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Dangerous Jesus - Kevin "KB" Burgess - 2023 - Tyndale Momentum - 256 pages

to gain something much more You may not enjoy reading this book, but then I'm pretty sure KB didn't write it for your enjoyment. He confronted me, the reader, with a decidedly "unsafe" Jesus, one who challenged how I lived, what I did, much more than what I believed.  Oh yes: I agree with KB on just about every point. It's not that I disagreed with other points: it's that my life as a Polish-German immigrant kid, then a professor of theology in a Christian university, and now as a cross-cultural Christian worker in Indonesia has not prepared me to evaluate things that were part of KB's reality. I kept hoping to myself that things were not as grim as depicted, but I've witnessed enough of real life to know that they quite certainly were. But the point of this book is not a series of stories about the injustices of life. It is about living as a disciple of a Jesus who is dangerous, because he calls me to live the way
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Is Masking and Social Distancing in the Bible, or is it Anti-God?

https://communiocate.blogspot.com/2021/08/masking-and-quarantining-biblical-or.htm Oops - this was supposed to be in my theology blog, not my book review blog. The edited and corrected post is available at  https://communiocate.blogspot.com/2021/08/masking-and-quarantining-biblical-or.html . Sorry for the redirect - please read the post there
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Mind The Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus - Matthias Henze - 2017 - Fortress Press - 248 pages

Rating:  ★★★★  out of  ★★★★ ★ The stated purpose of this book is given in the introduction: "I did not recognize the Judaism of Jesus because all I knew was the Old Testament. But the religion of the Old Testament is not the Judaism of Jesus. While in the New Testament, Jesus studies and teaches in the synagogues, there are no synagogues in the Old Testament. While in the New Testament, Jesus’s disciples call him rabbi, there are no rabbis in the Old Testament. While in the New Testament, Jesus is often involved in conversations with the Pharisees, there are no Pharisees in the Old Testament. While in the New Testament, Jesus expels demons and unclean spirits, there are no demons in the Old Testament. The list goes on. These are not incidental matters in the life of Jesus. They all stem from the Jewish world to which Jesus belonged, a world about which I knew so little apart from what I had read in the New Testament." Henze sets out to make the reader aware of the "Jewis
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If the Oceans Were Ink - Carla Power - 2015 - Henry Holt - 336 pages

Rating:  ★★★★  out of  ★★★★ ★ If the Oceans Were Ink  tells the story of a year-long journey through the Quran. Carla Power, a secular Western journalist, engages with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a madrasa trained Islamic scholar. It ranges wide in geographic scope, engagement with the arts and literature, life and culture, and of course religious and philosophical perspectives. It is not as much a conversation between Christianity and Islam as it is between Western culture and Islamic culture, while incorporating an accessible introduction to Islamic thought and belief.  While Carla Power does not become an adherent of Islam in the course of the book, she acknowledges the profound impact made on her by her time spent in the study of the Quran, and clearly also the impact of Sheikh Akram. As a practicing Christian, I found the book worth reading and informative. One conversation in particular stood out to me. It starts on p. 281, where Carla asks the Sheikh about her eternal d
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