Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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Well, at least I won’t go to the grave having accomplished nothing. After more than 130 hours of listening, I finally came to the end of William Manchester’s incredible three-volume biography of Winston Churchill (As you may know, Manchester grew ill and died before completing the third volume, leaving it in the capable hands of Paul Reid). It is a stunning achievement—over 3,000 pages of reading or 130 hours of audio, all focused on just one man. Few men merit …
It does us good to read missionary biographies. This is especially true when those missionaries served during the great age of missions in the 1700’s and 1800’s. This was a period when missionaries traveled overseas into uncharted and unfamiliar lands. As they left familiar shores they knew they might never return to their homelands, that they would inevitably suffer in terrible ways, that they would very likely give up their lives in service to the Lord. And still they went. …
Last weekend I made the rookie mistake of leaving my book at the office. Rather than blow time on a one-hour round-trip to fetch it, I decided instead to search for something new. Something different. Something interesting. Preferably, something moving. I spent a full hour browsing Amazon without success and then began to scour the sites of the various Christian publishers. It was at Zondervan’s site that I spotted something hopeful—A Dream So Big: Our Unlikely Journey to End the …
Many years ago my grandmother succumbed to cancer and went to be with Jesus. Among the things she left behind, buried among other personal effects, was a long, handwritten letter from Joni Eareckson Tada. My grandmother had experienced excruciating pain in her life, losing both a daughter and her husband to suicide. As a new Christian she had written to Joni to share her grief, believing that perhaps in Joni there would be someone who might understand and who might …
Without a doubt, C.S. Lewis is one of the most interesting, perplexing and polarizing figures in recent Christian history. For some he is a giant of the faith who asked questions few were willing to ask and who answered those questions in compelling ways. For others he is no Christian at all, a fake, a fraud, who revoked his faith at the end of his life. Few men are seen in such contradictory ways. What is undeniable is that Lewis …
Mez McConnell has an interesting story to tell–a story of the transforming grace of God in his life. Where some children grow up under the loving care of kind parents, Mez was left to tumble up on his own after his mother abandoned him, after his father took up with an abusive woman. Roaming the streets of Yorkshire, he lived a life of drugs and burglary and violence, eventually and inevitably finding himself confined to one of the nation’s worst …
This morning I posted a review of Shon Hopwood’s new memoir Law Man. After reading the book I tracked down the author and did an interview with him. Give it a read, as I think you’ll enjoy it. If you had to give a short summary of the theme of your book, what would it be? I don’t mean an outline of the contents as much as an underlying theme. What will the reader take away from it? I think …
Shon Hopwood robbed five banks before he was apprehended and sentenced to spend twelve years behind bars. Just twenty-three years of age, he was suddenly looking at living out some of his prime years in a federal penitentiary. Yet he somehow managed to find his place, not in sports or in gangs, but in the law library. There he found that he had a deep interest in the law and a knack for understanding it. Before too long he had …
Adam Brown was one of the elite of the elite, a member of SEAL Team SIX, the counterterrorism unit that has among its accomplishments the capture of Osama bin Laden. Brown was also a man with a history of addiction and all that attends it–theft and broken relationships and devastation. Most important of all, Brown was a man who had experienced grace and forgiveness through a relationship with Jesus Christ. His story, told by Eric Blehm in the book Fearless, …
When Carolyn Weber arrived at Oxford University to begin her post-graduate studies, she felt no need for God and had no interest in him. An intelligent young woman who had grown up in a nominal Roman Catholic family, she was glad to rely on her intellect for the answers to life’s greatest questions. As a blooming academic, she had few mentors or models who could show that faith is not only compatible with intellectual pursuits, but that it actually enhances …