Book Review: Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

Every once in a while, I come across a book that thoroughly captures my imagination and causes me to wish that I had written it.  Included in this category are Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, and [...]

Book Review: Allen Hunt, Confessions of a Megachurch Pastor

The Roman Catholic Church has seen a sizeable influx of evangelicals over the course of recent decades.  This has changed the complexion of Catholicism here in America, as these evangelical newcomers have held forth all the major Catholic distinctives in ways that are decidedly evangelical. Among these evangelical emphases is the importance of a strong [...]

Book Review: Garry Wills, What The Gospels Meant

If you are interested in a refreshingly different take on how the Gospels show us Jesus Christ, then I strongly recommend What The Gospels Meant by Garry Wills. Wills is a political columnist whose work appears in newspapers all over the country on a syndicated basis.  He has written many books over the years, chiefly [...]

Book Review: George Cunningham, Decoding the Language of God

Can a scientist really be a believer?  George Cunningham answers this question with a resounding No. An accomplished geneticist, Cunningham now writes for a broader audience in this rebuttal to Francis Collins’ 2006 book The Language of God.  Cunningham deconstructs the chief arguments used by Collins to make the case for belief in the Christian [...]

Book Review: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer and essayist for The New Yorker magazine, is best known for The Tipping Point, in which he challenged our most deeply held assumptions about how the world works and showed us that seemingly little things can make a very big difference.  In his follow-up, Blink, he challenged our dearest notions about [...]

Book Review: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

While we’re talking about books about doctors, here’s another good one for you:  Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary is the story of Emma Bovary and her corruption and dissipation as she attempts to pursue an ideal of romantic love inspired by pop culture, and of her husband Charles who cannot be deterred in his [...]

Book Review: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

For those of you who have the yearning to step into the time machine and go back to see what life, and specifically the medical profession, was like in the Midwest back in the early 1900s, let me recommend for your reading pleasure Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. Arrowsmith is the story of a young doctor by [...]

Recommendation: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass

Those of you who are interested in JFK might wish to check out this brief review by Dennis Hamm, a cousin who is a professor at Creighton University, of James Douglass’s new book JFK and the Unspeakable. This is not just your run-of-the-mill JFK conspiracy book.  Instead, Douglass takes an entirely different tack by suggesting that the tragic [...]

Book Review: The Organic God by Margaret Feinberg

Those of you out there who loved The Shack will probably find this book by Margaret Feinberg to be helpful in determining where to go next in your relationship with God.  In this book, Margaret Feinberg asks us to imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with God that is true and [...]

Book Review: The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy

Walker Percy was a Louisiana author whose career spanned over three decades and whose interests included philosophy and language.  He is best known for his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. The Message in the Bottle is a collection of essays spanning the full length of Walker Percy’s writing career.  They all hang together around the question [...]