Has Palin written a parable?

Going Rogue may not be quite as much a work of fiction as Left Behind but Dan Gilgoff seems to think they're aimed at the same general audience.

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's '20 worst sentences'

Just three, explained, from Tom Chivers list:

20. Angels and Demons, chapter 1: Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.
They say the first rule of fiction is “show, don’t tell”. This fails that rule.
19. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 83: "The Knights Templar were warriors," Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space.
“Remind” is a transitive verb – you need to remind someone of something. You can’t just remind. And if the crutches echo, we know the space is reverberant.
18. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.
Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence.

Read the rest here at The London Telegraph.

Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism

The book Hardball Religion by Wade Burleson gets an almost play-by-play punches-unpulled review from John Pierce, executive editor of Baptists Today.

Key snippet:

Burleson’s courage to stand toe-to-toe with abusive power-brokers, to expose the misuse of denominational authority and resources, and to defend those harmed by heavy-handed tactics is commendable.

Yet, for so many of us, his recent “discovery” of fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention is not breaking news. It shows just how late Burleson is getting to the game.

He writes: “I began to realize in 2005, to my horror, that the issue causing such pain in the Southern Baptist Convention was not a battle for a belief in the inspired, inerrant word of God.”

Burleson is right. It is about something else — something very destructive.

Read the entire review here.