A book claims to have researched the details into the moods we have while smelling good and bad aromas. Prep for the smell test.

Author Jim Holt talks about the subject of his book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Author Rich Wagner tells Christian men “if you allow your heart to be captured by career and church, you put your kid’s spiritual lives at risk.” He argues that the answer to life is not balancing family, career, and church. It’s about limiting career and church in order to lead the family whole-heartedly.

The Jolly Blogger reviews J.P. Moreland’s The Kingdom Triangle, which he calls well worth reading. The triangle consists of “the recovery of the life of the Christian mind, the renovation of the soul and the restoration of the spirit’s power.” Here’s an excerpt:

Side two of the kingdom triangle is the renovation of the soul and I think Moreland offers one of the best and most incisive diagnoses of the illness that plagues our souls that I have seen anywhere. He describes this as the empty self, or the false self, and it has four characteristics.

• The empty self is inordinately individualistic.
• The empty self is infantile.
• The empty self is narcissistic.
• The empty self is passive.

He goes on to describe the antidote as a recovery of the art of Christian self-denial. This dovetails nicely with John Calvin’s contention that the summary of the Christian life is to be found in self denial.

So I am enthusiastic about Moreland’s diagnosis, but I diverge from him on the cure. Basically the cure for the empty self, and the practice of the renovation of the soul, is to be found in what I would call the practices of the Christian mystics, with an emphasis on the cultivation of the inner life.

Read on

Here’s a provocative series title, “A Book You’ll Actually Read.” It’s a series of short theology books by Mark Driscoll, trying to make tough issues easier to understand.

H.S. Key complains about Americans who need to grow up.

We want to discover our inner child. We wear shirts that say “Runs with scissors” and “Eats glue.” We sit in great big Starbucks chairs with our shoes off and our legs Indian-style, like Kindergartners on growth hormone. I can’t stand it. Those kinds of things are the subjects of this book, called The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.

I’m sympathetic to a point. I would love to heard someone say, “Vulgarity is to common people. That’s what they word means. We aren’t common people.” Or better, “My dad is my hero. When he bought me my first hat, I knew I was becoming a man.” But I don’t know that the hand-wringing in this book (or post for that matter) is all that it could be. As some of the commenters mention, there will always be extremists among us–weird parents with no morality. Because we hear about them doesn’t mean they represent most of us.

But all of that is beside the point. The real point is that more people should read BwB and The Art of Manliness for maturity and health. Can anyone question that?