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I love this series so much! I just re-read this already (Jan 2023)!
This line made me actually laugh out loud: “Dex rubbed the outer corner of their left eye. If they'd wanted constant debates, they thought, they would've stayed in seminary.”
I love the system of “currency” that is described in this book:
“You're saying that instead of a system of currency that tracks individual trade, you have one that facilitates exchange through the community. Because ... all exchange benefits the community as a whole?” [...]
“Nobody should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don't have the right number next to their name.”
“But if there's no penalty for debt, what's to stop you from taking without giving back?”
“It's a bad feeling,” Dex said. “Everybody has a negative balance from time to time, for lots of reasons. That's fine. That's part of the ebb and flow. But if someone had a huge negative ... well, that says they need help. Maybe they're sick. Or stuck. Maybe they've got something going on at home. Or maybe it's just one of those times when they need other people to carry them for a while. That's okay. Everybody ends up there sometimes. If I saw a friend's balance and it was way in the red, I'd make a point of checking in.”
And this part... oof... as someone studying to maybe be a pastor, this sure hit home for me: “How am I supposed to tell people they're good enough as they are when I don't think I am?” they said.”
And I love how Dex tells Mosscap that Mosscap helps Dex figure things out just by being there with them. That sounds like any good friendship.
Other good quotes:
“They just ... don't understand what you are. Or maybe they can't fit you into their beliefs, and that scares them. The unknown makes us stupid sometimes.”
“You don't have to have a reason to be tired. You don't have to earn rest or comfort. You're allowed to just be.”
I loved this book so much! Time travel? Yes please! Set in the 80s? Awesome! The main characters are lovable geeks and nerds? Even better!
I'm excited to dive into book #2 soon. (It looks like this is a trilogy.)
There is so much in this book: a lot of really interesting ideas related to Christology. I don't think I completely agree with Rohr here, but I do find a lot of things helpful, and I will most likely re-read this one. The central question of the book is who is Christ, the LOGOS.
I read the first chapter about 10 times because it's dense and deep and he gives me a lot to think about. He presents a valuable perspective and different ways of looking at things but I have a lot of resistance in me to some of his ideas. I don't agree with the way he seems to want to make such a firm distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and “The Christ” Towards the beginning of the book he asks: “How is Christ's function or role different from Jesus's?” (11). Rohr's answer is that Jesus is limited, particular, and earthbound, while “the Christ” is unlimited, universal, and cosmic. Rohr writes: “Christ . . . was clearly not just Jesus of Nazareth, but something much more immense” (3).
Some of the questions Rohr asks at the beginning:
“What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every ‘thing' in the universe?
“What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love?
“What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too?
“What if Christ is another name for everything – in its fullness?”
On the whole, I can recommend this book to people interested in theology and Christology but would want to also recommend they read N. T. Wright and some others as a comparison.
1/15/22 - Favorite moment: Aslan to Susan: “You have listened to your fears, child” said Aslan. “Come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave again?”
A detail that caught my attention this time was the explanation that Caspian's ancestors, the Telmarines, were originally pirates from our world! They had fallen through a magic portal in a cave by accident to find themselves in another world!
Oh, and we have the introduction of one of my favorite characters, Reepicheep!
And... the part where Lucy has to follow Aslan even if her family and friend won't come with her... now I'm second-guessing ranking this as my 6th favorite Chronicle of Narnia.
The Chronicles of Narnia ranked from my favorite to my least favorite:
1. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (kind of tied with the ending of The Last Battle, but also that one scene from The Silver Chair... oh dear, I really can't choose! It's whichever of these I'm reading at the moment (to steal Douglas Gresham's answer!)
1. The Last Battle (for the ending)
1. The Silver Chair
2. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (kind of tied with The Magician's Nephew...)
2. The Magician's Nephew
6. Prince Caspian
7. The Horse and His Boy
Superman has always been one of my absolute favorite superheroes, and I was OBSESSED with the tv show, Smallville, and Tom Welling as Clark Kent. So I was predisposed to enjoy this book. I also was definitely picture Tom Welling as Clark Kent along with the other actors from the show as I read this.
I'm not sure I liked this one enough to re-read it though. I mostly just want to re-watch Smallville now...
Johnson has a broad audience in mind and says her goal with the book “is to enlighten the minds of those who seek understanding about spiritual matters; to encourage those who doubt to keep faith with their questions; to give energetic support to those who work for the good of others, and to provide those who teach or preach in the church with food for thought that they can use to nourish others” (1).
This book highlights some of the lessons learned from discoveries people have made about who God is and how God acts in the world. Each chapter describes the context it comes from, the reasoning behind it, and the challenge it presents to spiritual and practical life. The book features transcendental, political, liberation, feminist, Black, Hispanic, interreligious, and ecological theologies (3).
I liked this one but didn't love it like I loved the first one in the series and Just Out of Jupiter's Reach.
This is one of my favorites from this series, along with the first one, How It Unfolds by James S.A. Corey
The first two books in this series seemed much stronger stories and more entertaining. I had a really hard time getting into and getting through this one. I think part of the issue is related to character development, or lack thereof in this book... I'm sure I will still read the next book though. I still want to know what will happen to the characters.
Update 3/3/2018:
I liked this book even more this time through, which was at least the 4th time I've read it (or listened to it, in this case.) I still enjoy listening to Rob Bell read the audiobook more than I enjoy reading his books. And I still want to dig deeper into the theological issues raised here.
Review from 2014:
I liked the audiobook more than the written version because I do not care for Bell's writing style, and listening to it felt more like him talking/teaching, because it was actually Rob Bell reading the audio-book.
The book leaves me wanting more, ready to dig deeper into some meatier theological books. But I think Bell would appreciate that reaction.
I highly recommend this book!
Father Patrick Cheng is an Episcopal priest, lawyer, and theologian in NYC. He teaches some classes at the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary and serves as an Associate Priest at The Church of the Transfiguration, a “historic Anglo-Catholic parish in Midtown Manhattan.” Cheng has degrees from Yale College, Harvard Law School, and Union Theological Seminary where James Cone was his doctoral adviser and mentor (vii).
This is a great book for anyone who wants to learn more about queer theory and theology! Cheng provided study questions and references for future study at the end of each main section, making it “ideal for self-study, for religious studies, theology, and queer studies classes, or for adult education in parishes and congregations” (xi).
Cheng uses the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed as a framework to talk about the doctrine of God as “the sending forth of radical love” (ch. 3), the doctrine of Jesus Christ as “the recovery of radical love” (ch 4.), and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as “the return to radical love” (ch. 5). The subsections of these chapters include the following doctrines:
Revelation - God's coming out as radical love
God as radical love itself
Trinity - an internal community of radical love
Creation - God's outpouring of radical love
Sin - the rejection of radical love
Jesus Christ - the embodiment of radical love
Mary - the bearer of radical love
Atonement - the ending of scapegoating through radical love
Holy Spirit - points us toward radical love
Church - an external community of radical love
Saints - the breaking through of radical love
Sacraments - a foretaste of radical love
Last things - the horizon of radical love
2023: Yup, I still love this book even reading it for the 5th time. It is definitely comfort food when it comes to reading for fun.
2020: Yes, I read this again already. Yes, I still love it! It's basically comfort food at this point!
2019: Just finished re-reading it again. I still love it! I'm sure I'll revisit it again at some point!
2017: I love this book so much! It is especially fun to listen to Wil Wheaton read the audiobook. Is it fine literature? Of course not. But it is so much fun! This was my second time to read it and I'm fairly certain it won't be my last!
2015: First time I read it but apparently I didn't write anything about it.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this audio-book. I love that Tina Fey reads it herself. She had me laughing out loud all along the way.
Yikes. I get imagining what Jesus as a child may have been like, doing miracles and such. But killing people who made him angry? Not so much.
I loved the Berenstain Bears books when I was a kid! So I'm on a bit of a nostalgia kick and revisiting the ones I have easy access to on ebook. (I think I still have the paper version somewhere...?)
In Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Marilyn McCord Adams is responding to J. L. Mackie's 1955 article “Evil and Omnipotence,” which argued that theism is irrational because “the existence of evil is logically incompatible with that of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God.” For Mackie, the fact that evil exists challenges the existence of God. Adams argued that the ongoing debate Mackie's article instigated regarding the logical problem of evil stayed too abstract, avoiding responsibility to a particular tradition and ignoring the worst evils in particular, which Adams calls horrendous evils.
Adams defines horrendous evils as: “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitute prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole.” One might say, horrendous evils are the kind that can make a person wish they had never been born. Or, if talking about a person who committed horrendous evils, we might wish that person had never been born. It is the “life-ruining potential” of horrendous evils that put them in this category because they have the power “to degrade the individual by devouring the possibility of positive personal meaning in one swift gulp.” This means the big question is why does God allow horrendous evils to happen and what does God do about them?
Adams argues that one does not have to provide a “logically possible morally sufficient reason why God does not prevent” horrendous evil to show that God is “logically compossible with horrendous evils.” Attempting to provide a sufficient reason for why God does not prevent horrendous evil is misguided because of our limitations as finite humans. And attempting to think of plausible or sufficient reasons can lead to trying to use “credible partial reasons why as total explanations, thereby exacerbating the problem of evil by attributing perverse motives to God.” Therefore, instead of seeking sufficient reasons for why horrendous evils exist, Adams chooses to show how despite the existence of horrendous evils, it is “logically possible for God to be good to participants in horrors.”
Adams' central thesis is that horrendous evils “require defeat” by the goodness of God and that they can be defeated by the Goodness of God within the framework of the individual participant's life, and that Christian belief contains resources that can explain how this can be true. At one point she says it is her conviction “that only religious value-theories are rich enough to defeat horrendous evils.” For Adams, if we can find a logically possible scenario where God is good to each created person by insuring each person a life that is a great good to them on the whole and by defeating their participation in horrors within the context of the world and that individual's life, then we have successfully explained how God and evil both exist. Her strategy for this is to identify how “created participation in horrors can be integrated into the participants' relation to God.” For a person's life to be considered a great good to them on the whole, that individual must be able to “recognize and appropriate meanings sufficient to render it worth living.” For this to be the case, salvation must be universal. God must be good to every created person: “Given the ruinous power of horrors, [...] it would be cruel for God to create (allow to evolve) human beings with such radical vulnerability to horrors unless Divine power stood able, and Divine love willing, to redeem.”
In chapter eight, Adams discusses different ways of showing how God might overcome horrendous ruin: 1) Divine Suffering and Symbolic Defeat; 2) Suffering as a Vision into the Inner Life of God; 3) Divine Gratitude, Heavenly Bliss; 4) Chalcedonian Christology as a Christian Solution to the Problem of Horrors; 5) Jurgen Moltmann: Crucified God, Trinitarian Solidarity.
She begins by talking about Rolt and Hartshorne's ideas about how Divine suffering provides symbolic defeat of evil: “for Rolt, exemplar goodness is suffering love, love which finds self-fulfillment through suffering.” Because God suffers with us our suffering can, at least sometimes, be symbolically defeated within the context of our individual lives, but the problem for Adams is that this is not a universal given. Hartshorne says, “God pays creatures the respect of compassion: God literally suffers with creatures by feeling everything they feel.” Adams says this would translate to not only the “symbolic balancing off but also the objective, symbolic defeat of created suffering.” Rolt and Hartshorne both see Divine suffering as “an expression of solidarity, of cost sharing in the expensive project of cosmic ordering, as a manifestation of Divine love.” Later, Adams brings in Moltmann who also sees God suffering with us as key to defending Divine righteousness in the face of evil. Moltmann's focus is Christological, seeing Divine solidarity with humans in the incarnation and culminating in the cross of Christ.
In talking about suffering as a vision into the inner life of God Adams draws from Simone Weil. Weil believed the Divine embrace would “balance off” the negative aspects of affliction and the horrendous aspect would be defeated. Adams goes further than Weil saying that not only does horrendous suffering have “an objective good-making aspect (cognitive contact with the Divine),” but that after this life on earth, God makes it so that a person's relationship with God will “resolve into beatific intimacy so that the “sufferings of this present life” are concretely balanced off.” Adams then discusses Julian of Norwich's “postmortem happy ending” where God will compensate us for what we have undergone. Adams frequently refers to the “size gap” between God and humans and points to Julian's understanding of that concept in this section as well.
Adams draws from all three of these schemes, especially the last two, to show how the central Christian doctrines of Christology and the Trinity show how God defeats horrendous evil. Adams says she has a Chalcedonian Christology which understands that Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully human, and she says Julian of Norwich's understanding of at-one-ment and identification is also what she is drawing on to show how the work of Christ “sheds light on Divine defeat of horrendous evils in the lives of all participants.”
So how does God defeat horrendous evil? Because of God's great love for humans and God's desire for union with us, God entered creation in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, God participates with us in the horrors of human life as a victim who was betrayed by one of his friends and crucified, which made Him “ritually cursed” and “symbolically a blasphemer.” So God, in Christ, also identified with the perpetrators of horrors. Adams argues that God's “identification with human participation in horrors confers a positive aspect on such experiences by integrating them into the participant's relationship with God.” She emphasizes that it is only retrospectively, from the time when “all is well”, that “human victims of horrors will recognize those experiences as points of identification with the crucified God, and not wish them away from their life histories.” The fact that God became “a blasphemy and a curse for us” will allow those who committed horrors to accept forgiveness and forgive themselves because they will see how nothing they did separated them from the love of God, and they will know God has also “compensated their victims (once again through Divine identification and beatific relationship). So God will not only “engulf and defeat,” but “force horrors to make positive contributions to God's redemptive plan.”
At the end of the book, Adams says “she hopes to have persuaded many readers that even horrendous evils can be defeated by the goodness of God. I do find more comfort in Adams' work than in many of the other theodicies I have read. But it is hard for me to imagine that once all evils are defeated we will be glad the evil existed in the first place, and not wish that the evil things had never happened.
Adams certainly took a different approach to the conversation and changed the terms of the debate. Instead of trying to answer the question: How can a perfectly good God permit evil? She changed the question to: How can a perfectly good God redeem evil? One might think this is cheating, but Adams makes a strong argument that it is not necessary to answer why God permits evil so long as one can show how God can guarantee to both those who suffer and those who participate in horrendous evils, a life which is a great good to them, on the whole. I am left wondering if Adams is justified in not answering the original question. As mentioned earlier, Adams said we cannot know or think of plausible reasons why God would permit such horrors, and she often appeals to that “size gap” between humans and God. But failure to find a solution to the problem does not make the problem go away. If God can defeat evil and redeem it all in the end, why could God not have prevented it, to begin with?
While it is impossible for me to pick my favorite Chronicle of Narnia, this one is easily my least favorite of them. It's a decent story. I'm sure I enjoyed it even more when I was reading it as a child. But it just doesn't do for me what the other ones do. It doesn't have a passage that I think of often or a line I quote. But, my least favorite Chronicle of Nania is still a tale of Narnia, and therefore, well worth reading and re-reading.
One thing that I noticed this time around (1/14/22) was when Shasta was talking about being drawn to the North, always wanting to go north. Lewis had a deep love of “northernness” (He was obsessed with the Norse myths and often talked about longing for that sense of northernness when talking about sehnsucht/joy/longing.
Things I do like about this one: Aravis, the talking horses, and of course, Aslan.
The Chronicles of Narnia ranked from my favorite to my least favorite:
1. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (kind of tied with the ending of The Last Battle, but also that one scene from The Silver Chair... oh dear, I really can't choose! It's whichever of these I'm reading at the moment (to steal Douglas Gresham's answer!)
1. The Last Battle (for the ending)
1. The Silver Chair
2. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (kind of tied with The Magician's Nephew...)
2. The Magician's Nephew
6. Prince Caspian
7. The Horse and His Boy
This is still my favorite book by Barbara Brown Taylor. This was at least my 4th time reading it. It's the third time I've led a book club through it. Highly recommend.
I liked Pathfinder enough that I plan to read the next book in the trilogy. I love the time-travel elements and the plot kept me engaged through the parts that dragged on a bit.
I greatly enjoyed this modern meets historic fairy tale come true, complete with time travel!
One of my favorite quotes:
“You cannot go on ‘explaining away' forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see.” (Lewis 81)