Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
A friend, David Horton, once said, “Some get paid to be critics. Everyone else does it for free.”
We, like any organization or business, get our share of criticisms and complaints. How do we deal with it? Here are my guidelines.
Continue reading “Unpaid Critics”
With almost as much delay and anticipation as the launch of Kindle, the Google e-bookstore opened its virtual doors yesterday.
When I met with Google at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, they gave me chocolate, smiled broadly and said it was really, really coming after months of delay. But they still wouldn’t give me (or anyone) a date. Now it’s here.
Continue reading “Google Editions Is Here”
Can we possibly be serious about creating a five-year plan? In an era of breakneck changes in technology, cultural tastes, the economy and 24-hour news cycles, futurists look suspiciously like palm readers.
Just some of the recent, and massive, changes in book publishing we are all familiar with include
Continue reading “Five-Year Plans Are Ridiculous”
While sitting in a limo in Manhattan wondering if she is overdressed for the party, Jeannette Walls looks out the window and spots her homeless mom rummaging through garbage in an alley.
Walls’ astonishing memoir, The Glass Castle, begins here and then chronicles a childhood in which alcohol, dysfunction and bad choices conspired to keep her whole family
destitute. After she and her siblings moved to New York City and clawed their way out, her well-educated parents continued to live in poverty. And when the pair moved to New York to join their children, ultimately the two of them were without a home.
The book contains one incredible episode after another of pain, hardship and disappointment. Yet one that struck me the most took place after Jeannette had scraped together enough funds to go to college. There she took a course from a professor she enjoyed who began teaching about the effects of economic and social forces on people.
Continue reading “No Ordinary People”
Sometimes what a publisher doesn’t publish is just as important as what it does publish.
Continue reading “The Importance of What You Don’t Publish”
James Davison Hunter tells us, in To Change the World, that the political frameworks of the Christian Right, the Christian Left and the neo-Anabaptists are inherently defective. Is there another option besides these three, which Hunter reframes as “defense against,” “relevance to” and “purity from” the culture? What’s his solution?
Continue reading “To Change the World 5: Seeking the Common Good”
Often [I have wondered](http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2010/09/uncommon_decency.php#more) in frustration, Why does everything seem so politicized? Why are the extremes the only apparent option? Where are the sober, even-handed, reasoned, moderate alternatives?
Continue reading “To Change the World 4: Three Choices Both the Same”
What’s the central dilemma for Christians who want to change the world? James Davison Hunter answers: Even though populism is organic to American Christianity, what actually brings about change instead is the
combination of powerful institutions, networks, interests and symbols. And when it comes to the latter, American Christianity is decidedly on the outside looking in.
The ten biggest independent foundations give away billions; the ten biggest religious foundations give away millions (pp. 82-83). Professors at Christian colleges have twice the teaching load of their counterparts at elite and research universities—so they are at a huge disadvantage in any ambition to lead their academic disciplines (p. 86).
Then he quits preachin’ and starts meddlin’.
Continue reading “To Change the World 3: Between Presumption and Hope”
Christianity has long been “Exhibit A” of populist movements [changing the world](http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2010/10/to_change_the_world_1.php). Two thousand years of history clearly show these people on the margins transforming their societies through the power of the gospel. Right? Why then is James Davison Hunter’s [*To Change the World*](http://www.amazon.com/Change-World-Tragedy-Possibility-Christianity/dp/0199730806/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287011037&sr=1-1) so negative about the ability of a widespread impulse in ordinary people to transform society?
Continue reading “To Change the World 2: The Untold Story of Christianity”