Deus Misereatur

  I would sit enthralled as the old Colonel would pace the floor telling stories of serving under General Patton in WW II. The commandant of our High School JROTC was striving to get us young adolescents to think bigger than just their hormones and hungers. To do this he recalled life experiences that drew from others long gone to teach us leadership values. Os Guinness, author or editor of over thirty-five books and founder of Trinity Forum, does something similar in his newly published 128-page softback “Signals of Transcendence: Listening to the Promptings of Life”. Guinness retells the fascinating stories of ten people who were tripped up by “signals of transcendence” in their lives, those “arresting and intriguing experiences that both capture our attention and call for further explanation” (1). This delightful manual is the type of work that is easily digestible by teens and twenties and on to those in retirement.   Guinness recounts an abbreviated version of the liv...

  The Magna Carta of Humanity Sometimes it takes non-American eyes to see America well. Os Guinness, born in China and expelled by the Chinese Revolution in 1951, prolific author, social critic, senior fellow at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and founder of the Trinity Forum, has a pair of those eyes, and shares his observations regularly. His most recent survey and evaluation has come forth in his new 288-page hardback "The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom". This densely argued dossier  is a valuable excursion through history, political philosophy, economics, Bible, theology, social analysis, as well as the "is" and "ought to be". This is an adult manuscript that forms readers into citizens, and citizens into neighbors. Guinness picks up his theme from a previous work distinguishing between the French Revolution (1789) and the American War of Independence (1776). He chronicles the rise of five...

Carpe Diem Redeemed: Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times by Os Guinness My rating: 5 of 5 stars On the other side of mid-life I am feeling time racing by me like a bullet train into the sunset. I think of it regularly. I’ve already spent 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and retired, and now I’ve spent 20 years in Christian ministry, and my head is reeling a bit from the speed of it all! In many ways Os Guinness, prolific author, insightful social diagnostician, and one-time guest scholar and senior fellow of numerous institutions, has provided the public a valuable and venerable dossier built from his experiences and perceptions. “Carpe Diem Redeemed: Seizing the Day, Discerning the times” is a 176 page sobering hardback reminding readers that each of our lives is short and, realistically, will barely make a ripple in the cosmic pond. Further, that the sun doesn’t rise or set around our star. And yet, in spite of the brevity, we have the opportunity to do our part; “we humans are s...

Last Call for Liberty by Os Guinness My rating: 5 of 5 stars Over the past five or six years I have been puzzled and concerned at a change that has come over American assumptions and actions. That change seems to be a shift from a position of "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent." Make an accusation and the accused is automatically declared guilty by many media moguls, cyber-gurus, podcast pontificators, as well as every Tammy, Dionne, and Henrietta on social media certain of their own self-assured rightness. The accusation is enough and no amount of provable innocence can be found to overcome the attribution. Then it dawned on me earlier this year: the Reign of Terror in France and the Great Terror in Russia followed similar paths. So, in an odd way, I was glad to read a new 336 page dense hardback, "Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom has Become Its Greatest Threat" penned by accomplished author, fou...

Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion by Os Guinness My rating: 5 of 5 stars Slick spin and polished patois throb and thud their way through every aspect of American society. Whether it’s left or right, liberal or conservative, revisionist or traditionalist, each group has its own particular guild-talk and encoded lingo that fulfills and fortifies their respective self-perceptions. On top of this, much of our communication has become self-serving and self-absorbed, as we post and present and publish our blogs, statuses, thoughts and tweets. As all of this self-important and self-fulfilling hype clouds our associations, “social” media and society what, then, happens to the Gospel? Increasingly it falls into the trap of just being another slice of profile-raising that craves all the “Likes” it can garner. In “Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion” Os Guinness, author, editor, and founder and past senior fellow of the Trinity Forum, has comp...

Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times Os Guinness InterVarsity Press  PO Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515  www.ivpress.com ISBN: 978-0-8308-3671-0; $16.00; July 2014 4 Stars out of 5 Re-ignited Resolution Some years back a fellow church leader quipped to me, “It feels like we are standing alone facing a spiritual tsunami!” It was a poignant statement, since it was just after the December 2004 tidal wave that hit Malaysia. His point was made. In the Christian Church in North America and throughout the West, on the left and the right, amongst progressives and pedants, it appears that more and more churches, ecclesiastical leaders and denominations have slipped their dock lines and drifted away from their moorings. On top of this, the social and political temperature has become increasingly frigid toward Christianity and Christian mores; with civil leaders, educators, mass media and health professionals progressively throwing overboard...