James Boyce > Recent Status Updates

These essays are awesome. I have to return it to the library but will get it again soon.

Very interesting premise and excellent historical and cultural analysis. I have to return it to the library though, so will pause here for a while.

Thrilling start. I have to return it to the library but hope to pick it up again soon!

Very interesting but also hard to get through too much during one library loan. I need to get in line again!

This has been a wonderful story so far. The premise of a man who ages extremely slowly with jumps between the present and various times in the past has been interesting and provided increasing depth to the story. I have been listening by audiobook thus far but my library loan is expiring today so will have to finish it once I can acquire the book again!

This book has been great so far. The authors are looking at Rousseau and Hobbes' ideas about the history of civilization and inequality through the lenses of indigenous critique and questioning the history of these ideas. I have to return the book to the library today but look forward to continuing it again soon.

I've only read the first 5 of these Roots stories that the book begins with but it is evident that this will be a good read. The writing is compelling, the characters interesting, and the relationship with the trees around them fascinating. I suspect that each of these characters being introduced will end up interconnected together.

The first two chapters of the book are outstanding. First Frost lays out the missional nature of God and the implications of God's coming kingdom. Then he explains his vision for slow evangelism- pointing us to holistic, communal, transformative proclamation and demonstration that the kingdom of God has come in Jesus. Within this chapter, there was a helpful exploration of what the gospel is in Acts and Paul.

I was gripped by chapter 3. Blumhart discusses what it means for the kingdom of God to be foreshadowed in human society. He discusses Jesus's commands about money in Matthew 6 and how a community where we care for one another's needs makes it possible to not need to store up wealth, but instead trust God's provision through the self giving community of faith. It provides a high call indeed- one given by Jesus.

The most recent section has been fascinating. I enjoyed the story about the time on Molokai and the foundations about the leper colony there (though heart-breaking) and have been gripped by MIchener's narration of the Hawaiian revolution.

After a fascinating section on the Polynesian discoverers of Hawaii, the subject is a group of American missionaries on the journey to Hawaii, with noble ambitions and scary assumptions and praxis.

The last chapter had an excellent analysis of the shifting role of the Christian church from the Christendom "come-to" model to the need to go out to the borderlands and live real, meaningful lives among the "borderlands" and into Newbigin's missional church movement.

Thus far, Carson has laid out the significance of the problem of suffering as most clearly explained by Hume with some painful examples, given a few missteps for those who believe in the Christian God to avoid (pantheism, changing our conception of omnipotence, overstating the bounds of human freedom, asserting that knowledge of evil is necessary), and laid out 6 dimensions of the cost of sin in our world. Good start