I am certain that there is no other book I've been asked to review more times than William P. Young's The Shack, a book that is currently well within the top-100 best-selling titles at Amazon. The book, it seems, is becoming a hit and especially so among students and among those who are part of the Emergent Church. In the past few weeks many concerned readers have written to ask if I would be willing to read it and to provide a review. Because I am always interested in books that are popular among Christians, I was glad to comply.

There are few things I love to eat more than bread. I just love a good loaf of white bread. I eat it the way many people eat junk food (and, I suppose, one could argue that it is junk food). Not too long ago we bought a bread maker from a person nearby who was selling all his possessions to move back to his native Poland, having found that North American living was not to his liking. The machine worked well for five loaves but on the sixth, while the bread was being kneaded, I heard a strange grinding sound followed by a sharp crack. I opened the machine and saw that the paddle, the piece that beats against the dough, had broken. I removed the lump of dough and decided I could simply put it in a bread pan and bake it on my own. A few minutes later I pulled the loaf from the oven. It looked just perfect—golden brown on top and shaped a whole lot better than the loaves that come out of the bread maker. I eagerly cut into it, looking forward to enjoying a slice of bread.

A Review of Max Lucado’s latest book.

A review of Brian “Head” Welch’s Bestselling Autobiography.

The atheistic literary pantheon is currently comprised of three men: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All three men have written bestselling books and all three have published their most recent efforts in the past year. While I have no reason to believe that they have planned their books to coincide thematically or chronologically, their books do resemble each other in several ways. All three men believe that religion is a blight on society and all of them choose to deal most specifically with the evils of Christianity and its adherents. All three believe that religion harms far more than it hurts and all of them are angry and unwilling to be silent about all of this. Of these three, Dawkins is the most influential and we can rightly say that he is currently the most prominent atheist in the world.

It requires a certain amount of trust to read and to enjoy a biography. Most books are easily-verified, easily fact-checked. A book discussing a particular doctrine can be easily held up to the Scripture and seen immediately to be true or false. Biographies, though, and especially those that rely on secondary sources, are much more difficult to verify and thus the reader is left having to place his trust in the biographer, believing that she is providing the true story of her subject’s life. In the case of The Most Famous Man in America, a Pulitzer prize winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher, I was never able to reach the point where I really trusted the author, Debby Applegate.

Years ago I found a beat-up old box that contained a stack of musty books. I suppose they must have belonged to my father or grandfather and that they had long since been forgotten. They were interesting books, clearly targeted at boys of a different age. They had stories of pirates, heroic tales of valor and suggestions for activities that would appeal to any boy. It seems that books like this were all the rage once upon a time. Children needed to entertain themselves and this type of book gave them the suggestions they needed to keep busy.

Over the weekend I began reading The Most Famous Man in America, Debby Applegate’s recent biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The book has been widely celebrated, winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award Best Biography of 2006 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Best Biography of 2006. It was even winner of the Frederick G. Melcher Book Award for the most significant contribution to religious liberalism in 2006 (an award distributed by the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations). As one might expect, the book has sold well and has been very widely and very well reviewed.

The Bible tells us about three people who were privileged to see heaven on this side of the grave. All of these men, Stephen and the Apostles Paul and John, were alive when they were given a glimpse of the wonders of heaven. Don Piper, a Baptist pastor, claims to be a fourth, though unlike the other three, he first had to die first. Returning home from a conference, Piper’s car was crushed under the wheels of a truck. Though medical personnel declared him dead at the scene of the accident, ninety minutes after this accident, a pastor, waiting at the scene, was told by God to pray for the dead man. He did so, and Piper immediately returned to life. For the 90 minutes that his body lay lifeless inside the car, Piper claims to have been in heaven. He now carries with him memories of paradise and in 90 Minutes in Heaven, a book which has sold over a million copies and which has been a long-time fixture on the New York Times list of bestsellers, he seeks to encourage other Christians with a description of our eternal home.

On Sunday, April 14, 1935, a massive dust storm fell upon a portion of five different states: Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. The greatest and worst dust storm on record, it turned night into day and became known ever after as Black Sunday. During the 1930s these storms had become common throughout the Great Plains and extending all the way into the Canadian prairies.