Safely Home

I recently read Randy Alcorn's Safely Home, a story that largely centers on persecution of Christians in China. Quite frankly, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book ... I haven't been hugely impressed with modern Christian fiction as a whole, but Alcorn's a good writer (in spite of an occasional slip into cheesiness; btw, this is another excellent piece of Christian fiction, and I have to admit to having enjoyed the few Mitford books that I've ventured into).

ANYWAY, I was doing a little "googling" of Safely Home reviews today and ran across a pretty cool website. The thesis of the website is that Chinese language and culture have some deeply-embedded Christian truths that are particularly evidenced in the pictures that comprise certain words. For we Westerners who don't really understand the complexities of the Chinese language, it's a helpful tutorial.

For those of you out there who are of Chinese (or other Asian) descent (you know who you are), I'd love to hear your feedback on both the book and the website ... am I just being a guillible, commercialized, wannabe from Montana? (But please say it to me more gently than that.)

In other news, this is probably the funniest first sentence of a book review that I've seen in a long time. To preface the quote, I'll say that I've been reading a number of reviews recently on Barna's Revolutions, and they are all from disappointed and dissenting readers. So that's part of why this is so funny:

Christian pollster George Barna has been kidnapped and replaced by gremlins. That is the most logical explanation for the premise, content, and reasoning of the latest book attributed to Barna's authorship, Revolution (Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2005)." (quoted in Randy Alcorn's review)