Today and tomorrow are Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days. I’ve got a list of deals that may be of interest to you on my Prime Days Deals for Christians page. You probably won’t be surprised to know that my main focus is books and Bibles in both print and Kindle editions.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include some excellent books for both men and women, along with some for any reader. Be sure to check in after 7 AM EDT once I see if there are any special deals for the day.
Recommended Reading
When You’re Not Sorry. John Piper addresses an interesting situation: when someone thinks you owe them an apology, but you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. Along the way, he offers some thoughts on what’s being called “the sin of empathy.” “Maybe Joe [Rigney] didn’t emphasize this enough; you can judge. He knows this. Empathy is good — very good. You can’t obey the Golden Rule without empathy. But it’s not good when someone manipulates your empathy into an apology you don’t owe. That’s the issue.”
What Is Her Body For? Katie Laitkep found herself pondering some of the women who have been in the headlines recently. “September seemed to be filled with headlines about women: Lindsay Clancy. Sydney Sweeney. The woman identified as Jane Doe in the Cornell case. Different women, very different stories—with each one calling for different responses. … In cultural moments like these, I’ve found it helpful to begin sorting: to look at the ideas about womanhood that seem to be sticking and to hold them up to the light of God’s Word. Some distort what is good. Others express a longing Scripture teaches us to honor: for women to be treated with dignity, for their bodies to not be exploited.”
Is AI the New Covid? Brad Littlejohn has a very strong article about AI. He draws lots of interesting comparisons to the early days (and later days, I suppose) of the Covid pandemic. “As with Covid-19, AI poses an almost perfect storm of uncertainty and confusion: myriad conflicting factors conspire to make it very difficult to estimate the risk in proper perspective, to know whom to trust, or to know how we ought to respond even if we did know what the heck was going on. And the stakes are much higher now even than in 2020, so we could be forgiven for getting a bit shrill in our debates. I have deep doubts that we will do any better this time around, but if we are to have any hope of doing so, let’s see what we can learn from last time.”
On Dying Well. Casey McCall: “Previous generations of Christians talked about death a lot more than we do. Of course, they couldn’t avoid it. Before the Industrial Age, best estimates suggest that half of all children died before they reached fifteen. Between 1550 and 1800, the lifetime risk that a married woman would die giving birth was one in eighteen. People died younger, and people generally died publicly, before the eyes of those still living. Grandma didn’t die in a nursing home; you heard her moans in your living room. The inevitability of death was unavoidable.”
Why Translation Must Have Fingerprints. I was almost surprised by how much I enjoyed this article and benefited from reading it. James Eglinton explains why translation must have fingerprints, which is to say, why it is an essentially human task. “That pursuit of truth means the recognition of many things: that all theological translation is interpretation, that the translation and the source text are different texts, and that somewhere between the two, the text was covered in the translator’s fingerprints. A way of imagining theological translation that ignores this is linguistically naive. More seriously, it pushes that use of theological texts toward ambivalence to the pursuit of truth.”
When Friends Turn Against You. As J.V. Fesko writes about friendship, he makes this claim: “The best way to prevent the dissolution of good friendships is to treat them like marriages. While our friendships do not have the same nearly unbreakable commitment, at the same time we shouldn’t treat them as if they were disposable. I think our consumeristic age encourages us to discard anything and everything that does not immediately satisfy our needs.”
New Books
New Christian books tend to release on Tuesdays. Here’s what’s new this week.
The Greek New Testament Study Bible, ed. Constantine R. Campbell (Zondervan Academic). The Greek text with more than 9,500 notes on grammar, syntax, and textual variants.
Justification and the Churches: Pastoral Questions at the Heart of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Theology by Gerald Hiestand (Baker Academic). “Gerald Hiestand explores one of the most debated doctrines in Christian theology—justification and salvation—by asking a deceptively simple question: What if Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians aren’t just giving different answers but are answering different pastoral questions?”
Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven by Dane Ortlund. “In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund plunges into the word of God and the wisdom of the saints to help us rightly think about heaven, and to draw strength from our coming future more deeply than we ever have before.”
Irreplaceable: Humanity, Vocation, and the Limits of Technology by Gene Edward Veith Jr. & A. Trevor Sutton. “Practical, theologically grounded, and bracingly timely, Irreplaceable helps you think through the role emerging technology should play in your life—at home, at church, and in wider society—and brings clarity, purpose, and hope in this brave new world.”
Flashback
How Much Money Is God Not Concerned About? Sometimes it is not wrong to spend more rather than less, and sometimes saving money is actually wasteful. After all, money is not the only thing that is valuable—time is too, and energy, and effort, and much else.
We obey God’s Law, not to be loved but because we are loved in Christ.
—Jerry Bridges
