book review--Clear Winter Nights by Trevin Wax

I received a free Advanced Reading Copy of this book from the Waterbrook Multnomah Blogging for Books review program.

I recall a few years ago reading "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren. It was basically a book about a guy who has having a crisis of faith, and meets another man with the nickname Neo, who essentially plays the role of the sage advisor, and there are several conversations between them in the book. One may well say that book wasn't so very far off the range, though later developments in McLaren's views have pretty clearly shown that he's gone a lot further into wackiness, which kind of gives the impression that NKC was rather like him sticking his toe into the water before finally jumping in.

"Clear Winter Nights" has a similar premise. There's a man who is having a crisis of faith, and there is the man who plays the role of the sage to him. There are numerous conversations about various aspects of Christian theology. But the main, and important, difference between the two books is that the sage old man in CWN has very different ideas than McLaren's Neo, and to my mind his ideas are orders of magnitude superior to McLaren.

Many different things are discussed between the two main characters, things like evangelism and religious pluralism and sexual morality, and the main character's grandfather, the sage in this story, does a good job of answering the younger man's doubts and questions, by pointing him back to what the Scriptures say.

I was pretty well pleased with this book, and it earned a pretty strong recommendation from me. It's well worth reading.