My Review of "Oil Painting Essentials"

Gregg Kreutz's Oil Painting Essentials: Mastering Portraits, Figures, Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Interiors offers step-by-step practical advice on creating beautiful and lasting paintings -- everything from setting up a still-life scene to wrapping up the painting process.

Whether you are a brand new painter, have been painting for years or just like to look at great art, this is the book for you.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

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My Review of "Radical Spirit"

Joan Chittister's Radical Spirit: 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life continues her literary tradition of making Benedictine spirituality accessible for new generations. I read her Distilled from the Daily several years ago and found her spiritual wisdom deep and transformative. In Radical Spirit Chittister focuses on the tough "spiritual hinge" of Benedict's Rule: The 12 steps of humility. Through her judicious use of spiritual parables from around the world and events from her own life, Chittister engages readers with narrative and humor, drawing them down a path to self-revelation and spiritual grounding. These thoughtfully choreographed chapters address the individual and offer an antidote to contemporary trends where "demagoguery is the new political brand, where narcissism is too often misunderstood to be leadership." Chittister writes that humility is the corrective to dangerous grandiosity, which "in religion ... makes i...

My Review of "Come as You Aren't"

Come as You Aren't: A Role-Playing Game for Adventurous Couples is a simple role-playing kit for couples who want to explore and experiment in ways to seduce one another that they simply wouldn't have imagined otherwise. The set is meant to offer one partner who draws a Who, a What, and a Where card at random and places them in an envelope for the other partner. From there, it's up to them to enact the scenarios as they see fit. The instructions are printed on the back cover of the box and the deck comes with a few blank cards for couples to customize. This is a fun little gift for couples -- and just in time for the holidays. I received a free copy of this game from the Blogging for Books review program in exchange for my honest review here.

My Review of "Misfit Faith"

Jason Stellman's Misfit Faith: Confessions of a Drunk Ex-Pastor was not quite the book I had expected it to be. It was so much better! Jason Stellman was a Presbyterian pastor, but he became a Roman Catholic. I expected Misfit Faith to be, therefore, a semi-autobiographical work of Catholic apologetics. I read of Scott Hahn's mentorship of Stellman, and expected Misfit Faith to be a new, milder version of Hahn's scholarship. But I did not see any defense of Peter being the first pope in Misfit Faith , or any criticism of Sola Scriptura, or an explanation and defense of the Catholic understanding of justification. Instead, I read the story of Stellman's own spiritual journey. From the opening confession that Stellman had flirted with Christian universalism, I knew this wasn't going to be a Catholic apologetic. I wouldn't even characterize Misfit Faith as an apologetic at all. Because if there's one thing Stellman isn't sure on...

The Mrs. & the Minister

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