Tuesday Tomes - Following Up

This week I'm going to do a little follow-up on two books mentioned in past Tuesday Tome posts. The first is Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor, the selection for my recent book club at Valley Christian Church. The second is another one I finished reading last week – The Seven Big Myths about Marriage by Christopher & Jennifer Kaczor.

Every Good Endeaver
by Tim Keller

This is a solid book I would gladly recommend to anyone trying to sort out their personal work goals and motivations. Keller does a great job of framing the Christian perspective for work and life.

The book has three sections: 1. God's Plan for Work; 2. Our Problems with Work; 3. The Gospel and Work. Keller's straightforward outline makes for very assessable reading and an easy to follow line of reasoning.

In the first section, "God's Plan for Work," he describes the Christian basis for seeing the inherent goodness of work as part of the Creator's design for humankind. In Part 2, "Our Problems with Work," he shows how the Christian view of sin and brokenness server to explain the many ways work can be distorted into burden, disappointment, and worse yet, a corrupted pursuit. In "The Gospel and Work" (Part 3), Keller shows how the Christian Gospel can redeem and reorient our work goals and experiences.

The Seven Big Myths about Marriage
by Christopher & Jennifer Kaczor

I think I heard about this book through a positive review or comment in First Things magazine or the First Thoughts Blog, and so I thought it might be pretty good. The subtitle for the book – "What Science, Faith, and Philosophy Teach Us about Love and Happiness" – also raised my level of expectation.

Unfortunately, I found this book to be generally disappointing. I wouldn't be saying anything negative about this book if I hadn't expressed hopeful enthusiasm about it in an earlier post. My mistake.

That's not to say that there was nothing good about it. There were a few interesting ideas, research observations, and statistics I hadn't seen before, but these were not enough to save the book from being underwhelming. Furthermore, the writers present only data and information that supports their own conclusions. They do not give serious attention to contrary views (secular or religious) and they do not question their own.

The title of the book suggests it will help the reader put aside wrongheaded ideas with insights gleaned from science, theology, and philosophy, but I found it to be the writers' case for holding on to conservative Catholic perspectives. The book was especially disappointing in its approaches to the ethics of contraception, definitions of marital covenant, marriage and the State, and theological views about heaven and salvation.