Category - Review

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Book Review: 90 Days with a Heart like His
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Book Review: When Helping Hurts
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Why You Don’t Need to Marry Augustus Waters
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TV Show Review: Resurrection

Book Review: 90 Days with a Heart like His

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As 2014 came to a close, I needed a Bible study to get me in the word personally. Ever since I attended a Christian-based university, I have believed that a person’s quiet time should not be the same passage that they are reading for homework, studying for a paper, or researching for a sermon. I do well with personal goals so I decided to start this study because it had a reading plan, thought, and prayer for every day. I love that.

There is a video that goes along with the study that I did not watch, so I cannot speak for the video portion.

On a physical, non-spiritual note, this book is HUGE! It’s 437 pages long and a beast to haul around with you. So this book took a permanent home in my car and I read and reflected on Scripture every day on my lunch break. I don’t know about you, but by 12:30, I need more Scripture in my life to make it through the afternoon with a Christ-like attitude.

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Book Review: When Helping Hurts

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Book Review: When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert

 

My husband, Kevin, has worked with nonprofits in Jackson since 2010. The first nonprofit he worked at had a strong mission to help alleviate poverty. From his experiences, we both grew to believe in the importance of breaking the cycle of poverty in our city.

Since then, we have had several students join our youth group that come from families that need assistance. Poverty isn’t just a word in my vocabulary; poverty has a name and a face.

One our my social worker friends told me that the entire staff was required to read and discuss When Helping Hurts at her job. So I decided to get myself a copy and read it, too.

It’s not meant as a mere good read but as a thought-provoking book to be used in a group setting. Each chapter begins with initial thoughts to answer, the chapter, and then reflection questions and exercises.

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Why You Don’t Need to Marry Augustus Waters

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Augustus Waters’ name was spoken so many times by the middle school girls in my Sunday School class that you would have thought he was a boy in our youth group rather than a character in a #1 New York Times Bestseller book. Naturally, I was curious as to what drew such attention to this book, especially since it lacked zombies and werewolves (perhaps this is the end of that trend – I do hope so).

I borrowed The Fault in Our Stars and found that I read the book in its entirety that Sunday afternoon. From an initial cultural standpoint, I was excited to realize that the author is John Green, vlogger of Mental Floss. As an English Major with an emphasis in Creative Writing, I was fascinated that this male author had chosen to narrate the book from the point of view of the female character.

The first line of the book drew me in,

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Our coming of age love story sums up like this: Hazel, miraculously recovering from thyroid cancer that moved to her lungs, meets Augustus “Gus” Waters, osteosarcoma survivor (who lost a leg to it), and the two fall in love.

What kept me glued to the couch that day (other than a 100 degree fever), was the heads on approach that John Green took to the issue of religion and belief in these two characters who had both faced their own potential death as teenagers.

Characters can struggle with beliefs. In fact, Kate Weiss recently wrote a guest blog on this very subject. After all, if a novel is based on reality, don’t we all struggle occasionally? And I would even say that I do not have a problem with characters who have not fully formed their beliefs before the novel is over. But I do think that in order for me to endorse a book, I need to see glimpses of the truths found in Scripture.

But my middle school girls didn’t chatter about the truths of the book, they fantasized marrying Gus.

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TV Show Review: Resurrection

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From the moment the first commercial echoed the a capella words “I’m coming home, coming home, tell the world I’m coming home” I wanted to know how ABC’s new show Resurrection would mirror culture’s desire to have life after death.

After all, this is the same station that has heaped a pile of shows I refuse to watch: Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Nashville, Revenge, Scandal, Betrayal, Desperate Housewives, Trophy Wife, The Bachelor / Bachelorette, and Dancing with the Stars. (I will make four exceptions: Once Upon a Time and Marvel’s Agents of Shield (though I have not watched them), Wipe Out and our house’s favorite, Shark Tank.

ABC does not reflect my family or my family’s values. With our little spare time, we have become increasingly choosy about the television shows that we do watch. But the echoes of “coming home” triggered a deep desire to hunt for the moral truths in Resurrection.

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