Some Book Thoughts
Neil Gaiman brings Shadow (of American Gods) back in a novella that closes his wonderful collection of stories, Fragile Things. Gaiman is at the top of his form in so many ways these days. This collection gives free reign to some of his work in short form. There's poetry, history, weirdness, and all the other neat things that we come to expect from him. And as I said, a new visit with Shadow and other gods caps it off.

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Paulo Coehlo takes the ancient story line of making a choice between Good and Evil and gives us another spiritual challenge in The Devil and Miss Prym. Coehlo is a master at this type of story. He brings an old idea or myth and brings it to life in a contemporary setting. He is great at reminding us that even in our so-called modern world, we are still as susceptible to the old challenges, temptations, and superstitions as any of our ancient forbears. We just have new ways, or new twists on old ways, to justify it.

When a stranger comes to town Berta is not surprised. She has been watching for Evil to come to town for years. For Chantal Prym it becomes a struggle within her soul about what to do. For the Mayor, he sees a way of consolidating power and wealth. For the Priest, it is a challenge to twist scripture to meet his needs. For the rest of the town it is a shock. What they do about it is the battle of Good and Evil. Worth the read.

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I continue to wrestle, along with Philip Yancey, on Prayer. Yancey is, as usual, willing to wrestle with scripture and his own beliefs to make sense out of stuff that is not easy to reconcile. This is not a book that I am taking lightly so I am moving very slowly through it. I may even skim it again before I come to any real conclusions. It is certainly worth the challenge as he digs deep into our popular visions of just what it is that God expects in prayer.

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Philip Jenkins opens a whole new world of Christianity in The New Faces of Christianity. This is Jenkins second book on the changing world of Christianity. In his previous book, The Next Christendom, he documented the major seismic shift going on in the numbers and demographics of Christianity worldwide. In this volume he takes a closer look at what it is about the Bible and theology that is being discovered in the two-thirds world (or the global south) where Christianity is growing significantly, but not necessarily in a way that we global north Christians would recognize it.

Most of global south Christians live in a world that is culturally, economically, and spiritually closer to the 1st Century world of Jesus and the Bible than we are. Many of the passages that we skim over are the centers of their faith. They understand a world of miracles and the supernatural in a way that we have long forgotten. When they get to read the Bible with their own eyes instead of the interpretive eyes of the global north missionaries they are discovering more than we realize is there.

This brings some conflicts, obviously. They tend to be more moralistic than most of us but also can tend to the socially radical side as they, like the 1st Century Christians are the poor, the outcast, and the oppressed by the overall economic system. But, and Jenkins does a decent job of showing this, there is also some considerable diversity in global south Christianity.

If nothing else, the book is able to show some of the ways that we have traditionally enculturated the Gospel with Western, European civilization and its world-view.