My Review of "Flipped"

Don't miss Doug Pagitt's Flipped:  The Provocative Truth that Changes Everything We Know about God.  This book has fresh Bible interpretations and anecdotal stories to keep you turning pages while Pagitt presents what's come to be known as "Progressive Christianity".  He even throws in a little Einstein as he explains what it means to be the light of the world.

Flipped is about turning everything we know about God over and seeing it fresh.  This book will challenge you, know matter who you are.  The book itself is really nothing more than a theological imagination of what it's like to "live, move, and exist" in God.  

Pagitt wants to free us from what he calls an "If/Then service", or a "Transaction System", in which we bargain with God.  If we do this, then God will do that.  If we believe this, God will provide that.  If we can discard the idea of conditional existence in God, then we become free to just be.  To live in the moment, to become part of the whole, to see every human being as existing "in God".  Removing this idolatrous image of God from Christian vocabulary is an important thing for the Bible, and it's a message that Pagitt recovers with lots of imagination here.

I really enjoyed this book.

I received this book free, from the Blogging for Books program, in exchange for my honest review.  

My Review of "A Fifty-Year Silence"

Miranda Mouillot's Fifty-Year Silence:  Love, War, and a Ruined House in France is the story of the displacement and exile that drives her investigation into her Jewish grandparents' experiences during World War II.  This is one of those novels that highlights the on-going tragedy that families experience after the Holocaust -- children and grandchildren who search for who they are in light of an unspeakable suffering in the last century.

At the heart of the book is the crumbling home her maternal grandparents purchased in the South of France in 1948.  A few years later the couple broke up, the reasons for which prove more nebulous than mysterious.  They did not speak for 50 years, and Mouillot sets out to investigate why and how the marriage dissolved.

After a life-time of searching for the core of the story through its oral transmission in the family Mouillot eventually moved into the house.  By the end the novel, she -- and we through her -- are left with no tidy conclusions but with some sense of continuity.  It's that story that recounts the continuity that kept me turning page after page.

This is a real literary treat, and I can't recommend it highly enough!

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I received this book free, from the Blogging for Books program, in exchange for my honest review.