PostHumous Book Review: Station Eleven: Remaining Human after Doomsday

PostHumous Book Reviews: Personal reflections on books worthy of a re-read.

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Today's review is by guest writer Joe Johnson.
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At first glance, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven: A Novel belongs on the same well-trodden path as other it’s-the-end-of-the-world tales, like Stephen King’s formidable, The Stand, or George Stewart’s Earth Abides. Pestilence washes over the world like an unstoppable force, shattering society and decimating humanity. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. While Station Eleven bears a familial resemblance to these other apocalyptic narratives, it tells a noticeably different kind of story. Not every post-pandemic novel becomes a National Book Award Finalist, or subtly subverts a genre, or causes me to reflect and say, “Now that was beautiful,” as I finish it, yet Station Eleven accomplished all of these things. Why? 

PostHumous Book Review: The Time Traveller's Wife and Sanctification

PostHumous Book Reviews: Personal reflections on books worthy of a re-read.

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Today's review is by guest writer Dan Leman, my long time friend and local pastor.
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The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger taught me the secret to loving someone who consistently falls short of the person you want them to be.  

PostHumous Book Review: The Mundane Miracles of the Hiding Place

PostHumous Book Reviews: Personal reflections on books worthy of a re-read.

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Corrie Ten Boom's now classic autobiography The Hiding Place recounting her time working as part of the Dutch underground during World War II and her enduring of Nazi prisons and concentration camps with her sister Betsie is a surprising book on a number of fronts. 

In many ways what is most remarkable about the it is how unremarkable Corrie's story is—it is the account of a group of incredibly normal and almost boring people, humble people of faith attempting to live out their lives in faithfulness to God and their neighbors. The power of her story, however, is found in what these normal people decide to do when placed in dire and extraordinary circumstances. And thus, interspersed all throughout The Hiding Place are ever increasing miracles of the mundane. They are miracles to be sure, instances where God meets people and the truly miraculous occurs, but they are low-key miracles bound up in the ordinariness of life. Corrie ten Boom's story has been inspirational to millions but it also offers a direct challenge: Will we allow God to be present and move in our everyday lives? Even when we do not seem to be heroes or extraordinary people can God use us to bring about the miraculous?

PostHumous Book Review Week

Earlier this year we had a week long segment featuring what I call PostHumous Record Reviews, which are "personal reflections on a long-forgotten album in need of a resurrection."

Well to kick off the summer we are going to have a week of PostHumous Book Reviews: Personal reflections on books worthy of a re-read. 

Slowing Church Down in a McDonald's Culture?: A Review of Slow Church

"Slow Church takes the long view, examining all thought and culture, every ideology and assumption, all action and reaction by the messianic light of the last day." (Slow Church pg. 24)