Last week we invited friends home from church to share a pot of soup and a loaf of bread hot out of the bread maker. They left us with a book by David Platt that is being passed around church--Radical; Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. It is easy to read, but hard to put into practice. Platt challenges the dominant culture and the assumption that living well means being comfortable and having all the toys your neighbors have. He compares his own mega-church and the whole American philosophy that bigger is better with Jesus spending three years with twelve men.
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Yesterday I began my review of Dale Cramers 2006 Christy-award-winning Levi's Will by pursuing the themes of non-violence that I have discussed in my reviews of Cramer's Daughters of Caleb Bender series. But this book isn’t really about war and non-violence. It is about relationships and about grace over three generations. When Will runs away from home as a teen, he must lie to hide his identity and keep his father from finding him and dragging him home. He lies about his last name and where he is from in order to explain why in the midst of World War II he has never signed up for the draft. He lies about his age to join the military. Last year I reviewed Dale Cramer’s Paradise Valley, the first volume in his Daughters of Caleb Bender series about an Amish settlement in Mexico in the 1920s. In January I reviewed its sequel, The Captive Heart. I liked them both. I liked them enough to review them on this blog and not merely say something polite on Amazon or Shelfari. But THIS is the book you really want to read. In fact, Levi's Will stimulated so many thoughts that I will be spreading this review over two days. Today we deal with the non-violence theme that Dale and I discussed when I reviewed The Captive Heart. Come back tomorrow to hear more about the theme of grace found in this 2006 Christy Award winner. The Daughters of Caleb Bender series by Dale Cramer is based on the daughters of the author’s own great grandfather who was the elder statesman of a colony of Old Order Amish who emigrated to Mexico in the 1920s when the state of Ohio passed laws requiring the Amish to send their children to public schools. Dale’s father was born in Mexico so he has a strong vested interest in these stories. Let's start with a disclaimer: Robin Jones Gunn is one of my favorite people. I met her at a Litt-World conference in Brazil. She has a HUGE heart for women and girls. Robin began writing when the girls in her Sunday school class had nothing decent to read. She recommended some books that they loved, but when they had read those, there was nothing more to give them. So she wrote her own, taking the chapters week-by-week to her class for the girls to critique. Moralist Therapeutic Deism—the religion of this age. There is a God, and he wants us to be nice and to feel good about ourselves. True, but what a watered down version of faith! It’s a far cry from “Be holy as I am holy!” This is not the religion of the apostles or martyrs, nor of medieval saints or the reformers. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism would never have driven the Pilgrims to the rocky shores of New England, or sent anyone to the Gulag Archipelago for defying an atheistic empire. Gabby is fleeing a disintegrating marriage after years of fertility treatments and miscarriages. Heidi and her daughter Katie are hiding the secret of teen pregnancy that has ostracized them at home. Cassandra is a no-longer-up-and-coming reporter, hoping for the big story that will rejuvenate her career. The four of them end up on a missions trip to South Africa where they meet women whose faith and passion to help others transform their lives. On our recent cruise in Alaska I took a dozen books. My luggage didn’t know the difference since they all fit into a space no larger than my cell phone. Ah, technology! I don’t need to own a Kindle or a Nook—just agree to pay a whopping monthly data fee for my smart phone. Sigh. One of the books I read sitting by the pool while the mountains of the inner passage slid by my vision was Cynthia Ruchtie’s They Almost Always Come Home. The strong, irreverent voice of a woman who “would leave her husband if she could find him” draws the reader in immediately. I have been discussing a book proposal with Zonderkidz, the juvenile and YA division of Zondervan Publishers, so when I got an e-mail a couple weeks ago about a special on Zonderkidz e-books I went to the site and downloaded several to see what kind of thing they were doing these days. Last night I read Nikki Grimes’s A Girl Named Mister. According to her website, “New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes is the recipient of the 2006 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Her distinguished works include ALA Notable book What is Goodbye?, Coretta Scott King Award winner Bronx Masquerade, the novels Jazmin's Notebook, Dark Sons, and The Road to Paris (Coretta Scott King Author Honor Books).” In other words, she’s good. In the end, 28 of 30 bloggers posted something about my novel, Glastonbury Tor last week. Most also tweeted, posted links on Facebook or reviews on Amazon and other book sites for a total of 74 mentions in six days. Not at all bad. The thing that struck me was that very few of these reviewers were profound or particularly articulate. They simply love books, and people who read their reviews pay attention to what they have to say. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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