Duane Alexander Miller's Blog, page 22

Earth Abides by George Stewart: a review

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a PhD in divinity, have taught and published on the Roman and Ottoman Empires, and have conducted anthropological research throughout four continents. This book challenged me in all of these areas.

Let me first say that the book is not dated. There is a certain timelessness to it that the greatest books have–I think of The Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Flies. Indeed, I kept on going back to meta-metaphor of the hammer in Earth Abides in relation to Piggy’s glasses in Lord of the Flies.

But this book touched me on a deeper level: I am like Ish. I am the kind of person who is always asking. Or as one former girlfriend asked me a long time ago: don’t you ever stop thinking? Like Ish, I cannot.

This book is set apart from other ‘end of the world’ books, like Lucifer’s Hammer or The Stand, in that it extends decades beyond the apocalypse, which in this book is a plague which eliminates very close to 100% of humanity. While those other books focus on the preservation of technology, this book gets to the primordial question: is civilization better than primitivism? Does reason, and so science, and so applied science–technology–make life better? What is progress? Is it, in fact, good?

Enjoy the audio book version I listened to. It is narrated by Jonathan Davis and he does this masterfully. The language is refreshingly clean, so let your children listen too while you’re on a trek from, say, San Antonio (where I live) to Denver (where my dad lives).

I will, in closing, note that the main character’s name is Isherwood, but he is always called ‘Ish’. It is a Hebrew word. It means ‘man’.

View all my reviews

Roger Dixon on Insider Movements in SE Asia

Some time ago Dr. Roger Dixon and I published an article/interview (me interviewing him) on his experience and work in Indonesia. This was published in the May 2014 issue of the Journal of Asian Mission (15:1). Here is a section on his experience of what are typically called ‘insider movements’:

DAM: One topic of great interest today are insider movements. Proponents of IM claim that these movements exist as a work of the Spirit and apart from the initiative of Western-based missions and missionaries. I have been looking everywhere for a ‘real’ insider movement, and can’t find one. Do you know of anything that matches up to the stories we hear of movements initiated by the Spirit without foreign involvement?

RD: I understand your concern for some verifiable facts. They are hard to find.

Either the foreigners who report these movements will not identify the persons involved, or if they do, ask that the researcher not contact them because it would insert a “foreign” element (whereas they have already been a foreign element themselves). My repeated statement/conclusion is that if these reports [of Insider Movements commenced by the Spirit independent of Western missions] cannot be verified by independent research, we can’t really accept them as confirmed results by the normal social-science standards.

None of those claiming great results will respond to this. They just claim that we have to accept the reports of these people who write under pseudonyms about unknown people groups in unknown countries. It is puzzling. I have not heard of any IM groups in Indonesia or elsewhere that were not started by foreigners—mainly Americans. Though there is a strong IM strain in Korea now and some reports coming from them. Again, I personally do not know of any successful insider movements.

This is not a categorical rejection that genuine IMs exist, of course, and I am grateful to Dr. Dixon for his precise choice of words.

Check out the PDF at my academia.edu site (link in the sidebar) or click here: Miller-Dixon Interview JAM.

Article on All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral in Cairo

Back in 2015 an article of mine on All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral in Cairo was published in Anglican and Episcopal History (Vol 84:1). I thought that with the rising interest of Christianity in the Middle East I should share it here.

The article begins with the note that in 1839 the Egyptian leader Muhammad Ali made a gift of land to the local Anglicans for the construction of a church. Also, the beginning of Anglican mission there was through the Church Mission Society (CMS) and the London Jews Society (today known as the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People) as far back as the early 1800s.

Click here to read the whole article.

Learning to Pray…a guest post at Building a Church without Walls

Gladys Ganiel recently published a guest post of mine at her excellent blog, Building a Church without Walls.

Here is the intro:

I was running errands in the large Arab city where I was studying Arabic, when I ran into a friend of mine. We had had several spiritual conversations by that time. So there on the sidewalk I asked him if he would like to pray with me. He said he didn’t have time to go to church with me, so I explained that we could pray right there, and he agreed.

Click HERE to read the rest of the post, and thank you to Gladys for helping make people aware of Living among the Breakage.

Al Kresta interviews me on Christianity in the Holy Land

It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Al Kresta from Ave Maria Radio.

In this interview, released on January 12th, we shift over to the central topic of Arab Evangelicals in Israel  and, indeed, Christianity in general in the whole region.

The opening question: does Christianity in the Middle East have a future? Listen and enjoy.

https://duanemiller.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/al-kresta-inteviws-duane-miller-on-the-holy-land.mp3

Also, visit Al’s website and consider subscribing to his podcast.