Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You are standing at the gateway of heaven. You are living in the House of God.”

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck

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Hunting Magic Eels is a map for burned-out Christians. Beck, himself burned out by years of doubt and Christendom, wrote this book as an antidote to focusing too much on the wrong things. His idea is that we live in a time of a reduced existence: We’ve reduced humans to meat, redwoods to lumber, art to content. “Welcome to the ache,” he writes. We have a chalk outline of what’s missing from our hearts, but we don’t know how to fill it. Why is life […]

“The Bible becomes a confusing mess when we expect it to function as a rulebook for faith. But when we allow the Bible to determine our expectations, we see that Wisdom, not answers, is the Bible’s true subject matter.”

How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers--and Why That's Great News by Peter Enns

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How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News by Peter Enns My rating: 5 of 5 stars I first heard of Peter “Pete” Enns on the “Bible for Normal People” podcast and greatly appreciated not only his own commentary but also the guests and discussions that he hosts on each episode. This lead me to hearing that he had written a book. So I went out […]

Learning About but Don’t Appropriate

Jewish Holidays: A Brief Introductions for Christians by Kerry M. Olitzky

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Jewish Holidays: A Brief Introduction for Christians by Kerry M. Olitzky My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is a really good overview of Jewish holidays for those that are curious about their origins and practices, particularly from a Christian context. If you are looking for a “how-to” this is not that book. Like the title says, it’s brief. Each holiday is presented in it’s context from the Torah followed by a socio-historical context. There is an overview of how the holiday is practiced […]

this is the sort of book that requires some quiet wallowing time post-finish

The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith

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I picked this one up because of the cover. I saw it featured at my local bookstore and put it in my basket without even reading the blurb on the back. Had I read the blurb, I would have KNOWN that it was meant for me none the less, but something about the neon pile of bodies reached into my brain and demanded to be brought home. Unfortunately, “brought home” was as far as the demand went. It sat in my literal TBR pile until […]

Choose this day whom you will serve.

The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not as Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life by Leo Tolstoy

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I took a long, weird road to this book. I grew up in Texas with public-service-minded parents of faith. I was a political science major turned public-interest lawyer turned political staffer. Public service, making the world a better place, all of it. In my mind, Jesus’ line about rendering to Caesar what’s Caesar’s meant that, in my democratic context, I had to work the system for good. I navigated the classic political argument of the “problem of dirty hands” with all of that in mind […]

A surprisingly earnest (and not surprisingly literal) exploration of the Bible.

The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

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Feels good to finally knock this off my TBR after 13 years, and it was a pretty good read, but I think I wanted more from it. This mindset is puzzling, because I was actually expecting less than what I got here. I was expecting this to be more of a satirical, humorous, critical exploration of the Bible. And it was not that! At all! Jacobs is extremely, beyond-call sincere in his exploration. He’s funny, but the humor is secondary. His quest comes first. (He […]



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