Skip to main content

My Review of "Daring to Hope"

Katie Davis Majors' Daring to Hope: Find God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful tells beautiful stories about the triumphs and tragedies Majors faced as an adoptive mom and missionary in Uganda.

After her adopted daughter's biological mother took the child back, Majors questioned God as she pleaded for him to bring her daughter home.  God did not give her the answer she desired, and for the first time in her life, she wondered whether God was good.

From there, Majors embarked on a journey of doubt and loss that brought her to a place of hope and understanding.  While serving a disease- and poverty-stricken community in Uganda by volunteering at a hospital and eventually starting Amazima Ministries, Majors felt helpless watching many of the people she cared for -- including friends and their children -- suffer and sometimes die in her home.

Pondering these events, she comes to the realization that God is good, gracious, near, faithful, and strong.  The book is both filled with sadness while simultaneously written with the faithful courage that itself encourages readers, with love as the driving force behind hope.  Majors tackles her doubt about her faith boldly, and her thoughts can serve as a reminder that God "breathed life into us so that we could breathe life into others".

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 "Inside the Criminal Mind"

Samenow's Inside the Criminal Mind is an odd book to review.  Samenow, a research psychologist, says criminal behavior is 100% voluntary.  It is a product of disordered thought patterns that are almost entirely congenital.  Poverty doesn't cause crime, Samenow claims.  Nor do bad parenting, peer pressure, drug use, or any of the other "standard excuses".  Some kids are born anti-authoritarian thrill seekers and will remain so pretty much no matter what.  The only hope is to get criminals to intensively examine their thought patterns, and change them through sheer force of will. Originally written in 1984, I have to wonder:  Is this book merely a product of its time?  That is, does it represent the best of the cultural thinking that went into personal responsibility and individualism that was so rampant in America in the mid-1980s? Because, let's be honest:  Inside the Criminal Mind has a glaring problem.  To quote another 19...

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...