David Robertson, a Free Church of Scotland pastor who lives in Dundee, wanted there to be an intelligent Christian response to Richard Dawkins’ bestselling The God Delusion. To that end he wrote an open letter to Richard Dawkins and subsequently posted it on his church’s web site. The letter somehow found its way to Dawkins who posted it on his own website where it generated a response that was massive in scope and in passion. According to the back of The Dawkins Letters, “The ferocity, and shallowness of thinking, of some of the responses spurred David to write further letters, which form the basis of this book. They explain a credible basis for faith that counteracts the ‘atheist myths’ that so much popular discussion is based upon.”

Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Emasculated Theology…

Those of us who have been keeping a wary eye on the Emerging Church know that to understand the movement we must understand Brian McLaren. Though it is not quite fair to label him the movement’s leader, he certainly functions as its elder statesman and his writing seems to serve as a guide or compass for the movement. Where he leads, others follow. It is with interest, then, that I turned to his latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It is a book that promises to electrify the Emerging Church and, if history is a reliable guide, to further polarize it from those who hold to more traditional Protestant beliefs. My plan in this review is simple: I’m going to give an outline of what the book teaches and then interact with it just a little bit.

Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is a mega-seller, having been a long-time fixture on the New York Times list of bestsellers. Easily the world’s most prominent atheist at this time, Dawkins is becoming still more popular and gaining a wider and wider voice. Just recently he has introduced his “OUT” campaign which seeks to convince atheists to come out with their beliefs and to stop hiding in shame. He is leading the charge for society to regard atheism as a valid and respectable worldview.

In 2000, when she was only twenty-three, Wendy Shalit published A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, a book in which she argued that the sexual revolution may not have been entirely beneficial for women. She decried the lack of modesty this revolution has brought about and, according to TIME defended “compellingly, shame, privacy, gallantry, and sexual reticence.” Of course many people, and feminists in particular, were disgusted with the book and ruthlessly mocked her.

I found Letter to a Christian Nation a difficult book to read. It is, after all, a book whose purpose is to criticize one of the things I hold most dear—the church of Jesus Christ. While certainly deliberate and measured as these things go, it is still something of a rant against religion in general, Christianity in particular, and, at its narrowest focus, those who call themselves by the name of Christ (and hence, the one they call themselves after).

I really don’t understand Anne Lamott’s appeal. I’ll grant that she is a talented writer but clearly this, in an of itself, cannot explain it. I suppose a good bit of her appeal probably stems from her gut-honest authenticity, her willingness to say exactly what she’s thinking all the time. She’s profound, she’s profane, she’s shocking and people seem to love her for it.

I often wonder if my Canadian perspective keeps me from really understanding race relationships as they exist in the United States. Things are different here. I live in a city where over half of the population was born outside of this nation. A trip to any public location (or even a walk around the average neighborhood) will show an incredible variety of races and backgrounds and this seems to have been Canada’s historical pattern. To be Canadian is to be diverse. Canada never embraced slavery and never had shockingly unjust Jim Crow laws to overcome. We had no Martin Luther King Jr. and, in a sense, never had as great a need for one. Racism was never systematized here as it was just a few miles south. So when I read about racial issues I read about something that comes from outside of the context I know best.

The Secret is a phenomenon. Since the book debuted late in 2006 it has sold over four million copies with some thirty other translations now available or underway. It is likely to become one of the best-selling self-help books of all time and is being constantly praised and endorsed by celebrities. Venture into your local bookstore or look around you while waiting at an airport, and you’re bound to see people reading it and absorbing it. They will not just be people who consult astrologers and who listen to Tony Robbins tapes, but normal, average people like the ones who live next door to you. There are almost 1400 reviews of the book printed at Amazon with an average rating of 3.5 out of 5. The breakdown of those scores is interesting: fifty-two percent of them are 5-star, thirteen percent are 4-star and twenty-one percent are 1-star (Amazon does not allow a 0 rating).

I recently began reading Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, a book I am really only reading because of the final three words of the title. That young women are pursuing sex and delaying love is common knowledge, but it’s rare to find someone who is willing to declare that this causes women to lose at both. While I am not yet at that stage of the book, I am looking forward to her conclusions.

In the first section she discusses what young people mean by the oft-used phrase “hooking up” and seeks to figure out why girls are so quick to hook up and so slow to commit to significant relationships. She shares a conversation that took place between a college-aged girl named Shaida and her friend.

Inside Narnia was one of the many books published in advance of the recent movie adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. In this book Devin Brown, a Lewis scholar and aficionado, offers a detailed look into the world of Narnia, digging far beyond the surface, and exploring this magical world. Having just read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe with my children, I decided to read this as a commentary of sorts, to see what I had missed and what I would want to look for the next time I read the book.