by Bryan Knedgen | Mar 11, 2019 | Book Reviews
by Bryan...
by Bryan Knedgen | Oct 11, 2018 | Book Reviews
A Book Review by Bryan Knedgen Tish Harrison Warren is Co-Associate Rector at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, PA and a Priest in the Anglican tradition. She is notorious for being removed from Vanderbilt University for her orthodox views of Christianity where she was ministering to graduate student with Intervarsity. Warren penned Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life which won Christianity Today’s Book of Year for 2018 in Spiritual Formation. She is also a contributor at The Well, Christianity Today and Mere Orthodoxy. One of the joys of being in campus ministry is our ability to see students grow in profound ways that shape them for the rest of their lives. Their time at the university is not in any sense of the phrase “real life,” but instead is full of adventure and change. However, to be frank, this is not true of life after college as most of our time is ordinary and mundane. Following college, we begin to ask, “How do we worship and see God in these repetitive schedules?” Thus, we turn to Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary. There is no technical introduction, ironically, the book jumps right into the day like some worship services which often never tell anyone the structure and purpose of its elements. However, she uses the first three chapters to set us on a trajectory to understand the book. We’re introduced to that structure when she lays out the events of a normal day as chapters and relates those events to acts in a liturgical service. Throughout the book she draws on this pattern to make parallel...
by Angela Knedgen | Feb 14, 2017 | Book Reviews
Beyond Racial Gridlock: Embracing Mutual Responsibility is a product of several years in specializing in race, ethnicity and biracial families at the University of Texas by George Yancey Ph.D. He is currently a professor of sociology that now focuses on academic bias and anti-Christian attitudes in the United States. This book is an in-depth and holistic discussion of the need for a Christian approach to resolving the tensions, healing the pain, and reducing the effects of racism. Dr. Yancey contends that the Christian faith provides a unique answer to the problem of racism that the four most prominent secular approaches to resolving racism lack. The first half of Beyond Racial Gridlock is a clear and robust exploration of four current approaches to resolving racism: Colorblindness, Anglo-Conformity, Multiculturalism, and White Responsibility. This section covers the strength and weaknesses of each and a critique of the ways the church has adopted these approaches for better and worse. The second part of the book focuses on moving the church toward constructing a Christian solution to racism through examining the unique effects of sin on majority and minority groups, Jesus as the ultimate reconciler of humanity, the hindering effects of fear on majority and minority groups and the practical application and the outworking of a Christian solution. Part one starts with the individual and internal focused approaches to racism and ends with the structural and external focused approaches. The first two models have internal and individualized components. In the Colorblindness model, if we emphasize racial issues, we will continue to have racial problems. (29)” As a result, diminishing the focus on race diminishes racism....
by Bryan Knedgen | Oct 14, 2016 | Book Reviews
David A. Livermore is president and partner at the Cultural Intelligence Center and also a visiting research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He gained a Ph.D in International Education from Michigan State University and previously served as the executive director of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. His book, Eyes Wide Open, won the Outreach Resource of the Year Award in global outreach from Outreach magazine. Livermore has penned Cultural Intelligence: Improving your CQ to Engage our Multicultural World. In stepping into a new year of ministry with college students who are a decade or more apart from me, I thought it best to brush up on understanding cultural differences and how the Gospel can be hindered by cultural differences. There is a lot in this book, and 500 words on the book cannot give it justice. He intends the reader to be transformed as they seek to cross the chasm of cultural difference in order to show love and respect to “the other,” those of a different culture, as a means to being faithful to our calling as Christians. The book is divided into four main parts. The first part is “Love: CQ Overview.” In it Livermore talks about the overriding goal of crossing cultures finding its basis in Jesus command to love our neighbors, which makes us uncomfortable. The second part is “Understand: Knowledge CQ” where he examines our own (American) culture and defines culture in order help us understand how we see the world and how we see others. The third part is “Go Deep: Interpretive CQ” In this section, Livermore shows the reader how...
by Bryan Knedgen | Jun 14, 2016 | Book Reviews
The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name by Sally Lloyd-Jones A Book Review By Bryan Knedgen Sally Lloyd-Jones penned The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name, with illustrations by Jago, almost a decade ago. She won the Gold Medallion Award for Baby’s First Bible and is an author of multiple bestselling children’s books. She sits under the tutelage of Dr. Timothy Keller, who is the preaching pastor at Redeemer Church in Manhattan. I decided to do this book because while I disciple multiple men in my life; the most important person God has given me stewardship over is my own son, MartelAs a parent, I wish to find as many tools to help me display God’s love, joy and hope to him. This is one of the tools that continues to help me try to communicate who God is and what he has done in Jesus Christ and our world so that Martel will know God and willingly and faithfully participate in his kingdom building mission. The book is divided into 44 chapters, each only six to nine pages long. At the end of each story, it connects how that story feeds into the Meta narrative of the God’s mission to redeem the world. I will focus on a couple of chapters that highlight this for the review. The first chapter is not a biblical story but a chapter on hermeneutics, or theory and methodology of reading this book and interpreting how God deals with his people and his mission. The chapter explains that God wrote, “I love you” in everything he has made, and highlights John Calvin’s idea...
by Bryan Knedgen | May 10, 2016 | Book Reviews
The Elder: Today’s Ministry Rooted in All of Scripture by Cornelis Van Dam A Book Review By Bryan Knedgen Cornelis Van Dam is Emeritus Professor of Old Testament and served as Professor of Old Testament for 30 years at Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary. He gained a Masters of Theology from Knox College, University of Toronto and a Doctorate of Theology from Theological University of Kampen, The Netherlands. an Dam penned The Elder: Today’s Ministry Rooted in All of Scripture back in 2009 and has written a large number of articles on aspects of law, government and wisdom in God’s kingdom. After becoming a Teaching Elder in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church last May, I have been trying to lean into what it means to be an elder in God’s Kingdom, thus, I took up this in that pursuit.The book is divided into five sections. The First section contains the introduction, where he talks about an understanding of what the office of elder entails. The second section handles the office of elder in its Old Testament Origins, as leaders and judges. The third section manages elders in the New Testament with regards to continuity and transformation from the Old Testament. The fourth section tackles elders as nurturers and preservers in God’s Kingdom. Finally, the fifth section grapples with the preservation and current attitudes towards the position. Furthermore, Van Dam has written a helpful study guide and questions at the end of the book that is paired with each chapter along with a helpful list of resources for more study on Eldership. In the Introduction, Van Dam starts the discussion of defining an elder: how have...
