Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde – pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.