Film - Blue Like Jazz movie news

Jazzed About the Big Screen - CT.com

Essayist Donald Miller's best-selling book Blue Like Jazz has been adapted into a screenplay, with The Second Chance director Steve Taylor at the helm - and both men are pretty excited about it. - More >

I love Donald Miller's witty, disarmingly honest writing and Steve Taylor's satirical, iconoclastic music and film direction. This should be a terrific team-up. And a Christian movie I can be excited to tell my friends about.

Book - On Beyond Zebra (A)

Author: Dr. Seuss

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This book introduced "paradigm shifting" into my intellectual vocabulary before I even knew what such a thing was.

Many, many, many years ago (Nixon was President, I think) I read this and was changed. I can remember the images, the textures, the smells (Ah! The ditto machine and its purple perfume!) and all my surroundings. I was sitting in the elementary school library, facing northwest toward the door. Lured by the title and the premise, I had taken the volume to my assigned seat ("Library" was a class back then, as it should have been) and quickly devoured it.

The concept - that our 26-letter alphabet was an arbitrary collection and not a universal constant - had never entered my cartoon-addled mind. It sparked an awareness of similar cultural and philosophical constrictions that I have expanded and retained to this day.

Hats off to the Dr.!

Final score: A

Books - CT's 100 Great Books of the 20th Century

Here is a "required" reading list for Christians, according to the editors, staff, and contributors to Christianity Today magazine. These are books that had the most significant impact on Christian theology, practice, and devotion in the 20th century. Many were, and are, controversial. Some were not written by Christians but still had a dramatic influence on Christian perception of faith and society.

I've read seven of them over the years, started three, and own ten others, so I'd best get crackin'.

I've provided Amazon links for the Top 10. The Other 90 are in the first comment.

THE TOP 10

1. C. S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
"The best case for the essentials of orthodox Christianity in print." - David S. Dockery

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship
"Leaves you wondering why you ever thought complacency or compromise in the Christian life was an option." - Mark Buchanan

3. Karl Barth - Church Dogmatics
"Opened a new era in theology in which the Bible, Christ, and saving grace were taken seriously once more." - J. I. Packer

4. J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
"A classic for children from 9 to 90. Bears constant re-reading." - J. I. Packer

5. John Howard Yoder - The Politics of Jesus
"Some 30 years after this book was published, the church has found itself culturally in a more marginal position, and this book is making wider and wider sense." - Rodney Clapp

6. G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
"A rhetorically inventive exposition of the coherence of Christian truth." - David Neff

7. Thomas Merton - The Seven Storey Mountain
"A painfully candid story of one Christian soul's walk with grace and struggle, it has become the mark against which all other spiritual autobiographies must be measured." - Phyllis Tickle

8. Richard Foster - Celebration of Discipline
"After Foster finishes each spiritual discipline, you not only know what it is, why it's important, and how to do it—you want to do it." - Mark Buchanan

9. Oswald Chambers - My Utmost for His Highest
"A treasury of daily devotional readings that has fed the souls of millions of Christians in the twentieth century. Future generations of Christians must continue to draw from this treasury." - Richard J. Mouw

10. Reinhold Niebuhr - Moral Man and Immoral Society
"Introduced a breathtakingly insightful, shrewd, and cunning realism about human sin, especially in its social expressions,
rooted in biblical theology and a penetrating appraisal of the dark era into which the Western world had entered." - David P. Gushee

The other 90 are listed in Comments.

Book - Carry A Big Stick: The Uncommon Heroism of Theodore Roosevelt (B-)

Author: George Grant
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An insatiable reader of books on TR, I was immediately drawn to Carry a Big Stick by its small size and by its wealth of quotes from the President (something many authors neglect). Grant is unabashedly hero-worshipping here: no negatives are to be found. If one begins "Stick" with this in mind it can be accepted and tolerated.

Though it is clearly colored by Grant's conservative ideology (he tags turn of the 20th century politicians with turn of the 21st century labels - and greatly underrepresents TR's progressive leanings), it does reveal some facts about Roosevelt's religious convictions and church activities - something that is absolutely ignored in most modern biographies of historic figures.

The book is less a chronological account than a quick look by turns at each facet of the multi-talented and constantly moving President. It is adequate as an introduction but is highly selective.

Reprinted in paperback as The Courage and Character of Theodore Roosevelt. Oddly, it's not any cheaper!

Final score: B minus

Book - Robert E. Lee: A Biography (A-)

Author: Emory M. Thomas

Thomas is ambitious but ultimately correct in proclaiming his compelling Lee biography a post-revisionist portrait. He attempts (with admirable success) to balance his respect for Lee's character and ability (without Douglas Freeman's blatant worship and apocryphal stories) with honest accounts of his faults and contradictions (minus the carping of Connelly's 'The Marble Man' and Nolan's 'Lee Considered'). In the process, Thomas has captured as much as any writer is able the humanness of Lee.

I was struck throughout the book by events and words that mirror my own aspirations and failures. I think the highest praise I can offer Thomas's book is that this avid Lee fan and Civil War buff felt like he had met Robert E. Lee for the first time.

Final score: A-

Book - Blue Like Jazz (B+)

Author: Donald Miller

Though I don't see eye-to-eye with Don Miller on everything, I can't help but like the guy. He is so candid about his thought life, his doubts, his shortcomings, his vices, and his all-around goofiness that he's like a favorite cousin you find both cool and amusingly befuddling.

Miller's self-deprecating wit, his conversational style, and his arms-length relationship with his evangelical background are his trademarks. Most of the chapters in "Jazz" are about mini-epiphanies he's had along his spiritual journey. You feel like he's hanging out with you at dusk, sitting on the hood of a car, swapping life stories and wondering about why crap works the way it does. It's like he circles around things in life until it dawns on him that - even though its representatives are often lame and its concepts seem outdated - Christian spirirtuality actually had the answers he was looking for.

Even though he tries to maintain a fairly liberal and liberated life, deep down he's fairly orthodox in his beliefs. He just doesn't dress them up in 19th century traditions, rules and regulations, and both fear- and comfort-based judgmentalism.

Take it out for a spin.

Final score: B+

Book - Bono In Conversation (A–)

Bono In Conversation
Author: Mischka Assayas
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A pleasant surprise. I was afraid this book-length interview would turn into a self-congratulatory rambling session with a sycophantic journalist. However, Assayas keeps after Bono with tough and interesting questions and Bono responds in kind. The singer seems - by and large - candid and frequently insightful about his life and art. He holds back on some things, which is his prerogative, and can get on tangents about his great passion of the moment (Africa) but ultimately I found him an honest, fascinating, intelligent, and admirable fellow. I couldn't put it down.

Especially refreshing (and amusing) is the chapter devoted to Bono's theology ("Add Eternity to That"). As an Irishman, he has a penchant for dropping a few swear words into the discussion and that may be off-putting to some Christians. But he clearly points to Christ's sacrifice on the cross and God's grace as his only hope of salvation. He argues aut Deus aut homo malus with Assayas. You don't hear that from too many rock stars.

Final score: A minus