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Book Reviews

Unreasonable People

Fred Smith is not an unreasonable person despite the title of this post. I have invited Fred to be my first guest blogger in years because I love his quirky sense of humor, balanced perspective on cultural shifts, and genuine love for the unreasonable people who change the world. Plus he’s a great writer.

I met Fred at The Gathering, an annual conference focused on faith-based philanthropy. Fred is the founder of The Gathering and until just recently its President. Fred is a graduate of Denver University and Harvard Divinity School. He is the co-founder of Leadership Network with …

Book Reviews,

How to Pray, by Pete Greig

How to Pray is a great book about prayer. It’s simple, approachable, and filled with engaging stories. If you struggle with prayer (as I often do) this is an encouraging book.

On a personal note, Pete likes to say he and I met in a bar in Hawaii almost a decade ago (more or less true, though I remember it as a restaurant). We immediately hit it off. Since then we have prayed together in Norman era churches and drank wine with friends as we watched a California sunset. Just last week he and his wife Sammy joined …

Book Reviews,

Shrewd Samaritan

My latest favorite book is Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor by Bruce Wydick. This book so impressed me I bought a dozen copies and gave them to people who should read it. And who should read it? Anyone working in poverty alleviation, anyone giving to charitable organizations, and anyone interested in how to measure impact.

Reading this book was like a breath of fresh air. Faith based but not preachy, practical but compassionate, and thoughtful without being academic. If you read this blog then you know a book that focuses on how to …

Book Reviews, Leadership,

The Advantage

On a recent trip to Belize with the PathLight board, one of the board members suggested I read The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. Most of Lencioni’s books are in my library but for whatever reason this one got past me.

My mistake. This might be his best ever.

The subtitle of the book sums it up nicely, “Why organizational health trumps everything else in business.” Think about that for a moment — Lencioni is saying organizational health trumps strategy, product, marketing, service, hard work and talent.

Anyone who has run any kind of organization will intuitively sense the truth in …

Book Reviews,

Love Your Enemies

We live in an age of contempt. Whatever your perspective politically or socially, you know people who practice contempt for their enemies. Even simply calling them “enemies” speaks to the hyperbole we use, as if people we disagree with are to be conquered, not neighbors and friends to be loved.

Into this sad state of affairs enters Arthur Brooks and his amazing new book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. It’s been a long time since I gave a book front page on this blog, but this one is well worth …

Belize, Book Reviews, PathLight,

Rooting for Rivals

Rooting for Rivals by Peter Greer and Chris Horst is one of those books all of us in ministry need to read. The premise of the book is simple: when nonprofit groups work collaboratively, generously, and across organizational boundaries, putting aside rivalry, great things can then transpire. All of us who work in the nonprofit world know how obvious this is, but we also know it should be practiced more frequently. I’m glad Peter and Chris finally wrote what we all needed to hear.

Despite the lovey-dovey image of the nonprofit world, it can sometimes be as ruthless as the …

Book Reviews,

Everybody Always

Everybody Always is the new book by Bob Goff, and I gotta tell you it’s exceptional. Bob had a runaway hit with his first book Love Does, but I worried for my friend because a lot of second books often disappoint. I should have known better — Bob doesn’t do anything halfway, and Everybody Always is fantastic.

Of course, it’s not actually his second book, as he explains at the beginning of the book. His second book is somewhere on a hard drive inside a stolen laptop computer that Bob failed to backup. Oops. But perhaps that’s for the …

Book Reviews,

Zeal Mixed With Theology

In his biography of the Apostle Paul, N.T. Wright emphasized zeal and theology in a way that … well, in a way that worked. There are a lot of books about Paul’s theology, but not many well written biographies. Leave it to N.T. Wright to author a biography about a intellectual from 2000 years ago and make it engaging!

If theology isn’t your thing, I still think you’d enjoy this book. The author takes clues from Paul’s writing as well as from early Church historians to blend together a fascinating profile of the man who did more to spread …