Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

CHRISTOBIOGRAPHY:  MEMORY, HISTORY,  AND  THE RELIABILITY OF  THE GOSPELS  Author: Craig S. Keener Reviewed by  Geoffrey W. Sutton It’s the second word in the title, memory , that first grabbed my attention. Then I noticed the word, reliability . Like many clinicians, I’ve administered many memory tests and discovered an incredible range of memory capacity. I've tested preschool children and senior adults. I used the best available tests covering a wide range of human memory. And, as a Christian thinker about integration, I wondered about the scant attention given to the role of memory and reliability in understanding the interplay between biblical texts and psychological science. So, I come to Keener’s latest cornucopia with considerable curiosity. Craig S. Keener is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary . Together, his works have sold over a million copies. He describes his scholarly vantage point as to the right of c...

UNPROTECTED TEXTS The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions   about Sex and Desire Author:   Jennifer Wright Knust Date: 2011 Reviewed by   Geoffrey W. Sutton Knust’s book, Unprotected Texts , has an intriguing title for anyone thinking about the sex-related moral issues constantly in the news. I purchased a copy of her book as I was writing A House Divided: Sexuality, Morality, and Christian Cultures , and I’m glad I did because I referenced some of her insights. Knust has impressive credentials. At the time she wrote Unprotected Texts , Knust had a Ph.D., from Columbia University and was an Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Boston University School of Theology. She’s also an ordained American Baptist pastor. Unprotected Texts is a well written book, which addresses biblical sex in six chapters with primary titles that do not easily identify the subject matter until you’ve read a few pages.  ...

A Review of Marcus Borg’s  Reading the Bible Again for the First Time :  Taking the Bible Seriously but Not literally . By Geoffrey W. Sutton   My earliest memory of a conflict between the Bible and the observable world happened sometime in late childhood when I learned that the moon was not a light as it plainly said in my King James Version of Genesis 1:16. It was downhill from there. Like many of my friends, we learned a near literal interpretation of the Bible from parents with a limited education and churches where teachers shared a blend of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Their application of select biblical laws, commandments, and rules to contemporary life seemed strangely arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive. I should like to think Marcus Borg’s, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time , would have saved me considerable puzzlement—and likely some distress. I’ll say more later but first, a summary of Reading the Bible Again for the First T...

London: A Biography By Peter Ackroyd Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton London: A Biography is not a biography in the usual sense of the term. True, Ackroyd is an excellent writer who is adept at weaving together bits of archaeology with a historical note and a dollop of quotes from a novelist. I did enjoy the book, but it was not what I expected. As a Londoner, I hoped to discover new insights into the nether regions of the past and present. That hope was realised . In fact, I am looking for some of the books Ackroyd mentioned in his closing essay. I suppose any biographer has to pick and choose among the many events in a long life that tell an interesting story. The author has chosen well. Would I have chosen differently? Yes. I would like more about science and history with fewer quotations from literary sources. I read about so many churches, but I did not learn much about the interaction of the people with their churches. I read about a few royal...

They Shall Not Grow Old is a profoundly moving tribute to the soldiers of World War I. Peter Jackson (Director; coproducer with Clare Olssen) and his team combine enhanced archival films, photos, audio recordings, and artwork to bring us face to face with the adolescents and young men living and dying along the Western Front . On the brief skeleton of the sequence of the war years, this documentary tells an extraordinary tale of ordinairy men from the farms, factories, and shops of Great Britain to the muddy graves of the ragged pattern of muddy trenches along the Western Front. Humour and games offer parenthetical relief from the abysmal struggle. The colourisation and 3D conversion along with other technological modifications help us glimpse the soldier's world of 100 years ago. Many of us have read about the war and seen the old black and white clips bounce by at unnatural speeds. The marvel of technology helps us get closer to real people living and dying on orders fr...

Inheritance A Legacy of Hatred and the Journey to Change It By James Moll, Director This 2006 documentary tells the story of two women with very different “inheritances” from Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant of the Plaszow Concentration Camp in Poland. Goeth was known for his brutal murders of thousands of Jews. Monika Hertwig is the daughter of Amon Goeth and Ruth Kalder. She gradually learned bits and pieces about her father’s horrific treatment of the Jews. It would be a mistake to overlook the role of her mother who had an affair with Goeth and a troubled relationship with Monika. The Spielberg film, Schindler’s List (1993), appears at a pivotal moment in Monika’s efforts to come to grips with her family history and her own identity. Monika learns of a Jew, Helen Jonas-Rosenweig, who was a kitchen slave in her father’s manor house. Helen survived the holocaust with assistance from Oskar Schindler, whom she describes as a different kind of Nazi. Helen is in...