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Showing posts from October, 2015

Little Pilgrim's Progress - Helen Taylor

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Little Pilgrim's Progress is a rewritten, illustrated version of Pilgrim's Progress and Christiana for kids.   In this version, Christian is a "Little Pilgrim" who is close friends with a little girl named Christiana who has several little siblings. Christian goes out on his pilgrimage first, and meets with various characters similar to the original Pilgrim's Progress, though some of them have been changed to be boys instead of men.   Christiana goes on her pilgrimage later on in the book with her siblings, where they also encounter Christian's father who has become a Christian and is also journeying to the Celestial City.      There are two things that I had trouble with regarding this book and this is that first of all Christian's mother, who had gone to the Celestial City before him, is focused upon too much, she is portrayed as if she is watching, and possibly even helping him on his pilgrimage.   Speaking of Christian's mother, one characte...

Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity - by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold

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Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff is just what its title declares it to be, it is an endeavor to answer, in only a few pages, many questions new Christians, or unbelievers, have about God, the Bible or Christianity.   The book is not as good as I had hoped it would be.   My main problem with it is its presentation of the relationship/interaction between God and mankind.     First, its discussions of the love of God toward people are presented too much like the modern concept of "falling in love", an uncontrolled, "couldn't help it" type of thing.   Here are a few quotes to demonstrate what I mean:   "God isn't just loving, he is love……And he isn't just a loving person 'in theory'; he literally, at this very moment, is aware of his deep love for you. " and, "he loves you because he created   you…If   you have a child,   you have felt this love before; you don...

The Carols of Christmas - Andrew Gant

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The Carols of Christmas by Andrew Gant goes through various popular carols of Christmas and tells some of their intricate, and often confusing, history.  You may not come out of the book wiser than when you started it about who wrote such and such a carol but Gant himself warns of this in the intro:  "…if you occasionally get to the end of a chapter in this book slightly unsure about who wrote words or tunes or bits of either, me too…." Apparently we don't know exactly who wrote some of the songs, and many of them were revised from their original written form.   One of the histories I found particularly interesting was that of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, originally Hark How all the Welkin Rings' by Charles Wesley.  Apparently George Whitefield was one of the people who revised the song, one of the verses he changed was "universal nature say 'Christ the Lord is born today!' " to "With th'Angelic hosts proclaim, Christ is born in Bethl...

Happiness - By Randy Alcorn

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God commands His people to be happy and therefore being 'happy' is a matter of obedience for Christians. Such is the argument of Randy Alcorn's newest book "Happiness".   It seems that he has encountered a lot of Christians who seem to think, or imply, that happiness is sin and that God's purpose is for us to be holy, not happy.   He declares that the oft cited difference between happiness and joy is in reality a nonexistent difference, that the terms are so alike in meaning they are synonymous.   "The distinction between joy and happiness is not biblical ".      He critiques the view that 'joy' is more 'contentment' without reference to the emotions, while 'happiness' is primarily circumstantial and emotional.   He makes a case that the word "joy" is also emotional in meaning.   He also believes that "happy" is the better term to use in the case of many of the Greek and Hebrew words translated in many...