John Grisham, The Appeal

Grisham hits with another enjoyable read. In The Appeal, Krane Chemical, a chemical firm that has been illegally dumping carcinogenic chemicals near the small town of Bowmore, Mississippi, is on the hook for millions of dollars because of its pollution. The book opens with the the conclusion of the trial, and the huge verdict against Krane. And that is only the beginning of the action. The real story is what happens next: the appeal.

Carl Trudeau, the majority owner of Krane Chemical, takes a huge hit in the stock market because of the negative verdict. In order to save his company from huge liabilities in the Bowmore case, and in hundreds of others like it, Trudeau recruits a secret firm to get a corporation-friendly judge elected to the Mississippi Supreme Court in the fall, tipping the balance of power on the court and making it likely that the decision will be reversed on appeal in the name of "lawsuit reform."

Ron Fisk is that candidate, though he doesn't know it. He is recruited by a high-powered group of supporters to run for the Supreme Court. He knows there are a lot of people behind his candidacy, but he has no idea that it is primarily being funded by Carl Trudeau, in hopes of essentially buying a seat and securing a verdict. Fisk will be running against Justice Sheila McCarthy, a centrist justice who is coming up for reelection. The Fisk campaign gets everything ready, including its huge fund-raising machine, but doesn't announce until shortly before the deadline, leaving McCarthy surprised and mostly without cash or a plan for a campaign. The Fisk campaign quickly pounces on her record and saturates the market with negative advertisements characterizing her as a liberal justice. Barrie Rinehart, the mastermind behind the Fisk campaign, also arranges for a gay couple from Illinois to move down to Mississippi and try to get married, injecting gay marriage as an issue into the campaign as well.

Sheila McCarthy, after a slow start, raises some support, primarily from trial lawyers, and gets her own campaign moving. But she is no match for Fisk and all of the money that pours into his campaign, and she is narrowly defeated. Fisk assumes a seat on the Supreme Court, and it is immediately obvious that he is living up to his pro-business billing. But as the time to decide the Krane Chemical appeal approaches, Fisk's son is injured by a line drive in a little-league baseball game, and the bat that was used was illegal. As his son clings to life, Ron comes to realize that the manufacturer of the bat should hold some liability for making the faulty and dangerous equipment, and this begins a shift in his judicial philosophy toward more compassion for the victims. But when the time for the Krane decision arrives, he reluctantly sides with the chemical company none the less, ending hope in Bowmore for cleanup and compensation for all of the toxic dumping and the resulting sickness.

I think Grisham has achieved a great blend of readability and enjoyment, together with thoughtful fiction. He certainly makes me think twice about the process of electing judges. This book is another good read, with believable characters and always-interesting legal plot twists.

Ted Dekker, Blink

I've heard a lot of good things about Ted Dekker, and this is my first forray into his work. He writes fast-paced christian fantasy fiction much in the mold of Frank Paretti. In Blink, Dekker follows Seth Borders, a brilliant graduate student who develops a very strange power, the ability to see alternate futures. At first, he can only see a few seconds into the future, but the gift develops into allowing him to see hours into the future. He is able to see an almost infinite number of possible outcomes for any situation, and thus is able to manipulate reality toward the outcomes he wants by doing the things in that particular future. Seth comes in contact with a Saudi woman named Miriam, who is on the run from an arranged marriage in Saudi Arabia. They meet by chance, and the book is the chronicle of their flight across the globe.

Intertwined with this plot is Seth's wrestling with the possibility of God's existence. He starts out intellectually open to the idea, but unwilling to actually believe that God really exists. His own ability to view alternate futures seems to debunk the idea of God's existence for him because it seems to mean that the future is open and this appears to be incompatible with an all-knowing God. But as the book goes on, Seth realizes that he can pray to the God of Jesus Christ and the possible futures that he sees change, pointing toward God's involvement in the world.

Miriam, meanwhile, is wrestling too, both with the cultural difference between Saudi Arabia and the United States and between Islam and the Christianity that Seth is exploring.

All of these plots come to a fast-paced conclusion as Seth rescues Miriam from her husband-to-be's palace and God delivers them from a seemingly inescapable standoff.

Dekker wrestles with some interesting questions in an imaginative way, and that makes the book work. The biggest weakness is in the characters, who seem rather flat. All told, the book wasn't bad, and I'm going to dip into Dekker's work again.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

I love this book. It is without a doubt one of my favorites. Tolkien is a master of words, and when this is wedded with his fertile imagination and his deep faith you end up with a powerful work. And it only gets better with rereading.

I am always struck by the beauty and depth of the world he creates, the reality and dynamism of his characters, and the epic scope of the events. It feels like every page of this voluminous work is built upon a foundation of volumes of history. I also love the powerful themes of temptation and failure, virtue, hope, and redemption. It is truly a theological goldmine, a volume illumined with a "Christian imagination" that propels the action. Simply said, I love it!

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement

In this great little book on the atonement, Scot McKnight lends his capable hand to this very important doctrine, navigating the often contested waters with ease. McKnight asserts the importance of atonement both as a doctrine of the church but even more so as a practice of the church. Does atonement work? He asserts that yes, it does. It can and should create a community transformed by Christ's work, and transformed to further that transformation in the world.

McKnight lays out a nicely rounded out picture of the atonement by situating the doctrine in the larger Christian story, by investigating the biblical and historical roots and developments, and by asserting the continuing validity of the theory and even more the praxis of atonement.

I think this relatively short book is a great entry point into this important field of discussion, and beyond that it is a robust statement of how this doctrine stands at the core of Christian faith and life. A number of helpful avenues are explored, such as atonement as the work of the missional God and creating a missional community. I also think he takes a very even-handed approach to the modern criticisms of penal substitution, showing how the doctrine can be sometimes distorted by some of its defenders, but also emphasizing how it can express an essential aspect of our faith. Last, I think his own summary of atonement as identification for incorporation proves to be a helpful way of approaching this doctrine.

This certainly doesn't constitute a full review of McKnight's broad and far-reaching project, but I hope it gives some of the flavor of this great little book that can help the church to rethink what it means to be an atoned-for and atoning people.