Category Archives: Authors

The Reason for God

The website for Tim Keller’s book, The Reason for God, is fantastic, loaded with audio downloads and a study guide. This looks like a great book for the modern church. First Things has a lengthy interview with Keller, which appears to be linked from many blogs. Keller says:

I think the new-atheism thing was an impetus [to writing the book], and it was also an opportunity, because I believe that this book, say, three or four years ago, the average secular person in a Barnes & Noble wouldn’t necessarily—why would you pick up a book that’s designed to say orthodox Christianity’s true? But now, as part of the cultural conversation, the book’s title immediately positions it as an answer.



Penguin probably was willing—which doesn’t even have a religion division—the reason Penguin was interested in it was because of the cultural conversation and the new atheists. I don’t think they would have picked it up otherwise, frankly. But they’ve been really supportive, wonderful.

‘Passover by Design’ sells 20k on First Day

Author and cook Susie Fishbein seems to be building a devoted following. Her fifth cookbook, Passover by Design, sold 20,000 copies on the day of its release. Her Kosher by Design series has sold 250k over the years, and Fishbein has been making the rounds on talk and cooking shows. In Passover by Design, she helps the kosher cook by offering recipes without leavening so no additional substitutions would have to be made.

Fabrications

Chef Robert Irvine, whose book Mission: Cook! is available for online reading through HarperCollins website, has not had his contract renewed by Food Network because he exaggerated his involvement with Britain’s Royal Family on his resume. Irvine says, “I am truly sorry for the errors in my judgment.”

In related news, the author of Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years admits to making up the whole thing. “She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish,” according to the AP.

Also, an adviser for Mr. Obama, a popular U.S. presidential candidate, says the candidate was pandering to his Mid-western audience with his protectionist language. That is, a Canadian official states in a memo that the candidate’s adviser said these things to him in response to the official’s trade concerns. Oh my, who to believe?

Chattanooga Seminar on unChristian

This Tuesday, David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group and co-author of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters, will speak on the subjects in his book at First Presbyterian in Chattanooga. Admission is free, but call ahead to aid seating.

Writing to See

Anecdotal Evidence has some good writing quotes from John McGahern. “Writing is an instinct. I’d say that I write to see. I suspect that unless there’s a sense of excitement and discovery for the writer, the reader will not have much sense of excitement or discovery either.”

Mark Steyn Threatened by Liberals

Liberalism undermines the freedoms which enable it by opposing those truths which should be self-evident. Case in point: Mark Steyn is being challenged before The Canadian Human Rights Commission for an excerpt from his book, America Alone, printed in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. The Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like Steyn’s arguments against Islam and have charged him with hate speech.

Here’s the excerpt. Steyn points out that many other publications have reprinted portions of his book, labeling them “alarmist.” In response, Steyn asks, “So what would it take to alarm you?” If what Steyn has written is over the top, cultural changes or specific acts should rational people be alarmed by?

It’s hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book “alarmist” accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada’s Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few.

(via Cranach)

More on and by Buckley

Commentary is publishing one of Buckley’s last essays, “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.” Here’s the start of it:

In the early months of l962, there was restiveness in certain political quarters of the Right. The concern was primarily the growing strength of the Soviet Union, and the reiteration by its leaders of their designs on the free world. Some of the actors keenly concerned felt that Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was a natural leader in the days ahead.

But it seemed inconceivable that an anti-establishment gadfly like Goldwater could be nominated as the spokesman-head of a political party. And it was embarrassing that the only political organization in town that dared suggest this radical proposal—the GOP’s nominating Goldwater for President—was the John Birch Society.

The society had been founded in 1958 by an earnest and capable entrepreneur named Robert Welch, a candy man, who brought together little clusters of American conservatives, most of them businessmen. He demanded two undistracted days in exchange for his willingness to give his seminar on the Communist menace to the United States, which he believed was more thoroughgoing and far-reaching than anyone else in America could have conceived. His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist party.” It was, he said in the summer of 1961, “50-70 percent” Communist-controlled.

Welch refused to divulge the size of the society’s membership, though he suggested it was as high as 100,000 and could reach a million. His method of organization caused general alarm. The society comprised a series of cells, no more than twenty people per cell. It was said that its members were directed to run in secret for local offices and to harass school boards and librarians on the matter of the Communist nature of the textbooks and other materials they used.

The society became a national cause célèbre—so much so, that a few of those anxious to universalize a draft-Goldwater movement aiming at a nomination for President in 1964 thought it best to do a little conspiratorial organizing of their own against it.

Several writers on Commentary’s blog, Contentions, are paying tribute to Buckley. Max Boot says, “He managed on a number of occasions to keep the conservative movement as a whole from lurching into loony-land.” The above essay is a case in point, I believe.