DWD's Reviews

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing LLC. Read by Tosca Hoskins. Duration: 11 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. The book is a detailed look at the Christian Nationalist movement in America. The strength of the book is its meticulous research. It ties together famous names and organizations with less famous names pulling the strings through not-for-profits and political action committees across the country. The author, Katherine Stewart I come to this book as a lifelong, politically aware Christian. I vote, I read about politics and religion, I post about politics and religion and I listen to podcasts that discuss politics and religion. That being said, I am all for keeping politics and religion separate because politics taints and corrupts religion every time and twists it into something it is not meant to be. The book does have its weaknesses, though. One is that the author, Katherine Stewart, does have some degree of anti-religious bias. She is really bothered by religious groups re...

  Published in 2018 by Hourly History. Hourly History is a publisher that specializes in short histories and biographies in e-book form that are designed to be read in about an hour. Sometimes, an hour is not long enough to explain a topic, but in this case an hour is just about right. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis is a pretty well known historical event, just let me say that this short e-book delivers a concise, well-paced history. It also manages to present a balanced history that spreads the blame for the crisis and somehow keep up a sense of tension even though the reader knows for a fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not actually cause a worldwide global thermonuclear war in 1962. I rate this e-book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

  Published in 2023 by Penguin Audio in July of 2023. Read by the author, Russell Moore. Duration: 6 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Russell Moore is currently a theologian for the magazine Christianity Today , but he is more famous for being one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for the last 20 years - both as a professor and at the national level. He's also a prolific author and very media friendly. In many ways, Moore was the perfect media face for the Southern Baptist Convention - smart, likable, pleasant and often funny. But, he butted heads on a variety of topics with the rest of the leadership. He was against gay conversion therapy and he wanted the SBC to listen to women who accused men in church leadership of sexual abuse. He especially wanted Southern Baptists to talk about racism and its complicity in upholding Jim Crow laws and distance themselves from Confederate symbols like the flag.  The biggest thing they disagreed about and the thing tha...

  Published in July of 2023 by Hourly History. Roy Orbison (1936-1988) was an early rock singer. As this book notes, the heart of his career is right after Elvis joined the Army and just before the Beatles broke it big. His hits include Pretty Woman  and Only the Lonely . Also, he is one of my favorite singers so I was pretty excited to read this short biography. I have no problems with the facts as laid out in this biography, although I was very disappointed by the disjointed and sometimes just plain old weird writing style. I have to wonder if this was written by an AI program. Because of the writing style I am going rate this e-book 3 stars out of 5. This e-book can be found on Amazon.com here: ROY ORBISON: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History .

  Published by Christianaudio.com in 2021. Read by Sarah Zimmerman. Duration: 7 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Beth Allison Barr is a professor of medieval and church history at Baylor University. She has written a lot about women in the medieval world. She is also an evangelical Christian and a youth pastor's wife. This puts her in a rather unique position to comment on the role of women in the evangelical church and topics like complementarianism in the more conservative churches. Complementarianism is a church teaching that men and women have very distinct roles in family life, marriage, and the church. These roles are distinct, but of equal value, but men are given leadership roles. In more conservative churches, women are never put into any sort of leadership roles over men. They will not be pastors. They will not lead a board. They won't even teach older boys or men in Sunday school. In some interpretations, they will not teach men or older boys any topic at all. The more...