[#] soup and nutter

You read the "I'm a nutter" post, right? You didn't? Go back and read the "I'm a nutter" post.

Annihilius, alleged god-blogger   read my book?!

Now that you're back, we have only a cup of soup today: there's a book called The Embarassed Believer. It's by Hugh Hewitt -- and it's interesting for a couple of reasons. To me, the most important reason is that it is out of print. Do you know how you can tell that at Amazon.com? When Amazon doesn't list a standard retail, it's becuase they cannot get the book under any circumstances from the publisher and you can only buy it used from an Amazon affiliate.

So Hugh's forray into the world of practical apologetics is out of print after only 8 years. Truth be told, part of the reason his book is out of print is that it's part of the Thomas Nelson book gin which produces oceans of material which is then immediately discounted and eventually made obscolete because Nelson can't possibly support the backlist of titles they would have to support for all these marginal titles. So maybe it's not Hewitt's fault for writing a book that went out of print.

But the second most important reason this book gets my attention is that it is Hewitt's follow-up to the astonishing PBS-funded "book" Searching for God in America. This book is also out of print, so at least Hugh's track record is consistent. The real question, I think, is whether Hewitt sees the, um, ambiguity of writing, in 1996, a book which implicitly says that Islam, Judaism and Christianity are all about the same thing, and in 1998 writing a book which, allegedly, says Christians are "too timid" in proclaiming their own faith and values.

Just to make a fair comparison, John MacArthur has a little book called Our Sufficiency in Christ. (you don't have one? You can buy one at that link) It's published by Crossway, and has been in print since 1999. The comparison is fair, btw, because this is the actual advocation of Christian moral reasoning instead of the politically-expedient version we get from Hewitt all the time.

Given what I have read by Hewitt and from Hewitt on the topic of the Christian life, I think he doesn't know very much about it. I'm sure that makes me a bad person -- very unloving to say such a thing. You can see how broken up I am about it.

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