Finished Reading “Heretics”

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  "G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on  "heretics" - those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views - Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds... those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them." (Goodreads)

John Piper on Abiding in Christ and Reading

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"Read great Christian writers who know God deeply and saturate their writing with the Bible and take you deep into its spirit. They are like reading the Bible through the mind and heart of great knowers and lovers of God. Don't let long books daunt you. Finishing the book does not matter. Growing by it matters. But finishing is not as hard as you might think.

Suppose you read slowly like I do—about the same speed as you speak—200 words a minute. If you read 15 minutes a day for one year (just 15 minutes, say just before supper, or just before bed), you will read 5,475 minutes in the year. Multiply that by 200 words a minute and you get 1,095,000 words that you would read in a year. Now the average book has about 360 words per page (that's what Carson's book has). So you would have read 360 words into 1,095,000, or 3,041 pages in one year. That's 13 books the size of Carson's book, or reading his in 21 days. All that in 15 minutes a day.

The point is: the words of Jesus will abide in you more deeply and more powerfully if you give yourself to some serious reading of great books that are saturated with Scripture."

(From "If My Words Abide in You")

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