That’s not how we typically think of it, but it’s as true as the day you were born. Paul Tripp talks about his new book, What Did You Expect?.

Paul Tripp- What makes “What Did You Expect?” different than other marriage books from Crossway on Vimeo.

Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:

Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”

Philip Christman reviews What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba. He summarizes it. “One thing they’re not good for, argues Scialabba, is constructing secular substitutes for religion. Whether they’re Marx’s, Kant’s, or someone else’s, accounts of justice, human nature, or rights that try to specify once and for all the nature of human life are doomed to failure.”

In vain, men set themselves up as the mouths of god.

Susan Wise Bauer has a new world history book out. This is the second one, The History of the Medieval World: from the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Howling Frog Books has a good review, noting this is world history, not western civilization history. She writes:

Medieval history and literature is a favorite subject of mine, so it was a bit dismaying to realize how ignorant I am about nearly all of it. I particularly appreciated the chapters on Korean history, which is probably not very well-known to most people outside Korea–certainly not to me. The history of the Chinese empires and the great influence they exercised over so much of the east is fascinating. The many ever-changing kingdoms of India are terribly complex and difficult to follow, and I admire the effort that must have gone into making them comprehensible.

Many more reviews of this book are linked from a post on Dr. Bauer’s blog.

Danny Orbach’s book, Valkyrie: German Resistance to Hitler, focuses on the people who fought The Third Reich from within, people like Georg Elser, who bombed a beer hall just after Herr Hitler left. Reviewer Tom Segev writes:

Danny Orbach believes in the myth of German resistance. He rightly admires the courage of the few who dared to put their lives at risk for the sake of their country. Nonetheless, this young Israeli historian tends to assign them an exaggerated role in the history of the Third Reich. Yes, the Nazis used concentration camps and other means of suppressing resistance and intimidating would-be opponents of the regime, but the truth is that most Germans supported Hitler until the very end of the war.

Matthew Paul Turner talks about the abusive publisher of CCM magazine and how he was assigned to solicit an apology from Amy Grant for her divorce from Gary Chapman. The end of this account amazes me, but I guess I continue to be amazed at the blindness of abusive Christians, if they can be called that.