I'm not quite sure how exactly I came across this book, other than I am generally wanting to learn about team building since our Phoenix adventure has made that more relevant than it's been in a while. I stumbled across it and the reviews sounded interesting–seemed like it could be one of those God-ordained books that he brings across my path. (I think it probably was, but time will tell on that).

In Dream Teams, Snow blends together clever story telling, recent neuroscience, and lots of discussion around facets of great teams. He is a clever and funny author, and the neuroscience he covers really is fascinating. I suspect his visual of the mountain range of potential solutions is probably something I'll carry with me from here forward, as is the model of creatively-productive tensions that he outlines. I thought his observation that great teams play-their-way-into-camaraderie to be quite an interesting idea as well. There were lots of parts I liked a lot; the only downside to the book was that Snow is clearly highly pro-liberal-agenda, and at times that comes across as almost preachy. If you can push that aside, the book has some really quality content.

I came across this book as a result of a recent conversation with my Dad in which he shared how illuminating he was finding it as it came to making sense of some of his upbringing. As a continual student of many things, emotional and relational health being one of them, I thought it would be worth the read for sure.

In this book, Webb zeros in on an aspect of her clinical practice that she says she often encounters but is not a central part of most counseling conversations: Emotional Neglect. Webb defines emotional neglect as what your parents didn't give you; not the mistakes they made by doing the wrong things, but the absences they left and the resulting holes in our emotional being and identity. She spends the first half of the book helping the reader examine their own life–first giving twelve different parenting scenarios that can wind up with emotional neglect, then ten symptoms that people with emotional neglect often carry. The second half of the book is given to healing and recovery, and I found it quite good. The chapter she has in which she paints a picture of self-care and how it works may be the best I've read on that particular subject.

The book reads easily due both to Webb's writing style, as well as the vignettes she has intentionally sprinkled throughout to make it accessible. She's got great insights here and it's a great book that will help any reader engage with whatever degree of your own emotional neglect you have experienced and what moving past it looks like.

I read this as part of the theological mentoring program I'm participating in over the last couple of years. This is one of the books we're reading about the nature of the Church, and in particular Twelftree explores the what Luke articulates in his Luke-Acts writings.

In this book, Twelftree wrestles with a number of the classic church questions: what is the nature of the church? What is the nature of the relationship between the church and salvation? How does the Spirit and things like the gift of tongues fit in? What did worship look like? How did the early church understand Scripture? What was their mission as they understood it? Throughout, Twelftree carefully and methodically examines what Luke was trying to say and how it lines up with what the church presently believes.

On the whole I found the tone of the book just a bit dry for me (reads like a scholastic book even a bit more than I'm used to), but I did find some of his conclusions quite interesting. The way he articulated the early church's understanding of Scripture (less prescriptive and more used in making sense of their ongoing experience of Jesus in their midst and the leading of the Spirit) was rather daring conclusion, as was his conclusion on mission (that the church needs to stop preaching the gospel to itself and bringing social action to the world and work to preach the gospel to the world and bring social action to the church). I'm glad for his summary chapter at the end which I suspect I'll continue to chew on for a while.

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As someone looking to church plant in the near future, this book seemed an obvious choice to engage. At 104 pages it is a quick read and reads with Wimber's voice coming through strongly. I wonder if may even have been a transcription of a church planting seminar; in it Wimber comes in-and-out of colloqual anecdotes and casual sayings that read like he was talking in person.

Wimber was on the leading edge of training church planters in his day and there is a lot of good content in this book, but it doesn't dive very deeply and it has the marks of being a content generated 40 years ago. I found it helpful and I will occasionally refer back to it as a reference I'm sure.

Having recently read and really enjoyed Issacson's The Code Breaker, I decided to try another one of his books out. I find biographies of fields of study or industries to be fascinating and this book promised to cover exactly that territory for the digital revolution.

The Innovators is a significant read: 488 pages covering the history and major developments from the first mechanical counting machines through to the development of the web (which culminates with the creation of the Google search engine). Along the way Issacson paints the portrait of dozens of tech innovators and occasionally reflects on where he sees the field going. It is indeed the story of how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution as the subtitle reads.

As someone who enjoys this type of literature I really enjoyed it! Issacson is a fantastic writer and I believe the digital revolution is playing out to be an epoch-defining historical event, so I found the history and an insider look at how it came to be to be both fascinating and helpful.