And now for a commercial interruption...

All who are fans of a cappella music will probably want to add this to their collection:

The Wonderful Spirit-filled Life by Charles F. Stanley

RATING: A reasonably sound III

Lori VanDer Kamp handed this book to me. They have read it in the "Far West" PUMP life group that meets on Wednesday nights and have really enjoyed it. Charles Stanley (from Atlanta, Georgia way) is widely accepted as a wise and moderate evangelical teacher and pastor.

Stanley admits in the opening pages that he is not all that thrilled with the final title of the book. It just sounds a little too "nice" for his taste (mine too.) If you can get passed this I think you'll find a solid, entry-level introduction to the nature and work of the Holy Spirit. For the most part the author treats the holy scriptures with conservative respect. He is unafraid to retreat into his own experience as a minister, and uses autobiographical narrative as a consistent backdrop for the work. I am sure that will encourage all of PUMP's life groups to make use of this material over the next year or so.

The Hoffman Diaries: Part IV

A CONCLUSION AND A SHORT DISCUSSION OF THE THEORETICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARASOCIOLOGY AND BLOGIOLOGY.

"Parasociology is the subdiscipline of conscientiology that studies the philosophy, techniques and practices of conscientiological intraphysical society and extraphysical societies of extraphysical consciousnesses, as well as their consequences in human, extraphysical and projective life. It is a scientific subdiscipline of holoresomatics."

I'm sure I don't know what any of that means. I have a friend who works in radio. I haven't talked to her for a long time, but I hear her on the radio often. Because I hear her on the radio often I feel like I am closer to her than I really am. As I understand it, that's parasociological association. People who feel they personally know how their favorite movie actor thinks or people who send a birthday card to their favorite music superstar, that's "parasociology."

While I can see how folks might view Blog-a-terra as an explosion of "world-wide" parasociological association, I don't think it needs to be. Blogs have comment engines that encourage interaction, asynchronous and written maybe, but interaction all the same. Furthermore, I've personally talked to my friend Moon and our family has hung out more times in the last year (since we started reading her blog) than we did in the ten years since college. How about that...who knows what it could lead to?

This concludes "The Hoffman Diaries" series.
Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post series entitled
"meTUBEmentary: film ideas that Ike would like to write and direct."

Art by Claire Jones

Because I spend a lot of time looking at my computer, I choose to spend a little bit of time making it nice to look at. DeviantArt is a great place to find interesting art work with which to wallpaper your desktop. (Keep in mind that art is in the eye of the beholder.) Recently we've been admiring the work of Claire Jones quite a bit. I thought you might like it too.

Angel Death by ClaireJones on deviantART

Practice Safe Blogging

It can happen to anyone using blogger. It has happened to me. Sometimes, without explanation a piece (sometimes a big piece) of your blog template will just disappear. POOF! Gone. Just like that, and there you are: left there standing in the cold with half of the links in the right bar missing.
Don't let it happen to you.

1. Open up your favorite word processor
2. Go to the Blogger dashboard in your favorite browser.
3. Click on the "template" tab.
4. Highlight all of the text in your template text box.
5. Ctrl-C.
6. Go back to your word processor.
7. Ctrl-V.
8. Save your template.

In the case of something hinky, just paste the whole thing back into your template text box, and your saved! Look, I'm telling you this because I care about you. It only takes a few minutes and it can save you a lot of pain and suffering. Please just do it, for me.

Simply Christian by N.T. Wright

RATING: A IV plain and simple

Here is the review for which Emily has been waiting. This is a good book in the most powerful sense of "good" that your imagination can conjure. Wright lends masterful description to the Christian faith, stating the matter with crystal clarity at times, embracing the full mystery at others. This volume will earn its place on the shelf of Christian classics next to Mere Christianity.

(I am relieved to say that) I don't think there is room left in our world anymore for apologetics as we understood and practiced them half a century ago. But if there any explaining room left at all, I say let's leave it to the unapologetic N.T. Wrights of the kingdom. It is a rare thing to read a man put his finger on the point with such skill and grace. More powerful to me, is the possibility that someone who has been to going to church since birth may pick up this book and find deeper meaning in what they have witnessed their entire lives. Don't walk; run to your favorite bookseller.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt

RATING: A provocative III

Freakonomics was recommended to me by the to-be-famous artist, Michael Brummett. (This post and this picture will demontrate in later years that I knew him before all of the art-world attention. But I digress...) He basically could not stop about the book. This might be an annoying trait in some people, but not in M. He made me want to read it, and I was not disappointed.

Freakonomics is an engaging read. It reminds that economic philosophy is a study of cause and correlation that can be applied much more widely than to just money; the fruit of which can be illuminating in unexpected trajectories.

The Body Broken by Jack R. Reese

Rating: A Conciliatory III

Having grown up in Southern Idaho in the 70's and early 80's, I witnessed some of the negative results of the debate culture of the churches of Christ.* It seems to me that when the restoration movement that is the churches of Christ went from being a unity movement to being a uniformity movement, the only thing that we were left capable of restoring was 1st century pharisaic legalism.

Dr. Reese wrote a book that basically says the Fruit of the Spirit (specifically KINDNESS, GENTLENESS, and SELF-CONTROL, I think) should be demonstrated in your life whether you agree with someone or not. He says it pretty well, I might add.

*To the credit of southern Idaho: I learned what it meant to be family there. I learned how to sing harmony and what good strawberry rhubarb pie tastes like from Gloria Fox. AND some of the coolest places in the world to ride a dirt bike are there.

Sir Ken Robinson - The Educational Imperative

[Google Video seems to be experiencing some technical difficulties. I will still try to get this working on my blog. In the mean time, you can click here and watch it at Google.]

Kathy Graul, my sister-in-law, sent me a link to this video. It is well worth 20 minutes of your life. Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Robinson is author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative", and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:03).

Making Progress

After a few later-than-normal nights, all of our books have been physically inventoried, the title pages have been embossed with our library seal, the ISBN numbers have been catalogued in Library thing, and the spine labels have been printed and applied to all but a few books.

The biggest challenge: in order to print spine labels for our unlabeled books, I had to export information out of LT one book at a time and import it into Readerware (our old library software); thankfully this process was basically drag and drop and did not take too long. I had a full page (40 books) and had double-checked the Dewey decimal numbers for accuracy, and only then did I realize that I had lost the custom template I had built 18 months ago for the particular Brodart spine labels we use (industrial-strength, library-grade labels.) This meant that I would need to rebuild the label template. Unfortunately it also meant I didn't know what font and font size I had used to print them.

The solution: search, print, compare with an existing spine label, repeat as necessary (read: for about 2 hours.) I finally found the exact font and size and printed the spine labels. Then there was the simple matter of shelving those books in their proper Dewey decimal order, which required a lot of shuffling stacks of books from one shelf to the next. I finished the process in the wee hours of Thursday morning: beautiful!

And so this major piece of my old year's resolution is complete:

• We have purged our holdings down to right around 500 books
• The spine label template has been backed up locally and online
• We have a consistent "intake" process for new media acquisitions(book, DVD, and music)
• We can keep accurate account of what books we have loaned to others
• I've got a good sense of how much shelf space we have left
• We know the precise location of every book we own

Falling Away by Dr. Brian Simmons

RATING: A Statistical III

Brian Simmons is a former professor of mine and a great mentor to many. I think the most powerful thing about this book that he has written is that it actually answers a question that lots of people are asking, "Why are so many leaving the church?" More than spreading a lot of conjectural fertilizer around to grow a plausible guess, Simmons actually examines and interprets hard data, what an unusual concept!

This book is not a hilarious Hacker's Diet. It's not a convicting Great Omission, it's not a tear-jerking Where the Red Fern Grows. I only say that because if you've ever heard Brian Simmons speak, you might expect all of those things. He is a master communicator.

Simmons accomplishes something even more challenging than presenting an emotionally charged book. He offers real answers to a question all church people should be asking.

Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola

RATING: III

My father-in-law laid this book in my lap and said something like, "This is a book that I've wanted to write, but someone did it for me." My father-in-law (Sam Coy, since we name names on this blog) is on my short list of the most thoughtful, Christ-like people I know, so that was all the recommendation that I needed.

The book offers the pagan origins of many, if not most of our traditional church trappings. It would be a rude awakening for most traditional church of Christ folks that still think our forms and practices are patterned after the New Testament.

The book itself has a lot of solid information (very well foot-noted) though I think sometimes the author mistakes "correlation" for "cause." It mostly reads like a college term paper with some overly passionate polemics, urging the reader to throw off the unnecessary bonds of "pagan-oriented, Christian traditions." Still if your interested in the information it is well worth the read.

Confronting Christ by Elton TrueBlood

RATING: A Solid II

Here be the second of the "devotional commentaries" that I have read this year. Trueblood translates and then expounds on the text of the Gospel of Mark. I have had this book forever, and just pulled it off the shelf in August to read it for the first time. The book was helpful. As a staunch modernist, Trueblood takes some theological stances on certain aspects of the the gospel stories (i.e., the invalidity of demon possession) with which experience leads me to take exception. All the same, Trueblood gives us another interesting look at the life of Christ through the eyes of Mark.

Parable of Joy by Michael Card

RATING: A bulging and nearly bursting III

I picked this book up for a second read this summer as I prepared for the ACU songwriter's workshop. It is a fantastic "devotional commentary" on the book of John.

Today I was listening to my one of my artist friends talk about how much he learns about art history as he reads about it in the perspectives of other artists that he admires. It struck me that I have recently read three books (POJ is one) where the writer included the full text of one of the Gospels along with their own thoughts and feelings on the story of Jesus. Seeing Jesus through another's eyes is refreshing. Seeing Jesus through M. Card's eyes on the Gospel of John is both instructive and inspiring.

The New Testament in Its Social Environment by John E. Stambaugh

RATING: An Informative III

So I've gotten a lot more interested in Jesus lately. Context plays so much into the meaning of what a person says, so I picked this off the shelf again and plowed through it. Stambaugh gives an interesting look into the world of Jesus; his language gets technical at moments, but never inaccessible. If you are looking for something that falls within its narrow purview, this book is worth your time.

The Hacker's Diet by John Walker

RATING: A Classic III

Jason Hill recommended this online book to me over breakfast one day as we were discussing weight loss. It was written by an engineer who lost a lot of weight by approaching his weight problem as an engineer and computer programmer instead of as a nutritionist. Walker is an hilarious writer and deals with the problem of weight loss and maintenance in a no-nonsense way.

His strategy is far from the most healthy, but I believe his principles are the most effective. The Hacker's Diet is an entertaining read and I would recommend it even to those who have no need to lose weight.

"This Far and No Further" or "Bad Librarian! Bad Librarian!"

I have two book-related goals that share the end of the year as a deadline:

1. I have not been able to maintain as brisk a reading schedule since Labor Day, so I've decided not to start any more books until I've finished all of the books I'm currently reading and written reviews for everything read in 2006. (There are two exceptions: the Factory Repair Manual for the Vanagon and the Renovare Study Bible, but those are really reference works.)


2. Over the last several months Kaelea and I have purged about 180 books from our personal library. Unfortunately, I didn't remove the books from LibraryThing as they were discarded, so our catalog is sorely unreliable. (Not to mention that when I imported our library holdings from Readerware to LibraryThing, we had a large number of books that didn't make it into the new database.) That leaves me doing a physical inventory of the books on our shelves. No complaints here; it's an escape for me to work on such a measureable, organizational project. I'm weird like that.