Review: The Struggle by Lincoln Gordon
The Struggle by Lincoln Gordon is a non-fiction work on the conformist attitude many people have about race and religion – especially in the African American community, of which author Lincoln Gordon is a part. He laments the ideas he found growing up about how one should behave as a person of color. A man who has lived his life by the beat of his own drum, Gordon’s The Struggle can be seen as something of a philosophical manifesto about identity in a multicultural society, as Gordon implores us to live by the rule that we’re all part of one […]
Come Flutter Your Wings by Audrey Thompson is a passionate declaration of faith in the form of devotional poems, scripture, and stories from her life, in which she’s gone down a dark road and come out the other side with intense optimism and hope. It’s brimming with earnestness and sincerity, and should be a comfort for other religious devotees who have had to triumph over adversity.
The Evangelical Experience is a book with two agendas. One is easily identified. The other is harder to discern, perhaps even for the author himself.
A Spiritual Journey is Susan Kapatoes’ memoir about communing with the divine, and finding evidence of the divine in her life, such as in friendships and love. The book is not so much a spiritual treatise investigating different spiritual traditions, so much as a personal memoir about personal spiritual growth. Though she has her first spiritual awakening after picking up a Christian Bible, her story is not centered around Christianity specifically, but a more-universal take on the meaning of God.
Among the most important decisions that any church body must make, choosing the correct pastor is of the utmost consequence. Jeremiah 3:15 states: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.” In a nutshell, this is the role of the pastor today. The pastor is the leader of the church, the one who will direct the flock in the way it should go. He provides encouragement and guidance and is entrusted with the most imperative of duties. He must study The Word to discern God’s heart and instruct his congregation. There […]
The delightful, whimsical cover of this book and tongue-in-cheek cover quote (“I am almost certainly going to end up in Hell”) alerts you right away to the fact that you are getting more—far more—than another of the currently popular anti-religion screeds. Boomsliter has tremendous respect, bordering on hero worship, for Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris. But he wisely takes a slightly different tack in this book. Boomsliter, you see, has a sense of humor (in this he owes more to Christopher Hitchens than the triumvirate mentioned above, although Boomsliter’s wit is just a tad less acerbic than Hitchens’). […]
Much of the commentary surrounding recent terrorist attacks and threats might lead one to think that religious hatred is a new thing. But in fact violence and hatred in the name of religion have been around a very long time, perhaps as long as religion itself. Or at least as long as the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. For many Americans, religious violence seems to have recently arrived on American soil, but that is a bit ingenuous as well. From the Salem Witch Trials to the Sikh Temple massacre in 2012, the United States is no stranger to hatred and violence that […]