Thursday Three

New blog series for Thursdays:  three new books that have come out recently to keep your eye out for.

Here to kick off the cyber festivities are two offerings from Crossway Books and one from New York Times Columnist David Brooks.  I've included the publishers' descriptions.

David Brooks, The Social Animal:  The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York:  Random House, 2011).

This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.

Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus:  Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission Around the Table (Wheaton:  Crossway, 2011).

Meals have always been important across societies and cultures, a time for friends and families to come together. An important part of relationships, meals are vital to our social health. Author Tim Chester sums it up: 'Food connects.'  Chester argues that meals are also deeply theological--an important part of Christian fellowship and mission. He observes that the book of Luke is full of stories of Jesus at meals. These accounts lay out biblical principles. Chester notes, "The meals of Jesus represent something bigger." Six chapters in A Meal with Jesus show how they enact grace, community, hope, mission, salvation, and promise.

Philip Ryken and Michael LeFebvre, Our Triune God:  Living in the Love of the Three-in-One (Wheaton:  Crossway, 2011). 


How are we to relate to a three-personed God? The idea of the Trinity may initially seem too abstract to understand, but the truth is that a deeper knowledge of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has daily importance. Convinced that many Christians "have some level of awareness that God is triune...[but] are virtually Unitarian," the authors have written a practical and theologically robust resource to help readers "grow closer to the Triune God."  Read More.