BOOKS AND OTHER STUFF I'M READING/HAVE READ
LibraryThing Profile & Book Listing
This page is a place for me to comment about books and other stuff I've been reading or have read in the past. Some comments will be a lot longer than others, and some topics will be continued elsewhere. You may also want to check out the Books and Periodicals categories here on All Things. You can check out my Amazon reviews from my Amazon Profile.
Also, some of my books, and several comments about them, are on my LibraryThing page. I recommend you check that page and consider trying out LibraryThing yourself, for these reasons. Since I wrote that I've joined (see profile) several LibraryThing Groups, one of which - considering you've found this blog - may align with your own interests.
Aerospace
I wrote about Kelly Johnson's Lockheed Skunk Works, with a number of helpful links. The main books are Johnson's Kelly and his successor Ben Rich's Skunk Works. While I recommend them both, Skunk Works is the better book for learning about Johnson's methods for designing very advanced aircraft quickly using a small, highly-talented technical staff.
Business
Business Week is one of my favorite periodicals. On its promotion of industrial design and other creative disciplines, see Business Week: America's No. 1 Design Booster.
Peter Drucker is one of the most interesting writers on management; it's hard to find anything but his recent books at a used book sale so I guess people like to hold onto them. I discussed him and some of his works after his recent passing.
Christian Life
I recently quoted from Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. This is an important book that considers a lot of issues fundamental to the Christian life. It's especially strong in addressing the need for a proper balance between theology/scripture and practical living, and I bet a lot of folks will be surprised to read his treatment of some things.
We've been reading it in my Sunday school class, and I've really liked it, yet still have a long way to go to finish it. Consequently, I can't definitely recommend it in total yet (I've been disappointed quite a few times by books that started out so strong diagnosing a problem, and then fell off a cliff trying to prescribe a solution). Nevertheless, the book deals with a lot of the same issues I've looked at for years in parts of my research. In essence, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places is taking direct aim at many of the key subjects the Church has either studiously avoided or never seriously considered, but really needs to be grappling with in our time.
Let me just give a couple of quick examples of this. The first is escapist premillennial/pre-trib/rapture eschatology (whatever you want to call it). Rather than get into an endless debate about the books of Daniel and Revelation, Peterson simply shows (pp. 65-71), from Genesis 1, how the trite "waiting for Jesus to come back" is really a failure to respond in gratefulness to God's gift of time to us.
Second, regarding creation, one of the most common questions I hear folks ask about spiritual things is "What happens to animals when they die?" It's disturbing then, considering that God started the Bible talking about His creation, how little the Church has seemed interested in so much of it (and so, at times, of science). Peterson doesn't address, specifically, this question, but does consider (pp. 77-82) some of the basic differences between people and animals, disctinctions which, if understood, would cast the whole human evolution debate in a whole different light.
To sum up, regardless of potential faults, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places may well prove to be one of the books that sets the "paradigm" for Christian thinking in the 21st century. And yes, we certainly need a paradigm shift - a la Thomas Kuhn - to clear out a lot of the accumulated debris that's impeded the Church's thinking, and positive impact on our world, for well over a century.
History
Mathematics
Personal Development
Science