Lamb - Christopher Moore

Help, thanks, wow - Anne Lamott

Help, thanks, wow: three essential prayers - Lamott, Anne

Summary: Describes the three simple prayers--asking for assistance from a higher power, expressing gratitude, and feeling awe--that help to deal with the hardships of daily life.



Booklist Reviews
Inspiriting, trenchant, and funny, best-selling Lamott takes an imaginative do-it-yourself approach to spirituality in her disarming and stirring essays. Unabashedly emotional yet practical and sharply attuned to the absurdities and tragedies of life, she focuses on prayer in this mighty little volume, defining it as "communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding." If you are uncomfortable addressing God, Lamott suggests praying to "the Good." The point is to make contact with "the Real, with Truth, with the Light." To take a moment to focus and breathe. She cites three basic themes. Asking for help, she writes, "is the first great prayer." Giving thanks is essential, and not only when things are going well. One also benefits from summoning gratitude for hard truths and tough challenges. "Wow" is the joyful expression of wonder in response to astonishing moments great and small. With a stand-up comic's snap and pop, candid and righteous Lamott tells hilarious and wrenching tales about various predicaments that have sparked her prayers and inspired her to encourage others to pray anytime, anywhere, and any way. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Does this church make me look fat? - Rhoda Janzen

Does this church make me look fat?: a Mennonite finds faith, meets Mr. Right, and solves her lady problems - Janzen, Rhoda

Summary: Rhoda Janzen had reconnected with her family and her roots, though her future felt uncertain. But when she starts dating a churchgoer, the skeptic begins a surprising journey to faith and love. Rhoda doesn't slide back into the dignified simplicity of the Mennonite church. Instead she finds herself hanging with the Pentecostals, who really know how to get down with sparkler pom-poms. Amid the hand waving and hallelujahs, Rhoda finds a faith richly practical for life.

Publishers Weekly Reviews
Author of the improbable bestseller Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Janzen continues her quirky tales of finding faith in unlikely places in this dotty, squeaky-clean postdivorce sequel in which she describes life with a new boyfriend and the courage to battle breast cancer. Having fallen out of her conservative Mennonite community in California—"abgefallen" is how she is referred by her church folk—now an English professor in Holland, Mich., Janzen meets and falls for a Pentecostal born-again "Jesus-nail-necklace-wearing manly man" shortly before she is diagnosed with massive, inoperable breast cancer. With Mitch standing firmly by her, along with her resilient mom and sister, Janzen was determined to face her condition with optimism, and in startlingly breezy prose, considering the gravity of her condition, pokes fun at her professorial distractedness in contrast to Mitch's literal groundedness. She plunges into activities at his Pentecostal church, as wildly improvisational and "kooky" as her Mennonite church had been sober and dignified, with enthusiasm, embracing their particular rituals of healing and even tithing. However, underneath her limpid facetiousness (one inspired simile compares Mitch's gloomy aged father's boredom to "a stretch of wet cement that he protected with cones and tape") run serious concerns about her faith, spiritual growth, and the meaning of prayer and humility. "I had unfinished business with God," Janzen writes, sharing in this vibrant, charming narrative her own "fruits of the spirit." (Oct.)

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Unholy night - Seth Grahame-Smith

Unholy night - Grahame-Smith, Seth

Summary: Depicts the lives of the Three Kings of the Nativity, casting them as a set of infamous thieves who accidentally happen upon Joseph, Mary, and the newborn king and help them escape to Egypt.



Booklist Reviews
Blasphemous or brilliant? That was the buzz surrounding Grahame-Smith following his auspicious arrival on the New York Times best-seller list in 2009 with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a clever literary mash-up that launched a new "historical revisionism" genre of popular fiction. Blockbuster authors don't grow on trees, so it wasn't a huge shock when Grahame-Smith made headlines last December after Warner Bros. paid him $2 million for the film rights to Unholy Night before its publication. The twisted plot revolves around the biblical story of the Three Wise Men, depicted here as thieving scoundrels who—through a series of outrageous set pieces—end up aiding Joseph, Mary, and the little baby Jesus as they escape from the evil King Herod. There's no way of knowing if Grahame-Smith wrote this would-be epic with the intent of having it become a big-budget Hollywood movie, but it's not hard to visualize someone like Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of the murderous yet charming Balthazar. It's a rollicking, swords-and-sandals yarn that could easily have been subtitled "in 3-D." Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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If God is love: rediscovering grace in an ungracious world - Philip Gulley

If God is love: rediscovering grace in an ungracious world - Gulley, Philip

Summary: Argues that one's beliefs play a key role in how one lives and interacts in the world, inviting readers to envision a world where everyone shares a belief that God loves every person and proposing world transformation through spiritual change.



Booklist Reviews
Gulley, a minister, and Mulholland, a theologian, turn the popular slogan "God is love" into a question that opens a Pandora's box of unanswered queries that some prefer remain unanswerable. If God is love, how are those who profess belief in God to act? If God is love, how does Christianity explain the vastly accepted dualistic theology of heaven and hell? If God is love, how can Christians live in God's grace? How can we continue to hate, slander, murder, and condemn our neighbors? If God is love, and God commands us to love our enemies, how can we justify war? Gently taking organized religion to task for perpetuating its power to control people, and only slightly lacing their discussion with their personal political opinions, the two Quakers propose ways to live, work, play, and be in a state of grace. Many may fault their approach for seeming overly simple at times. Yet anyone searching for a "graciousness primer" might look on this book as a commonsense example of such a manual. ((Reviewed October 1, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews.


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Tattoos on the heart: the power of boundless compassion - Greg Boyle

Tattoos on the heart: the power of boundless compassion - Boyle, Greg

Summary: A Jesuit priest shares anecdotes from his life of working in broken-down urban areas with underprivileged children, describing how he helped them to find faith and embrace such values as patience, self-worth, and kinship.

Staff Review
This book moved me so much. Father Greg Boyle works with Mexican-American gang members in East Los Angeles who are out of prison and out of choices. He started Homeboy Industries to give these young men and women a place to work and thrive. The story of tragedies and triumphs of these young people had me crying and laughing, sometimes within the same page.

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