3-2-1: The Story of God, the World, and You

This book by Glen Scrivener is a fantastic introductory exposition of Christianity; my church runs a video series using the same material as a seeker event series every so often and I thought it was worth checking out. It was. On a personal note, I'm extremely glad I ended up reading it alongside this other book, as the bubbling refreshers of truth in this considerably offset the misguided downers of the other.

   It's not a full-throttle attempt to provide an inarguable rational basis for Christianity, nor is it a vague doctrinal overview; Glen introduces it as if Christian beliefs were a house and this book the tour, organised into a superbly helpful framework of 3-2-1 (I'll explain what this is shortly), which he expounds with thorough biblical referencing, explanation of doctrinal, and sound philosophical reasoning. He writes with an easy charm, presenting enormous ideas without reducing their magnitude or complexity but making them generally comprehensible as he goes along, partly because of the brilliant simplicity of the 3-2-1 framework for explanation.

   After introducing the book, he gives us an overview of the life, claims, character, deeds, significance, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the central figure and absolute core of Christianity. Glen then leads us through: 3 - the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how they together exist as love and how this conception of God is resoundingly different to any other faith and gives us a sturdy and beautiful foundation for our understanding of big questions; 2 - the division in the world between fallen humanity and God's original perfection, and what this means for us, especially in light of Jesus's entry into and triumph over the brokenness of creation; 1 - our individual decisions to live for self (remaining subject to fallenness and death) or to accept Christ's substitution as what we actually need and to be united to God through him. I have not done justice at all to the devastatingly lucid power with which Glen works through Jesus, the Trinity, the fall, and union with Christ as a progressive cogent whole explanation for Christian beliefs. He consistently grounds his points well in scripture, arguing them compellingly (well, he did study philosophy) but not with cold intellect, a style well-matched by his warm and conversational tone. It's extremely easy to read and extremely enlightening as to the coherency and plausibility of Christian truth as a standalone worldview.

   Having laid out Christianity's blueprints for itself, he then turns to consider some of the main external objections to it. How can we validate its truth? Can we actually trust the bible? Why select this above all the other multitudes of religions and worldviews? What about the problem of suffering and evil? And if God is love then what's the deal with hell? And why has Christianity and the church had so much hypocrisy and evil in its past, for that matter? Particularly, regarding sex and sexuality - why is Christianity so weird about that? Finally, hasn't science pretty much undone faith anyway? Glen tackles these questions using the understanding of the universe from Christianity that he's built up using Jesus and 3-2-1, perhaps not giving a completely satisfactory explanation regarding each, but there are literally thousands of other books on apologetics to do that; here he examines the general gist of why these objections may not actually pose much of a threat to the actual truth of Christian belief. He does this with the same punchy calmness and poignant vivacity that permeates the rest of the book.

   As far as general-readership introductions to Christianity go, this is probably the best I have ever read; it's rare to find one that might actually be accessible to non-christians and therefore effective as the give-away kind of book, but this is. If you're not a christian, I recommend you acquire a copy as it will better acquaint you with the contents of a worldview which you are probably dismissing without properly understanding. And if you are a christian, then I urge you to read this, digest it as an easily-communicable philosophically-fresh means of presenting our shared truth, and then buy like thirty of them and give copies to every non-christian friend you have.

Praying Drunk

This book by Kyle Minor is probably the most tragic and beautiful work of fiction I've read since last summer. I can't actually remember where I heard of it, but it's been sat on my shelf since February waiting for me to plough through it, which is exactly what I did in the last four days. Buckle yourself in for a long post, as I have a lot to say about this book.

   It's by no means an easy read. Apparently it's partly autobiographical, but the disparate patches of story and question and conversation and sorrow that comprise the book work so powerfully as a whole collection that that almost doesn't matter; it's written so well that be it based-on-truth or not Kyle Minor leaves the reader emotionally wrecked and ponderously adrift, not in a cruel cheap way but in a deep, thoughtful, and ultimately sad way. He prefaces the book with a note reminding the reader that though the book is not a novel and is composed of shorter parts, he has put these into a particular order for a very good reason, and therefore one should read straight through rather than skipping around. The rationale behind this order is, at least on my interpretation, a rough meta-narrative tracing the trajectory of some of the stories' shared themes - which I'll discuss later. His fragments of story are revealed in a variety of mediums; some collections of letters, some memoirs, some dialogue, some Q & A with an anonymous despondent quasi-angelic figure, a fifty-page novella, and several more typical-style short stories. They all seem to take place on the same broad stage as well, sometimes touching on the same events or characters or memories, from different angles and in different tones, connected by loose-stitched threads that show either an incredibly deep commitment to leaving parts of pictures unshown or that they are in fact biographical. It matters little to me.
   So, to the contents themselves.

• First, an account of an uncle's suicide, with questions of its causality leading further backwards into abstraction, a deterministic account of the narrator's uncle's life in universal perspective, the initial blame for the ultimately tragic end of his uncle's life, and by implication all of human suffering, lies at the feet of the supposedly benevolent omnipotent God.
• Second, a young boy endures torture at the hands of his high school bully only by clinging to the words of an old Jewish joyous song; later as a grown man, in times of great upset, he finds this victimisation internalised and that he cannot leave it behind, not even able to look beyond it to the Christian faith which he has long since lost.
• Third, a mother leaves her husband and child, who slip into a depressed and depraved lifestyle full of bitterness and anger, leading to horrific fallout, which even within vaguely miraculous elements of the story go to demonstrate how ultimately in control of our lives and our meaningless suffering we as human beings aren't.
• Fourth, several conversations occur between a passive but inquisitive young agnostic man and the charismatic enigmatic Christian woman he is trying to understand and to woo, revealing in many interesting angles the nature of faith as a mysterious crutch.
• Fifth, seven short anecdotes from a missionary in Haiti about a gregarious but untrustworthy acquaintance of his called Sebastian, which display the impotence of knowledge-based faith in inspiring works of love, and the emotional turmoil that results in actively persisting with such contradictions realised in oneself.
• Sixth, a hypothetical reader and an ethereal entity exchange Q & A about the uses of fiction and narrative in making our sensations of life somewhat more tolerable.
• Seventh, at the funeral of a young man who killed himself, the preacher tries to explain God's plan's involvement of suffering using the analogy of making sweet biscuits out of bitter ingredients.
• Eighth, the narrator accounts the disorderly trawl through life of his older brother, through rock bands and sweaty desk jobs and grudges and addictions and bereavements, and asks: how do we keep it together, how do we as people cope with this madness, what do we cling to in the face of our world's sheer insubstantial unreliable shifting sands of cause and effect?
• Ninth, we glimpse the inchoate misery of our bodily existence, especially as we age, as a young man ponders dependence and dignity while attempting to correct his dying grandfather's false teeth.
• Tenth, in the longest short story, comprised of a series of letters (all from different people and in different voices), we see criss-crossing lines across America and over to the distant country of Haiti of loneliness and desperation and selfish appropriations of relationships; a missionary in Haiti falls in love with a student visiting on a volunteer trip, and secretly arranges to marry her, much to the disapproval of her family and his fellow mission team; we see the pastoral and social consequences of this decision bloom all manner of emotional mess in the lives of the poor and beset-upon Christians on each side of this wreck, only accelerating once a violent uprising bursts out in Haiti, and friends and family back in America have their concerns reoriented by other developments. I think ultimately what we see from the story is the deep-rooted need for human companionship of some form, and that in the mess of a world of selfish people, even selfish Christians, this takes many surprising forms, but that all of them are something like clutching at straw; we can never keep or protect properly those we love or those whose love we adopt, and even within faith in a loving powerful God, we let ourselves slip away also.
• Eleventh, another Q & A, our ethereal answerer tells us how truly empty and meaningless and dull heaven is, therefore how faith as a crutch for the empty and meaningless and dull misery of earthly life is likewise but clutching at straw.
• Twelth, the ill-fated attempt of a boy to overcome his bully, and reflections on the hereditary misfortune of violent tendencies, a further meaningless inheritance to human suffering.
• Thirteenth and finally, a countryside-dwelling artist ponders his family and all the tragedy and darkness that has unfolded throughout his life, and how all he can do to keep his soul from crumpling under its weight is to focus on the people present, the work at hand, the pleasures available, the acceptance of misery as part of the way the universe is and a stoic dedication to living with and through it.

   Each component is immaculately written, with the pace and poise of Minor's prose flowing perfectly to suit the tone and point of each part, and with the varying voices of his narrators having their own life and weight. I've heard him described in some reviews as a 'writer's writer', given his inventive playfulness and abundant reflections on the purposes of his writings even within them themselves. In terms of telling a collection of stories well, and provoking a poignant series of thoughtful responses therein, I don't think Minor could have done better. Anyone who enjoys top-notch fiction, especially sad stuff, the weighty kind that every few pages makes you stop short and breathe in blinking back stunned eyewaters at the sheer distressing honesty of his words; read this book.

   However, in a much more personal (and yet much more objective) sense I found the book problematic and upsetting. Minor's characters are largely Christian, and of course, looming throughout the themes and tones and currents of his stories is God; though this god that he writes of is not good. He writes of a powerless, distant, uncaring, unknowable, even cruel god; the humans populating his stories struggle with and lose their faith in myriad sadnesses of circumstance and confusion precisely because this is the kind of god they believe in. I think this is indicative of the damage nominal faith can do; these people largely don't have living personal relationships with God, they are simply brought up into a conservative unquestioned set of doctrinal truths that have never endured trial or test, and so when these difficulties do arise, the grounding of what they think to be true dissolves, plunging them via their suffering into further misery and darkness. It's pretty bleak. The meta-narrative that I mentioned I thought spanned across his collection is one of an individual, who has grown up amid Christianity, seeking meaning and truth and goodness in a broken world. As you'll see by reading back through the descriptions of each piece, we start off by clinging to faith in hope of some abstract redemption, amid brutality and suffering, and unsettled by a vague awareness that God must know what's going on - why is he allowing this? This insecurity and mistrust and feeling of betrayal and absence is built up in leaps and spurts across the following stories, with layers of cynicism and loss further separating the narrator from the god they thought they could trust, before we reach the end, and question whether even if that god is really there and everything I believed about them were true, would it make a difference to me now? And the answer given is a plaintive "not really", leaving us with nothing to do but grin and bear it by ignoring the disjoints, like the artist in the closing story.

   This is, I think, sadly the reality of faith for many nominal christians, especially in America (which is where Praying Drunk's complaints and qualms occur), and it breaks my heart to think that many people may have had internal trajectories in their relationship with God similar to the ones expressed so accurately here. A proper understanding of God's character and the doctrine of the Fall would together remedy so much of these characters' inner turmoil, and could save the faith of many real persons whose lives bear resemblance to the stories. I'm lucky to have grown up in a church environment that is much more open to dealing with the hypocrisy and failure of Christians than in trying to deny or forget them, and also one with a far firmer grasp of the theology underpinning how we can stand in trusting God amid the wreck of this world. But worldwide, certain Christian socio-cultural tendencies will emerge, and so I do recognise with an uncomfortable familiarity a great deal of the internal ruins that seem particularly to plague those living in the Bible Belt, the more conservative types who can't quite reconcile their love-filled faith of fear and judgment against a broken world of human wrong and unanswered questions.

   Fortunately, I ended up reading this book alongside 3-2-1 (an excellent theologically and philosophically sound overview of Christianity), so was reminded persistently while I read onwards that the darkness and hopelessness of Minor's stories is not fully true to the God I know. Christian readers, I'd recommend doing something similar as an antidote to the pervasive persuasive negativity of the short stories. It reminded me of Gilead, the last fiction book I read narrated by a Christian, albeit one with much better-grounded reflective passages and thus a more substantial and encouraging output of its worldview and conclusions.

   Anyway, I've expended all my main points, if I were to start going into the smaller ones then this post may well be my first to exceed 2000 words. Ridiculous. I put so much time into writing these things, only to have no idea if there's a readership at all, but if there is, I hope you enjoy my ramblings, and I hope you enjoy Kyle Minor's stories - because there's no way you'll have read a post this long about a book that you're not planning on reading.

The Book With No Pictures

This is a book for children by B. J. Novak (yep, Ryan (and also one of the writers and producers) from The Office, he's an incredibly skilled comedy writer I'll have you know). I visited home today and my mum showed me it, saying that it had recently made a member of its target audience (i.e. a child) become so overtaken with laughter that it proved an utterly ineffectual bedtime read, as they couldn't sleep for a while due to laughing. This sounded funny, and I've heard of B. J. Novak's prowess as a writer (obviously, from his part in one of the best comedy shows of all time, and his collection of short stories that I read about a quarter of in a bookshop in France last summer but I didn't have any money and eventually the owner realised I was just reading it without paying and told me to leave).

   So, this book; it's designed for parents to read to young children so as to entertain them, and of course, most of those kind of books have pictures. This one doesn't. Of course that doesn't make it any less interesting or fun to have read to you though, as the 'rules' of reading books to kids dictate that grown-ups have to read out aloud whatever it says on the pages. As such, Novak exploits the situation to the full, throwing the grown-up reader into fits of inexorable ridicule for the entertainment of the child, who of course will delight far more in seeing their parental figures descend helplessly into silliness at the hands of a book than they ever would from just having pictures in that book. How?
   By being playful and inventive with the words he puts onto the page. Who says a book needs to be a story? Can't it just be conversational, not even necessarily about something, just a string of statements that together lead one on a roughly-enjoyable verbal romp? Well, yes, because that's exactly what this book is. Novak's book forces the grown-up to declare exceedingly silly things, try to pronounce and vocalise bizarre onomatopoeic noises, to wonder aloud why they are doing so, and to exasperatedly decry the sheer silliness of the book for making them do all these things. It completely disempowers the reader for the benefit of the read-to, and it does so in a disarmingly simple and charming and fun way. I had fits of giggles just trying to read it aloud to myself, never mind to a child, though I might have to try that at some point, because that's what it's for.

   This book is fantastic, a wondrous feat of creative cheek that might just (and I hope I does so) spark something in the lives of the children being read it, showing them the fluidity of language and the fun one can have with having control of it; this is a book that might give little kids that first push into a deeper understanding of semantic and pragmatic language use, making them grow up to be better readers, better speakers, better thinkers. Maybe that's an overly-complicated side-effect, and the main point is just to turn the typical bedtime reading ritual into something a bit more unpredictable and amusing, but that's definitely something that may well come of this book, and for it and for the book itself I applaud B. J. Novak wholeheartedly.

   If you need a new book to read to a child aged three to seven (ish? I dunno, child development isn't perfectly consistent), then I can't recommend this one enough.

Dune

This book by Frank Herbert is arguably one of the greatest works of science-fiction (or any genre) of the 20th century, a status which I wholeheartedly vouch it deserves. Unfortunately, this great book, as with so many other books that I embark upon, suffered the profound neglect of my poor reading habits; I've literally been reading it for about eight years, and usually unless a book is particularly gripping or I feel compelled (in this case by a promise)* to finish it then I would've given up after around a year. So I'd been struggling lumpily across a chapter or two in sporadic bursts since the age of thirteen, but then a couple of months ago realised that I had actually no idea what had really happened in the novel so far, and thus my whole reading of it was effectively pointless even if I got to the end. This was disheartening. So, I read the Wikipedia plot summary to give myself a refresher, which actually turned out to be more of a prefresher, as I simply hadn't grasped the events or themes or currents of the plot at all in my years of attending to Frank Herbert's masterful pages. No surprise really - the Dune universe is one of immense complexity and depth and realistic world-creation,** and my pubescent self all those years ago didn't approach the saga with quite enough literary reverence of preparation to enter a whole new universe. As such, I found it boring, which is perhaps why I took so long to read it, but my newly-held grasp of the scope and complexity and brilliance of the work since I as a twenty-one-year-old read the Wikipedia summary of it has enabled me to dive back in and stand amazed at simply how incredible of a novel it actually is. Someday, I promise to myself, I will acquire the other books in the saga (some of which were completed by Frank's son and close friend after his death, but the wealth of information he left behind as a backdrop for the universe means that they are canonically consistent), and read them all more properly.
   Anyway.
   The sheer epic scale of the book's events and plot currents, the sheer scope of its themes and drivers, the sheer complexity of its characters who are completely embedded in this already highly alien universe with all the nuance of our own; it is an impossible book to summarise, both in terms of what happens in it and what it's about. If you are at all interested in thought-provoking, exciting, rich storytelling and incredible works of imagination, this novel will be a delicious treat for you if you read the appendices and glossary and step carefully and google things that you don't get; it's that kind of book, you might need a helping pointer every now and then but these are provided easily enough, and the payoff in terms of the whole novel is unquestionably worth the effort. It is living proof (as so many books are) that sci-fi/fantasy is not just the realm of poor writers with vivid nerdy imaginations; a stereotype unfairly perpetuated by drama snobs. This is superb literature, superb science-fiction, a masterful work that towers far above most comparable novels and completely redefined the genre forever (see *).
   But I should probably try to say something about its content.
   The House Atreides is gaining power and influence, irking the Emperor, but he cannot risk outright conflict with a house, so he plays on the age-old feud between Atreides and their nemesis House Harkonnen. Duke Leto of Atreides is therefore suspicious when the Emperor 'gifts' his House rulership of the desert planet Arrakis, which has long been under Harkonnen rule. Arrakis is the only planet in the known universe where the drug-like fuel-like substance melange, a.k.a. 'spice', can be found: spice is a psychoactive drug that extends the lifespan of its users by centuries, enhances mental and physical capabilities, and allows psychic extension that enable humans to navigate space-time folds, thus being a crucial component in interstellar travel, upon which the far-flung human Imperium is dependent. Spice, basically, is really important and expensive, and can only be found on Arrakis, because giant desert worms that live in the sand excrete it. Fremen, the natives of Arrakis, have a close cultural and historical and religious connection to the worms and the production of spice, but also suffer from living on a desert world where water is incredibly scarce; ancient prophecies among them foretell the coming of a Lisan al-Gaib, a messianic figure who will lead them to take control of the planet's ecology for their good while not destroying the desert worms or the spice-production capacity. These ideas have been planted among them by the meddling Bene Gesserit cult, who shape breeding programs and inter-generational schemes to suit ultimate ends of peace and balance; there is also an ancient prophecy that from among the (exclusively female) members of this cult will arise the Kwisatz Haderach, a male with immense psychic and physical powers. Also among the Bene Gesserit is the Lady Jessica, concubine to Duke Leto of House Atreides, mother of his son and heir, Paul.
   The complexity of the world Frank Herbert has constructed is such that I cannot fully explain the plot without giving this deep explication of its backstory and conditions, but nonetheless; the main events of the novel revolve around the schemes and feuds between Houses Atreides and Harkonnen once the former arrive on Arrakis, an ensuing war in which Paul and Jessica escape to join the Fremen, and Paul's rise to power following his having realised that he is (or can become) both the Lisan al-Gaib and the Kwisatz Haderach - he becomes a revered leader called Muad'Dib, and rides the giant sandworms into battle, leading a jihad that ultimately clashes with the Emperor himself and throws into question the distribution of power across the whole universe, what with the indispensability of spice to its continuity.
   Did that make sense? Probably not. Read the novel.
   In the depth of its concepts and complexity of its systems, Dune provokes a great deal of thought about some enormous themes too.*** The nature of leadership and following someone, loyalty, trust and necessity; how power and religion and economics all intermingle helpfully or unhelpfully depending on the situations and drives of whichever people group you're siding with; the unstoppable nature of these forces, and the challenge to nature that thus arises - do we perceive natural ecosystems as immutable, or do we seek to co-opt or change them to suit the driving engines of the normative struts of human civilisation? What does it mean to share experience, physically, psychically, historically, environmentally; to be part of a people in space and time? What is the place of an individual in the midst of these warring forces?
   These and other questions are thrown up time and time again throughout the course of this immaculate novel.
   I've said enough.


* As a thirteen-year old I was as pathetically fully a self-described nerd as ever there was. Some American friends from church had visitors over from Ohio, and one of them was also a sci-fi fan, so naturally he pitied the bespectacled jumper-wearing kid and spoke to him (me) about our shared passion. We promised each other that we would seek out and read a copy of the book that we each said was currently our favourite; so in pain of honour to this American stranger who I have never seen since, I bought a copy of Dune and have finally, after eight years of reading, finished it, and I feel greatly indebted to him for recommending that I do, not that he'll ever know. Incidentally, the book that he promised he would read upon my recommendation was His Last Command, the ninth book in the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett, a superbly-written hugely-entertaining war series set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (which, as it happens, derives a huge amount of influence in its paradigmatic sci-fi grounding from Dune, as so Star Wars and Star Trek), which I still love. I do not know whether my American acquaintance ever actually read it though.

** Easily on a par with George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire universe, or J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth; there is literally an encyclopedia dedicated to the wider world created for the epic saga of which Dune is the first instalment. Like, there's even several appendices at the back of the novel explaining the ecological systems and religious traditions and beliefs of the planet Arrakis, the methods and motives of the Bene Gesserit cult, a brief overview of the Imperial Houses and nobility, and then a thirty-page glossary explaining terms and concepts invented for the world. These additions are crucial to fully understanding what's going on in the novel, so deeply entrenched into high-creation is the story - but it never feels needlessly fantastical, because the story and characters are not transplanted into this world (as if from ours) but are part of it, shaped by it.

*** Apparently much of Frank Herbert's inspiration for the themes and concepts was derived from his experiences using psilocybin mushrooms (hey, it was the 1960's), which apparently (not gonna link the source cos it didn't look overly legit, so I'll just leave it at apparently) were also the direct inspiration for the effects of using melange. Something about how the 1960's birthed so much brilliant science-fiction amid so much psychedelic drug use is really interesting. The two are quite definitely linked - I mean, just ask Frank. Wait, wrong link. Frank.

Out of the Saltshaker and into the World

This book, an almost-mythically-good classic on evangelism from Becky Manley-Pippert, was quite excellent. It's one of those books that western middle-class Christians born after 1990 grow up wondering apprehensively when they're going to read.* As such, I've owned a copy for several years and can't remember where from (probably indefinitely borrowed from my dad, as many of my good books on Christianity are) and since the end of 2012 have been steadily chewing through a chapter every other month or so. I have terrible reading habits; for the last five years or so I've rarely had fewer than ten books on the go at once, and I don't pace them equally, so some I finish quickly while others take me literally years. This book was much slower going that I'd have expected given how readable and actually-quite-short it is, but last week I decided to finish it in a final focussed spurt and now I have. Ta-da.
   Anyway, my excruciatingly-dull reading habits aside, this book is an absolute corker. It's about how we should be doing evangelism, but it's not a textbook or guidebook or even methodological primer - it's a deep, wide, reasonable, and well-aimed application of the gospel to ourselves as evangelists. Becky isn't trying to teach us a new model of reaching the unbelievers with maximal efficacy, simply encouraging us in truths we should already know and sensitivities we should already be trying to develop so as to communicate clearly, kindly, and to God's glory. As the book's title recalls, we are the 'salt of the earth'; and this book is an extended series of reminders about ways in which we may become less salty.
   She starts by reminding us of who Jesus is to us, the beautiful intersection of his humanity with his Godhood, and our identity in him defining us to live in a radical relationship with him that can't help but share itself. Our knowing this should spur us to holiness and love and obedience, characteristics of our Christianity that differentiate us from the rest of the world that doesn't know God, and practicing our constancy of being aware of Christ's presence and centrality in our lives helps us grow in these ways. She also reminds us our the implicit need for the gospel in a human life, and that evangelism should be habitual, urgent even, for those who believe it if they truly love the people they are wanting to reach. In the second half of the book she takes a slightly more method-oriented approach, having grounded our reasons for being evangelists in the more theologically-dense first half. Primarily, this doesn't follow a rigorous methodological outline or step-by-step but is essentially based in properly engaging with people. That means being able and willing to have proper involved conversations with them, respecting their views and lifestyles fully enough to see them on their terms so that our arguments and discussions aren't insensitive ballistic missiles but well-discerned polite wrestles. Only if we are standing firm in God's word will our revelation of his truth through the Spirit be honest, and only if we as communicators understand opposing worldviews and perspectives rightly can we recommend accurately the gospel's superiority. She discusses stages in the process of evangelism: 'cultivating the soil' by discerning someone's relevant attitudes, 'planting the seed' by openly discussing Christianity, and 'reaping the harvest' by appealing to seekers (of course, also by appealing in trust to God's power over us and the Spirit's work in seekers' hearts and minds) to decide what they think about Jesus. In such culturally complex times, with many people still caught between modernism and post-modernism, there won't of course be one reliable method to reveal God's truth to people. Faith is an act of the will, but people's conducts vary in their composure between rationality, emotivity, convenience, and a variety of other things that may affect which way their will leans in the end. Becky cites as methods firstly apologetics,** whereby we should be able to argue philosophical and historical reasonable explanations for the case of Christian truth; secondly, alongside this intellectual approach is the experience-grounded mode of story-telling, whereby by recounting our testimonies or narratives from the Bible we can show how Christian truth works itself out in real lives. Also, and importantly, she adds, we must trust in the omnipotent ongoing work of the Holy Spirit; all the mission that we do as individuals is done by it through us anyway, and it also works abundantly and often without our knowing in the lives of those who need God's truth. Ultimately, bringing people to God is God's work, and though we as Christians have a part in it, we only do so as part of his prerogative and plan, so we should be evangelical but also faithful and prayerful. Finally, she discusses the nature of the church as an inclusive gospel-centred missional community; when individual Christian grace-redeemed sinners come together in joy and hope and love to celebrate their salvation, to pray and to worship and to share each others' lives and to further share the gospel that freed them with non-believers; this is powerful witness and testament to God's goodness and glory, and as a vehicle for supporting and enhancing evangelism, is absolutely crucial.
   I felt very challenged and encouraged by this book. Becky's writing is lively and readable but never overly ambitious in what she's arguing; all her points are distillations of gospel truth and common sense put together in ways that make clear our evangelical nature. She peppers the chapters with stories of real conversations she's had over her decades of experience leading people to Christ, so we get glimpses into the actual applications of this God-centred people-sensitive approach to evangelism; how she serves, speaks, responds, prays, loves, sometimes makes mistakes, and mostly trusts God to be at work. It's inspired me into a stronger-than-usual perseverance of intentionality in trying to talk to my friends about the gospel, and praying for God to bring them to him; as fallible as Christians are (as I am) we do need reminders and spurts to refocus our evangelical efforts and our walks with God, though the two go hand-in-hand, and the further one walks with their heavenly Father, the easier it gets for them to keep walking in trust without veering off the path.
   I thank God for Becky and this brilliant book, which in its 27 years of publication must have challenged and encouraged many thousands of Christians to reach out further and harder; God has probably used this book to (directly and indirectly) save thousands more - and I pray that he will continue to do so. If you're a Christian, read this book, and also make the decision now to step out in faith in Jesus and act like the salt you are.


* You know, like John Stott's The Cross of Christ or C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity or Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (for rebuttals only) or even the Apocrypha (if they're clear-minded and like a challenge).

** Her views on it, taken within the context of the whole book, were pretty similar to those of another book I read recently - though that shouldn't be surprising, as there is a huge amount of convergence between most well-reasoned biblically-led Christian thought.

Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right

This book, a compilation of Harry Frankfurt's 2004 Tanner Lectures,* was one of my selected secondary readings for an excruciatingly difficult philosophy mini-dissertation which I completed last week (sorry - yes, this post, other than book-specific details and links, is a copy-paste of the last post about Christine Korsgaard's similar book). It was the most intellectually strenuous thing I've ever worked on, but was also really interesting, so despite having handed in the final draft last Wednesday, I've still got my student library card until June 13th so am making the most of it by reading through the texts more thoroughly - it's an important topic and I want to actually understand it somewhat! The book contains two lectures by Frankfurt himself, then critical replies by Christine Korsgaard, Michael Bratman and Meir Dan-Cohen. I only skimmed these reply bits because the bulk of the original idea material is found in the main section and to be honest I've read far too much academic philosophy in the last two months to plough through an extra 51 pages of stuff that didn't fascinate me.

   Anyway, sorry, what's it about? To explain it to someone already familiar with moral philosophy and practical reason would be superfluous as the lectures are quite short and available free online (see link at bottom); to explain it to someone not already quite closely familiar with these topics would be an endeavour far beyond the capacity of time I want to spend on this post. But I'll try, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read below.

   He explores the nature of human agency and practical reasoning, which he argues are dependent on the volitional necessities of reason (as in our faculty of rationally deliberating between ends to decide on courses of action and then working out how to take means to our ends) and love (as in our capacity to care about ends in themselves in the first place, so that we have something as an object capable of propelling us to need to reason practically at all). By 'volitional necessity' I mean aspects of a person's function, as directed by their will, that are completely essential in being able to function in a way recognisable as a person: without the capacities for 'loving' anything we would be unable to adopt anything as ends, which would reduce us to merely being shunted around by whatever instantaneous exogenous desires and impulses assailed us; and without the capacity for rationality we would be unable to weight up and decisively pursue any of the ends that we claim to have, making us inefficacious. The overall model we're left with is considerably more haphazard and than most of the good-sounding ones in theories of practical reason, but this is because Frankfurt has pushed it to include the reality of love as something indispensable to human functioning; and this means that on the whole it comes across as making a great deal of sense.

   I've literally read so many chapters and articles about practical reason and moral psychology recently. It was quite refreshing to sit down and go directly through one book on the topic, especially one that as far as I can see is pretty much right on all points as this one. I feel like I'm actually learning helpful applicable things about what goodness and persons are from philosophy, which does happen sometimes. As I said, this was my last ever essay, so I'm no longer a student of the subject, which is a shame, but my interest will live on - I'll be one of those weird postgrads who takes books from someone else's course out of the library for personal interest reading. But yeh, Harry Frankfurt is a top philosopher, and if my hashed attempt to explain what this book is about hasn't completely put you off, particularly if you're already interested in theories of why people do what they do and how we could rationalise it in a good coherent way, check out these fantastic lectures from the pdf link below.

* The lectures themselves, effectively comprising the entirety of the book, are available for free online here:

http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/frankfurt_2005.pdf

The Sources of Normativity

This book, a compilation of Christine Korsgaard's 1996 Tanner Lectures,* was one of my selected core readings for an excruciatingly difficult philosophy mini-dissertation which I completed last week. It was the most intellectually strenuous thing I've ever worked on, but was also really interesting, so despite having handed in the final draft last Wednesday, I've still got my student library card until June 13th so am making the most of it by reading through the texts more thoroughly - it's an important topic and I want to actually understand it somewhat! The book contains four lectures by Korsgaard herself, then critical replies by G.A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and finally a reply to these replies from Korsgaard again. I only skimmed these reply bits because the bulk of the original idea material is found in the main section and to be honest I've read far too much academic philosophy in the last two months to plough through an extra 92 pages of stuff that didn't fascinate me.

   Anyway, sorry, what's it about? To explain it to someone already familiar with moral philosophy and practical reason would be superfluous as the lectures are quite short and available free online (see link at bottom); to explain it to someone not already quite closely familiar with these topics would be an endeavour far beyond the capacity of time I want to spend on this post. But I'll try, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read below.

   Normativity is that realm of reality comprised of oughts, shoulds, goods, rights, and so on; conceptual, social, ethical, psychological and philosophical structures that lend purpose and direction to our lives as rational will-directed beings. We're more than mere biological animals following instincts, we have the capability to step back in reflection from our activities and assess our desires, reasons that apply to actions that we could take in given circumstances, and so on, and we assert our self-constituted identity by committing our will to endorsing any of these given reasons for action and acting accordingly. But where do these 'reasons' come from? Korsgaard presents the four main cases that have emerged most plausibly throughout the history of moral philosophy: voluntarism (we are obligated by a legislator whose authority in relationship to us can prompt us to follow their commands), realism (we are obligated by the embeddedness-in-reality of values that give us reasons to act in particular ways), reflective endorsement (we are obligated to act by ourselves when we rationally assess external conditions' relation to our own mental activity to see what we consider would be good for us to do), and Kantian rational autonomy - which she argues emerges as a synthesis of the true aspects of the other three. Her arguments for this are extensive, deep, and compelling. Once having established her slightly-modified interpretation of Kant's model, she discusses how we may consider this to apply and function with our perception of values, our intrinsic value of human and animal life, our rational faculties, and our constitution of ourselves as agents with integrity in our identities based on our conduct - all very interesting and too complex for me to summarise.

   I've literally read so many chapters and articles about practical reason and moral psychology recently. It was quite refreshing to sit down and go directly through one book on the topic, especially one that as far as I can see is pretty much right on all points as this one. I feel like I'm actually learning helpful applicable things about what goodness and persons are from philosophy, which does happen sometimes. As I said, this was my last ever essay, so I'm no longer a student of the subject, which is a shame, but my interest will live on - I'll be one of those weird postgrads who takes books from someone else's course out of the library for personal interest reading. But yeh, Christine Korsgaard is a top philosopher, and if my hashed attempt to explain what this book is about hasn't completely put you off, particularly if you're already interested in theories of why people do what they do and how we could rationalise it in a good coherent way, check out these fantastic lectures from the pdf link below.

* The lectures themselves, effectively comprising the entirety of the book, are available for free online here:

http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaard94.pdf