With the arrival of summer hopefully your schedule allows you a little more free time for the simple joy of reading. The challenge of course is that it is summer and your brain doesn’t want to be bogged down by heavy theological discourse, it wants to be entertained. Yet at the same time you are aware of your God-given responsibility for life-long learning. The solution, two books which provide the best of both worlds, in depth education coupled with lively and entertaining writing styles.

What’s So Great About Christianity is written by up and coming Christian apologist and philosopher Dinesh D’Souza, who has come to prominence by holding a series of debates on college campuses around the United States with prominent atheists Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, and Daniel Dennet (Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him). You can find videos of each of the debates here or D'Souza's own written assement of the debates here.

His lively debating style is well captured by his writing style so that even when he outlines the history of philosophical thought, as he does throughout the book, he is able to give it life and place it in a contemporary context.

While at its core What’s so great about Christianity is an apology against the new set of popular anti-religious books like The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God Is not Great, its approach centers more on using the tools of philosophy and science to construct a positive basis for Christianity within those two disciplines. Although his writing is grounded in a personal faith, D’Souza is more concerned about doing battle with the hard core atheists and extreme Darwinists on their own terms. As such, What’s So Great About Christianity provides a wonderful review of the major philosophical and scientific developments of the last few centuries. He provides an honest assessment of what these developments mean for Christianity, but his critical approach also attempts to show what they mean for atheism and science as well.

Over the course of its twenty-six Chapters D’Souza tackles the relationship between Christianity and Western Culture, Christianity and Science (particularly extreme Darwinism), Christianity and Philosophy, and Christianity and Ethics. Along the way he shatters common misconceptions, perhaps the biggest two being the “Galileo Case” and the often asserted claim “that religion is the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.”  (203)

While fundamentalist Christians may have difficulty with D’Souza’s approach to both evolution and Scripture (he lays his presuppositions out for all to see in a preface entitled “A Note on the Interpretation of Scripture”), all can benefit from his thorough review of the major thinkers of the last few centuries, and how their work still impacts our society today. Best of all, it is packaged in a text that is as entertaining and lively as it is intellectual.

What Dinesh D’Souza does for philosophy and science, Laurance Gonzales does for psychology and science in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.

Gonzales focuses on adventure accidents over the past 35 years to try and make sense out of why sensible people often do insensible things when confronted with a crisis. For example, he relates how a number of scuba divers have inexplicably died over the past few decades despite having oxygen left in their tank because they took their regulators out of their mouths. Why?

By interweaving stores of mishap and misadventure with hard scientific analysis, he provides an entertaining look at contemporary scientific models for how our brains operate. In short, scuba divers sometimes take their regulators out of their mouths because that is the way that our brains sometimes operate – in the face of competing mental signals someone who believes they are suffocating will often have a profound impulse (based on experience) to remove whatever is in their mouth. Experience trumps logic, and the life-giving regulator is removed. The answer of course is more complicated than that, and Gonzales takes his reader on a journey through the brain – the relationship between logic and experience, emotion and logic, short term memory and long term memory. Along the way he offers scientific insight into why we have a hard time finding things that are lost right in front of us, why you can never remember a person’s name, and how it is that we can concentrate on one conversation when we are in a room full of people talking.

But Gonzales doesn’t stop there, he taps into the latest research regarding chaos theory to argue that the world doesn’t fit into neat and tidy models. In fact the only model that accounts for the messiness of the world is a model that recognizes that accidents are not the exception they are the rule and big accidents, though they happen less frequently than little ones, are a part of that rule too. Although he would not label it as such, it is not too far of a stretch to see how the concept of original sin plays into chaos theory.  Heady stuff, but he provides just enough adventure narrative to make the complex scientific descriptions readable and relatable.

While not a Christian book, Christians can benefit from his gathering of recent insight into how both the mind and the world operate. It is not hard to read his analysis of people in crisis and see parallels with how churches in crisis often operate. One of his more insightful assertions is that people in crisis are usually set up for disaster not by their inexperience, but by their experiences, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see." (87) The blind commitment to a plan ignores what he calls the "friction rule" which is that "There is a tendency to make a plan and then to worship the plan, 'that memory of the possible future.' But there is also a tendency to think that simply by putting forth more and more effort we can overcome friction." (127) Ultimately this is doomed to fail, "Rather than accept friction as a fact of life, they tried to overcome it. And as history shows, the harder we try, the more complex our plan for reducing friction, the worse things get." (128) The solution, "To admit reality and work with it is to accept it. Be here now." (128) In other words, work with what God gives you, not what Bonhoeffer calls in Life Together, "The Wish Dream" of how we think the world, our church and our own lives shoudl be.

For less cerbral adventure reading which nevertheless can give wonderful insight into the human condition, I recommend: Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghiglieri and Thomas M. Myers which recounts all of the deaths that have occurred in the Grand Canyon and High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed by Michael Kodas which explores death on Mt. Everest, and how often the quest for greatness brings out the absolute worst in people.

Finally for a great book on the dangers of religious fundamentalism in any form, John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith explores fundamentalist Mormonism which provides a thought-provoking challenge for people of faith to explore the consequences of our own teachings and rhetoric.

Read anything good lately? Begining in July we will begin posting online book reviews submitted by our readers. Please submit your review(s) to associate editor Paul Sauer at prs@lutheranforum.org