A local bookstore has few books for sale.

There’s quite a selection here.  If you’re interested in any of the titles, I’ll let you know where to find them…

This week our sale cart is featuring titles concerning Islam and/or events in the Mideast. All titles listed below will recieve a 50% discount at the cash register:

• The Rise of Babylon $12.99
• Iran: The Coming Crisis $13.99
• Muhammad’s Monsters: Comprehensive Guide to Radical Islam $13.99
• Journey Into the Mind of an Islamic Terrorist $14.99
• (Is the Battle Against Terrorism a Prelude to…) The Last War $10.99
• The Unseen Face of Islam: Sharing the Gospel with Ordinary Muslims $13.99
• The Prophet & the Messiah: An Arab Christian’s Perspective on Islam and Christianity $14.00
• Whose Holy City?: Jerusalem and the Future of Peace in the Middle East $15.99
• The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism $18.00

Never mind… Fox News just called and they want their books back.

Here you go:

If you or someone you know was unable to attend Mr. Barton’s presentation Tuesday evening and would like to have a DVD that is very similar to the presentation he made here at Harding, please visit his website: www.wallbuilders.com. The DVD is entitled “The Role of Pastors and Christians in Civil Government” and it sells for $19.95.

Or, you can purchase a copy of David Lipscomb’s On Civil Government for $9.95 from Amazon.com.

Lipscomb’s book is much older and probably not as flashy as Mr. Barton’s DVD but Bro. Lipscomb is one of “our people” so his views are probably more in line with what most members of the Church of Christ believe with regard to the role of pastors and Christians in civil government.

Or not.

A.J. Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possibly.

Alternet has a review here.

We’ve all heard the premise before: An agnostic wishes to discredit the Bible and embarks on an effort to disprove its teachings. As a result, the agnostic comes to an new appreciation of the Scriptures.

But in this case, the agnostic concludes that he is doomed to live in sin and that the entire approach to finding God by living in strict accordance with God’s commands is rather silly.

Jacobs’ conclusion should come as no big surprise for any Christian who has been trying to live her life in accordance with a list of “Thou Shalts” and “Thou Shalt Nots”. That kind of life tends to make you rather narrow-minded and neurotic.

I know, I’ve been there.

Moreover, Jacobs asks us to consider:

What if a modern-day American followed every single rule in the Bible as literally as possible. Not just the famous rules – the Ten Commandments and Love Thy Neighbor (though certainly those). But the hundreds of oft-ignored ones: don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers. Grow your beard. Stone adulterers

And that’s why I’ve been a big fan of the grace of God for most of my Christian life.

More hugs — fewer stonings.

Children’s Books Not recommended by the National Library Association

• Valuable Protein and Other Nutritional Benefits of Things from Your Nose
• The Hardy Boys, the Bobsey Twins, and the Vice Squad
• The Tickling Babysitter
• A Pictoral History of Circus Geek Suicides
• Charles Manson Bedtime Stories
• Daddy Loses His Job and Finds the Bottle
• Babar Becomes a Piano
• Controlling the Playground: Respect through Fear
• Curious George and the High-Voltage Fence
• Legends of Scab Football
• Teddy: The Elf with the Detached Retina
• Things Rich Kids Have, But You Never Will
• The Care Bears Maul Some Campers and are Shot Dead
• You Were an Accident
• Strangers Have the Best Candy
• The Little Sissy Who Snitched
• Some Kittens Can Fly
• Kathy Was So Bad Her Mom Stopped Loving Her
• The Attention Deficit Disorder Association’s Book of Wild Animals of North Amer - - Hey! Let’s Go Ride Our Bikes!
• The Kids’ Guide to Hitchhiking
• When Mommy and Daddy Don’t Know the Answer, They Say God Did It
• Garfield Gets Feline Leukemia
• What Is That Dog Doing to That Other Dog?
• Why Can’t Mr. Fork and Ms. Electrical Outlet Be Friends?
• Daddy Drinks Because You Cry
• You Are Different and That’s Bad
• Dad’s New Wife, Timothy
• Pop! Goes The Hamster…. And Other Great Microwave Games
• Testing Homemade Parachutes With Nothing At All But Your Household Pets
• The Boy Who Died from Eating All His Vegetables
• Start a Real-Estate Empire With the Change From Your Mom’s Purse
• The Pop-up Book of Human Anatomy

Happy reading, kids.

Check out Andrew Dorsey’s review of “A Long Way Gone”, the first hand the story of Ishmael Beah, a boy-soldier in Africa.

For too long, the civil wars in Africa and in other parts of the developing world have been waged on the backs of children who are forced to grow up too quick. Beah is just one of the thousands of young men who have been pressed into taking up arms in wars that are not of their making.

Andrew will be traveling to Dallas this weekend to pick up several autographed copies of Beah’s memoir of his experiences in Sierra Leone’s civil war and will be offering them for auction at the Starbucks in North Little Rock (Highway 67 and McCain) beginning March 19.

I’m planning on getting a bid in on one of the copies just as soon as I can get down there. I know I can do it by e-mail or through Andrew but I’m always looking for an excuse for a road trip.

The proceeds from the auction will go to UNICEF, one of the many international organizations that have taken an interest in situations like Ishmael Beah’s.

Todd tagged ME a couple of days ago in a rather unusual way… I haven’t done this is a while but I’ve got a few minutes to play along before I leave for the office.

At first, I thought I was going to be able to get away with the first or second time this happened to ME.

Here are the instructions:

1) Grab the book closest to you.
2) Open to page 123; go down to the fourth sentence.
3) Post the text of the following three sentences.
4) Name the author and book title.
5) Tag three people to do the same.

My response:

During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go, worship the LORD as you have requested. Take your flocks and herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me.” The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and leave the country. “For otherwise,” they said, “we will all die!”

From The NIV Study Bible; Exodus 12:31-33.

There are a number of theories on who the author was; I’ll play it safe and say “Moses”.

The first three people who read this and have a blog can consider themselves “tagged”.

This list was a bit easier than the list I did after some doofus in Texas tagged me.

Reading blogs is good for you but reading books is much better.

One book that changed your life: The Source, James A. Michener. I read several of Michener’s novels when I was in the navy; after reading this one, I realized that man’s desire to find and know God has been a work in process since the dawn of time. Michener tells that story with archeology and shows the good, the bad and the ugly side of religion.

One book that you’ve read more than once: The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli. I�ve read it at least six times and I�m going to read it again this semester. I disagree with much of what Niccolo has to say in this “handbook for gangsters” but I think he (a) never intended for it to be published as a book and (b) only wrote it to ingratiate mself with the Medici family. Bit it has made me appreciate his more pro-republican sentiments in The Discourses.

One book that you’d want on a desert island: The Dictionary; it�s got all of the other books in it.

One book that made you laugh: Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese. Nelson is better known as the head writer and host of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Megacheese is a collection of his own movie reviews and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Andy Olree and I used to read this book to each other when we were driving back and forth to Conway when he was teaching with me at AGS. Sometimes, we got to laughing so hard that we had to pull the car over.

One book that made you cry: Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo. The first anti-war novel I ever read. I was supposed to read it during my senior year in high school but I blew it off until just before I started college.

One book you wish you had written: On Liberty, John Stuart Mill. Most of the core ideas found in Mill’s treatise on personal freedom are so ingrained in our society today that it’s hard to believe that they were once considered radical.

One book that you wish had never been written: This one is only one step away from asking me to name the first book that I would throw on a bonfire and I’m not into that kind of thing. Write ‘em all; I’ll decide which ones I want to read.

One book you’re currently reading: Plato’s Republic (again).

One book you’ve been meaning to read: Moby Dick.

Tag five others: Laura Kaiser, Carl B. Burt Hollandsworth, Lisa E, Kolby Kuwitzky, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

I have now repeated the cliché of reading The Da Vinci Code on an airplane by finishing Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons on my flight to Philadelphia on Monday.

Several of my friends insisted that I needed to read A&D even before I had started reading The Da Vinci Code earlier in this year. I was told that A&D was a better book than TDC but I think the only difference I found in the two books was that in the first one, I had a lay-over in Detroit and in the second one, I had a lay-over in Cincinnati.

Both books were interesting and helped pass the time in the airport but they certainly won’t go down as two of the best books I’ve ever read. But now I’ve got my Dan Brown ticket punched. Please don’t suggest that read any more of his books – I think I’ve already put enough money in Dan’s pocket.

About two years ago, another friend told me that I needed to read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz. I didn’t know why he insisted that I read it back then but I understand now. Between then and now, I haven’t met anyone who has read the book who didn’t like it. It’s a great read, particularly for Christians who have problems with institutions, religious and otherwise, but who are still trying to find the essence of what the Christian life is supposed to be.

If you haven’t read it (and I suspect that several of you already have) Blue Like Jazz is Miller’s account of his journey toward finding God and learning to love others more than he loved himself. His discovery was that this is the key to being a complete Christian. That sounds pretty simple but we all know it isn’t. For many people, that journey begins and ends in a church building but for Miller it took him through hippie communes, a pagan college, and an apparition of the virgin Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Miller is a good writer and story teller, so I almost forgot that I was reading a book about spirituality. Blue Like Jazz lived up to what everyone told me it would be.

I’m not entirely convinced that faith has to be a mystical experience, as Miller says it is. There are certainly a number of convincing rational foundations that can be used to establish a faith in God but Miller concludes that there is no sense in trying to prove the existence of God — it’s something you either feel or you don’t feel.
But I realized why my friend told me to read Blue Like Jazz just about the time I got to Chapter Twelve.

In his discussion of what bothered him about many of the churches he visited on his journey to discover real Christian spirituality, Miller says this:

Only one more thing bugged me, then I will shut up about it. War metaphor. The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn’t clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.

Nice thought. I never considered myself to be a hostage before.

This is a book that I’ll have to read again sometime, and I will. Just as soon as I get the Illuminati out of my head.

I’m not going to be able to moderate too many comments today. I’ll get caught up just as soon as I get back from Washington tonight.

OK, I admit it, I liked The Da Vinci Code and I am reading Angels and Demons right now. But I’m still not sure if I fully appreciate what the fuss is all about.

I suspect that the work-up about the book and upcoming movie stems from the fact that both have the potential for confusing people about who Jesus was. This is something that theologians have been arguing about that ever since somebody first decided that the world needed theologians but for Christians who figured it out, any attempt to re-open the argument is dangerous. I would have said that it was “pointless” but if critics of the book really believed that it was pointless, they wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.

But it could be that since The Da Vinci Code book and movie have the potential for reaching such a broad audience that there is a real fear that readers and viewers will have a more difficult time separating fact from fiction.

Case in point: Nancy Grace. In her interview with Rubel Shelly back in March, Ms. Grace seemed to be most interested in challenging the Church of Christ doctrine (if there is such a thing) on the role of women in leadership positions. This observation has already been made but even at the time, it seemed to me as if that entire portion of her argument came straight out of The Da Vinci Code. There are good arguments to be made on that subject but it’s probably not a good idea to base them on a book you picked up in the fiction section of the airport bookstore.

Like most works of fiction, The Da Vinci Code takes some liberties with historical facts, some of which I was aware of before I read the book. Many of these involve the way in which the canon of the New Testament was compiled by the early Christian church and how the leadership of the early church dealt with heresies. Dr. Erwin Lutzer, who seems to have become the point-man for going after the “deceptions” of The Da Vinci Code suggests that author Dan Brown “blurs the lines between history and fiction.” Moreover, Lutzer and others believe that Brown has an agenda:

Dan Brown’s agenda is not so thinly veiled: this book is a direct attack against Jesus Christ, the church, and those of us who are his followers and call him Savior and Lord. Christianity, according to Dan Brown’s novel, was intended to suppress women and to turn people away from the ‘divine feminine.’ Understandably, the book appeals to feminists, who see a return to goddess worship as a necessity to combat male supremacy.

The upshot of this theory is that Christianity is based on a big lie, or rather, several big lies. For one thing, Jesus was not God, but his followers attributed deity to him in order to consolidate male rule and to suppress those who worshipped the divine feminine. Indeed, according to Dan Brown, at the Council of Nicaea Constantine invented the idea of the deity of Christ so that he could eliminate all opposition, declaring those who disagreed to be heretics. Further, Constantine also chose Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the only Gospels because they fit his agenda of male power. Eighty other viable Gospels were rejected because they taught that Jesus wanted Mary Magdalene to be the real leader of the church. “It was all about power,” we’re told.

Some of these ideas found in The Da Vinci Code have been around for a long time, such as the speculation that the role of the women in Jesus’ inner circle was more important than many modern Christians believe or that even in the earliest days of Christianity there were sharp differences of opinion about the divinity of Jesus. So the idea that some of these ideas were suppressed by some of the followers of Christ or that the canonization of the New Testament was politicized is not that far-fetched for many readers.

I recommend the book for casual reading but not for teaching a Sunday school class. The backlash against the movie is going to be almost as interesting as the film itself.

And at some point, Dan Brown needs to send a thank you note to Dr. Lutzer. I’m sure that all of these this is going to translate into at least another aditional million or two dollars at the box office.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read” - Groucho Marx

Ray Muncy, my first department chair, once encouraged me to read a book a week. I’m sure he thought that this was a reasonable suggestion for a first-year teacher who was supposed to be working on a dissertation but it wasn’t. If you knew Ray, I think you’d agree that he seemed to eat books for breakfast.

Unfortunately, even in the post-dissertation phase of my teaching career, I’ve had a hard time keeping up that particular quota but I still try to read at least one or two books a month and usually try to get to a few each year that have nothing to do with what I teach.

I keep a stack on books on a corner of my desk that I need to get to eventually. Some of them sit in the stack longer than others but I eventually get to most of them. This is what’s been in the stack this semester:

Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Graham Allison & Robert Zelikow (2002). Graham’s original account of the Cuban missile crisis published in 1971 is a classic but I haven’t been real crazy about the second edition. I re-read it with my American foreign policy class this semester and we all agreed that it could have been shorter and more to the point. It’s still worth reading if only for the details about the crisis that have now been made available through declassified American, Soviet, and Cuban records of the decision-making process during the CMC.

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer (2005). The title is misleading because Foer’s book is more of an illustration of globalization rather than a theory but this is a great book. Because the rules of soccer are the same everywhere but the game is played differently in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, the “beautiful game” is a good illustration of the tension between globalization and localism.

The Ionian Mission, Patrick O’Brian (1981). I got hooked on O’Brian’s Aubry-Maturin series of books on naval warfare and political intrigue during the Napoleonic wars after seeing the movie Master and Commander. This is the 8th book in the series of twenty books and they’ve all been good.

America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, George Herring (2002). If you’ve never read a book on Vietnam, this is the one that I would recommend. This is another one that I’m re-reading with my American foreign policy class and we agreed the other day that the parallels with Iraq are eerie – not so much about how we got there but how hard it was to get out once the commitment was made.

Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament, J. Julius Scott, Jr. (1995). Great book so far. I’m teaching a Sunday class at West Side this summer on the intertestamenta period and I think I’m going to use this one for much of my material.

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003). I’m sure that Mark Elrod is the last person alive who hasn’t read this book — I’m not even sure why it is still for sale in bookstores since everyone seems to already own a copy. I know I’m going to look like the biggest cliché in America this weekend reading it in the airport and on my flight to Philadelphia and back this weekend but I’m going to do it anyway.