Reading List

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As the bookgroups move on and as I finish one thing and another the list of books naturally changes:

My Only Friend is Darkness Barbara Dent
A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist Abbot Vonier
Cannery Row John Steinbeck (Bookgroup 1)
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis (Bookgroup 2)
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen (only about halfway through the "assigned reading" for the week--hope to catch up)
Utopia Lincoln Child
Quattrocento James McKean
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (Not with me here so the author slips my mind)

Many of these are shorter works so they are likely to change sooner. For example, I have no doubt that I will finish Screwtape in a matter of a couple days.

Oh, I'm also reading The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren for a home fellowship I attend on Monday Nights. It was recently given a great deal more credence (to me) because the priest I mention below read an excerpt of it at Mass. I must say, however, that it is relatively poorly written (and much of a kind with many of these evangelical/fundamentalist kinds of "self-help" books). Moreover it is peppered with distasteful doctrine and fundamentalist assurances so that its practicality for a believing Catholic is somewhat limited. I don't know that I would recommend it to all--I'm having a very difficult time with it.

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6 Comments

I like these book comments, especially on Rick Warren's book, which I admit to be curious about (but not curious enough to actually read it).

That's one of the hardest things I've found in adjusting to my "new" protestant culture: the hackneyed, cutesy-pie presentation of things that have been said better one hundred times before.

Lord, help me not to judge. Lord, help me not to be an evil snob. Lord, there are REASONS that you did not suffer me to graduate college: I reek of intellectual pride (though I'm not even really that smart!).

You said it well, Steven. I said it with disgust and disdain. PRAY FOR ME! How will anyone know we are Christians except by our love for one another? "Without holiness, no one will see God."

AAAGH!!! I just can't bear these Protestant books!

Guess you kind of hit a nerve there, huh?

Dear KTC,

Cutesy-pie is less the problem for me than it seems that while a lot of talk is made of Grace, Grace is, in fact, very little relied upon. And this is an overall tendency. The Evangelical "self-help" or community books differ very little from most secular "self-help" books in my experience. And none of them help me very much because of their vision of reality.

However, I hasten to remind that technically C.S. Lewis is also "protestant" (depending on one's views of Anglicans--I tend to see them more as schismatics--but I also tend to be fairly sloppy when it comes to technicalities.

It does one well to recall from time to time that there are a great many very good books by protestants that are not of this "change you life if 40 days variety."

But I do understand the reaction and it affects me much the same way. I just chalk it up to yet another deficit of not having a teaching magisterium.

shalom,

Steven

My Lutheran church has had a study group around the Warren book too. Your comments, at least, affirmed my gut feeling about what it would be like, and why I didn't want to participate.

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This page contains a single entry by Steven Riddle published on February 2, 2004 7:46 AM.

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