Like countless millions of people of my generation (and the one before and the one after), I grew up reading Peanuts. I loved reading stories and gags based on Charlie Brown and his gang. Charles Schulz had a gift for creating lovable characters and for communicating real ideas through the simplest medium—three or four small…
I have often expressed my love of biography. It’s not only that I enjoy peering into people’s lives, but also that there is so much to learn about life and faith by reading about other people. Biography, and Christian biography in particular, shows Christianity lived, realized in God’s people. New from Leland Ryken is J.I.…
You are familiar with the name John Newton, I am sure, and with the broad strokes of his life–how he went from captaining a slave trading ship to becoming a Christian and composing the great hymn “Amazing Grace.” What fewer people know about is his 40 years of pastoral ministry. Newton the pastor is the…
Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth is a book I have read and re-read, and one I intend to read again in the very near future. As I flipped through it today I came across the fascinating account of her conversion. While still at L’Abri, I had once accosted another student, demanding that he explain why he…
Well, at least I won’t go to the grave having accomplished nothing. After more than 130 hours of listening, I finally came to the end of William Manchester’s incredible three-volume biography of Winston Churchill (As you may know, Manchester grew ill and died before completing the third volume, leaving it in the capable hands of…
It does us good to read missionary biographies. This is especially true when those missionaries served during the great age of missions in the 1700’s and 1800’s. This was a period when missionaries traveled overseas into uncharted and unfamiliar lands. As they left familiar shores they knew they might never return to their homelands, that…
Last weekend I made the rookie mistake of leaving my book at the office. Rather than blow time on a one-hour round-trip to fetch it, I decided instead to search for something new. Something different. Something interesting. Preferably, something moving. I spent a full hour browsing Amazon without success and then began to scour the…
Many years ago my grandmother succumbed to cancer and went to be with Jesus. Among the things she left behind, buried among other personal effects, was a long, handwritten letter from Joni Eareckson Tada. My grandmother had experienced excruciating pain in her life, losing both a daughter and her husband to suicide. As a new…
Without a doubt, C.S. Lewis is one of the most interesting, perplexing and polarizing figures in recent Christian history. For some he is a giant of the faith who asked questions few were willing to ask and who answered those questions in compelling ways. For others he is no Christian at all, a fake, a…
Mez McConnell has an interesting story to tell–a story of the transforming grace of God in his life. Where some children grow up under the loving care of kind parents, Mez was left to tumble up on his own after his mother abandoned him, after his father took up with an abusive woman. Roaming the…
This morning I posted a review of Shon Hopwood’s new memoir Law Man. After reading the book I tracked down the author and did an interview with him. Give it a read, as I think you’ll enjoy it. If you had to give a short summary of the theme of your book, what would it…
Shon Hopwood robbed five banks before he was apprehended and sentenced to spend twelve years behind bars. Just twenty-three years of age, he was suddenly looking at living out some of his prime years in a federal penitentiary. Yet he somehow managed to find his place, not in sports or in gangs, but in the…
Adam Brown was one of the elite of the elite, a member of SEAL Team SIX, the counterterrorism unit that has among its accomplishments the capture of Osama bin Laden. Brown was also a man with a history of addiction and all that attends it–theft and broken relationships and devastation. Most important of all, Brown…
When Carolyn Weber arrived at Oxford University to begin her post-graduate studies, she felt no need for God and had no interest in him. An intelligent young woman who had grown up in a nominal Roman Catholic family, she was glad to rely on her intellect for the answers to life’s greatest questions. As a…
I have a deep respect for John MacArthur. I admire the man himself, having met him several times; I admire the teacher, having had many opportunities to sit under his teaching; I admire the writer, having had his books (literally) change my life; I admire the leader, having spent a lot of time with the…
Embarking on a short tour of the afterlife is all the rage, it seems. Don Piper got it started with 90 Minutes in Heaven, a really bad book that sold millions of copies. Then there was 23 Minutes in Hell, another bestseller and another awful book. And now hot on their heels comes Heaven Is…
Albert Pujols is a phenom. 10 years into his career he has already broken the 400 mark in homers, he has driven in more than 1200 runs and has maintained a batting average of .331. The closest player comparisons to him are men who inhabit the baseball pantheon–Frank Robinson, Lou Gehrig, Ken Griffey. But there’s…
There can be a very fine line between genius and insanity. Such was the case with Bobby Fischer–perhaps the greatest chess master to ever play the game, but a man who seemed to live his life teetering on the brink of insanity. Fischer is the subject of Endgame, a compassionate but honest new biography written…
A.W. Tozer is a man whose ministry has long fascinated me. A man who held closely to biblical, Protestant theology, he was also a man who loved the old Catholic mystics. He had little formal education, yet had the ability to hold the most educated of men and women at rapt attention. He had a…
Of all the made-for-TV celebrities, I’m not sure that there are many stranger than Duane “Dog” Chapman. He’s a study in opposites: a tough guy who cries, a foul-mouthed dude who quotes Scripture, a family man who has had twelve children by at least five wives. His show, Dog the Bounty Hunter, has developed a…