Category Archive

Sydney Bauer has written, so far, three novels based on the character of David Cavanaugh.  I read one and then when I was returning it to the library the next one was available.

Undertow is obviously a first novel.  It explains too much at the beginning rather than let you find out.  I was thinking of giving it up until about 80 pages in when it started to twist and turn and ended up ratehr good.

Gospel did not have the first novel issues, in fact it was a very good second novel and I look forward to reading the third to see how Ms Bauer grows as an author.  I have read all of the Sue Grafton novels to date and see a similar growth in her story telling style.

The problem with this series is the incongruity of it.  Ms Bauer is an Australian who has obviously spent some time in Boston and may have other connections to the US of A.  Unfortunately she is writing a male, US character and seems to have him based more on an Australian and what an Australian would do than an American.  so his sport interests, his beer and his attitudes seem more Australian than American to me.

I am surprised at Ms Bauer’s consistent choice of murderer and admittedly while there is enough sense in the novels that they would commit the crime I am wondering if I see some sort of bias towards a certain type of character.

I will find out I suppose when I read the next novel.

I’d like to complain about my new local library.  I really would like to complain.  But what can i say about a place that gets my books to me in a week or two of requesting them?  Or the week they are released in Australia?

My favourite bad story so far is returning a book and having it left on my account accruing charges.  Then one Thursday night I was going to have to go out and return it I found out that they had obviously had someone else check it out and wiped out my charge.  And I did not even call them.

So here’s my thumbs up to an efficient library.  Keep it up ERL.

I realise a large amount of my reading is based on where I have lived or visited. If I liked a place I wanted to read more about it in some form or other.  So I have read Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and its sequel Angel of Darkness for my New York phase.  Similarly I have read both Jonathan and Faye Kellerman for my Los Angeles phase.  I have yet to find a series set in contemporary London or New York that I enjoy though I have read many of the Pascoe and Dalziel novels by Reginald Hill for the Yorkshire flavour.  Suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Of course Venice has the Donna Leon but I just can’t seem to get into that series however Rome has, in its historical form, Lindsey Davis’s Falco which I do enjoy.

Three hands in the Fountain is I suspect a play on the old movie and song, Three Coins in the Fountain.  And true to that reflection is the idea that someone needs to be lucky in love.  In this case it is not Falco who is doing very well but his good friend Petro.

This novel has all the hallmarks of a good mystery, not quite sure who did what and why, meeting the killer abd realising that it is them without the characters realising yet and enough light heartedness to not make this bog down.

I look forward to reading the next ones.

In the third of the Capitol crime series, Capitol Conspiracy, William Bernhardt brings together a series of interesting ideas.  Finally his hero, Ben Kincaid, and his offsider Christina are married but not all is pleasant for these honeymooners.  On top of this then is a number of deaths that Ben is forced to be involved with which separates him from Christina.  In the end it all resolves happily with a few twists that I did not see coming especially as a conspiracy is involved.

There are some interesting questions that this novel raises.  First Ben has to decide whether he is a liberal who has been mugged, thus having him side with the conservative Republican party.  Second what do you do if you make a decision your partner disagrees with? Ben sleeps in his office.  Finally there is the question of at what cost should a nation be protected from enemies - especially if it means giving up your liberties or what defines you as a nation.

I think I have said before that it seems to me Bernhardt writes as a liberal while Grisham with sometimes the same style writes as a conservative.  In this novel the issue of partisanship slips into the background to face an almost Tom Clancy-ish issue.  How do you respond when your government - both parties eventually - are attacked?

This seems to me to be an interesting take on government and one I’d like to see more novels consider as at least one Christian approach to government is not to see them as always right in every action but to have some suspicion or idea of evil in many acts.  This novel shows ways to see people being manipulated for all the “right reasons”.

While I liked the novel, partially because I have been reading the series for a while I will leave it to you to decide if you want to think through the issues of how to handle a conspiracy.

Ok, with the move I do not yet have a new library to start raiding.  So last week I hit up the bookshelves of the folk I am staying with and came across Forsyth’s Avenger.

Now this is the sort of thriller that is not full of action on every page but directed towards the questions, will the hero suceed or not?  It is also driven a little bit by the fact that the date of the action is just before September 11, 2001 and you wonder if this is part of the plot or not.

At the same time as finishing this novel I started reading What do they Hear?  Bridging the Gap Between Pulpit and Pew by Mark Allan Powell.  One of the ideas that Powell raises is who do we empathise with in a story.  You see Powell mentions he used to empathise with James Bond and not the bad guys in James Bond films.  This makes Avenger a little awkward as a read as the only person I truly empathised with is not really in the novel they just get a couple of mentions.

Overall this then made me wonder why did I persevere?  The answer is mixed, part of it is that Avenger is written as a series of character studies and how characters interact.  You wonder what connections are and how it will all work out, you hope the bad guy will get what he deserves but are never sure if he will.  Yes there are plot elements that are contrived, gruesome and you wish were not there but the novel does raise the idea of how well do we know our neighbours, could our lawyer really be a person who takes vengeance for a righteous cause when asked and paid enough?  Or as a professor put it do we realise how close to being a murderer we all are?  While not the aim of the novel it makes me think of a little more than I expected but not enough to give it 5 stars.

Have a great weekend.

John Grisham is a church goer and as far a I know a committed Christian.  I still think Grisham’s, according to one interview I read semi-autobiographical,  The Testament is one of the best Christian novels I have read.

Then along comes The Appeal. This is an interesting book because while the outcome is obvious the route to it is not.  Grisham’s characters in this book are sympathetic for the lovable ones and horribly vindictive for those you are to loath.  This is fiction based on some ideas and situations of real life.

The plot revolves around three groups of people, the small people, big business and the legal fraternal who has to interact on behalf of both. The small people are from the South and have small town lawyers and churches on their side.  Big business is, of course, New York based and deliberately woos other churches to its side. The legal profession is in between and is shown to be at the mercy more of big business than not.  This is Grisham’s point and he is quite obvious in the author’s notes how he wants things to change in the legal profession.

As I said the outcome is expected but the route is not and the suspense towards the end when one of the characters starts to change sides - like the old American joke - “What’s a republican?  A democrat who has been mugged” - makes you wonder how things will turn out.

The use of churches as part of the backdrop is an interesting reflection of how churches can get co-opted, by either side in a debate, to causes they themselves do not understand well enough.   It continues to make me think about how as churches we need discernment.

Overall a satisfying read and a reminder “what does it profit a man if he has the whole world and loses his soul?”

The post prior to this is an apology for trespassing on someone’s private life.  It seems like at some levels I suffer from the same problems as Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton’s T is for Trespass  Kinsey can not figure out whether to  intrude on a situation she knows is odd or to stay away and in the end she goes in feet first.  It seems I do the same.

I started reading the Sue Grafton A-Z series when I was living in Santa Barbara.  The series is set in Santa Teresa which is a slightly fictionalised form of Santa Barbara and in those days I don’t think Grafton was anywhere else.  I read them as they were local flavour and not a bad read.

Nowadays they are a bit sentimental for me.  I remember living there and timewise they are getting close to when I arrived.  Not quite there yet but getting close.

There are a couple of great lines in the book. One is that the Domestic and Elder Abuse Telephone Hotline as an acronym is DEATH.   There were some others about food and weight issues which I enjoyed as well.

This seems to be Grafton back on form after a couple of books that weren’t so great.  I look forward to the rest of series and hope I don’t trespass again.

Janet Evanovich’s Plum Lucky is another “between-the-numbers” book in the Stephanie Plum series. Before you stop reading these comments be aware they will not end up where you think.

The “between-the-numbers” books seemed to have started out as a publisher’s idea of generating extra revenue and indulging stories that are a little on the sillier side. So far we have had Santa Claus, Cupid and Leprechaun look-alikes appear in the three books.

Now I am not protesting the silly use of these characters. They are grounded in reality, somewhat, so I am not real upset with the clash of genres. What I am more concerned with is the world the modern detective style novel is set.

I believe it was Eugene Peterson who commented that many pastors read detective fiction because in a world of greys it is nice to have black and whites like good guys and bad guys. And then at the end of the day for the bad guys to get caught and the good guys to win. I am starting to get concerned that many pastors are going to read detective novels of this sort. The reason is that more and more “detective” novels are focussing on the marginalised of society. What I am thinking of is the characters who are taking drugs, laundering money, visiting prostitutes or even being one. I have no question that these people exist. I lived long enough in New York to meet some. What I am concerned with is thinking these are all the problems of life and that these are the norm.

You see how long does it take a young man reading novels about prostitutes (see Tara Moss’s Fetish for example) make him think this is acceptable practice? In Evanovich’s novel Lula, a regular character, is a former prostitute. In the later books there is no mention that she was very abused at the end of the first book. She is just made out to be a fun character with a very poor dress sense. In setting these novels in the “real world” the normal world is changed.

Two different blogs I read have recently posted about meeting people’s needs where they are. This is not usually detectives but housewives (see Simon Holt Carey’s blog) and businesspeople (see Richard Mouw’s blog). We need to give answers to hurting people as well as the marginalised. We need to see the world we live in as needy and needing the light and salt of Christ whether this is city, suburbs, “normal people” or the marginalised.

I think Plum Lucky is a fun read. It is fluff and it is meant to be. Yet for once this piece of fluff has tickled my nose of discontent and made me think of far more than I expected.

Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education by Bach, Haynes and Smith was an interesting read for me. The reason for this was it reinforced my own biases on the issue.

This reinforcment is best demonstrated in one of the tables (2.1 p. 34) in book describes simple to complex uses of virtual learning environments. The simple end of the spectrum is ideas such as “A quick and easy way to use the web to distribute course materials and carry out course administration” and “A means of communication between students, tutors and outside contributors.” At the complex end there is the idea of “A platform for collaborative student projects” and “Delivery of complete online courses with fully integrated activities”.

I like this taxonomy which I had in some form in my own head already. You see when you have a background in computing and move to higher education there are impulses to use technology to fix everything. The problem is that technology introduces new issues. See the writings of Jacques Ellul on technique/technology if you want to be convinced.

The rest of the book is helping people to consider what changes are really needed if the subject being taught has a certain elements like lectures, tutorials or other teaching strategies to make them work in an online environment. These changes include deciding on a useful computing environment, design a useful look and feel and the actual changes required.

For those unfamiliar with this field this is a great introductory book from an education and information view. For those familiar with the field the last two chapters are the most helpful. What I took away from these was unfortunately something not expected - this is a lot of hard work. To make these changes properly requires more time and effort than my current workload allows. Institutional commitment to embracing all these changes is always another factor. While we have had incremental changes while I have been here the longer term issues are still to be decided. Multiple schools with multiple ways of doing things makes it more of a challenge.

Overall look at this book if you are deciding to explore the issues of online learning.

This week I will explore two chapters of Weimer’s Learner Centered Teaching work before I go on holidays on Wednesday.  YEAH!

The issues that  chapters 5 & 6 of raise are helpful ones for me.  The first is making the students take responsibility for their learning.  The second is making evaluative assessment that shows learning as well as keeping exercises that enable learning.

I am working through how to have my students learn what is a skills based course, reading the Bible well,  to do so consistently.  I want them to keep reading the Bible at the end of the course in an informed and responsible manner.  I want them to look up tools and concordances when they get stuck on a word.

Now here is the problem students get the mindset they need to keep the lecturer happy to show they have learned.   How do we really know they have learned?  They want to know more.  This comes about as there are real consequences for not doing an action.  In psychology and the Boundaries books this is known as enabling.  Allowing someone to get away with something and then making up for their shortcomings just plasters over problems.  It solves nothing and only increases the enablers work.  We can do the same for students.  I think I will be setting tough consequences for the class for those who do not have the textbook in class by week 3.  The textbook is far better and more succinct than I at explaining the material and will work with the method I use so I have to come up with good exercises.

This leads onto the second point.  How are students encouraged to learn through self-assessment.  To truly understand you are learning you should not be relying on the grade that your lecturer gives you.  You should know yourself what you have learned.  This however is a process.  This last academic year I tried to get students to self-assess and Weimer points out they need to grow into this.  I think I know how I will help them grow into this but I have to plan more.

Which is an earlier point that Weimer says, we need to plan more to make this work.  And I really do want the students to learn.

Lee Child has written 11 Jack Reacher novels.  I started reading them when I was in the UK as WH Smith’s (I think) had a sticker on one of the books “Enjoy this or it is free”.  It was something like that to get you to read a novel they hoped you would enjoy and not return to them.  A sort of money back guarantee.  I have now read 10 of them.

I liked the initial novel I read and more so as they have progressed.  Jack Reacher is a drifter going where ever he wants carrying only the clothes on his back plus his toothbrush.  The action has been all over the place from small towns in the south of the US, to an English village to, this time, Los Angeles.

The stories vary, at their heart is the idea that Reacher is righting some wrong.  Whether it is an innocent family or friends that have been killed or framed Reacher is called upon somehow to set things right.  Along the way he usually gets the girl, though less so in the later novels.

So are these novels formulaic?  It would seem so as I have described them yet this one hooked me.  The plot twist of why did the friend get killed when he was better than his killers is the issue of the novel and it is revealed late enough to make you really want to read the novel but not too soon so you want keep reading.  More of Reacher’s past is filled in but not enough to make you know everything about him.  The numbers in this one are also a fun part of the story.  Its the inner geek being evoked.

So should a Pentecostal pacifist read novels which are violent and sometimes contain sexual content?  This is a harder question to answer.  I don’t let these things shape my world, in fact the violence reminds me more of why I am a pacifist.  Yet this is not to justify the reading of these novels for the “benefit” they bring.  I read them because they are a good yarn and I enjoy thrillers.  This was the genre I moved to after science fiction and I think it started when I was visiting Europe and reading the Len Deighton series Game, Set and Match, then Hook, Line and Sinker and finished off with Faith, Hope and Charity.  I could really imagine the action taking place in these places.  This is still why I like thrillers.  I still have that bit of a kid in me who wants to be James Bond or some sort of super spy.  I just read them and think of me being there.

Is this wrong - I am not sure but it is better than doing what Reacher does.  We all want to change the world for the better.  Some of us just use books to imagine bad ways of doing it.

One of the books I never read for my thesis was Wayne Cordeiro’s Doing Church as a Team. I quickly read it a couple of days ago to figure out if it was aimed at teams or leadership. It is ultimately aimed at leadership of teams. The best point I found was the fact that a team should be four people and you can keep delegating down. So each member of a team of 4 builds a team of 4 and each member of that team builds a team of 4 and so on. This is the first material I have heard on the practicalities of team based work.

The reason I finally read Coreiro’s book was I had read a very different book on teams. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni is a very practical book with the theory tucked at the end.  The descriptions Lencioni uses reminds me of places I have worked and had managers say exactly what some of Lencioni’s character say.

I really enjoyed the  book.  Now I expect if you have read this far you may be surprised that this is filed under theology rather than something else.  The reason the reading of Lencioni’s book became theological for me was finally understanding the issues of leadership that I struggle with.  I know within Australian Pentecostalism there is the idea that “everyone is a leader”.  This is a complete fallacy but it is still spoken about.  The answer I have realised is not to deny this but to say “Everyone is part of a team”.  Whether teams have captains or not is a different issue.  For the church the captain is Jesus and what that means for teams may need different interpretations.

The issue is not how do we empower people to be leaders but how do we empower them to be part of teams, people who trust one another, share deep feelings which sometimes leads to conflict,  being committed to the team and its vision, not avoiding accountability and paying attention to results.  This is a much bigger ask than empowering people to be leaders as we need to be part of functioning teams first.  Which means we have to overcome these own issues in our lives first.

Our salvation has become so individualistic that our service to God has gone the same way.  We must now all be leaders for God and not team players.  We can be individually saved by Jesus and not need the church. This was part of the thinking behind my thesis - why do we have church and how does it function?  The priesthood of all believers is not supposed to be individualistic but an exercise in team work.  These books confirm my thinking but it is Lencioni who will make me think for a while as to what to do about building teams.

As I finish up a week of reviews on books I have read recently I now get to the end of a series of 11 volumes in the Sword of Truth books. Congratulations to Terry Goodkind for finishing the novels before any serious health issues or death stopped the writing.

Terry Goodkind’s Confessor seems to be one of those novels you either love or hate. Amazon.com reviewers give it 3 stars.  Would I be so mean?

Well I will agree the series has dragged on for a bit but the ending is unexpected.  Goodkind does figure out how to keep both views of the future open without destruction of one or the other.  I have written this in a deliberately vague way so that readers who do read the book are not surprised.

The epilogue is quite appropriate to end the series on a high note rather than Tolkien’s sending Bilbo et al away at the end of Lord of the Rings.

What about the action?  A bit more gory than I would like.  The magic - not lots.  The basic ideas good with a great twist for the ending. Read if you have enjoyed the series otherwise leave it alone.

My students often ask why do I read science-fiction and fantasy.  These genres are what started me reading when I was in my early teens.  This means these books are escapism and a pick me up.  On my desk to read now are three different books on the academy and one on church.  I have a varied reading diet maybe not just the most healthy one

I had the pleasure of meeting Roger E. Olson a few years ago at an Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting. We were both about to go into sessions where we were speaking/chairing and I did not have long to speak to him. I bailed him up about a comment in a paper he had written as I knew it could be interpreted two ways and I wanted to know which one he meant. It was the way I hoped it would be, phrased in such a way to keep everybody happy.

Roger’s new book Reformed and Always Reforming is a great read though I must admit it is slightly repetitive at points. The editors could have cleaned up some of the prose as the same thing is said a few times about the same people. It reads as if it was a series of addresses that have been compiled into a book and slightly more editing could have been useful.

The back cover of the book says “Can we be more evangelical by being less conservative?” That is the thesis of the book and the book succeeds in showing so. I also think I will write a paper, in response to the book, “Pentecostals as Pre-Cursors to Postconervatives: We Can be more Pentecostal by being more Evangelical”.

So what is the content?

The lengthy Introduction sets the context for the whole discussion. It defines terms, names names, and says who are postconservative theologians and who are opposed to postconservative theology.

Chapter 1 is a consideration of the style of postconservative evangelism. Here Olson shows that the centre of doing evangelical theology is being evangelical. Being evangelical for Olson is defined by 5 points which I understand as:

1) Centrality of Scripture
2) Conversion
3) Christ
4) Evangelism
5) Christian Orthodoxy with God’s word as the highest authority for all Christian faith and practice.

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Bruce Beresford’s Josh Hartnett Definitely Want To do this …  True Stories from a Life in the Screen Trade was not quite what I was expecting.

I thought it would be a memoir of some sort with a prose type structure.  Instead it was a memoir in a diary, with footnotes, insights and name dropping galore.  The name dropping is not for the sake of it but because these really are the people Bruce mixes with.  He has good days and bad days and knows more correctly than not that certain producers really do not have the money.

I think what I most  enjoyed about this book was the fact that it was about the reality of a persons life that many of us would think is glamourous.  Bruce shows he lives a lot on airplanes, visits strange places for work, some of which are nice, refuses the services of well dressed men who can provide “comfort” in the form of young women and overall is a “normal” Australian guy.

Of course most normal Australian’s do not go to the opera, theatre or watch movies as much as Bruce does but his one paragraph reviews of these items makes them interesting. He is basically stuck doing not much in the time he writes the book.  He rewrites scripts, tries to find money and dreams about making interesting movies.  He was the first choice as director for a movie about William Wilberforce which became Amazing Grace directed by Michael Apsted.

If you like Australian directed movies or want insight into what movie making is like I recommend this book.

Weimer’s Learner Centred Teaching takes a dramatic shift in the second change she examines.

The first chapter was on the balance of power - the second chapter is on covering the content.  Except it is not about the content per se but the learning of the content.  How do we make sure students learn what we need them to learn without overburdening them.

I find this an interesting question as it affects my hermeneutics class.  I need technically to cover the different genres of the Old and New Testament.  What I will have to have the students do is show me they have learned how to read the textbook well to interpret the different genres.  This will be a change as I had an exercise like this previously and it did not work well.  Now I will have to make it work and I think I know how.  I am going to have to ask the students how the two different groups of genres (NT & OT) have different steps and then apply it.

There are some great lines in this chapter though.

“comprehensive finals were dubbed academic bulimia for the way they encourage students to binge and purge knowledge.” p48.

“In a learner-centred  classroom students do more than hear from the teacher about the work biologists do; they do the work themselves.” p52.

Weimer also gives a series of examples on how to develop learning skills so what is learnt in first year can still be around in second year.

But the final section before the chapter conclusion is personally encouraging as I read in this area.

“I believe that we greatly underestimate the complexity of the process involved in taking a generic active learning strategy and adapting it so that it fits the content, learning needs of students, instructor style and instructional setting in which it will be used.” p70.

I recognise my struggles to adapt material are not unique and I need to persevere.

Shalom

Before I start this new book a couple of comments about the weekend.

In America they had Thanksgiving. My favourite comment about this for this year is here.

In Australia we had an election. My favourite comment about this is here.

Marking almost over - 1 or 2 papers to go.

And now to the book MaryEllen Weimer’s Learner Centred Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice

Weimer’s Preface gives us a feel for the book as a whole and identifies the structure of the book, as well as giving us insight into her own journey.  I found this very helpful as she tells me up front what the changes she proposes are and that in the first chapter why she has decided on these.

Chapter One is the journey.  There is  a great line on page 3, “I had redesigned my course; afterward, I attempted to redesign the teacher.  Getting the course reshaped turned out to be much easier than fixing my very teacher-centered instruction.”  I think this is where I am at presently.  I have been asked to propose a unit to teach at a Masters level in another Bible College.  I want more of a sense from the students as to what they want.  I realise I want to call the course “Priesthood and Prophethood, Clergy and Laity, Structure and Spirit, Church and World: Practices for Pentecostals”.  The problem is that is toooooo long a title.  I will solve this by clarifying to myself what I want the students to know and learn but I will want some feedback.

The chapter ends with Weimer giving further discussion as to what it means to change in five practices.

The first practice discussed in chapter 2 is the Balance of Power.  The idea is to let students decide what they want to learn, how they want to learn when they want to learn. I tried some of this in one of my classes this year.  It helped somewhat but not enough for my liking.   The flexibility of what was proposed is also a sticking point for me as we are stuck with pro-forma as to our teaching and creative teaching in what is skills based seems important to me but possibly not to the bureaucracy which accredits us.  What is nice is a comment that Weimer makes having considered a points system like I have in the past.  “The assignments are not mastery based, in the sense that those who complete them get the credit.  Each assignment is graded against specific criteria, and to have any assignment count, the student must earn at least 50 percent of the points.”  I need to develop criteria that help do this so I can do this in future.  Mind you as I only read the Introduction to Rubrics book recently I have come a long way this year.

Finally what does this mean for me?  My hermeneutics unit will be undergoing lots of changes again.  I am now happy with the material and the textbook just not the order or mode of presentation.  I will have the students select the New Testament book we study in class (except Ephesians).  The assessment will need lots of changes but I think I know how I want to go.

Pray for me.

David Kowalski’s Company of the Dead is a new Australian novel about an alternate US history.

I am wary of this genre as I have seen it done in ways I like (Harry Turtledove’s World War series) and ways I do not.  This book fell into the “I like it” category.

The basic plot is what if the events on the Titanic really affected all of Western Civilisation and what if someone time travelled back to change them? There is more to it than that though.  Though I won’t give away some of the plot points that make this a good novel.

While the characters are not always well drawn and some are little more than red shirts on Star Trek the basic interactions and ideas are interesting.

So why do I like this novel in the end?  The majesty of travelling on the Titanic, good science-fiction, good history and its written by an Australian.  I know there will not be a sequel but I do look forward to Kowalski’s next book.

Amazon has released an electronic book reader. This does not seem to be a theological statement. At the same time a new novel Out of Print by John Frye is out. The theological issues both raise the issue in different ways is how we understand the “Word” of God.

We need to discern again what it means to be people of the book - are we really obedient and in love with its giver or with the words themselves or the idea of the words?

Amazon will move us to a more ephemeral form of word - something that is present then gone as we replace one book in our reader with another. Out of Print I suspect, as I have not read it yet, will move us to value the word giver.

Pentecostals have usually placed a premium on an experience of the Spirit which the church has understood to be in alignment with the word of the God in the Bible.  The problem is that in much of Mega-Pentecostalism, the large scale churches, the Bible is receeding as we try and reach out with a message that the world can accept.  What used to be reserved for Bible Studies and teaching believers is now watered down and then given to non-Christians.  Jesus did not come to make my marriage great, he came to redeem all of creation which changes my marriage.  Yet our preaching seems to focus on the effects and not the redemption.

Yesterday someone started a discussion about gradualism and how we come to accept what we should not accept if we are exposed to it enough.  I wonder if our lack of exposure to the Word of God will cause us to remove its importance so it is as ephemeral as a book in the new Amazon reader.

So it is a choice we need to make sure we are faithful to the Word of God and not let it be ephemeral in our lives.
What choices are you making?

There are days when I should not turn on Firefox, the TV and walk in my office.

These are the days when I want things to remain the same but realise later they will never be.
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There are days and season when you should not read. Well not if you want to stay the same at least.

Recently I have read The Starbucks Experience, Emerging Church and The Azusa Street Mission and Revival.

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Mel’s book The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (2006) is on my rotation at the moment.  A few things strike me about the book.

• It is incredibly well researched and well written.  Each chapter is well thought out and the content is often surprising.

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