More on Sudan, Ireland, and Current Reading

The crisis in Sudan continues. Click here to send a message to America's leadership. Yes, we must be careful because the Sudanese government is helping us in the fight against terrorism in their corner of the world, but we cannot let that same government get away with genocide!

You may have noticed that I've expanded the categories in the left margin. In particular, I've got about 23 different links on Irish history and culture, which is a little different than the rest of the categories, which only link posts from Restless Blogrimage. (Seriously, Blogger - get with the program with the whole "categories" thang!)

In other random news, I finished "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by the brilliant Irish author and literary figure, James Joyce. It's a tough read, but the man had such an amazing command of the English language. If you don't mind a little stream of consciousness, (with some heavy philosophical discussion thrown in towards the end), I'd definitely recommend him to any fan of classic lit. However, if you want a consistent story line and standard literary elements like plot, climax, and resolution, forget about it.

Before that, I read through "Liquid Church" by Pete Ward. Wasn't nearly as helpful as "The Shaping of Things to Come," but, early in the book, Ward does a great job of describing how things like modernism and the enlightenment have shaped the church. I wasn’t real crazy about his approach to systems of theology at the end and how he combined the ideas of several theologians to try and give answers for the current challenges of today’s church. He also had some great evaluation about the consumerism paradigm so prevalent in the postmodern psyche, but he didn’t really offer any significant cautions or weaknesses in it. It might be good to go back and take another quick read through some of the things I highlighted.

Now I’m hoping to jump into Leslie Newbigin’s classic missiological work “Foolishness to the Greeks.” It’s only about 150 pages, but I’m anticipating some density.