Review-in-brief of Dangerous Calling, by Paul David Tripp. I worked through part of this book with a mentor at home and went through most all of it with the brother I was mentoring out here. This book is of immense help in assisting the pastor to examine his heart. Sin is already deceptive--in the life of a pastor, it can prove deadly. As helpful as the book is, it is far too long for the simple points that the author attempts to make. His examples of failure grow stale, his lists and key points grow repetitive, and it seems like entire pages are lists of questions/characteristics that are meant to provoke introspection, but because there is twenty of them at one time, and there are over twenty such lists in the book, they become easy to ignore. This book is a welcome addition to the library of any pastor or congregation seeking to care for the pastor. If it was edited more ruthlessly and cut down to about sixty pages, it would become indispensable and an immediate pastoral classic.
Currently reading:
Bad Religion by Ross Douthat. I have enjoyed reading articles by this author for years. He is a former editor at The Atlantic, is the refreshingly philosophical movie reviewer for The National Review, and is one of the two dissident conservative opinion writers for The New York Times. Like most of the other writers for TNR, he is incredibly witty and verbose. The central and provocative contention of this books is that America has not become more secular, but more heretical. With a thesis likely to catch flack from all sides, he argues that most Americans are still vaguely spiritual, but have largely discarded orthodox Christianity (as defined by the ancient creeds). He tends to view the 1950s as a time of spiritual renewal, before the broadly caused crash of the 60s and 70s. I know much of the history of this crash in Protestant circles (which I would date back to way before this time), but was fascinated with the story of a similar collapse in American Roman Catholicism. If you are not offended by some portion of this book, then you are probably not actually reading it. I look forward to finishing it!
And it begins...
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