It’s Tuesday today, and that means we have a new lot of reviews for you to read over at Discerning Reader. We’ve also got a fascinating interview with one of the authors whose work we have reviewed today. So read on!

To start, I’ve added a short review of Iain Murray’s The Life of John Murray. It is not an exhaustive biography of the great Westminster theologian, but it is a good one and is well worth adding to any library.

James Anderson has written two reviews this week, the first of Revelation and Reason, a collection of scholarly essays on Reformed presuppositional apologetics, the purpose of which is to explore how revelation (specifically, Scripture) informs and constrains our use of reason in defending the claims of Christianity.

James has also reviewed Putting Jesus in His Place, a book he says is “the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable defense of the deity of Christ available today.” He also shares a fascinating interview with J. Ed Komoszewski, one of the authors.

Mark Tubbs also offers two reviews, the first of Douglas Wilson’s The Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking and the second of John Piper’s devotional Pierced by the Word.

Finally, Scott Lamb provides a review of the ESV Children’s Bible, a Bible he says is “a complete ESV Bible that is truly put together in a child-friendly way to encourage reading and spiritual growth.”

The subject of reading has been much on my mind lately. I love to read but often receive emails from people who struggle to read and struggle to enjoy reading. Thus I thought it might be beneficial to piece together a list of tips to read more and to read better. I hope you find it useful.

Read - We start with the obvious: you need to read. Find me someone who has changed the world and who spent his time watching television and I’ll find you a thousand who read books instead. Unless reading is your passion, you may need to be very deliberate about setting aside time to read. You may need to force yourself to do it. Set yourself a reasonable target (“I’m going to read three books this year” or “I’m going to finish this book before the end of the month”) and work towards it. Set aside time every day or every week and make sure you pick up the book during those times. Find a book dealing with a subject of particular interest to you. You may even find it beneficial to find a book that looks interesting—a nice hardback volume with a beautiful cover. Reading is an experience and the experience begins with the look and feel of the book. So find a book that looks like one you’ll enjoy and commit to reading it. And when you’ve done that, find another one and do it again. And again.

Read Widely - I’m convinced that one reason people do not read more is that they do not vary their reading enough. Any subject, no matter how much you are interested in it, can begin to feel dry if you focus all of your attention upon it. So be sure to read widely. Read fiction and non-fiction, theology and biography, current affairs and history. You will no doubt want to focus the majority of your reading in one particular area, and that is well and good. But be sure to vary your diet.

Read Deliberately - Similar to reading widely, ensure that you read deliberately. Choose your books carefully. If you neglect to do this, you may find that you overlook a particular category for months or years at a time. Al Mohler, a voracious reader, divides books into six categories: Theology, Biblical Studies, Church Life, History, Cultural Studies, and Literature and has some project going within each of these categories at all times. You can draw up categories of your own, but try to ensure you are reading from all of these categories on a regular basis. Choose books that fit into each of these categories and plan your reading ahead of time, so you know what book you will read next and you know what you’ll read after that. Anticipation for the next book is often a motivating force in completing the current book.

Read Interactively - Reading is best done, at least when enjoying serious books, when you work hard at understanding the book and when you interact with the author’s arguments. Read with a highlighter and pencil in hand. Ask questions of the author and expect him to answer them through the course of the text. Scrawl notes in the margins, write questions inside the front cover, and return to them often (and, if the questions remain unanswered, even seek to contact the author!). Highlight the most important portions of the book, or the ones you intend to return to later. As Al Mohler says, “Books are to be read and used, not collected and coddled.” I have found that writing reviews of the books I read is a valuable way of returning at least one more time to the book to make sure that I understand what the author was trying to say and how he said it. So interact with those books and make them your own.

Read with Discernment - Though books have incredible power to do good, to challenge and strengthen and edify, they also have the power to do evil. I have seen lives transformed by books but have also seen lives crushed. So do ensure that you read with discernment, always comparing the books you read to the standard of Scripture. If you encounter a book that is particularly controversial, it may be worth ensuring that you can reference a review that interacts critically with the arguments or that you can read it with a person who better understands the arguments and their implications. You do not need to fear bad books as long as you read with a critical eye and with a discerning heart.

Read Heavy Books - It can be intimidating to stare at some of those massive volumes or series of volumes sitting on your bookshelf, but be sure to make time to read some of those serious works. A person can only grow so much while living on a diet of Christian Living books. Make your way through some Jonathan Edwards or John Calvin. Read Grudem’s Systematic Theology or David Wells’ “No Place for Truth” series. You will find them slow-going, to be sure, but will also find them rewarding. Commit to reading some of these heavy volumes as a regular part of your reading diet.

Read Light Books - While dense books should be a serious reader’s main diet, there is nothing wrong with pausing to enjoy the occasional novel or light read. After reading two or three good books, allow yourself to read a Clancy or Grisham or Peretti something else that never changed anyone’s life. Allow yourself to get lost in a good story every now and again. You will find that they refresh you and prepare you to read the next heavy book.

Read New Books - Keep an eye on what is new and popular and consider reading what other people in your church or neighborhood are reading. If The Secret is selling millions of copies, consider reading it so you know what people are reading and so you can attempt to discern why people are reading it. Use your knowledge of these books as a bridge to talk to people about their books and what attracts them to the ones they read. Use your knowledge of these books to understand what other Christians are reading and why.

Read Old Books - Do not read only new books. I cannot say this any better than C.S. Lewis: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” So be sure to read old books, whether that means classics or whether that simply means books that come from a generation or two before your own. And be sure to read history as well, since there is no better way of understanding today than by understanding yesterday.

Read What Your Heroes Read - A couple of years ago, while at the Shepherds’ Conference, a young man who was in ministry but had not had opportunity to attend seminary asked John MacArthur what he would recommend to this man so he could continue learning and continue growing in his knowledge of theology. MacArthur’s answer was simple: He said that this pastor should find godly men he admires and read what they read. So do that! Find people you admire and read the books that have most shaped them. I have compiled a short list of recommended reading at Discerning Reader. While the content is still a mite sparse, I do hope to add some more lists to it before long. Even in its current form it may be a good starting point for you.

Yesterday I finished Iain Murray’s biography of theologian John Murray (there is no relation between the two Murrays) and was struck by John Murray’s insistence on the importance of memorizing the catechisms. I was raised on a steady diet of the Heidelberg Catechism at church and the Shorter Catechism at home and can attest to their value. Murray, being a product of Scottish Presbyterianism, was an ardent supporter of the Shorter Catechism and once said this to a group of children:

Now everyone of you children should know the Shorter Catechism from the beginning to the end without a mistake by this age. Now that’s without joking at all. At the age of twelve you ought to know the Shorter Catechism from beginning to end without even making a mistake. You don’t know what you are missing! Get down to learning it, if you haven’t already learned it! It will not only give you the most perfect human compendium of Christian truth that there is in the whole world, but it will be the finest mental exercise, and it will lay a foundation in your mind and in your life for a hundred other things as well as for true religion. The mere mental discipline of learning it with exactness down to each preposition is one of the best disciplines that we know of in this world in the field of education. The primary reason is to learn it for the purpose of having in your mind a comprehensive compendium of Christian truth, but even apart from that there are a hundred by-products. It will be invaluable to you through your whole life, and not only in this life, but in the life which is to come.

I’ll grant that Murray may have been speaking in some hyperbole when he said that the Catechism is “the most perfect compendium of Christian truth that there is in the whole world,” but I do believe it is a wonderful and valuable summary of Christian doctrine. At this point my oldest child is seven and he does not yet know his catechism. We worked through some of the Children’s Catechism based on the Shorter but did not do all that much of it in the end (primarily, I’ll admit, because the book was so tiny that it kept getting lost!). I do hope, in the future, to work through one catechism or another with the children. I’m sure they’ll hate doing it just as much as I did, but I am confident that as they grow older they will be grateful (as I am now) that their father insisted upon it.

How about you? Do you teach your children to memorize a catechism? Do you consider this an integral part of teaching and training your children? If so, what catechism do you use or do you intend to use?

How endless choice is making us endlessly miserable.

A few weeks ago my cell phone went missing. For a few days we looked for it passively, keeping half an eye out for it as we went about our business in the house. It didn’t show up. So for one morning we tore the house apart, looking high and low. We couldn’t find it anywhere. All we knew was that it was last seen in the hands of Michaela, our silly little one-year old. Finally, with a vacation looming (and a vacation that would require over 2,000 miles of driving) we decided we had better give it up for lost and buy a new one. I had a sneaking suspicion that, as soon as I did so, the old one would turn up. My suspicion proved to be well-founded as it look only an hour after I returned home for Aileen to feel a lump in the couch down in the basement and to dig out the phone my daughter had lodged between cushions. Murphy’s Law is alive and well.

When I was in the store and looking for a phone, I was amazed at the variety available to me. There were flip phones and sliders, MP3 phones and Blackberries. There were phones with cameras and phones with video, phones with all kinds of absurd features and the low-end phones with only the bare-bones capabilities (which, these days, still seems to include a camera and a variety of ridiculously stupid games). I eventually decided on one of the cheaper models (though it still does all kinds of things I’ll never need it to do). And then I had to choose a phone plan. There were all kinds of plans available to me. Far too many, really. Each looked pretty good until I looked to the small print. One plan gave all kinds of free minutes, but only to other callers using the same network. Another provided lots of airtime but charges out the nose for call display and call answer. And on and on. After a good hour of work I finally left the store with my new phone. I was far from certain that I had chosen the best one or the right one, but after a while I just had to choose and get out of there.

Interlude: The other day someone saw my phone and asked, “It is a Razr?” [a style of phone manufactured by Motorola]. I chose to hear the question as, “Is it a razor?” and replied, “No, not yet, but it does just about everything else.” Seriously, are we far off from the day when we’ll be able to shave with our phones?

We live in a world of almost infinite choice. It wasn’t always this way, of course. Even just a few generations ago people made do with far less to choose from. But today we demand and expect that we will be able to choose from among hundreds of options. A short time ago someone sent me a short outtake from the movie Borat. I haven’t seen the movie, don’t recommend the movie and hear that it is, from all accounts, not the kind of thing Christians should see. But this clip was harmless and pointed to our ridiculous demand for choice (and Sasha Cohen’s ability to draw out a joke). Standing in a supermarket with a manager, he walks slowly alongside a refrigerator, pausing at each package of cheese and asking, “What is this?” “Cheese,” says the manager. Borat moves to the next one. “And this is…?” “Cheese.” It goes on and on and on. And then, like a typewriter hitting the end of a row, he zips back to the place he started and begins in on the next row of cheese. It goes on and on.

Earlier this summer I bookmarked an article at the Times that discussed this very thing. Choice, it seems, is not the key to happiness, though our consumeristic mindset may beg to differ.

Everywhere you turn there is a mind-boggling parade of clothes, gadgets, financial products, holidays and entertainment. Tantalised by all these buying options, we stockpile our shopping baskets, homes and lives with ever more consumer goods that we probably don't need or even appreciate. And this isn't good for our happiness.

“The huge number of choices that assault us every day makes many of us feel inadequate and in some cases even clinically depressed,” says Professor Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice. “There is vastly too much choice in the modern world and we are paying an enormous price for it. It makes us feel helpless, mentally paralysed and profoundly dissatisfied.”

And who can claim that they haven’t felt dissatisfied after choosing from among so many options? Just last week, with our dryer threatening to burn the house down and our washing machine refusing to spin, Aileen and I headed to the big box stores to shop for a new set. There were so many choices we didn’t know where to begin. We looked to Consumer Reports but were befuddled by the 500+ reviews of machines they list. Is the Maytag THG438447 the same as the THG438448 because Best Buy has the 8 but Consumer Reports only reviews the 7! Is it true that 4 of the 6 brands sold at Future Shop are simply re-branded models of GE appliances? And do we really need sixteen wash settings and 247 dry settings? What’s the difference between a front-loader and a top-loader. Is there any benefit to having a glass door or does the solid door work just as well? “Professor Schwartz believes that the dogma of all Western societies - that maximising freedom and choice increases welfare - is deeply flawed. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if eventually you'll be able to buy a mobile phone with integral nasal-hair trimmer and creme brulee torch,’ he speculates sardonically.”

I could really use a new torch, and all the better if it integrated with my phone, my nail clippers and my iPod.

“So much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex,” says David Shanks, a psychology professor and the co-author of Straight Choices, a new book that examines how to make the best decisions when faced with a perplexing array of options. We feel bad that every time we do make a choice, it seems we are missing out on other opportunities. This makes us feel inadequate and dissatisfied with what we have chosen. Often, we feel bamboozled and just shove a familiar or prominently displayed brand into our basket. Then we feel useless because we can't cook gourmet dinners like Jamie Oliver and don't know what to do with any of these exotic new ingredients. So we end up buying and eating the same meals time and again.

This excess also numbs us to the heady pleasure felt by previous generations when they bought something new in an era when budgets were leaner and consumer goods in shorter supply. All we can think about now is what we still want to buy, rather than appreciating what we have.

Or perhaps instead we’re thinking about what we could have had. This new Olympus camera is great, but I still wonder if I should have bought the Canon. Or the Nokia. Or the… It’s endless. The evidence suggests, says Professor Leppe, that we thrive when we have less choice. “Excess choice is paralysis rather than liberation.” “‘It challenges a lot of our beliefs, but it could just be that choice within constraints will make us feel a lot better,’ says Professor Schwartz. ‘We need to live in the moment, appreciate what we have and not think about all the other things that we could choose instead.’”

Even better, we need to live with an eye to the future. We can pile up all the stuff we want here on earth, but we can’t take it with us. But we could still live our lives miserable, always wondering what could have been.

Just a month ago my youngest sister got married and in his speech at the reception my dad challenged Grace and Justin with the thought that the only thing you can take with you when you die is your children. Obviously he didn’t mean it literally, but merely meant to indicate that you must invest yourself in your children and in other people. People are all that you can take with you and it is there that you need to make your investments.

The endless choice we face may be the mark of our culture’s prosperity but the evidence is proving that it just makes us miserable. It seems to me that endless choice makes for endless discontent.