Read this Book!
some InterVarsity Missions Department staff picksIf you can only read one book this fall, what should it be? Glad you asked! Here in the InterVarsity Missions Department, we are a bookish set. Here are a few of our picks for the fall.
Matthew Gibbins, InterVarsity Canada
Race Against Time by Stephen Lewis
Having spent much of his career in the inner circle at the United Nations, Stephen Lewis of Canada is well-qualified to expound on the AIDS crisis in Africa. The current miserable state of affairs didn’t simply fall out of the sky full-grown; there is a story to it, and people and human decisions—political and personal alike—made it happen. Lewis also shows how the United Nations works (and doesn’t work) at the operational level.
Jim Friedrichs, InterVarsity Link
Greg Mortenson was climbing the K2, the highest mountain in Pakistan, when he suffered an illness and was nursed back to health by local villagers. Humbled by the hospitality of these dirt-poor tribal peoples, he vowed to return and build them a school. A decade and dozens of schools later, he is still going strong. This is not Christian missions. I’m not sure where the author stands relative to faith. There are some spiritually iffy moments, as he struggles to accommodate local culture and its Islamic context. But it is an incredible story of an outsider learning to live with, and serve, a people very unlike himself.
Diane Eggleston, Urbana 06 Associate Registrar
The Universe Next Door by James Sire
If I could do my college years all over again, I’d start with this book. In a nutshell, this catalog of worldviews will help you think about—and understand—the people you are living with, and what makes them tick at the deepest level. Worldviews and habits really get cemented in college, and relationships are so much easier on campus than in the years beyond, when life and children make it harder to have deep relationships.
Helyn Luisi-Mills, Global Projects
Sixty years after first appearing, Native Son has not lost its emotional force, even as the social context has changed and changed again. It is a novel about race, gender and power. It is a book of big ideas—a must-read for people who like big ideas. Bigger Thomas becomes simultaneously a Christ-figure, drawing all of America’s racial hatred onto his black body; and at the same time he is a monster and a psychotic. The nature and nurture question leaps out of these pages: did racism make Bigger what he became? If so, why is his closest family relatively stable?
Lucy Meade, Urbana 06 Program
Voice of Jesus by Gordon Smith
Jesus speaks to his followers, but we don’t always listen. Sometimes, the problem is as simple as not knowing how. But learning to hear Jesus’ voice is crucial if we wish our character to be changed. Gordon Smith manages to be practical without being overly how-to-ish. He approaches the topic as a learned skill – listening to the Holy Spirit through scripture and prayer, and allowing God’s voice to shape our minute choices. It’s about hearing and responding in wisdom.
Paul Grant, Editor, Urbana.org
This short novel by the Nobel prize-winning German author has caused quite a stir in its homeland. The topic is the suffering of German citizens during World War II. Crabwalk is a fictionalized version of a true event: the sinking of a ship carrying thousands of refugees by a Russian submarine in January 1945. The disaster was not a war crime, because the Wilhelm Gustloff was no civilian ship. It was a warship, but it was on a mission to save East Prussian Germans from the Soviets' scorched-earth campaign on the Eastern front. German suffering in WWII was just as real as Allied suffering. Right and wrong doesn't change that. The Nazis were wrong, but Grass argues that including Germans among the victims of the war is not the same as arguing the right and wrong of the war itself.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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