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Ellen's Review Corner: Discovering Humor in the Bible
This month Ellen’s friend Max Carter, who was director of Friends Center at Guilford College for more than 20 years until his retirement, is sitting in as guest reviewer. Friends who have little acquaintance with the Bible will find this book funny, Max writes. Those who have a deeper acquaintance will find the humor to be profound. “The former may find that reading the book encourages a deeper acquaintance,” he adds. “The latter may find it leads to a more liberal understanding of the literal text.” Image credit: Pexels.com/congerdesign Reviewed by Max Carter When I taught a course at...
Ellen's Review Corner: A Gathering in Hope
Fairfield Friend Meetings, Camby, Indiana Bestselling author Philip Gulley has been wandering around our meetinghouses again. And with gentle humor, he shows us who we are. By Ellen Michaud Friends who long to heal the schisms that separate us one from the other might want to consider Quaker author Philip Gulley’s new novel, A Gathering in Hope, as a candidate for their Meeting’s next book discussion group. Gathering is the latest offering from Gulley, an Indiana pastor (at Fairfield Friends Meeting) whose previous novels have won raves from both Publishers’ Weekly and The Wall Street Journal. The book picks up...
Ellen's Review Corner: The Anti-War
This month, Ellen's friend, Brian Drayton, is sitting in as guest reviewer. Brian is an ecologist, recorded Quaker minister, and author of On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry and co-author of A Language for the Inward Landscape. “It is clear that in various ways Friends are deeply secularized (as the broader society has become), and that this makes it difficult for us to make any testimony rooted in our experience as Friends that can reach the human heart and speak to the human condition,” writes Brian Drayton, as he sits in Ellen’s Review Corner this month with a...
BookMusings: October 2016
Ellen's Review Corner: Syria Burning
By Ellen Michaud “No hands are clean,” writes former ABC News chief Middle East correspondent Charles Glass. “Syria has become the venue of …`a proxy war’ or wars: the United States versus Russia; the Sunni theocracies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar against the Shiite theocrats of Iran; and Turkey versus Arab nationalists over the attempted restoration of Turkey’s pre-World War I dominance.” In an age in which much of our national media has closed its news- gathering bureaus abroad to fund a cult of partisan political pundits at home, Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe is a...