or God has a serious vendetta going, with no sign of Him letting up in the foreseeable future. What all this transmuted into was rage, a blinding, encompassing, white rawness of fury. When I hit the guy on the bridge, the truth was I felt near released. Only massive control prevented me finishing him off, and man I wanted to – still did. The classic definition of depression is rage turned inward, so the way I figured it, I was born depressed. No f***ing more. I wasn’t going under that dank water which is depression, where your best daily moment is climbing into bed. Of course, the very worst is when you wake, the black cloud waiting, and you go ‘Not this s**t again.’

Bruen weaves in Pascal, Bono, Soren Kierkegaard, Cash’s ‘Hurt’, and dozens of other literary and musical references which helps to raise his work from the gutter of pain -where most crime noir novels reside.