DWD's Reviews

  Published in September of 2020 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Sean Patrick Hopkins and David French. Duration; 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. David French is, like me, a Never Trump Republican, which means he is a man without a party right now. French starts Divided We Fall with some observations that rang very true to me. For example, he noted that while he was still a part of the two party system, he didn't really think about the automatic intensely negative reaction both sides have to the other side's proposals. The other side isn't just misinformed, they are evil. They are not just mistaken, they are trying to overthrow America and all of its institutions. They want to murder us in our sleep by taking away our rights. They HATE us. The author It doesn't matter which side is the "they" and which side is the "us" - it is the same argument, it is a dangerous pattern and it threatens to tear the country apart as we self-segregate into communities t...

Published in January of 2016 by HarperAudio. Read by Tristan Morris. Duration: 10 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen Prothero takes a look at American history in Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars . Culture wars, for Prothero, are more than the typical left-right discussion  - they are a left-right discussion with serious religious overtones. Prothero's thesis is that the major debates in American history have been those types of debates. He looks at 5 areas: 1) The fight over who would run the country after George Washington - the John Adams (1735-1826) inheritors of the Calvinistic Puritans (John Adams) or those with a vaguely defined faith (Thomas Jefferson); 2) Catholics vs. Protestants; 3) Everyone vs. Mormons; 4) Fundamentalism vs. Modernism as commonly typified by the Scopes Monkey Trial (which only gets a passing mention in this book); 5) Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority types vs. abortion, gay marriage, the Equal Rights Amendment and more. While his discus...

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio. Read by the author, Rob Schenck. Duration: 11 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. In Costly Grace , Rob Schenck tells the story of his life as a story of three conversions. His first conversion was a conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a teenager. Soon after graduating high school, he married and began to work to his certification to join the ministry. He first worked in a shelter for junkies but he found that to be a little too dangerous for his wife. Plus, he longed for something with a larger impact. He became a pastor with a church but still felt that wasn't enough. He participated in joint missions in Mexico to help those that live in the garbage dumps and scrounge them for food and recyclables. After one of his trips he found that his twin brother (also a pastor) had become involved in Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion movement that encouraged protesters to block the entrances to abortion clinics and use non-violent resistance to stop w...

  Up and Down throughout the book Published in 2006 by Hudson Street Press Stine comments on any number of popular culture items, including tobacco, abortion, God in public schools, baseball, Las Vegas, banning guns, bumper stickers and Wal-Mart. Each little rant comes in short chapters averaging around 4 pages each. Now, my review: I wanted to love this book (since I am  the exact target for this book: a Christian, a conservative and I am a proud resident of Indiana - a red state since LBJ in 1964 with the exception of Barack Obama in 2008) but I could barely get myself to like it. Brad Stine First and foremost, I quickly grew tired of the publisher's decision to pull little tidbits out of the text and highlight them with a box right next to the text that contains the exact same sentence? What was the point of that? Secondly, Stine blames everything in the world on liberals (even for bumps in the road). He assumes that liberal automatically mea...