Self-reflection is a tricky thing.  When we feel we’ve moved on from some idea, passion, or stage of our life, we tend to distance ourselves from it, like the college student who denies he was ever a Trekkie once he realizes Star Wars is truly superior.  We harbor contempt (or at least embarrassment)...

As a quick primer, The Virtues of Capitalism: The Moral Case for Free Markets by Scott Rae and Austin Hill does an excellent job of hitting the talking points and fleshing out some of the back-story of the world’s most powerful economic system.  However, this book only offers a thin analysis of...

In our Summer Reading Symposium, I recommended three books for summer reading. I love these books too much to leave it at a mere ‘name dropping’. Let me try to convince you, using the opening line, my thoughts and an excerpt from each, that the three books I mentioned are really and truly worth...

Three years spent repairing old books in the basement of a university library can’t help but leave a girl like me with a definite bias.  I love books–and I don’t just love reading them.  I love the smell of leather, I love the texture of fine paper, and I love the way a well-bound volume...

What would you do if Odin decided to haunt you because he was angry you’d left him for Jesus? When a pagan society is Christianized, it must determine how to either leave behind or incorporate its old talismans and traditions into its new Christian faith.  This is seldom an easy task, as any...

Anyone seeking a witticized slam of ‘The New Atheism’ should stay away from Against All Gods.  The new release by Dr. Phillip Johnson and Dr. John Mark Reynolds refuses to wade into mind-numbingly circular surface arguments with writers of the new atheism. Instead, Johnson and Reynolds focus...

The Tipping Point is a studied explanation of “how little things can make a big difference.” Gladwell combines whimsy with scholarship and story with study to create a powerful page-turner that will leave the reader full, but wanting more. Perhaps the most compelling feature of this book...

If Donald Miller does something well, it is the provocative marketing of storytelling. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years displays Miller’s roundabout style of making insights by emphasizing the power of personal narratives.  Both punchy and meandering, the book demonstrates that which it demands...

What do you want, purpose or happiness? If you don’t think the two pursuits are exclusive, take it up with Freud, who says as much in his treatise Civilization and its Discontents. “The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system,” he said. “We will therefore...

If the world is a stage, we like putting on the same shows. The Matrix, The Truman Show, Equilibrium…not original. Even in Shakespeare’s 17th century comedy As You Like It, we confront the suggestion that the world is a sham and humans are the sham’s pawns. At surface-level, the play is a ball...