Bookshelf Anomalies #1: The Culture-Wise Family & Velvet Elvis

I’m a little OCD in my book organization. All of my library is on LibraryThing, including each book’s Library of Congress catalog number. So, I arrange my books in order of their Library of Congress number. There might be a few mistakes, but regardless, I put my books on the shelf just like LibraryThing sorts them.

The other day I was putting some books back on the shelf and noticed that a couple of books didn’t exactly belong together. I kept looking through the bookshelves and saw a few more “Bookshelf Anomalies,” pairs of books that make strange bedfellows. So I thought it’d be fun to share a few of those.

The first two I noticed were the books above:

• The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World by Theodore Baehr and Pat Boone. The Culture-Wise Family was an example of exactly what Rob Bell was writing about and trying to move past in his book. In my estimation, the thrust of the book was a call to move back into the “good ol’ days” of the 1950s or so without much theological discourse dealing with current cultural trends as I had hoped (I reviewed the book here).
• Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell. Bell begins his book with the example of people who think that velvet Elvis paintings are the pinnacle of artistic tradition, saying that the church is a velvet Elvis unwilling to continue to progress, adapt, and “repaint” the Christian faith.

Obviously, the authors of each book don’t exactly see eye-to-eye.