Tedd Tripp

Shepherding a Child’s Heart isn’t a bad book. It doesn’t contain much that you wouldn’t find in lots of other books with similar titles, but it doesn’t contain anything that made me sorry I read it.

Madeleine L’Engle

Madeleine L’Engle is one of the many authors whom I greatly respect while not quite believing.

A Wrinkle in Time is presented as a children’s books, in that it involves children traveling through space and time to battle evil, but it’s really a treatise. As is its sequel, A Wind in the Door, and its sequel, The Swiftly Tilting Planet. The third of the series is by far the most intriguing on a plot level, but the basic universalist tilt comes through the entire series.

Love Letters, a stream-of-consciousness weaving together of three stories centered around the meaning of romantic and divine love, starts slowly, very slowly, but picks up toward the end.

Walking on Water is a tone-based argument on the need and method of Christian art. It’s not always inspiring, but it includes some great quotes.

Looking over these brief memories, it would seem that I don’t care much for Ms. L’Engle. That’s far from true. I’ve enjoyed every book of hers I’ve read. Yet, at the same time, every one has left me a little disappointed. Maybe it’s that thy carry hints of the great, “sweep you away” feeling of the Lewis and Tolkien myths, while mired in the realism of white suburban women. Maybe it’s that they bring a whiff of divinie mercy, without any room for justice. But whatever the case, I’ve left every book thankful I’ve read it, yet wanting something more.

John Eldridge and Staci Eldridge

John Eldridge is a phenomenon.

I had a friend who raved about The Sacred Romance, and I gave it a shot. Verdict: the best parts were ripped off C.S. Lewis; nothing else seemed that great.

Then, a few years later, every Christian evangelical man I met seemed to have had his life recently changed by Wild at Heart.

With great reluctance, I read it, and it hit me, too. I’d never found another author who so well described the frustrations evangelicalism imposed on masculinity. (I didn’t notice at the time, but they’re basically the same frustrations you’ll find described by Tolstoy, Falludi, and Wolfe; the problem isn’t evangelicalism vs. men, it’s just men.)

It hit me hard, and led to a lot of great talks.

A month or so later, though, when I tried to encourage myself by reconstructing his arguments, the satisfaction lessened. There were some deep problems in his theology that I’d missed because his examples were so relevant, as though a physician had a gift for diagnosis, but no ability in epidemiology or treatment.

The problem came to the forefront in Waking the Dead: at a fundamental level, Eldridge seems to believe that God is the best of gods, but not necessarily God. He makes a big deal of “sovereign” really meaning “Lord of the Angel Armies!”, as though a it would be better to be a commando than to have your finger the nuclear hot button. It’s as if he doesn’t realize that a qualitative difference appears, one that requires the abandonment of “romance”, when you switch the argument from whether Batman could beat Superman to whether Superman could beat God.

I decided Walking the Dead would be the end of my reading of Eldridge.

But then we were at an isolation camping for debriefing and recovery, and they had Captivating sitting there, and I gave it another chance.

Staci Eldridge helped out on this re-imagining of Wild at Heart from a female point of view. If you’ve read Wild at Heart, imagine the same outline, run through a Search/Replace program that switched “wild” for “beautiful” and Braveheart for Steele Magnolias, and you’ll have the basic idea. My wife said it was a stretch.

It would be easy to focus on the weaknesses of his work and trash him, but he really was onto something with Wild at Heart. If only he’d turn that passion toward building up God instead of building up some glorified dirt and ribs.

Gary Smalley

In For Better or For Best and If Only He Knew, Gary Smalley attempts to tell women how to understand men and men how to understand women. He says, for example, that “sex starts in the kitchen”. This is an attempt to motivate men to help their wives with housework. He says that all significant lasting problems in a marriage are the fault of the husband. This is an attempt to motivate men to take leadership. He says that men need to have sex to feel complete. This is an attempt to state the obvious.

Now any idiot with testicles knows that while sex may, on fortunate occasions, occur in the kitchen, it doesn’t start in any place or list of procedures that can be written on a page. The same idiots know that, while they have not taken full responsibility for their problems, their wives are also sinners. And any woman who does not know that men, Christian or not, want sex, should just turn on TV for ten minutes.

This is not to say his books are worthless. It’s to say that they may be worse than worthless.

I can’t help but wonder if every man who read his books spent time helping his wife around the house and listening to her problems, and if every woman who read his books spent the same time having sex with her husband, the marriages might be even better.

Ed Wheat

I’m not sure if this market still exists, but there was once a segment of the American population that loved God, and loved the Bible, and probably voted Republican, and bought books, and, evidently, didn’t know how to have sex.

They’re the people who formed a market not only for Intended for Pleasure, but for the “simplified” sequel, Love Life for Every Married Couple.

I was one of that population when I read those books—except I didn’t vote because I was eight or nine years old, and I didn’t buy the books because they were in the church library.

Both books were probably considered daring by that segment of the population because they used words like “penis”, and they even included diagrams of positions. Think of it as Joy of Sex for monogamous couples who believed that, though a picture may be worth a thousand words, a Bible verse is worth a couple dozen color pictures.

It’s hard to know who I’d recommend those books for. I don’t think I think that 21^st-century America has that many adult, married, holy virgins.

James P. Giles

The best thing about Love: fulfilling the ultimate quest is that it contains true information. The second best thing is that it’s short.

William F. Harley, Jr.

So, marriage works on the basis of “love accounts”. These are like bank accounts. If you give out a lot and don’t get any back, your love account will diminish, and you’ll be unhappy. Couples should try to keep each other’s love accounts full.

He expands for a hundred and fifty pages or so in His Needs, Her Needs. Cute examples are included.

James Dobson

The last time I was in Colorado Springs, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Focus on your own damn family.” I laughed. Then I felt a little bad about laughing. Then I didn’t.

Hopefully, that information will give enough insight into possible bias in my review of Preparing for Adolescence and Bringing Up Boys.

Preparing for Adolescence had some good stuff. I read it when I was, what, 12? 13? Maybe a little too late to “prepare”. But I remember leaving it a little more afraid of what would happen to my body and my faith during the next few years, which I think was one of Dobson’s goals. I also remember thinking that the single paragraph describing sexual intercourse used the word “friction” far too often to explain the prevalence and import of this activity.

I was given Bringing Up Boys just after the birth of my first son, and I can say with absolutely no hesitancy that it is an absolutely terrible book, and my life would be far richer if I had spent six or seven hours looking at my son instead of reading the book.

It’s a dishonor to Jesus that writers who claim his name exhibit such intense fear. Well over half of the book is devoted to clarifying the dangers 20^th-century American culture poses to the development of godly men. It raised in me a fully rational fear of potentially-godly men wasting their lives reading paranoid ravings.

I’ll hope that a single example will suffice. In an attempt to prove that modern society is biased against men (not just godly men, but men), Dobson spends several hundred words analyzing the film, The Runaway Bride. I found this interesting because I had never seen the film. Neither had anyone I knew. I sent out a couple hundred emails, and couldn’t find anyone who had seen it. I checked a couple film-review websites, and they all pronounced Runaway a flop. So the obvious question is whether The Runaway Bride really represents American cultural values.

Assuming that terrible films no one watches should not be taken to represent the viewpoint of 300,000,000 people, I would question the wisdom of devoting several pages of a book to The Runaway Bride. Since Dobson obviously chose to do so, the questions arise of whether he is really in touch with American society, and whether his analysis should be taken seriously.