Jason Albertson

I took a chance on an audiobook this year.  It’s been a year without much slack, and leisure reading has been hard to come by, so I’ve been listening to more audiobooks while I work around the house. This one was a recommendation from Hoopla , and I gave it a try: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. From the description, I thought it would be a funky story about time travel. Instead, it was a tragic and often funny story about how Alzheimer’s disease affects individuals and societies, and I think it has something to say about this week’s kerfuffle over the US Senate’s dress code. Time Shelter Time Shelter is a Bulgarian novel, published in 2020 in Bulgarian then translated into English in 2022. The narrator’s relationship with a mysterious friend, Gaustine, is the core around which the story develops.  Gaustine pulls the narrator into a business venture: he is developing a clinic for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. He wants to provide them with the greatest possible comfor...

Mockingbird  is a young adult novel by Kathryn Erskine published in 2010. My wife has been doing ongoing research and review of young adult literature to help develop her middle school classroom library, and she checked out Mockingbird as part of a batch from the public library. It's a story about a 5th-grade girl, Caitlin. She's on the autistic spectrum. Her older brother, a teacher and another student have just been killed in a school shooting. Her circumstances aren't ideal. Her single dad is out of commission, his own burdens heavy, leaving her to figure out grief on her own. Caitlin's school counselor helps, teaching her about the power of empathy and friendship by helping her befriend a younger student who's sad. His mom has died recently--she was the teacher killed in the school shooting. She determines to find closure for herself, her dad and her new little friend. And she does. Her brother had started an eagle scout project. Her dad covered it ...

I like to read young adult fiction. As literature goes, it's not demanding, and it lets me get my mind off study and explore new directions. Recently, I read through the  His Dark Materials  trilogy. You may have run across reviews/comments on that series before, and I can confirm, it does present a view of God and the universe that runs completely contrary to Scripture. More on that another time, probably. However, as I read, I was struck by a beautiful theme in the books that's worth reflecting on: the incurable wound. Fig. 1, Two Severed Fingers In the second book, Will, one of the characters, must retrieve the subtle knife. To do so, he must fight for it, and in the course of the fight two of his fingers are cut clean off. In a gut-wrenching and fantastic turn of phrase, the author describes the fingers lying on the floor like a hideous, bloody quotation mark. The former keeper of the knife tells him that this was no accident: every keeper of the knife loses the same two...

Children's literature has always been a point of interest for me. It can offer scope for metaphor and makes for straightforward communication of ideology.  I got a chance to read  A Wrinkle in Time  this week, and it didn't disappoint me. I had read somewhere (and I can't recall exactly where, now) that it may be seen as a sort of counterpoint to C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Where Narnia had a theology and cosmology very similar to that described in the Bible, the ​Wrinkle universe does not. This is most plainly shown when one of the mentor characters is introducing the main characters, Meg, and her brother and a friend, to the cosmic struggle of the universe: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5), but the darkness is constantly trying. The mentor character identifies a list of figures who are engaged in the fight against the darkness on the planet Earth (as distinct from innumerable other planets). The list inclu...

I read this short account of conversion to and from Reformed theology on a colleague's recommendation. I found Fischer to write engagingly. He uses metaphors throughout in compelling ways. As the title indicates, this is the story of a personal journey of belief. Thus, as  Kevin DeYoung notes , it's extremely light on exegesis and substantive, nuanced interaction with the Calvinist positions Fischer finds inadequate. As a Wesleyan-Arminian, Fischer's objections to Calvinism echo some I've felt and heard, but his lack of methodical engagement with key arguments would likely be frustrating to a Calvinist reader.  The primary problem Fischer encountered in Calvinism is the reprehensible nature of God's actions. He acknowledges God's transcendence and consequential inscrutability, but argues that if God's goodness encompasses creating individuals and predestining them for Hell, then God's definition of goodness is apparently meaningless to humans. If God...