Review of Ascent from Darkness by Michael Leehan
Ascent from Darkness: How Satan’s Soldier Became God’s Warrior by Michael Leehan is the story of a man’s journey into a life of satanism and his subsequent salvation. The author is not a writer by trade, however he tells his story from his own perspective followed by entries from several of the people in his life who fill in some of the details and give us a better grasp of the time line. During his time as a satan-worshipper, he actually spent more time reading and memorizing the Scripture than most so-called Christians today. The great thing is that those in Michael’s life during his time of searching did not try to force him to make a hasty decision nor did they abandon him for his honesty that he really did not want to give his life over to Christ at the time.
Two primary take-aways for me were first of all to be sure that I know what I believe and why I believe it. We are to love God with all our heart, soul and mind. There is a lot of emphasis in church on worship and loving God with all our hearts and souls, but not nearly enough emphasis on knowledge of God and his Word. Michael commented more than once that during his time as a satanist, he found it incredibly easy to confuse those in the church and trip them up on their beliefs or cause them to abandon what they believed altogether.
Secondly, don’t give up on people when they don’t make a decision right away. We have no idea what people have gone through or are going through in life, and our pat answers to life’s problems are not going to convince them. We in the church are so quick to use our Christian jargon and cliche’s that we really don’t even know what we’re saying anymore. Refer to the first take-away above.
I rated the book only a four due to the writing quality, however it is a book that I would recommend to other believers.
Disclaimer: I received this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
Review of Fyodor Dostoevsky from the Christian Encounters Series by Peter Leithart
Fyodor Dostoevsky By Peter Leithart is the first of the Christian Encounters Series that I have read. I became interested in Dostoyevsky after reading about him in another book and while I have not read any of his actual writings, he seems to be a compelling person. Not knowing a lot about him or his work beyond the few quotes in the other book, I was interested in reviewing this book about his life.
The use of fictional conversations and settings in the telling of his life certainly keeps it interesting, but I believe the reader is left with questions as to which parts are actually true and which parts are creative license. The writing style is good and kept my interest throughout. The author does not gloss over Dostoyevsky’s shortcomings as a man during his lifetime as some are prone to do, however some of the descriptions seemed a bit much.
The content is footnoted to show where the reader can get more information and as such is a good introduction to the life of this author with resources for those who want more than a surface-level understanding of this author. I would recommend this book to someone who knows very little of Dostoyevsky.
Disclaimer: I received this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
The Bone House Review
The Bone House is the second in Stephen Lawhead’s Bright Empires series of novels, combining “hidden dimensions and lands in any possible alternate world–with a dose of time slippage thrown in for good measure.” This quote by Stephen Lawhead himself is taken from a brief essay at the end of The Bone House describing his own foray into the exploration of the idea of multiverses.
The story brought to us in The Bone House is a great follow-up to The Skin Map. We follow Kit and Wilhelmina and the various people they encounter along the way in their quest to understand ley travel and survive while doing so. The story advances while at the same time providing us insights into the background of some of the characters, fleshing them out and giving us a better understanding of their motivations. Without giving too much away, toward the end of the story, Kit encounters a stone-age group of people after one of his ley travels. Over time, Kit’s impression of them as “primitives” is replaced by a deeper understanding of them through his immersion into their daily living. Both the background information on characters and Kit’s interactions with the “primitives” are a reminder how we misjudge people by looking only at the surface, not bothering to try to understand them.
I enjoyed this book and I am very much looking forward to the next one, I just wish it was going to be sooner than a year from now!
Disclaimer: I received this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
The Skin Map Review
The Skin Map is the first book I’ve read by Stephen R. Lawhead and I thorougly enjoyed it. The book falls into the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre and a lot of these books follow the same general pattern: a sort of “Here and Back Again” theme like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Lawhead’s treatment is vastly and refreshingly different. Instead of a single epic journey travelled by all of the main characters and their interactions with the people and places along the way, The Skin Map has several simultaneous threads going on with the various characters. The main character, Kit Livingston, lives a life of no real purpose. When he encounters his great-grandfather Cosimo who has been dead for years, he is pulled into a world of time travel, ley lines, and basically trying to stay alive as he and Cosimo try to keep the Skin Map from falling into the wrong hands.
The level of detail in the book keeps the story interesting without being too much; imagination is still required. I prefer that to an author who paints such a detailed word picture that no real room is left for the reader to visualize anything on his or her own. The pacing is good: not too slow, nor is it so intense you’re left breathless when you put the book down.
I enjoyed the book so much that I have since purchased the entire King Raven series. I have read Hood, the first installment from that series and I would recommend both books to anyone who enjoys a good Sci-Fi/Fantasy read.
Disclaimer: I received this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
How to Boot Ubuntu Directly to Command Line
I’m in the process of setting up a dedicated machine for Dansguardian on my home network. I found a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 laying around, so I installed it onto the machine I’m intending to use. Obviously, I don’t need the GUI at all on the machine as it’s going to run headless anyway. It’s actually very simple to do this.
1. Edit /etc/default/grub with your favorite editor:
sudo vim /etc/default/grub
2. Find the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
3. Change it to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash text”
4. Finish up with:
sudo update-grub
What in the World is Going On? A Review
Jesus chided the Pharisees for being able to look at the current weather patterns and reasonably predict forthcoming weather, but their inability to look at the various geopolitical events of their time and understand them in light of prophecy.
Today we see many signs that the end is fast approaching and still many believers live as if time is not running short. We worry more about our plans for the weekend or that vacation trip than we do about making sure our non-believing friends get to spend their eternity with Jesus.
Dr. David Jeremiah addresses some of the signs that show things lining up for the end, and he does so without a sense of foreboding that can be so prevalent in this type of writing. Rather, he gives us hope and reminds us throughout that God is on control of and is orchestrating the events we see online, on tv and on the newspapers.
The book serves as a basic primer on eschatology and is very helpful if you don’t really know a lot about the subject. Dr. Jeremiah reminds us– informs us, as the case may be–that there are more prophecies about the end times than there are about Jesus. As he instructs us on such matters, he weaves current events into the discussion to help us better understand them and their prophetic significance.
I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a better understanding of current events in the light of biblical eschatology.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book as part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
Wild at Heart by John Eldredge – A Review
Wild at Heart impacted me several years ago when I read it as part of a
men’s group at my church, and this new version adds some clarifications
and stories to make the book even more compelling. While the message
could be construed that being “nice” is a detriment, I think that
reading deeper will help the reader realize that what John Eldredge
means is that being “nice” and passive at the expense of doing what
you’re called to do is the true danger. One of the things he points out
is that while Eve was decieved, Adam was standing right there beside
her, passive. Passivity is the silent killer of the plan that God has
for a man’s life and until men stop being passive, we will continue to
see problems in our families.
Eldredge also discusses men who have erred to the other end of the
spectrum and become overly aggressive and abusive and how it is just as
much an aberration of God’s design for men as passivity.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
The Selfless Gene – A Review
The premise of this book was to show how one can believe in God and believe in Darwin, however it fails miserably. The author confesses in his preface that he not a theologian and his sloppy handling of the Scriptures is proof of that. A few paragraphs later in his introduction he states that he is bothered by Genesis. Why write a book attempting to reconcile a belief in Scriptures and a belief in Darwin when you obviously have no commitment whatsoever to the veracity of the Scriptures?
I found the book painful to read, not because the subject matter was difficult to understand, but because the author’s message was so logically inconsistent with it’s premise.
I do not recommend this book to anyone as it is a complete waste of time.
Disclaimer: I received this book as a part of Thomas Nelson’s Booksneeze program.
The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user mapped section open
I recently started receiving the error “The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user mapped section open” while attempting to commit large changes to my subversion repository. My server is a Windows 7 Ultimate installation with VisualSVN, and I never had this issue with my Linux server. After some researching, I found that the issue is the AVG Resident Shield that I have running on the server. Once the Resident Shield was disabled, viola! No more errors.
The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great – A Review
The account of the battle in opening paragraphs of The White Horse King could have been taken straight from the pages of The Lord of the Rings.
From there the book becomes more of a historical narrative, albeit a very interesting one. Alfred was the fifth son of Æthelwulf, king of Wessex. We learn about Alfred’s formative years as the Vikings begin to attack various nations that made up Britain in the early 900′s, specifically the nation of Wessex. It was during these years that Alfred made two pilgrimages to Rome with his family. He received confirmation from Pope Leo IV during his first visit.
Alfred became known as a fierce fighter in the battles with the Vikings and after the death of his four elder brothers, he became king of Wessex. The book chronicles many of the battles and an especially low time of his life when he was forced to flee and remain in hiding from the Danish invaders until he could muster enough troops to retake his throne. It was during these years that Alfred would lead bands of men in ambush of various Viking troops and he learned much of their tactics.
The Vikings were especially brutal to to the conquered king. They would offer the defeated king in various forms of sacrifice to their god Odin. However when Alfred defeated the Viking Guthram and his army, instead of killing him, he gave Guthram the option to be baptized as a Christian. Guthram accepted this offer and was baptized and never again attacked Alfred or the kingdom of Wessex.
When Alfred retook the throne, in his most significant and lasting achievement, he completely reorganized the military structure. Instead of a disorganized band of nobles and landowners called up to fight as needed, he instituted a professional, trained standing army.
Alfred also saw the need for the people to become literate, able to read and advance in Christian learning. He brought together the best scholars he could find to help him learn Latin and then assist him in translating many texts into the vernacular of the Anglo Saxons. He established schools for the children to start learning as soon as they were able. Literacy was required for anyone serving in any form of government office.
Lastly, Alfred instituted a reworking of the entire legal code. The legal system when Alfred became king was based more on the station of the claimants in a case than anything else. “[T]he composition of the [legal code] really constituted the culmination of Alfred’s work to rebuild the defenses of Wessex and to revive learning throughout the nation.” In doing so, Alfred established the framework for what would be known as “common law,” the foundation for the legal systems of England, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Pakistan. Interestingly enough, the code began with the Ten Commandments and included parts of Exodus 21-23 and the Sermon on the Mount all in the preface.
I read this as part of Thomas Nelson Book Review Blogger Program.
