Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years

Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years is a collection of Charles Schulz's comics throughout his career, with introductions and commentary from Schulz.  I read it over a few months in bits and parts, the best way to digest a book like this. Of course, I'd read and still recalled about 95% of the comics, but they are still delightful and I'm glad to have this nicely bound collection.

I read Schulz and Peanuts last year (a biography), and seeing the history of the strip unfold in "real time" over several decades was quite enjoyable. One of my favorite blogs these days is Roasted Peanuts, a running commentary on the gocomics.com postings of classic Peanuts comics. Each of these increase my enjoyment of the comics themselves by revealing some of the inner workings of the strip.

I bought it from Amazon as a gold box deal, one of the few good ones I've seen. It was a real bargain and I'll be hanging onto it.

Books on Hosea

In preparing for our small group, I reread one book and read another on the book of Hosea. 

Love Divine and Unfailing: The Gospel According to Hosea by Michael Barnett is a well-done book bridging the message of the Old Testament prophet with the gospel of Christ. Barnett does not take the prophetic book sequentially as much as topically. He does a great job of connecting the crises in the life of Hosea and Israel to the finished work of Christ, in which all the promises of judgement and life are fulfilled. While not technical it is informative on the text, and it is also devotional, providing encouragement that our current state is not "final" but that I will be perfected in Him. This was an enjoyable read, and a good entry in the "Gospel in the Old Testament" series.

Hosea: The Heart and Holiness of God by G. Campbell Morgan was an unusual find. Amazon and CBD carry few books on Hosea. This is published by an unknown (to me) publisher. It turns out that this is actually freely available online. I bought it on Amazon and was expecting something a little meatier size-wise. But it turns out to be a great book of 12 sermons by the incomparable preacher. He is mostly on the mark, delving into the word and expositing the message of Hosea for Hosea's time and for ours. Occasionally he bases a sermon on one word ("Canaan" vs. "merchant" for example) without significant support, but overall a great book on, as the subtitle notes, the heart and holiness of God.

I also read most of Matthew Henry's commentary on Hosea (always good) and bits of Calvin. Calvin's was unusual in that it seemed to also be transcribed sermons. 

For our study we used Dale and Sandy Larsen's bible study from IVP. Great bible studies are hard to find, and I suppose that balancing exegesis and practicality is always a tension of preparers of group studies. The "how do you think the prophet felt when..." kinds of questions rarely seem valuable to me. This study has some of that...

Nevertheless, the Larsen's do a game job of making Hosea accessible and practical. The questions usually helped our group to focus our attention in specific areas. As leader I used them as a jumping off point and added my own questions based on my further studies. I think that what I missed (having read Barnett's book first) was the relentless return to the grace of God in Christ that is the ultimate story of Hosea. The practical story of Hosea's call to love Gomer and to redeem her echoes throughout the balance of the book--in some places louder than others, but always there. At times the gospel seems dim, yet it is always there, and needs to be seen.

As a note, I started the study with an overview of the history of Israel and Judah and the key societal situations during the time of Hosea, the two calves, and the reasons they were set up, and a brief geography lesson. Among other sources, I found this to be very helpful from a historical standpoint.  

Social and Cultural Anthropology by John Monaghan and Peter Just

Part of my work is understanding people and their behaviors within their context so that I can advise clients how to reach them effectively with their products and services. The things that are important to people are not as apparent as it seems, and research methodologies such as ethnography can provide insight into motivations that are not conscious to the consumer. 

What this book does primarily is to introduce the questions that anthropologists ask and the methods that they use to get their answers. The key research practice is to live among the people being studied long enough to be "forgotten" as an outsider, whereupon the routines and nonroutine events gradually surface what the values and mores of the culture truly are. Every culture has its assumptions about what is normal, and the authors make an effort to expose some of the common differences through examples of varied marriage practices, rituals of reaching adulthood, etc.  One had studied a tribal group in Papua New Guinea, a synchretistic Islamic group. Their practice after birth is to discard the placenta in a field, but the placenta has a spirit that is angry because it "did not become human" and this spirit can cause problems later. Their primary crops are considered sentient and receive offering before being harvested. 

The book is a brief introduction to the study practices of anthropologists and some of their findings. It naturally ignores the reasons for the adoption of some of the practices--worship of creation rather than the creator, and violation of the natural Law--that would be condemned as biblically abhorrent. 

The version of this that I read was published by a different publisher and the subtitle was "A Brief Insight." I finished this on 6/9/12 as we were driving home from the beach. I'll probably shoot it to the used bookstore. 

Gospel Centered Discipleship by Jonathan Dodson

I'd been looking forward to this since I started reading in Dodson's blog where he mentioned that he was writing it. It's an expansion of his book on "Fight Clubs" that focus on fighting sin in the believer's life. Overall, it's a helpful book. It's strength is in defining the problems it sees in certain areas of the current church and then helping to focus on the gospel as the solution rather than moralism. He suggests that small groups of men or women (2-3 at largest) read scripture together, confess to one another, and apply the gospel truth to fight against sin. Among the useful practices he suggests in the Fight Clubs (as he calls these groups) is defining the promises of God vs. the promises of sin. For example, what is the appeal of anger--self justification, power, getting my own way? Compare that to the promise of God to trust in His way and be justified by the person and work of Jesus Christ. 

Overall, a good book on putting the gospel in the center of discipleship, with some practical framework for helping that happen without making a list of legal requirements that constitute a new law. Having heard and read much in this line from Paul Kooistra and Jack Miller, I thought Dodson's work was a good primer to this critical understanding of Christian discipleship, with some new ways of implementing it within the current cultural framework. 

I read this during our vacation in Daytona Beach in early June 2012.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Thompson writes his memoir of a pair of boys (himself and his younger brother)  raised in a fundamentalist household, and of his first love. It was interesting and the boys are very convincing. It's well-drawn and paced. It left me sad because ultimately it is a tale of lost faith. His spirit was stifled as a youth by a father who does not take seriously the command to fathers to "not exasperate your children." Rather, the father locked them in a scary cubby-hole when they misbehaved. Thompson sees mainly the negatives of "religion" as a result, and is lured away by more attractive prospects, especially in the form of a young girl he meets at camp.

I started Thompson's Habibi, which was recommended on Paste's list of the best graphic novels of 2011. Again it was well-drawn and engaging, but I got tired of the frank depictions of the harem, (which Thompson obviously relished,) and also found some of the character development so unbelievable as to be offputting. I finally gave up about 2/3 of the way through and moved on to more profitable reading.

Finished Blankets about 3/31/12. Gave up on Habibi about a week before that. Both library books. I was on a graphic novel tear for a while and moved on to regular novels and nonfiction for some balance.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Well, I had a post here with a couple of paragraphs about my thoughts on this. But I tried to edit it to change a typo and somehow managed to wipe it out. So I'll just say this: The Power of Habit is an interesting layman's look at the influence of habit on daily behaviors and purchasing. Some of it seemed less related to habits than others (like the programming of radio stations and the making of hits, which was more about the use of repetition to "cause" popularity. Maybe that's forming a habit of "liking" a song?) The chapter on Target and the use of predictive models is interesting and touches the tip of the iceberg on that topic. All in all, a really enjoyable read, and one I have in my business book library now.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

King has written a story of redemption from a prior evil that had profound effects. An unassuming English teacher goes back in time to...save Kennedy from assassination? Yes, but really his purpose ends up changing, and what he wants most is to save his love interest, Sadie, from her past (an abusive and frigid husband) and her future (an attack by the same man that mars her appearance, affecting her forever--or so Jake assumes). King spends many pages developing the romance between Jake and Sadie, which has plenty of time to develop since Jake arrives in Dallas a few years before the assassination. It is a sweet story, not a sidebar at all but really the heart of the story. Jake cares for Sadie, for the other residents of his adopted home in Jodie, Texas, and for the people of his "future," whom he believes will benefit from his prevention of the assassination. 

But the past is obdurate, as Jake says often. It's a common theme of time travel books, and used to good effect here. Jake is beset by accidents and personal tragedy as he tries to "fix" history. His best efforts turn out, well, not as he expected. I see an aspect of the gospel here: Jake can  no more bring about redemption through his efforts, great though they may be, than man can bring about his own salvation. King does not name the "force" that keeps the past obdurate, but watch the "Yellow Card Man" and you will eventually see that there's someone watching over things. Is it the benevolent God or something more sinister that wants to protect the Plan and cares not for the individuals therein? Hmmm. 

King wrote an ending and then a suggestion of his son (also a writer) caused him to rewrite it. If you have read the whole book, read the original ending here and you will find that the ending as printed is better. It harmonizes with the balance of the book, it satisfies the reader more, and it answers that last question I posed. 

King did his homework on Dallas. I was not here in 1963, being only one year old, but the streets and descriptions are accurate, and the attitudes of the people coincide with what I have learned of the past during my 17 years in the Metroplex. 

I got this from the library, and finished it on 3/25/12.