I have been trying for weeks to figure out what to take and what not to take with me to Uganda, and as a friend of mine said yesterday, less is more. It seems no matter how little I take I’m still doing what I perceive a typical American would do, take too much stuff. So books are my big question mark left. I have several (actually more than several) books that I have been trying to read over the last several years and I would love to take them all with me and finish them on the first plane flight but can’t decide if I will actually read them. Three of these books at top on my list, God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards with the Complete Text of The End for Which God Created the World (yes I know, the title is very long) by John Piper and Jonathan Edwards, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd by David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards, and The Life of God in the Soul of Man by Henry Scougal. I have picked up and read all three, then put down, then picked up again, and so on… for years now.
I know these aren’t your traditional quick reads, and one is quite a bit beyond my comprehension. I have all of them in Kindle eBook for my iPad, paperback, and audiobook but keep going back to the paper bound books because of the depth of their words. This morning I was going through each of these three books thinking about my time in Uganda, our sponsor child, Joanita, who I hope to meet while I’m there, I came across this chapter in The Life of God in the Soul of Man, titled “Religion Better Understood by Actions than Words”. After re-reading that chapter I wanted to share Scougal’s words here today that help remind me why we go. The text is also available in Google Books here.
Religion Better Understood by Actions than by Words
When we have said all that we can, the secret mysteries of a new nature and divine life can never be sufficiently expressed; language and words cannot reach them: nor can they be truly understood but by those that are enkindled within, and awakened unto the sense and relish of spiritual things. There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding.
The power and life of religion may be better expressed in actions than in words’ because actions are more lively things, and do better represent the inward principle whence they proceed; and therefore we may take the best measure of those gracious endowments from the deportment of those in whom they reside; especially as they are perfectly exemplified in the holy life of our blessed Savior; a main part of whose business in this world, was, to teach by his practice what he did require of others, and to make his own conversation an exact resemblance of those unparalleled rules which he prescribed: so that if ever true goodness was visible to mortal eyes, it was then when his presence did beautify and illustrate this lower world.
I know that is kind of a mouth full for only two sentences, and not in the most current English, but Scougal’s words here are pretty incredible. That’s why this book has taken me so long to read. The words are incredible but I have to read each page several times. Once you do, the value is deep and lasting. Why do we go according to Scougal? Because this is what Jesus did and He is our ultimate example to follow. As Scougal says, our actions are better represented by the inward principle they represent. This is to say our actions proceed from where our heart resides, and to me, that’s very telling, and a little scary.
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I love having this conversation with my paper book loving friends, maybe because I am always in the minority when it comes to eBooks over paper books with the IRL friends. Even if you don’t read my post below, go read this comical view of the debate from TheNextWeb called Product Review: Will ‘Paper’ Replace E-Readers?. This is a great look at the debate, which is sure to rage on for years, but digital is gaining ground every day. Amazon even announced last year that Kindle eBooks started outselling paper books, but that’s old news now (see also What Amazon Didn’t Say About eBooks by CNET). I even wrote this: Amazon Kindle 2 iPhone App and the Future of Books? almost two years ago now when the Kindle 2 came out, it’s interesting to see how eBooks have changed since that post.
I do think that the physical paper printing of books will always be with us as long as we have trees left to use. There is value in each platform, but it is hard to deny the future of books is in a digital form, just like analog LP’s made way for MP3′s. There are many today who still swear by vinyl records, saying the sound quality surpasses a Compact Disc (which from what I understand, it does), but LP’s are now a niche in the digital world of music.
The history of an LP is far far less in time than the historical life span of the printed book by some two thousand years or so, so it may take a long long time before we see paper books reduced to the level of vinyl records. Good or bad though, it seems inevitable at some future date that eBooks will far outsell and be the preferred platform to read a book. This two lists below is an extremely small snapshot, it could easily have been a list of 20 plus, but for sake of being long-winded, here are a few.
The Pros About eBook and eReaders
- Price :: It’s almost always cheaper
- Weight :: No matter how many books, they all weigh the same
- Features :: instant searching, highlights, bookmarks, notes, and more
It is almost always the case that eBooks are cheaper than paper copies, sometimes drastically cheaper. This is just the realities of the manufacturing process. Paper is expensive, uses natural resources, and you are taking a digital original (I am guessing no author writes by hand, but all use a computer to write) making it into paper. An eBook you don’t have that conversion.
There are still publishers that just don’t get it, or are overly greedy. I would love to see one give a side by side comparison of profit margins for an eBook over a paper copy that has to make its way into the distribution network. An eBook is overwhelmingly cheaper to produce and distribute than a paper copy, so “most” publishers pass that savings along to their customers. If the eBook is close to the same price, it shouldn’t be. DRM is always trying to rear its ugly head as well.
I can carry 10 books, or 100 books on my iPad 2 and their combined weight is still going to be 1.33 pounds (601 g). This is a bigger deal, at least to me, than it sounds. If I am going on a trip, especially on a plane, I can literally take as many books as I can possibly read, that just isn’t physically possible with paper.
This in an incredible feature of owning an eBook. You have instant access to search all aspects of the book, your notes, highlights, and you even have instant access to a dictionary, Wikipedia search, or even a google search on a selected area (try searching the bible for one single word or phrase by paper). Amazon takes this one step farther and offers all highlights, notes, and bookmarks for each book on your Amazon account at http://kindle.amazon.com/. From there you can access everything associated with each kindle book.
The Pros About Paper Books
- The Physical Smell and Feel of Paper?
- Paper is Art :: it is created only when reading is complete
- Comfort Factor
This seems to be the biggest hang up with those who love paper books, you can’t get that musty smell of the paper and ink with an iPad. I know this smell well. Deb and I owned our own book business for several years (see We are No Longer Selling Books as Amazon Marketplace Sellers) and we had a house filled to the brim with tens of thousands of books. It is a smell that lingers with you for a long time. Personally, I love the smell of solder and computer boards in the morning, but it’s true, you don’t get that connection with nature without the paper.
I understand this one too, but I would think a hand written copy by a scribe would be more art than a bulk made printing press, but yes, you the reader make the book into art as you read the book. If you highlight, underline, scribble, you are free range on the book and when the book is finished, you have a new “work of art” unlike anyone else. Of course if you are one who never highlights or makes notes (and if you are, I don’t get that either), then the book is not art, but just the same book that still sits on a Barnes & Noble shelf.
For some it’s just the comfort, like that of an old slipper. A book, by definition, is paper. If it’s digital, call it an eBook, not a book. Some say it just isn’t the same to curl up with your iPad eBook in front of a warm fire and drift off into the greater beyond of reading. I will say on this point that there is a distraction factor with a digital device that is totally removed by a paper book. Your paper book won’t pop up with a Tweet or news alert while you are in the middle of a deep chapter, and this adds to the comfort level.
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Being the technology type, I had been looking at the Kindle 2 since it was announced and found it very intriguing. Most everyone that looks at the Kindle, 1st or 2nd generation, balks at the price of the device but being a photographer and traditionally having to spend $1,000′s on one single lens, spending $360 on a device that will save me money on the price of books didn’t seem like that much to try it out.
Not that $360 isn’t a lot to spend on the Kindle 2, but I just sold a few lenses out of my camera bag that weren’t used to much and a few days later the Kindle 2 arrived. After using the Kindle 2 for a while I felt like a review of this new piece of technology would be appropriate, but it didn’t end the way I had anticipated.
I will say right off, it is the best, most sophisticated ebook reader (that displays eink as it’s called) and theoretically it can digitize your book collection or library much like the iPod has done for music. If you just want the conclusion, scan down to that section and I will sum it all up for you. Some of you may know that I have a Kindle Screen that was damaged (see Damaged or Defective Kindle 2 Screen) so this was after the replacement had been sent by Amazon.
The Kindle 2 Graded
If you want the short of it, here are my grades for the Kindle 2 on different variables in no particular order.
- Price – [B]
- Size, Weight, Shape – [B]
- Screen – [C-]
- Keyboard – [D]
- Software – [C-]
- Ease of Reading [A-]
- Ease of Searching books [D]
- Availability of Books for the Kindle [B+]
- Price of Books [B-]
- Price of Periodicals [C-]
- Durability [C-]
- Customer Support [A]
- Portability [A]
- Practicality [C]
- Internet Browser / Browsing [F]
- Multi-use Portable Technology Device, i.e. it is a reader, only [D-]
- Highlighting and Taking Notes [C-]
- Compared to Other eBook Devices [A]
- Saving Trees [A+]
- Creating a Digital Library [A]
- Ability to Mimic Reading a Paper Book [D-]
All the point above are not weighted equally of course, but overall, I give the Kindle 2 (not having ever used the Kindle 1 but having used most modern portable decives on the market) a total grade of a “C”.
1. Price at $359 – About Right to Me
This is one of the biggest complaints of the Kindle 2. It costs $359 and since it is only sold by Amazon you can’t really find it for less than that anywhere. You can find a few used on eBay, but none of the Kindle 2 and Amazon only has a few Kindle 1 in the new/used category.
To me, the price is about right for what it does and the competition it has right now. When the iPod first came out it was (and still is) about that price and people couldn’t buy them fast enough. Of course the difference is the Kindle 2 requires that you actually read something. The iPod since it deals with music has a much larger appeal to the 18-28 age range, and they will usually plunk down $350 for just about anything if they want it bad enough.
I would not or do not expect Amazon to lower the price any time soon until the Kindle 3 comes out, and why should they. Amazon is probably making bundles on these Kindles with them priced at $359, and I think the price is about right.
2. Overall Size & Weight – OK, But Could be Bigger
The new Kindle 2 is light years ahead of the Kindle 1 in size and weight. It is about the size in total of a paper back book (not the screen size, the entire device). It is light and thin, but if I was wanting to ready a long book I could have used the Kindle 2 even larger than it is. The thickness is about right but I would love to see one about the size of a piece of paper.
3. The Screen – Can You Say, Touch, Color, and Backlit?
The screen is a 16 color grayscale, matte screen. To me, this was one of the bigger disappointments of the Kindle 2. The screen was to small, it was not in color, it was not a touch screen, and the biggest for me, the screen is not backlit.
Although the font size can be changed, the screen was too small to really be able to read a full page (on paper) on the Kindle 2. I would like to see one page on the Kindle equal one page on the corresponding paper book. Maybe I am jaded by using an iPhone for more than a year now. I want to be able to touch the screen and have it do what I want, not move some cursor around like I’m in DOS and in the same respect, a color screen is pretty much standard on everything today and it just looked old school. The last biggie on the screen was the fact that it wasn’t backlit. I would have preferred to be able to sit in a dark room and read without the need for a reading light.
One last bit on the screen. All of the images are all converted to gray, which in itself is fine, but it lost detail and did not show what I am use to in a high res screen that shows great detail in black and white.
I understand all those things go to battery life, but I would sacrifice a 2 week battery for one that lasts a few days for the above changes on the screen.
4. Keyboard – Needs Some Help
I know I keep going back to the iPhone, but that I the current device I am use to using. The keyboard on the Kindle 2 is a full keyboard, but it works like the crackberry qwerty keyboard’s of old. This is because the keys are very small. I would have liked to see them closer together and much much larger than the small round dots. They were hard for me to use, but it was a full-ish keyboard. All special characters were like a comma, or punctuation, were all on the shift end, which was a pain.
I did like the fact that you could type out comments and notes, but they were hard to get right and easy to mess up.
5. Software Interface – Good, But Not Very Sophisticated
The interface where you actually read the books is good for what it is intended for, but it lacks much of the functionality of today’s handheld devices. It has wireless through Sprint’s 3G network, and I seemed to get a signal everywhere, even where I don’t on my iPhone (which isn’t really saying much). Books downloaded quickly and the newspaper subscriptions were always on the Kindle 2 the next morning when I went to read them (I did the trial for the USA Today).
Reading on the eyes is good, probably because of the grayscale I didn’t like, and you can change the font size so it suits your needs. Taking notes and highlighting on the Kindle 2 is ok, but no where close to perfect. It saves all the notes into one .txt file and to extract the information you have to parse through all the different notes from the other books. It doesn’t separate out notes for specific books but puts everything all in one file. I would have much preferred the file attach to the actual piece I was reading.
Flipping from book to book is a little slow but works well. If you are trying to get back to a specific place in a book it is a little hard to do unless you bookmark the spot. Moving around in the books from place to place is much harder than flipping through the book.
Conclusion
In the title I said the “not-so-normal” review, because in the end, I returned my Kindle to Amazon, twice. I have never been accused of being old school. I will embrace technology and new developments before they are even released, but I still buy all my music on physical CD’s (to burn to my iPhone, iTunes, iPod etc) because there is something you can’t get from a download, the art the artist put into the album. The design of the artwork, the stories they still include in the booklet, silk screening on the CD itself, back cover artwork, and of course the ability to burn without digital rights management crap.
After using the Kindle 2 for about a week, I took it on a trip to South Carolina and while I was on the trip, the screen became damaged or something, but it wasn’t working correctly (see Damaged or Defective Kindle 2 Screen // Photos). After receiving a new one from Amazon, I continued to use the Kindle for a while and finally came to the conclusion that I did not like the Kindle 2 enough to actually keep it.
In the end, it came down to something I totally didn’t expect. I found out that you can not (at least not easily) replicate the actual reading of a book on paper. You smell the pages, you can flip through pages, write in the margins, underline passages and as you do so, you become part of the book. Each book is different. The covers are different, the font size changes, the thickness of the paper, all which is very hard to duplicate in the electronic world and you end up reading all these different books and they all look and feel the same.
As a friend would tell me, it’s not art. The art of reading, and a lot of the time, it is the art of reading in the way the author intended. This says nothing about the Kindle 2 device because it can’t replicate the actual flipping of the pages like you can when you physically hold that book.
If you want to read a book straight through from beginning to end, page after page, the Kindle may be right for you. I want to get lost in time, lost in the pages of paper, ink, and verse, and at least for now, I will stick with the printed book.
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I just finished up Killing Cockroaches on the Kindle and started wondering if I was going to be the first Kindle review of Killing Cockroaches? Of course, you may be wondering why I am holding up a paper copy of Killing Cockroaches but you will just have to wait and read my review of the Kindle coming up for that explanation.
Killing Cockroaches is in a crowded field of church leadership books, written by Tony Morgan from NewSpring Church in Anderson, SC. At the moment, there are so many books on leadership that I was thrilled to see Tony’s book written and presented in a slightly different format than the traditional chapter by chapter method. If you love reading blogs like I do, then you will love this book… basically 131 (if I counted correctly) blog posts rolled into one leadership book, all tied together on an overall theme of how not to waste time doing the things you don’t need to be doing in the first place.
Basically we can waste much of our time each day just walking around killing cockroaches (or putting out fires), or we can choose to use the skills and talents we have been given to use in the most efficient way possible. Tony did several one on one interviews with people in leadership roles in their respective areas which gave you a good sense of how and why other leaders spend their time killing cockroaches as well.
The Little Things about Killing Cockroaches
Some of the other little subtleties I liked about the book were the comic strip of cockroaches running around the book (if you flip through the book like you are trying to make a comic strip move, the cockroaches run around the edges of the book), and the “posts” or chapters were organized in alphabetical order. I also appreciate the “notes” area in the back, that was very helpful, but I would have loved to have a list of just url’s of all the websites Tony listed throughout the book. There were tons of them, and somehow I hadn’t been to a good majority of them before now.
Killing Cockroaches: Kindle vs Paper
There actually were a few differences in reading the paper copy of the book and the e-ink version on the Kindle. Mainly, the thing I liked about the paper version is what I didn’t like about the kindle version. The cockroaches along the side of the book on the Kindle are translated where they show up in the middle of the page along with Tony’s name and the book name. This just became an annoyance because it would split a page where there were only a few sentences on one page and then a graphic of the book name, and a cockroach. This is probably more a Kindle issue than anything else.
Top 10 Highlights from Killing Cockroaches
There were so many little zingers in this book it could be a line by line tweetathon if someone was reading it out loud, but some of the points I took away were:
- Churches that embrace change value some things over others
- change will flow naturally when we empower people to create rather than telling them what to do
- If you’re trying to reach the unreached, remember – your competition isn’t other churches. Instead it’s everything that’s competing for someone’s time and attention
- Being a bit different is an important ingredient to success
- Your leadership will only go as far as the relationships you’ve built… and no further
- some would note that we are not here for or to entertain but it has to be relevant to their lives and enjoyable
- make sure the guests know, we’re glad you decided to join us, we were expecting you, you matter to us and, more importantly, you matter to God
- competition isn’t the church down the street, it’s any other experience your guests have had
- the sacred cows (like church bulletins): We do it because we’ve always done it… are we worshiping our sacred cows or Jesus? Does it still add value?
- before you can move others, you must first be moved
If you are intersted in other reviews from other bloggers, Tony has compiled a good list here, Killing Cockroaches Reviews.
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Last week I traded in a few pieces of camera equipment for the new Kindle to really see if I could just whip through books at lightning speed and to my surprise, after about 2 days of use, I managed to mess up the screen. I am in the middle of doing an in depth review of the Kindle 2 that I will post at a later date, but after having the Kindle 2 for about 2 days, I seems that the screen on the Kindle 2 was damaged beyond a simple fix. The reason for this post was really to show what the customer service representative at Amazon did to fix the problem.
For those who don’t know, I really missed my calling in life to be a product tester. No matter what the product, I can an uncanny way of being able to break the unbreakable and find problems or issues that manufactures somehow seem to miss. I was told that the Kindle 2 was tested for durability and could withstand a drop from a two story building, but 2 days in my backpack managed to screw up the top of the screen.
Once I went through the normal troubleshooting that I knew how to do, I called the customer service number for the Kindle. She walked me through a few other tests, had me “reboot” the system (you can hold the power slider over for 20 seconds and that will initiate a reboot on the Kindle 2). After that (all of which took about 2 minutes total) Amazon told me they would just ship me a new one overnight. No questions asked, they just shipped me a new one. They paid for the shipping to return the old one, and I transferred all my book from the old kindle to the new kindle. It was easy as it possibly could have been.
As for what I did to the Kindle, I have no idea. I did put it in my backpack (in its own case) and perhaps to much pressure what applied to the top of the screen somewhere. I am not sure about the 2 story drop, didn’t try that, but I will be a little more careful with it in the future regardless. I was totally and completely thrilled with Amazon’s customer service on the kindle.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with the practicalities of the Kindle, that will come later, but as far as their customer service goes, it was great. Having also sold on Amazon for years, I can say that all of Amazon’s customers service is geared towards their buying customers (as opposed to their sellers) and they will bend over backwards to provide the best service they can.
You can see the screen issue on the photos below. It covers about an inch from the top with a blank line of gray going across the screen with a slash in the upper left corner. The last two shots are what the screen shot from the damaged kindle looks like (so it is seeing everything correctly under the screen issue) and what the new one looked like when it arrived.
Update May 21, 2010
I thought I would update this post with a few comments since it is still one of the most read posts on my blog. As some have suggested, my Kindle was NOT dropped. I simply put it in my backpack, which also wasn’t dropped, and took it out an hour later and it showed up with the damaged screen.
I did get a free replacement from Amazon, but I returned the replacement within a week for a refund (see my review A Not-So-Normal Kindle 2 Review for my reasons), but one major reason was I knew the “free screen replacement” was only going to last a short time, and it was a one time shot. Amazon did replace the damaged screen, but they said they weren’t going to do it again. Looking back now, more than a year later, it was the best decision and I am not super happy with my iPad.
Update February 12, 2011
As this post still gets heavy traffic and questions, I will say after using and testing the Apple iPad since it came out, I have never had a better ebook reader than the iPad and I am looking forward to seeing the new iPad 2 some time around April. The Kindle App for the iPad is one of the ebook reader apps I use, and although not my favorite, I do use it frequently.
The problem I still have with the Kindle is you basically can’t do anything else with it other than read a book. I can type out notes and highlights in my Kindle app on the iPad and it works great. The one great thing Amazon has done for the Kindle is continue to lower it’s price, but if you have an iPad I’m not sure what use one would have for the Kindle.
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This morning Amazon released the new Kindle iPhone App, or an iPhone eBook reader. Since I do not yet (but probably will soon) have a Kindle the news of the Kindle iPhone app was really intriguing, but I started wondering if the app was putting the horse before the cart. The very first reaction on the Internet was people saying they were disappointed they bought the Kindle and now they can get this on their iPhone. Totally wrong way to look at it altogether. What Amazon did by making an iPhone app for the Kindle was make their product more relevant and more useful than it was last week.
I won’t go through a comparison between the two, there is a great review over on CNET, see Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle’s iPhone app, but one of the great features is being able to read a book between the two devices. It doesn’t come quite as close as Seth Godin’s request in Reinventing the Kindle (part II) to share books between Kindle users, but it comes closer. If Amazon keeps going down this road they will really make the Kindle a breakthrough device.
Breakthrough in the same way the iPod was for music, the Kindle can potentially be for books. Everyone grumbled about the price of the iPod, and it took until the 2nd generation for me to plunk down the money for one, but after a while, people realized that the iPod revolutionized the way we listen to music. There will always be people who want to read on paper, but for many, paper is a hassle, uses trees, and culturally is on the same track and path as Kodak 400 speed print film, but it’s more than just that. Don’t blink, traditional media is going fast, and in some cases pretty much gone.
- Photography – Print Film —> Digital (almost totally complete at this point)
- Music – Vinyl –> Tapes –> CD –> Digital (niche markets for anything non-digital)
- Movies – Film –> Tape –> DVD –> Download (slower but almost there)
- TV – Tube –> Cable –> Satellite –> Streaming Live (computer only is coming)
- Books – Paper –> eBooks / Digital (the slowest of the 4, but catching up)
- Magazines / Newspapers –> Paper –> Digital (totally dying media in paper form)
My wife is currently working on her Master’s degree and last semester she spent something like $300-$400 on books. After the Kindle 2 came out, I started looking at which books she bought were available on the Kindle. About 30-40% of them are currently available, at $9.99-$15. She paid $40-$50 for some of these books which can now be downloaded on the Kindle for $10. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the savings potential for College students all over the world, and seeing that Amazon is working on things like iPhone Apps is only going to make the Kindle more and more relevant in our society’s future.
Sometimes we go kicking and screaming into the future, and change comes with a fight. The Kindle / iPhone app is a great example of a transition of all forms of media to digital, it’s just a question of how long will we hold on to the past print mediums because that is what we are use to today.
Update March 2011
I have since written an update to this post in light of the iPad, which makes eBooks even more appealing, you can read that posts Printed Books vs iPad or Kindle eBooks and the Future of Books
5 Great Thought Provoking Daily Devotionals for the New Year
I started looking around for a new daily devotional for 2012, and I ended up coming across too many. I came across some really good ones I haven’t read yet, but now have always had all intentions to read. This list, to some, may be a little too high church for them, but the wisdom put forth into these devotionals is pretty amazing, written by some pretty amazingly committed Believers.
I will state the obvious that none of these below will take the place of reading the inspired Word, the wisdom placed into God’s own book far outweighs any of the books below, so if there is only time in the day to read one book, for only a short period of time, make it the Bible instead of any of these books below, and I’m sure each of the authors below would agree with that. With that said, the best online Bible reading plans are located on YouVersion, so check those out as well.
The list below is all linked over to the Kindle version on Amazon, but each has a corresponding paper version. I just gave up on trying to have books shipped, the availability, and usually lower cost, of Kindle books just far outweighs the hassle of paper now, to me, for the most part anyway (see Printed Books vs iPad or Kindle eBooks and the Future of Books from back in March, or this I wrote back in 2009).
I decided to choose the “updated version” of this classical devotion since it is better annotated on the Kindle version at this point than the “traditional” version (first published in 1935). I think there is a lot of value in the original language of the traditional version, but having read neither in full, I decided to go with one that has a little easier language to start. Oswald Chambers was gifted with extracting the essence of biblical principles and condensing them into potent, thought-provoking, and life-changing devotions.
They don’t take a lot of time to read, but they can infuse you with the timeless truths of the Bible. In this edition of My Utmost for His Highest, you get updated-language daily devotionals that have become an enduring favorite because Oswald Chambers used his spiritual gifts so wisely and generously. Compiled from lectures given at the Bible Training College in London, to nightly talks in an Egyptian YMCA during World War I, My Utmost for His Highest will lend a powerful spiritual dimension to your walk with God. (some excerpts via Amazon)
The Upper Room is a publication that is, in part, produced by the United Methodist Church. The Upper Room is a global ministry, which is technically interdenominational, dedicated to supporting the spiritual formation of Christians seeking to know and experience God more fully. While they now produce far more than The Upper Room devotional, this devotional publication has stood the test of time more so than many other devotionals. For more information about their ministry you can visit them at upperroom.org.
This devotional is a fascinating find to me. It is a publication that C.S. Lewis never put together himself, but editors have taken pieces of his writings to place them in one daily reader. This book of daily readings, culled from C.S. Lewis’s major nonfiction writings like The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Miracles and A Grief Observed, might be called the thinking Christian’s devotional: it is deeper and meatier than most other devotionals on the market.
With 366 entries (including one for Leap Year) that are typically one or two paragraphs each, Klein has managed to distill some of the most memorable passages from Lewis’s famous corpus. Interestingly, she includes a bit of Lewis trivia for each day of the year, and often pairs the reading with the biographical information: for example, we learn that on March 21, 1957, Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham, and the entry for that day is about their marriage. Three separate indices list the sources by book, by day and by selection title or theme. (some excerpts via Amazon)
This is the classical Bonhoeffer daily reader. Bonhoeffer put together this set of devotionals upon the closing of his seminary, Finkenwalde, when it was declared illegal and closed by the German Gestapo. The treatise contains Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about the nature of Christian community based on the common life that he and his seminarians experienced at the seminary and in the “Brother’s House” there. Bonhoeffer completed the writing of Life Together in 1938. Prayerbook of the Bible is a classic of Christian spirituality. In this theological interpretation of the Psalms, Bonhoeffer describes the moods of an individual’s relationship with God and also the turns of love and heartbreak, of joy and sorrow, that are themselves the Christian community’s path to God. (some excerpts above are from Amazon)
This collection of inspirational writings from Dietrich Bonhoeffer is drawn from his many works and presented here as a series of daily meditations to last throughout the year. Organized under monthly themes, these prayers, sermons, meditations, letters, and notes offer readers a new glimpse at how Bonhoeffer understood the meaning of faith and discipleship. Featuring selections from classic works such as The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison, this set of writings follows the church year, making it ideal for year-long devotional use by readers seeking to be challenged and enlightened by Bonhoeffer’s call to find God at the center of their lives. (some excerpts via Amazon)
I guess this is where it gets really high church, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of value in this book. This book, especially this highly annotated copy on Kindle, provides everything from daily prayers to events on the Christian calendar. The Kindle TOC (table of contents) in this book is so extensive, making it quite an impressive Kindle book, and it’s price can’t be beat at only $2.99.
This is the Episcopal version of the Catholic Missal (which is absent on Amazon Kindle in the same version as above), and the book that the Episcopal Church uses in its services. I have only recently been introduced to this book, and it has an amazing amount of wisdom. This Kindle version contains both versions from 1979 and 1789, which contains The Book of Common Prayer, Administration of the Sacraments, Other Rites, Ceremonies of the Church, and The Psalter or Psalms of David. Worth the read no matter what your denomination.
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