Arts & Culture

This Christmas, give young children the gifts of song and music – wonderful gifts from God! – by sharing these books with them.

Beaty seeks to develop a more robust biblical understanding of work and culture-making for both men and women, and her premise is that since humans are made in the image of a working God and are jointly given the cultural mandate, “every human being is made to work.” Since women are human beings too, “every woman is made to work.”

Leyland Fields’ voyage is the catalyst for novel insights into discipleship, insights drawn especially from her working life on the waves. Her visit to the Jordan River crystallizes the book’s theme: “What is the power of this water and this place? Who is this man Jesus?”

This book is a chronicle of an intellectual journey that includes insight into Reformed and evangelical cultural dynamics through the last 50 years. Although Mouw’s canonization as a Reformed saint is still pending, this is a gem of a book.

Eire is not negative about religion in general or Christianity in particular. A reader from a Reformed background should find Reformations informative and engaging, but the final page may leave the question in one’s mind of whether it was all worth the cost, not just in blood and strife, but in the very idea of Christian unity.

In The New Farm, Brent gives readers a glimpse of the hard work farmers do in order to get their food to markets, grocery stores, and restaurants. He shares the ethical questions he struggled with when he realized that he needed more workers, couldn’t find any Canadians who were willing to become farmhands, and then decided to hire Mexican migrant workers.

This book makes one wonder about what we call civilization and a “normal” social life or, for that matter, what leaving it all behind might mean.

The Confessions of X by Suzanne Wolfe, CT’s 2017 Book of the Year in the fiction category, taps into Augustine’s influence from an altogether different perspective, one narrated by his anonymous concubine, the woman “torn from my side,” whom he dearly loved.

Taking My Life Back is both inspiring and encouraging, a clarion call to refuse to give evil the last word, and to wait for God to bring about his goodness and redemption when it seems that all is lost.