Let's Think It Over: A Christian's Day Book

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

This book is a devotional calendar of meditations and readings for one year. It follows the Christian year, beginning in December with Advent. Twenty-five readings are provided for each month. The readings have been selected from the author’s column in Country Guide and bear the date (from 1968 to 1983) of original publication. Reference to an appropriate passage from the Bible accompanies each reading.

The author, most recently Bishop of Calgary, has served for more than forty years in Anglican Church parishes of Northern Ontario and the Prairie Provinces. Published by the author’s denomination, the guide reflects Anglican culture and theology.

The year’s three hundred readings draw upon a number of categories: travel experiences, inspiration from nature, personal reminiscence, anecdote, incidents from pastoral work, family life events, and meditations upon Scripture. The first two of these predominate. The effect of this choice of material is an overall feeling of “off somewhere else” — if not in Cuba, Greece, Mexico, Egypt, or Holland, then in some inspirational natural setting in Canada. The joys and trials of everyday human life seem secondary, both in manner of treatment and in amount of coverage.

The book’s design is well suited to the content: a pleasing layout, good paper, and sturdy binding. It is all the more surprising, then, to casually come across at least a dozen textual errors, such as “miracle of the leaves” (p. 71), “gettting” (p. 199), and “who’s world” (p. 146) — the latter a title.