Resources on Book Reviews
My friend Craig put me onto Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Cholera devastates cities, a lethal enemy that, through the centuries, killed millions. The Ghost Map takes us to 1854 when a cholera epidemic ravaged London’s Soho district, and claimed more than six hundred lives. The death toll would have risen higher had not many anxious citizens fled. The dominant epidemiological paradigm of the day designated cholera an airborne disease, the product of foul air associated with overflowing cesspools and unsanitary living conditions. For several years prior to the outbreak, Dr. John Snow, a renown anesthesiologist, suspected the airborne theory wrong. When…
Read MoreHoliness by J.C. Ryle was the first book I read devoted to the believer’s personal holiness. Through the years I’ve returned to it many times for instruction and encouragement, and it remains atop my list of recommended books on the subject. Ryle loved the the gospel of God’s justifying grace in Christ. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). Not human works but Christ, by his meritorious life and atoning death, saves believing, repentant sinners. God justifies, and he also sanctifies as he works in believers to purify and make them holy…
Read MoreSeventeenth century Puritanism produced some of Christianity’s most able preachers. Many of them received a university training that required the careful reading of texts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. A language-based educational system prepared future ministers to find a home in biblical texts. If they tutored children of the affluent, they sharpened their expository skills. (T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach. P&R, 2009) The written text no longer dominates America’s educational landscape, and comparatively few students devote themselves to rigorous study of literature or ancient languages before entering seminary. Preaching suffers. T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach engages the modern preacher by considering his ability both to read biblical texts and communicate compellingly their God-breathed truth. The minister’s…
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