Mount Virtus

Rex Forrest Johnson. An Afternoon with Cody. Sioux Falls, SD: Pine Hills Press, 2006.

Rating: 2 out of 5

“I am sandwiched between a seventy something woman and an even older looking man with a headset on listening to some very loud music. I can feel the vibrations of the tune as I stood next to the old geezer. Imagine what it is doing to his brain! Can we say, ‘mush brain?’ He is just bobbing his head up and down, back and forth, having a good old time…. He is oblivious to what is gong on until I tap him on the shoulder and point to my seat between them. I sat down between them and thought to myself that if this trip is 1400 miles, it is going to feel like 2800. The old man started tapping on both of his knees with open hands as if he was playing drums. The old woman and I looked at each other and smiled. I could not resist. I had to know to whom he was listening to. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked, ‘Who are you listening to?’ He responded with a shout ‘Def Leppard.’ I thought to myself, ‘Who in the world is Def Leppard?’ I just nodded my head and smiled. I thought, okay dude, whatever.”

In Rex Forrest Johnson’s new Christian novella An Afternoon with Cody, the narrator and central character Walter Withers grows to learn and appreciate the strange old man with the headphones. Yet this reviewer’s journey into the book’s fictional future made the 112 pages seem more like 224 or so.

The book’s theme is primarily evangelistic, using the changed life of 72-year-old title character Cody Brill to testify the loving power of Christ to a New York sportswriter 50 years his junior. Woven inside the tale of their summertime encounter at the Sioux Falls airport is Cody’s retelling of his life story, primarily his days as a martial-arts competitor and the conflict to be overcome with his family life.

Easily the most compelling and most interesting substance of An Afternoon with Cody is the background of the aged, eccentric character. Whatever genuine emotional and spiritual gravity is to be found in the story lies therein. It’s what kept the pages turning. I would have loved to see this part of the story developed more.

Elements of the title character appear to have been inspired by the author’s own life, a longtime martial-arts instructor, husband and father who recently moved from Pennsylvania to Dell Rapids, South Dakota. Following the production of two “Christ centered screenplays,” An Afternoon with Cody is Johnson’s first novel.

Unfortunately, the book as a whole falls well short in the chronological setting. While the book is advertised as being set in the year 2020, there is very little painted in the text to convey a sense of what makes the near future at all different from 2006.

I was left wanting more, so much more of a sense of what had changed with the times. In Johnson’s future, terrorism is commonplace but seemingly trivial. America appears to be ethnically and culturally monochrome. Virtually no new technologies are introduced to spur the imagination. Instead the reader is left to believe the scarcely realistic notion that America’s secular scientific community has foisted Intelligent Design on all public school students to distract their attention from the Creator. One is left to wonder whether the author has studied the basic contours of the origins debate at all.

Johnson’s vision of a society driven deeper into moral deterioriation almost seems trite by today’s standards. While it is good that the author is conscious of a family audience and steers clear from the gratuitous, it seems there would be a way to convey deeper symptoms of alienation and depravity than the assertion that by 2020 God’s name has been removed from U.S. currency. Even so, how did American evangelicals allow their elite institutions to strip God from the public square?

The author suggests that the surviving churches in American cities circa 2020 are mere remnants of a dried-up formalism. While the gospel is a remedy for cold hearts, Cody goes too far to dumb down the Trinity to “the three amigos.” Likewise, Withers’ appellation of “Buddy Jesus” demonstrates a too shallow conception of the Savior’s majesty. But shallow theology only follows naturally from an apparently shallow conversion experience.

Before making an unexpected layover in Sioux Falls, the young sportswriter has walked through life with no serious understanding of religious or spiritual ideas and no familiarity with biblical language, truths, or stories. Yet despite no serious trauma or crisis, one mere afternoon’s conversation with the unusual sage appears destined to drastically reorient his faith, reshape his life, and develop a love for Def Leppard.

The text also is littered with technical mistakes that detract from the flow of the story. As exemplified in the passage above, an abundance of typographical errors, inconsistent verb tenses, and dangling prepositions - along with the claim that King David’s story is located in the book of Acts - belie the acknowledgment that the novella had at least five different proofreaders.

After another round of careful editing, An Afternoon with Cody could better be condensed into a gospel tract booklet or expanded into a full-length novel with a richer setting and deeper character development. Otherwise the best this reviewer could say is: “Okay dude, whatever.”

Ben DeGrow, M.A., Husband, Father, Church Leader, Student of Scripture

Thanks to Stacy Harp at Active Christian Media for the opportunity to read and comment on this book. No remuneration was paid for this review.

James L. Garlow. The Da Vinci Codebreaker. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2006.

“In one sense, The Da Vinci Code has done Christianity and the Bible a great favor, sparking questions believers should have been asking and answering long before reading about ‘the code.’ If people will seriously examine the historical data, they will know what they believe and why they believe it.”

So writes Dr. James Garlow in the preface of his concise and easy-to-use new reference tool, The Da Vinci Codebreaker.

As American evangelical Christianity continues to broaden and stretch, the need for solid depth in a biblical foundation becomes more apparent. That some Christian believers would shrink in doubt and embarrassment before the dubious conspiratorial rantings of a best-selling novel is the latest and clearest example.
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Joseph A. Klein. Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom. Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2005.

Having served several times as a delegate at my county and state Republican assemblies, one of the resolutions frequently voted on is: “The United States should withdraw from the United Nations.”

No proposed resolution at my recent county assembly received a smaller vote than that question - 51%, less than the two-thirds needed to be ratified. The globalist-socialist United Nations does not poll very well in the United States generally, but an especially politically conservative group of Colorado Republican activists was basically split on the question of whether we should disassociate entirely from the internationalist body.

My biggest surprise in turning the pages of Global Deception was that author Joseph Klein would likely cast the same vote as I did: No.
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The other night I lay in bed with my wife and weeks-old daughter. We snuggled up with a copy of Katharine DeBrecht’s Help, Mom! Hollywood’s in My Hamper, and I read aloud. My wife and I shared a few giggles throughout the story and dozed off (as best we could under the circumstances) with a warm feeling.

The baby? Well, I’m pretty certain she’ll appreciate the Help, Mom! series some day. I can picture her a few years from now tugging at my pant leg, pleading for me to read one of the sequels. And I can tell you right now - my whole family hopes for DeBrecht to publish some more that meet the quality of the first two.
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Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice - Instead of Good - Hurts Men, Women, and Children, (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2005). 224 pages. Foreword by Dr. Laura Schlessinger

When I was not too much younger, I made the same half-hearted New Year’s resolution for several years running: “No more Mister Nice Guy.” Certain friends balked at the expression, not sure they wanted to see one of my few favorable qualities evaporate. They always got their wish, as the resolution typically died about January 3. I have to say I didn’t know quite what I was looking for until I forged my way through a new book recently.

Packed with potent medicine for the timid male of faith, Paul Coughlin’s No More Christian Nice Guy is a refreshing read. Certain passages will taste a little bitter going down, but there are some good reasons to follow his prescription.

At the core of Coughlin’s book rests the argument that contemporary American church culture has pushed the pendulum too far from a proper balance and mutual appreciation of gender roles. Whereas women were once belittled and underappreciated for some of their feminine virtues, today men’s natural masculine energy has been confined and subdued in suffocating boundaries of politeness and formality.

Some men go along to get along. Many others lose interest and drift away from the church community and a more vital Christian life. Few are willing to take a stand.

But that’s where Coughlin steps in, urging his brothers in Christ to confront sin more aggressively and to take a stand for the rights of their families, while not laying themselves down as a well-used doormat. The author admonishes single men to be more assertive in the courting or dating process and married men to be more assertive in their sacred sexual relationships. He tells all men to stand up for themselves on the job.

In short, Coughlin seeks to encourage the development of more Christian Good Guys and fewer Christian Nice Guys.

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The following review is made possible by the hard work of Stacy Harp at Mind and Media.

Your mind trapped in a world that ends at the United States borders? Living a life of relative comfort and ease? William O. Levi’s The Bible or the Axe might be just the wake-up call the average Christian in America may need.

The Bible or the Axe recounts Levi’s early life journey, which began with a large, tightly-knit, strongly-rooted Messianic Jewish family in east Africa before he endured persecution at the hands of Sudan’s Islamic regime in the 1980s and ultimately escaped to the United States. He later founded Operation Nehemiah, a mission still actively helping the Christian community in Sudan rebuild its broken walls.

Levi tells his story with candor and confidence. Reading the book is the visual equivalent of listening to a capable storyteller recount his experiences on the foreign mission field - everyday tales of trust through trials intertwined with accounts of the providential, even the miraculous.

The young man’s baptism by his warm but revered Grandfather forms the crystallizing moment of truth - leading Levi from contemplation to action - that gives the autobiography its poignant title. The piercing interrogation by Levi’s grandfather grows larger than life in the turbulent context of Sudanese persecution: “When your enemy comes to destroy you, which weapon will you choose?” the old preacher asks.

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The following review is made possible by the hard work of Stacy Harp at Mind and Media, who sent a copy of the book to me through the generous donation of The Acton Institute, which has edited and distributed Natural Law: The Foundation of an Orderly Economic System as one in a series of “Studies in Ethics and Economics.”

The Review

Not many economics books could garner a vehement dispute whether taken off the shelf by a hard-core libertarian, doctrinaire Marxist, or New Deal apologist. Yet just such a new treatise will inspire a lot of readers to think outside the box.

Natural Law: The Foundation of an Orderly Economic System by Dr. Alberto M. Piedra (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004) challenges many traditional systems of economic thought with a penetrating paradox: appropriating traditional moral and theological ideas to promote the creation of a new order.

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