Reviews for Wrestling and Hyper-Masculinity

The average rating for Wrestling and Hyper-Masculinity based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-07-12 00:00:00 Rebecca Forbes Like his other book, 'Reading the Bible with the Damned', I found this to be oxygen to my soul. It's good academic theology, expressed for the layperson, combined with radical social justice work and a keen eye for religious hypocrisy. It expressed well much of my thinking about the dangers of nationalism and allegiance to the nation state, and is one of the few pieces of charismatic theology I've found to make sense of the idea of 'territorial spirits' and not make the idea sound like something out of a role playing game (no shade to RPG players - I was one!). I may not share all his applications - most of them, though, make sense to me - but this is a book written by someone who radically practises what he preaches and shows real fruit. Brillian.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-27 00:00:00 Damon Wooley This book combines three very disparate strains of Christianity (Pentecostalism, academic theology, A New Christian Manifesto is a fascinating combination of academic theology, Pentecostal theology, and a commitment to serving the downtrodden and social justice. Bob Ekblad has his hands deep into all three of those areas, and represents each of them well. I have rarely seen any two of those covered well by the same person before, and certainly not all three. That alone makes the book worth reading. The second thing that makes the book worth reading is Bob Ekblad's utter commitment to God and to the truth. You get the very clear impression that Ekblad is chasing after a faith that is real to God, a faith with power, a faith that saves. He is honest about his journey and pursues it in integrity and passion. There is no doubt that he has given his life over to what he believes. Unfortunately, it's quite a difficult book to read. I'm not sure what it was, but a lot of the parts of the book felt like quite a slog. There's a certain degree of theological abstraction, or perhaps analogy-making, which Ekblad gets into that makes it not exactly an easy read. This may have contributed to the fact that many of the chapters felt the same to me - while each chapter had a clear theme, the actual working-out of that theme had enough similarities that the chapters felt like melding into each other and afterwards I couldn't have told you want the theme of each was or what stories had appeared in each chapter.