Here is another roundup of 30 Minute Reviews. These are noteworthy books that I did not have time or opportunity to read from beginning to end. Instead, I tried to spend at least 30 minutes with each--enough to get a sense of what the book is all about.

Athanasius - Simonetta Carr is building a fantastic series of biographical books for children and Athanasius now joins John Calvin, Augustine of Hippo and John Owen. Future volumes are expected to include Lady Jane Grey, John Knox and Jonathan Edwards. “A complex and fascinating character, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, is best remembered as the Father of Orthodoxy, upholding the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arian heresy. In the newest addition to the Christian Biographies for Young Readers series, author Simonetta Carr introduces children to the life and times of this important church father who tirelessly defended the Nicene Creed, which many of us today recite as a confession of our faith.” This is a series you’ll want your children to have access to.

What Do You Think of Me? Why Do I Care? - This strangely-titled book comes from the pen of Edward Welch. I read it in manuscript form and wrote this blurb: “When we make people big, we necessarily make God small in comparison. This sin of pleasing people ahead of God, this fear of man, is the kind of sin we dress up and excuse and neglect; we have made it respectable. In What Do You Think of Me?, Ed Welch carefully, surgically, exposes people-pleasing for what it is. He lets it be ugly—all sin is ugly!—and offers a much more satisfying vision rooted in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Whether you are young or old (but maybe especially if you are young) you would do well to give this book a read.” This book is, in some ways, an extension to or expansion of Welch’s classic When People Are Big and God Is Small.

I have always loved language, and the English language in particular. In fact, part of the reason I love to read is not to learn new things, but to learn how other people use words. When I read an author like Malcolm Gladwell, a very gifted writer, I learn more about language than about the topic of his book.

While I have always enjoyed using words and studying language, my love of English grew during my college years when I studied other languages, primarily those from which English is derived--Latin, Greek, and to some extent, French. I also studied linguistics and, of course, the English language itself. I came to love understanding how people use words to craft ideas. There is a good reason that people continue to study Shakespeare in high school despite increasingly antiquated language. Shakespeare was a master of the language, a master word crafter, and we can all benefit by reading what he wrote. The same is true of Dickens or any other number of authors.

Let me jump from Shakespeare to Bible translation. Whenever I take the time to read the Bible slowly and meditatively—and this is particularly true of reading the Old Testament—I am struck by the beauty of the language. While I do not know Hebrew, I often hear people speak of the poetic nature of the language which leads even the prose to have poetic qualities. And I see this reflected in the English. At least, I see it reflected in the English when I read it in certain translations. 

For day-to-day reading I tend to rely on the English Standard Version. Now, I’ve heard it said that to be one of today’s New Calvinists you pretty much need to use the ESV. Let me say that I am not ESV fanboy. However, I do find that it is a superior translation and one that does a wonderful job of seeking to capture the beauty of the language. This cannot be said of all Bible translations. I have come to love the little literary devices, the metaphors and phrases used by the ancient writers and find that they add so much to the reading of the text. Without a translation that accurately rendered these sayings we would lose so much of the flow and meaning of the text.

There is so much beauty in the prose of the Old Testament and I love that I can have access to a translation (and to several translations, really) that carefully and accurately renders the metaphors and phrases used by the original authors. Let me provide you with a few examples from Kings. I am going to use the ESV as my standard essentially-literal translation. I do this not necessary to indicate that it is superior to the others within the category, but simply because it is the translation I use the most.

I’ll begin with 1 Kings 2:2 where King David gives his final wishes to his son Solomon. The ESV renders David’s words like this: “I am about to go the way of all the earth. Be strong, and show yourself a man.” The other essentially literal translations agree with this translation and the NASB, KJV and NKJV are all very similar. There are two constructs here that I love: “I am about to go the way of all the earth,” and “show yourself a man.” Let’s see how several other common translations render this particular verse:

• “I am about to go the way of all the earth,” he said. “So be strong, show yourself a man.” (NIV)
• “I am going where everyone on earth must someday go. Take courage and be a man.” (NLT)
• “My son, I will soon die, as everyone must. But I want you to be strong and brave.” (CEV)
• “I’m about to go the way of all the earth, but you—be strong; show what you’re made of!” (Message)

As we see, the NIV renders the verse in a way that is consistent with the original text. The NLT deviates a little bit, expanding the meaning of “the way of all the earth” to “where everyone on earth must someday go.” It also says, “be a man” rather than “show yourself a man.” The CEV further interprets the verse, removing any sort of literary device in both parts. The Message does a little better, maintaining the first half of the verse but removing the “show yourself a man.”

What is lost in the NLT and the CEV is the metaphor “the way of all the earth.” It is an important term, beautifully poetic, and one that is worthy of some time in meditation. There is a depth of meaning to that phrase that is clearly missing in words like “I will soon die, as everyone must.” Readers of the NLT and CEV have no access to this phrase and miss out on the wonderful opportunity to meditate upon it and learn from it.

I went to bed at 10:05 last night, and wouldn’t you know it, my site went down at 10:10 (or so I learned in the morning). I’ve had to dedicate some time this morning to trying to resurrect it. At this point it seems a little bit stable—stable enough to try to post this. However, it may well crash again. There is a team of people trying to fix it and they seem to be making a little bit of progress.

Trying to get the site running stole from my writing time. So instead of posting something spiritual and profound, I found this post, a work in progress, that tells you why you shouldn’t live in Canada. Don’t get me wrong; there are hundreds of great reasons to live in Canada. But I can’t deny that there are also some good reasons not to live here. Here are a few of them.

Amazon Hates Us

Amazon offers only a small portion of their total catalog to Canada. They offer CDs, but not MP3s, DVDs but not streaming video. They have a few other categories of products, but overall it’s a rather sad collection compared to what Americans can take advantage of. As if this is not bad enough, they also have no equivalent to Amazon Prime (which is the greatest deal in tech, don’t you know).

3-Year Cell Phone Contracts

All of Canada’s major carriers will only offer their good best smartphones with 3-year contracts. The only alternative is to buy the phone outright which incurs a large up-front cost. You might think the 3-year contract would then mean that the carriers could offer lower monthly rates, but the opposite is actually true: Canada is one of the most expensive countries for cell phone use.

Hockey Obsession

A long time ago someone invented a silly game that involves slapping a puck across an icy surface. For some reason most of my fellow Canadians are obsessed with this game. While I can grant that it makes an occasional entertaining distraction, and especially so during The Olympics, I simply cannot understand why people get so carried away with it.

In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta published a report saying that they had identified, without probable cause, five cases of a rare strain of pneumonia among men in Los Angeles. By the following July, this disease, now appearing in isolated pockets around the world, was given the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. Just two years later, proclaiming that we would soon be able to inoculate people against this disease, the United States Health and Human Services Secretary said, “yet another terrible disease is about to yield to patience, persistence and outright genius.” Almost twenty years later, we know a great deal more about the disease, but we still have no cure and no inoculation. Since its discovery AIDS has claimed over 25 million lives.

Yet AIDS has never killed anyone; not in the truest sense. As scientists researched AIDS in the months and years after its discovery, they came to see that it was not really a disease itself but was in fact a collection of symptoms and infections stemming from a common cause that they soon identified as what we now know as Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV.

But HIV does not kill people either. HIV is what is known as a retrovirus--a kind of virus that can insert its DNA into a host cell's genome and then reside there indefinitely. Transferred through bodily fluids, HIV primarily attaches itself to important cells in the immune systems--cells that defend the body from infection and disease. As infection spreads to greater and greater numbers of certain types of these cells, the body becomes susceptible to infections, tumors and other life-threatening illnesses. Viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi that a healthy immune system can easily defeat soon rage unchecked by the weakened immune system. Eventually most HIV patients develop what we know as AIDS. While it typically takes nine or ten years for HIV to become AIDS, a person with AIDS has a life expectancy of less than one year.