Here are the books I finished in March:

• The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll. Noll examines Evangelical thinking (or the lack thereof), and comes down really hard on two specific realms of Evangelical intellectual activity: politics and science.
• The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. Would the world really be better off without us? I don’t think so—we are part of the biosphere, not a cancer on the biosphere—but this book certainly opens one’s eyes to the increasing impact of human activities.
• 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke. This is the science fiction sequel to 2001: A Space Odessey. In 2010 a joint Soviet-American expedition brings HAL back to life, we find out more about what happened to astronaut Dave Bowman, and something very interesting happens to Jupiter.

Here are some additional books I’ve been working on this month:

• A History of the American People, by Paul Johnson. This one might take me a couple more months to get through.
• Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, by Christian paleontologist Simon Conway Morris. A famous statement by Stephen Jay Gould was that if one were to rewind the tape of evolution and play it over again, chance events would result in a very different world, probably without humans. Conway Morris argues the opposite, that convergence (e.g. multiple evolutionary pathways that lead over and over to similar structures) dictates that once evolution gets going in multicellular animals, something like human beings will inevitably occur.
• Economic Mineral Deposits, by Jensen and Bateman. Right now I’m in the chapter on hydrothermal alteration. I’ve done a lot of re-reading in my geology textbooks in the past six months. Depending on the employment prospects that looked most promising at the time, I have re-read substantial portions of textbooks on sedimentary petrology, geochemistry, igneous petrology, petroleum geology, and groundwater hydrology. This hasn’t led to a job yet, but I’ve had fun, as well as learned (re-learned) a lot.

Grace and Peace