Reading

Image vs Word

Tony Reinke Imagination, Reading

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 2005) p. 9:

“‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth’ [Exodus 20:4]. I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as a part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.”

Name that Novelist [games]

Tony Reinke Reading

Before you Google it, try to name the novelist:

“___________ is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time. His plots and characters pinpoint the sublimity, perversity, meanness, and misery of fallen human adulthood in an archetypal way matched only by Aeschylus and Shakespeare, while his dramatic vision of God’s amazing grace and of the agonies, Christ’s and ours, that accompany salvation, has a range and depth that only Dante and Bunyan come anywhere near. … his constant theme is the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation, whereby all human hurts came to find their place in the living and dying of Christ the risen Redeemer. ”

–J.I. Packer, The Gospel in ___________: Selections from His Works, (Orbis, 2004) vii.

Magazine 2.0

Tony Reinke Reading

Below is an 8-minute conceptual video of how the e-magazines of the future may operate. Recently Sports Illustrated launched a demo of a tablet e-reader device. Others will soon follow as the scramble has begun to produce the first widely accepted electronic reading device in the colorful world of magazines.

Which brings me to a question that I’ve been waiting to ask you rabid readers. For those of you who are familiar with reading books or magazines through an e-reader (like a Kindle), what have you noticed about your personal reading habits and experiences as you compare how you read the printed page with how you read digital text? What differences have you noticed? What similarities are you aware of? Which helps you retain more information? Which, if either, do you tend to read faster or more slowly or more analytically? I’d be very interested to know how the devices compare with printed materials, and especially books. Drop me a comment.

And have a blessed Christmas week!

Mag+ by Bonnier on Vimeo

Christmas Gift Book Idears

Tony Reinke Book Notes, Book reviews, Reading

A book makes a natural and meaningful Christmas gift, but finding the right one is not always an easy task. Here are a few suggestions, a list of a few of my favorite wee books. These books are each short, affordable, and likely to appeal to a broad audience. Listed in no particular order:

The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith by Tim Keller. A wonderful book that articulates the free grace of God and exposes legalism in the sinner’s heart. $11.57 each or 24 for $239.40 (WTSB).

The Loveliness of Christ by Samuel Rutherford. Christ’s beauty displayed in this collection of choice descriptions of Christ taken from the writings of the noted Puritan. $8.40 (WTSB).

Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy by Paul Tripp. One of my favorite books on grace. Tripp uses diverse writing styles to communicate the many features of God’s forgiving grace. $9 (WTSB).

Heaven: A World of Love by Jonathan Edwards. A glimpse of heaven so large you will be amazed it fits into a book you can slide into your pocket. $4.20 (WTSB).

Living Faith by Samuel Ward. Another book that you can carry in your pocket. For about 2 months I carried this little book on my travels and read it over and over. Few books have more built my faith. $4.20 (WTSB).

The Cross Centered Life by C.J. Mahaney. Perhaps the best of all my boss’s books. Transforming look at how the cross alters the way we live. $7 (WTSB).

Caleb’s Lamb by Helen Santos. A family favorite book. The fictional book centers on a little boy, his spotless lamb, and the news that God is coming to deliver him and his family from the bondage of Egypt. A wonderful cross-centered book for family reading time. It’s available only from the publisher for $7.50 (RHB).

Children of the Living God by Sinclair Ferguson. On the doctrine of our spiritual adoption into God’s family, this little book is one of the best. $5 (WTSB).

The Heidelberg Catechism. Perhaps the warmest and most devotional of all the catechisms. This little version is my favorite. $5.50 (Amazon).

Chequebook of the Bank of Faith: Daily Readings by C.H. Spurgeon. A wonderful collection of faith-building promises from God expounded by the prince of preachers. Take these divine promises to the bank! $14 (WTSB).

Morning by Morning and Evening by Evening (two volumes) by C.H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon’s classic devotional [Morning and Evening] updated into more contemporary language and divided into two volumes. One of the richest devotionals available. $26 for the set (WTSB).

The Cross: The Pulpit of God’s Love by Iain Murray. A brief meditation on the centrality and importance of the work of Christ. $2.80 (WTSB).

Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition), by Joseph Williams. Figured I would throw one book into the list for the writer in your life. One of the most helpful little guides for those who seek to improve the clarity of their writing. $16 (Amazon).

Need a specific recommendation? Leave a comment and let us know what you are looking for. Our team of book lovers will jump in with recommendations.

The Problem of Conversion in Parochial Christian Media [rile file]

Tony Reinke Fiction, Reading

“…the most extreme instances of contrivance, parochialism, and niceness may be seen in Christian stories that feature conversion experiences. There is often little discernible difference between a character before and after conversion. The criterion of ‘cleanliness’ demands that really bad aspects of character not be portrayed, although they may be mentioned in summary. So, there is likely to be little contrast communicated. This failing is seen in extreme form in the script for the evangelical film Born Again, based on Chuck Colson’s autobiographical account of his Watergate experiences. In the film, Colson is portrayed more or less as a basically good fellow who finds Christ. But, there is no convincing sense of the character’s radical transformation. The same might be said for a neo-Nazi youth portrayed by Clint Kelly in The Ayran. In contrast, the convert in John Grisham’s The Testament has strong credibility because the author has been frank about his character prior to his conversion to Christ.”

–Richard Terrell in his chapter “Christian Fiction: Piety Is Not Enough” in Leland Ryken, The Christian Imagination (Shaw Books, 2002) pp. 245–246.

On Reading

Tony Reinke Reading

“Presented with a word’s image on the retina, average readers of English can, within a few 10ths of a second, match it with one of 50,000 or more words stored in their mental dictionaries, comprehend its meaning in context and proceed seamlessly to the next word.”

—Susan Okie, in her review of Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene (Viking, 2009) published in The Washington Post, Sunday Nov. 29, 2009, page B6.