Reviews

Some years ago, I stumbled across Aaron Mahnke’s podcast Cabinet of Curiosities and immediately began devouring it. I enjoyed its bite-sized content, the narrator’s punny twists, and the subjects were genuinely,…

In The Narrow Path, Villodas takes us into a deeper, but super practical, dive of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Chapter by chapter, we are invited to more closely examine the…

“For better or worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. We say those words and mean them. Until we don’t. It turns out, given the right…

Trueman’s latest release is more accurately a re-working of his previous title The Creedal Imperative. Having not read the previous work, I was drawn to this title because I grew…

Furtick’s newest release offers six mindsets meant to help you realize and become who you were created by God to be. Each of the mindsets is further accompanied by a…

As I cracked open Jennie Allen’s Untangle Your Emotions, I was hopeful for some guidance in navigating through the chaotic, knotted-up ball that describes our feelings. Overall, her book offers some great, general advice. Feel your feelings before you attempt to simply fix your feelings. We were created to feel, and so our feelings can be gifts from God Himself. Her acknowledgment that we are all feelers was also deeply appreciated. (I always cringe when someone says they’re not emotional. No, we all have emotions even if we’re not all expressive in the same ways.) Her attempt to remind the Church that emotions in and of themselves need not be sin—it is what we do with our emotions that can lead to sin—is a poignant truth we need to acknowledge. It cannot suffice to simply tell someone, “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way,” and leave it at that. At best, it’s unhelpful, and at worst, it’s even more harmful. Particularly helpful was the second section of her book where she framed an approach to notice, name, feel, share, and choose our emotions as a method to untangle them. I found the chapter The Vocabulary of Emotion (naming your emotions) especially helpful, as she named the big four emotions and their secondary counterparts.

Saint Maximus, back in the seventh century, acknowledged, “A person who is simply a man of faith is [not] a disciple.” John Mark Comer frames the same axiom with the question: are you a Christian or are you a disciple? If your immediate response to that question is, “Are those not the same things?,” then Comer’s Practicing the Way is the exact book for you to read.