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Book Discussion Group

Our book discussion group provides an opportunity to read and discuss a wide variety of books related to religion and spiritual growth.

It ordinarily meets on the last Sunday of the month at 7:00 PM at the Forbes House. All are welcome--whether you have had a chance to read the book or not!

January 29, 2012

A New Christianity for a New World by John Shelby Spong makes a case that Christianity must free itself from such things as "belief in a supernatural God who reveals Himself from outside creation." According to Michael Gross, this book continues the work begun in Spong's bestselling Why Christianity Must Change or Die, "in which the former Episcopalian bishop diagnosed Christianity's major problems. Here, he offers a vision of what authentic Christian belief might look like today, stripped of theism and all its corollaries (doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Atonement). Christians may come to believe that 'God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God and Jesus is my way into God.' Readers inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's tantalizing writings on 'religionless Christianity' in Letters and Papers from Prison and by John A.T. Robinson's Honest to God will find much challenge and comfort in Spong's New Christianity, his most mature and most radical book." (from Amazon.com)

February 26, 2012

In God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it, the editor of Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis, may offend or comfort both ends of the theological spectrum he writes about. He shows how "the true mission of Christianity--righting social ills, working for peace--is in tune with the values of liberals who so often run screaming from the idea of religion." Yet he shows how the "religious vocabulary is co-opted by conservatives who use it to polarize. Wallis proposes a new sort of politics . . . wherein these disparities are reconciled and progressive causes are paired with spiritual guidance for the betterment of society. . . . Indeed, although both the right and left are criticized here, the idea is that the liberals, if they would get religion, are the more redeemable lot. (John Moe, Amazon.com)

March 25, 2012

In Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived), author, pastor, and teacher Rob Bell seeks to reconcile God's love and God's judgment. He shows the shortcomings of the story of heaven and hell we have been taught, presenting "a deeply Biblical vision for rediscovering a richer, grander, truer, and more spiritually satisfying way of understanding heaven, hell, God, Jesus, salvation, and repentance." (Book Cover)

April 29, 2012

Tatoos of the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Jesuit Priest Gregory Boyle is described in Publisher's Weekly as an "artful, disquieting, yet surprisingly jubilant memoir. . . . Boyle recounts his two decades of working with homies in Los Angeles County, which contains 1,100 gangs with nearly 86,000 members. Boyle's Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention program in the country, offering job training, tattoo removal, and employment to members of enemy gangs. Effectively straddling the debate regarding where the responsibility for urban violence lies, Boyle both recounts the despair of watching the kids you love cooperate in their own demise and levels the challenge to readers to stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it. From moving vignettes about gangsters breaking into tears or finding themselves worthy of love and affirmation, to moments of spiritual reflection and sidesplittingly funny banter between him and the homies, Boyle creates a convincing and even joyful treatise on the sacredness of every life. Considering that he has buried more than 150 young people from gang-related violence, the joyful tenor of the book remains an astounding literary and spiritual feat."

May 20, 2012

In The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, two professors of politics at New York University, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, analyze the reasoning of dictators. Through their historical assessments of leaders as diverse as Caesar, Tammany Hall, and the Green Bay Packers, they seem to make cynicism the new realism about government.

June 24, 2012

In Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Pagels returns The Book of Revelation to its historical origin, written as its author John of Patmos took aim at the Roman Empire after what is now known as "the Jewish War," in 66 CE. Militant Jews in Jerusalem, fired with religious fervor, waged an all-out war against Rome's occupation of Judea and their defeat resulted in the desecration of Jerusalem and its Great Temple. Pagels persuasively interprets Revelation as a scathing attack on the decadence of Rome. Soon after, however, a new sect known as "Christians" seized on John's text as a weapon against heresy and infidels of all kinds--Jews, even Christians who dissented from their increasingly rigid doctrines and hierarchies.