Church Bookcase

“He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own.” C. H. Spurgeon. Books and book reviews. Jesus is Lord.

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Books as of May 2026 - 1 of 2.

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Nice quote from David Foster Wallace:

“The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. … Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked … “then” what do we do? … All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. … Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.”

https://t.co/KCImAXpycC

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“Unbelief talks of delays; faith knows that properly there can be no such thing.”
—John Newton

Quote from 3rd June entry in Tim Keller’s My Rock; My Refuge.

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Two (Ligonier) talks by Sinclair based on his Sermon on the Mount book:

- Life in the Kingdom: https://t.co/OHvV2QxaPH

- The Cure for our Anxiety: https://t.co/1GU7YJmsYO

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Books as of May 2026 - 2 of 2.

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Books as of May 2026 - 1 of 2.

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Foucault’s work is driven by the conviction that “the main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not at the beginning … The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.” p70

Why read about Foucault? He’s the most cited academic author (more than Einstein).

Foucault by Christopher Watkin

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“In a culture where the real self is constituted by inner feelings, the external world will always be a potential threat to authenticity.”

Good for:
- Nietzsche’s Madman.
- Traditional and Critical Theory by Max Horkheimer.

The Desecration of Man by Carl Trueman

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Good for Herbert Marcuse:

- Man is an innocent conditioned by society (heteronomy rather autonomy).

- A sexual revolution would bring about the bigger revolution he wanted.

- His idea of freedom means centralised power.

What is Critical Theory?
A Concise Christian Analysis
By Bradley Green

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@pastorjgkell And once you have sinned “there is no way back to God”

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Three quotes: one each from the book, Camille Paglia and C. S. Lewis.

“Poststructuralists don’t (normally) doubt that there is a world: their anxiety concerns what we can claim to know about it with any certainty.” p71

Poststructuralism is a “pose of cynical irony” that destabilises meaning without offering anything constructive. Camille Paglia

“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man

People of a certain age will remember the Radio 4 game show Just a Minute where the panelists had to speak for sixty seconds on a given subject without "repetition, hesitation, or deviation.” Reading about poststructuralism for the first time, it felt like a game where the aim was to avoid absolutes. And quite quickly it becomes the most serious of games.

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Belsey

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Good introduction to cultural Marxism:

- classical Marxism vs cultural Marxism
- Marx vs Gramsci
- the Frankfurt School
- Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance
- Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Laclau and Mouffe.

That Hideous Strength: How the West was Lost by Melvin Tinker

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Augustine’s Confessions - which translation? by Trevin Wax. https://t.co/S1lH2t9FnU

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“If we're learning anything about human nature in the age in which we live, it is that outsized focus on oneself produces disabling anxiety, disorienting ‘identities,’ and dizzying confusion about man's ultimate end. It turns out, secular man's chief end of glorifying himself is producing the very opposite of joy.”

—Andrew T. Walker

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2025 book of the year:
How Should We Then Die? A Christian Response to Physician-Assisted Death by Ewan Goligher.

Honourable mention:
Scrolling Ourselves to Death edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.

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“I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks … the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”

“Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?”

“Thinking of the H. facts – real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt, I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me …”

A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis

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“We do not doubt that God is in control, not even that he has our best interests at heart. What we doubt is that he knows as well as us what our best interests are.” p28

“Does God create evil in the same direct way that he creates good?” p23

“Poetry is not a flowery way of saying something which can be said just as efficiently in prose. Poetry is a way of expressing the most intense and powerful emotions in the most intense and compelling ways.” p33

How God Treats His Friends by Robert Fyall

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“Suffering makes it hard for us to create meaning for ourselves because we cannot avoid the grim reality that self-created meaning is really only a pleasant fiction.” p99

Good for:
- the various types of end-of-life care
- quotes from Nietzsche, Camus, Victor Frankl and Bertrand Russell
- created vs discovered meaning.

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In Nov 2024, the Atlantic published “The Elite Students Who Can’t Read Books.” https://t.co/AiGBxeYS2n

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“… The demands of the law were met by His perfect life. The penalty of the law was carried out in His death in place of us, who deserved to die. And the power of death was defeated by His resurrection as He triumphed over it. As David in the Valley of Elah won victory not only for himself but for the whole of Israel, so Jesus at Calvary and the empty tomb won victory for all who are united with Him by faith. No wonder Paul declared, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57)!”

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“The internet demands our undivided attention, only to scatter it in a thousand different directions.”

“No technology is epistemologically neutral. Each will foster certain habits of the mind, for better or worse, while rendering other ways of knowing irrelevant and favouring certain views of reality over others.”

“To be a Christian is to be on a lifelong journey of transformation into Christikeness alongside a community of others pursuing the same. It's not so much that digital ministry and online church are bad; it's that they are inadequate and incomplete. Watching can inform us about and sometimes inspire us toward God's people. But only embodied participation can transform us into God's people.”