Take a fascinating group of influential leaders from a variety of professions. Mix in an author’s ability to find the telling story, anecdote, or insight. Add a publisher’s penchant for producing beautiful books in both content and design and you get The Club!
Highly recommended and quite entertaining!
The best compliment I can pay this book is that it joins my list of favorite dead and living authors for better engagement with our culture.
For the former, there are Augustine, Pascal, Chesterton, Lewis and Newbigin. For the later there are Dan Taylor, James K.A. Smith, Tim Keller, Charles Taylor, and James Davison Hunter.
The Temple and the Tabernacle is one of those books I can recommend with gusto.
The text of the book is gorgeously accented with loads of pictures. Baker has done a truly stellar job with the production of this book.
Hays is a careful reader of Scripture. He does not make wild claims, yet there are many wonderful insights throughout his book.
I learned much from this book. It is accessible, but loaded with insight.
My safe guess is that it will help you make better sense of the tabernacle and the temple.
Carl Trueman’s writings always deliver. In the fall, I will be interviewing him on The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. I get loads of books from various publishers, but there is no book I have more looked forward to reading.
For a taste of Carl’s writing, check out this recent essay in First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/06/a-dark-cloud-for-democracy
A terrific introduction to the similarities and differences between Paul and other philosophers.
I have been interested especially in how Christianity interacted with Stoicism. This book has much to offer in that regard. The various contributions are balanced and wise.
Recently, I interviewed C. Kavin Rowe on his influential book, One True Life. There is an entire chapter in Paul and the Giants of Philosophy dedicated to looking at the strengths and potential weaknesses of Rowe’s book. That chapter alone made this book a worthwhile read.
For the first half of this book, I felt the author was a bit redundant. That criticism probably still stands, but I found the second half of the book terrific. It’s not that the first half is worth skipping over. It still offers much, but I think the examples of dying and rising with Christ could have been reduced.
I greatly appreciated the illumination Miller brought to bear from ancient history. His exegesis of some key passages is also well done.
How Adam Smith can Change Your Life is wise, insightful, entertaining, and well-written. How much more can you ask of a book?
I learned much about Adam Smith. If you think of Adam Smith as the fountainhead of capitalist greed, you will be surprised by his clarion call to virtue.
As a Christian, I believe Smith’s Deism and glad embrace of the Enlightenment made him too optimistic about the potential of humans to do good. I certainly believe all humans, irrespective of religion, can do good because all people are created in the image of God. And Smith believed that humans do very bad things, but I think he was a bit naïve about the penchant of all us to do things that are destructive and yes, irrational.
How Adam Smith can Change Your Life is a great read and one that I highly recommend!