From Publishers Weekly
Chosen by Christianity Today editor Wilson, this eclectic treasure trove, on subjects as diverse as repentance, being an unmarried believer and the evangelical Christian Book Association convention, contains some truly extraordinary writing. Notable essays include a wide-ranging interview with German filmmaker Wim Wenders, a spare but haunting recollection of a trip to Wounded Knee, and a wonderfully contemporary and demanding sermon on the Old Testament Book of Daniel. Wilfred McClay's subtle and keenly honed meditation on what it means to be an American Christian after September 11 is timely, theologically acute and likely to be very challenging to some readers. Although some authors, like Frederica Mathewes-Green, Philip Jenkins and Kathleen Norris, are famous, others edit religious journals, pastor churches or teach in colleges. In his introduction, Yale Divinity School professor Miroslav Volf argues that the "soul of Christian writing is the ability to know everything through Christ; take that away and you will lose its content, motivation and style." Rich in whimsy, overflowing with gentle wonder and laced with both irony and anguish, these pieces by and large live up to their rather audacious billing, as the best of the best.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Unaccountably skipping a year in its title (the third was dated 2002), the fourth edition of this annual challenges and entertains, at least once within the same piece, J. Bottum's "Dakota Christmas." Bottum's rehearsal of mid-twentieth-century High Plains holidays evokes smiles aplenty but draws us up short with its self-questioning, regretful ending. Differently challenging is Douglas Jones' "Just Wood," which alternates, with never a line's space between them, long paragraphs on rendering trees into lumber and long paragraphs on a family encounter with giant redwoods, and conveys much botanical and religious lore about trees in both expository streams. John D. Spaulding's "Shocking Truth about John Wesley" is a delicious addendum to the weighty studies celebrating the tricentenary of Methodism's founder, and James Calvin Schaap's "Dancing with Ghosts: A White Man at Wounded Knee" is as somberly powerful as its title promises. If the representative sermon seems condescending, one biographical piece seems out of place, and two critiques of business seem soft, they may not seem so to every reader.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
