How to Spend Next Weekend: Friday evening: Read the first chapters of Genesis, with a good commentary or two at hand. Saturday: After breakfast, spend a couple of hours with Karl Giberson's Saving Darwin, then work in the garden. Catch a matinee of Ben Stein's Expelled at the multiplex. Sunday: After church, finish Saving Darwin. Conclude the day with Psalm 19: "The heavens declare the glory of God."
In this summer of the Beijing Olympics, we are awash in China books. Don't miss this one in the crowd. Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) is an irresistible raconteur, and once you start his account of Joseph Needham and his magnum opus, Science and Civilization in China, you won't want to put it down — even as you are occasionally grinding your teeth at Winchester's ideological moves.
The late Paul Hiebert helped to transform missiology with insights drawn from anthropology, a contribution from which the church continues to benefit. This posthumously published volume, perhaps conceived as a textbook, is not the best place to begin reading Hiebert.
However, it is worth mining, not only by missiologists and missionaries, on the one hand, and adepts of the worldview conversation, on the other, but by any Christian who wants to think more deeply about what conversion to Christ entails.