Reviews for Empowering Your Child Who Has Special Needs

The average rating for Empowering Your Child Who Has Special Needs based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-12 00:00:00 Corey Feil I am the choir to Dick Staub's preacher. And so the pitfall for me in reading a book like Staub's The Culturally Savvy Christian is complacency. I've heard Staub's arguments before and generally agree with most of what he has to say here. Thus, as I worked my way through this volume, I found myself growing impatient, looking for something new and original. But this is not necessarily a helpful attitude. Just because the material was not particularly new or challenging to me, doesn't mean it wouldn't be insightful or relevant to others, less versed in the topic. The basic argument of the book is that Christianity has become a pale shadow of its former self and that modern Christians (especially American evangelicals) no longer know how to engage productively with the culture around them. Staub lays out his manifesto in three parts, first describing the situation as it is - both in the church and culture - and then going back to the Bible and the history of the Christian faith itself to describe how Christians are called to be in a deep, transformative and loving relationship with God. This relationship becomes our grounding for engaging the world around us, a world that could benefit deeply from experiencing the love of its Creator. Staub rounds out the book with a section on how Christians can productively engage with a non-Christian (and sometimes anti-Christian) world by countering, communicating and cultivating culture in various ways. Again, none of this is particularly new to me. I've spent much of my life in a corner of the Christian sub-culture that takes Staub's points for granted. I've worked at faith-based organizations in the arts and higher education, hearing from modern voices like Andy Crouch, Scott Nolte, Gregory Wolfe, Dana Gioia, Jeffrey Overstreet and Makato Fujimura about the need for a renewed Christian imagination. My education involved reading Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers and others on the topic of faith and artistic expression, all of whom Staub quotes liberally. My familiarity with the material doesn't invalidate the premise, but I realized at some point that I was probably not the target audience for this book. The other thing that became apparent to me was that Staub is a more staunch adherent to a missionary form of evangelicalism than I am. There were several times when he drifted into language that emphasized sin, salvation and the Great Commission and as he did so, I realized that I am no longer comfortable with this emphasis. A re-telling of the Christian story that limits the narrative arc to just Fall and Redemption, while ignoring the Creation prequel or the Restoration epilogue is, to my way of thinking, incomplete and rather sterile. Not that I necessarily think that this is Staub's intent, but for my money, I would much rather spend the bulk of my time as a Christian figuring out how to live out the two commandments that Jesus emphasized (love God, love your neighbor) than in trying to "win others to Christ." I'm giving this book three stars, not because I had a three-star experience with it, but because I think it has a lot to offer for a different audience. For a young believer or for a Christian who is thinking about these ideas for the first time, I think this volume could be a good primer on the topic of Christian faith, arts and culture. I would recommend that a reader less well-versed in this topic pay particular attention to Staub's sources and, after completing this book, track back to some of those other writers for a deeper dive into this idea of the winsome, counter-cultural narrative of Jesus.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-10 00:00:00 Paul Hoeft I completely agreed with the overall message of this book and how we need to use popular culture to understand the needs and wants of today's society in order to better minister to others. I liked how he stressed the need for creativity because God is a creative being and that creativity is a part of us being fully human. Creativity isn't often encouraged or valued. And, I have myself have stopped attending regular worship services over the years because of the "Christianity-Lite" that is being offered in most instances. The author was good though in saying that despite what we are being offered, we still have to find ways to be a part of a congregation for interaction and fellowship with other believers, so he even stepped on my toes a bit, which is a good thing. I got bored with all of the quotes from other people that were used at times (he might have tried to pull in too much "popular culture" to prove a point), but overall, I liked this one.