I am still far behind my reading goal for the year, but I am at least making some headway. Here are a few books I’ve read recently and one that I’m currently reading that I can recommend to you.
Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. So far, my only complaint about this book is I was not able to stay up long enough last night to finish it. The history behind the Oxford English Dictionary is incredible, and Winchester has made what would seem on the surface to be a dull story into a page-turner. The lover of pure history will soon grow tired of his use of hyperbole and overly flowery language (One reviewer complained, “Winchester is besotted with ungrammatical constructions – which defect seems allied to his peculiar strivings for genteel archaism, as when he calls a year a ‘twelvemonth’, or refers to a short rest as a ‘period of quietude’.”), but to me it added flavor to what could have been a dull tale.
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.
Timothy Keller, Preaching. I love preaching and I love learning how to grow in my preaching. Keller’s book is a great addition to any pastor’s library, but it is also a great book for any teacher. Keller deals with some of Niebuhr’s categories for the Christian and culture and makes application of those categories to the proclamation of the Word. Without discounting the value of the publicly preached word, Keller has elevated the importance of teaching and one-on-one proclamation in this little book and has given important helps for all who would proclaim the gospel in large venues or across kitchen tables.
If you are preaching or speaking to people who have strong doubts about the Bible, you should reinforce the points you are making form the biblical text with supporting material from sources that your listeners trust. Paul himself most famously does this in Acts 17:28 when he quotes the pagan writer Aratus to an audience of pagan philosophers who would not otherwise grant the Bible any authority.
Edmund P. Clowney , Preaching and Biblical Theology. Clowney 
works to show that faithful preaching necessarily involves a full understanding of the Bible and of biblical theology.
Preaching in the biblical sense cannot be limited to bare proclamation. It is also teaching and it embraces every mode of application from the sternest rebuke to the tenderest entreaty and comfort. Since it is the declaration of God’s name it is addressed not only to men, but also to God. It is an act of worship
Mark Lee Gardner, Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy regiment, and the Immortal Charge up San Juan Hill. I read this one on the beach and it was the perfect beach read. Gardner does a great job of keeping the action flowing while making prolific use of original sources and first hand accounts. This is certainly not a full biography of Teddy Roosevelt, but much of his personality (strengths and weaknesses) jump off of the pages of this well written account.
This war war with Spain was no surprise to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. For months, he had been doing everything in his power–not always with the direct knowledge or approval of the secretary–to make the navy ready for the great conflict he was certain was coming. And he also let it be known the the had no intention of observing the war from afar. Crazy as it sounded–and more than a few did think Roosevelt was crazy–this lightning-rod bureaucrat intended to go where the bullets were flying. He had been waiting for a war, any war, his entire adult life, and not that it was here, nothing, was going to keep him from the battlefield.
Craig R. Whitney, Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment. Whitney traces the importance of firearms from the earliest
stages of American history through the present time. He argues that the second amendment was never primarily about hunting and maybe not even self-defense (at least in the way we would understand it today), but for the common good. Whitney takes a balanced approach to gun ownership in the U.S. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this look at the constitution, U.S. History, and our culture through the two lenses of gun rights and gun control.
Notably absent in the current stalemated debate about the Second Amendment is any sense of obligation, of civic duty, connected with the right to bear arms today–yet surely there is such a duty, to exercise the right responsibly and not recklessly. Keeping guns out of the hands of as many law-abiding citizens as possible is not the right way to encourage fulfillment of that duty, many more than arming as many of them as possible is the right way to control violent crime.
