Played an interesting card game last Sunday that I thought I’d pass on…

Do you love Monopoly, right up until an hour into the game when things start to get ridiculous and boring at the same time? Yeah, I’m right there with you. Monopoly Deal sounds pretty hokey at first - another Monopoly knockoff? - but it really does bring out the fun of Monopoly’s gameplay in a condensed form that lasts all of twenty minutes.

This is the seventh review in a series of posts about books for married men.

The 10 Commandments of Marriage, by Ed Young, is definitely the most basic of the seven books I’ve reviewed so far in this series. It’s a great primer on the relationship of a husband and wife… how do do the big things. Here’s the ten commandments:

1. Thou Shalt Not Be a Selfish Pig
2. Thou Shalt Cut The Apron Strings
3. Thou Shalt Continually Communicate
4. Thou Shalt Make Conflict Thy Ally
5. Thou Shalt Avoid The Quicksand Of Debt
6. Thou Shalt Flee Sexual Temptation
7. Thou Shalt Forgive Thy Mate
8. Thou Shalt Keep The Home Fires Burning
9. Thou Shalt Begin Again And Again
10. Thou Shalt Build A Winning Team

As far as the content of the book goes, that’s it in a nutshell. I’ve given too much of it away already to say much more; suffice that every point is well supported and well explained. The writing sometimes feels corny, like the author is trying too hard, but it’s a lot of solid advice and wisdom for any couple. While I’m not likely to recommend it to men as strongly as some of the other books that made deeper points, this is certainly a starting point for anyone who’s researching the “how to” of an “I do” relationship.

This is the fourth post in a series where I’m reviewing each of the Design for Discipleship Bible study books.

Now, I just reviewed DFD 5 a few weeks ago, so this is a little out of order, but I completed The Spirit-Filled Follower Of Jesus way back in January, before it was suggested to me that I run my mind back over each book at its conclusion. It’s probably a good idea for anyone working through the series to go back and review earlier material anyway, so whatever.

This is the third post in a series where I’m reviewing each of the Design for Discipleship Bible study books.

Page five of Foundations for Faith begins

In this book you will explore these five areas:

• Who is God?
• The Authority of God’s Word
• The Holy Spirit
• Spiritual Warfare
• The Return of Christ

Those are some pretty weighty areas of study! Who is God? Pretty deep. The actual questions are deeper than those of the earlier books as well. Each chapter ends with a blank page for you to outline/summarize/paraphrase its most important points. Sometimes it takes a while - chapter one took me a month!

This is the sixth review in a series of posts about books for married men.

Stu Weber has some pretty intense manliness credentials. At left is the Bronze Star, the fourth-highest combat award of the U.S. Armed Forces. Stu Weber has three of them. That he won as a Green Beret. He also holds a Master’s of Divinity, and a doctorate. Anyone with higher qualifications of manliness may skip this post. Now that I have everyone’s attention, on to the book.

This is the fifth review in a series of posts about books for married men.

Sheet Music, by Kevin Leman, is an interesting book to review since it deals with marriage exclusively through sex. This is perfect if you are newlyweds, or if your marriage needs some “BAM! Kick it up a notch!”; however, it’s not a book for anyone who’s more than a week away from marriage. That said, the review will be G-rated (and rather short since the book certainly isn’t!). Leman describes the book best in chapter one when he writes, “It’s not just a how-to-do-it manual… [it’s] a do-it-yourself look at why to do it and how to do it better.”

This is a guest post from my lovely wife. I’m including it in my series of reviews of books for married men since it is the original book from which For Men Only was derived. I will say that the book (which I haven’t read yet) has helped me a ton, since it’s helped my wife love me, and a loving wife is the most precious gift God has given me aside from salvation.

This is the third review in a series of posts about books for married men.

For Men Only (and the counterpart For Women Only) by Jeff and Shaunti Feldhahn were required reading when Emma and I went through our marriage counseling. They’re quick reads - but they were also some of the most helpful books we read.

For Men Only is really a guide to understanding why women do certain things. It’s broken down into six categories - “Key Findings About Women” - that were noted handily in a “Quick Start Guide” right inside the front cover. The six areas are outlined briefly below.

After a dismal showing from Fedora 11 on my MacBook, I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 last Friday. It is slick; they’ve got a lot of stuff working very well on the MacBook 5,1. I have a few gripes about Ubuntu so far, but I am using it until somebody figures out how to get multi-touch functionality for my MacBook in Fedora 11. So, here’s the good:

• Wireless works, out of the box. Even in the LiveCD.
• Trackpad works for single-touch right out of the box (like it did in Fedora 10); making multi-touch work only takes a few minutes following the guide.
• Firefox is a stable version.
• Sound is fixable.
• While flash and pulseaudio aren’t perfect, they’re a lot better than in Fedora.

And now, the bad:

So far, after a day of use, I’m completely unimpressed. Fedora 11 fails to even recognize the trackpad on my MacBook; while in Fedora 10 I couldn’t enable multi-touch options, at least the trackpad worked! Also, the default browser is Firefox 3.5.4b, which is still beta - and I get that this is Fedora, so it’s supposed to be the bleeding edge and all - but seriously, Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is not ready to be a default browser. GMail doesn’t even load correctly!

This is the second review in a series of posts about books for married men.

Love and Respect, by Emmerson Eggerichs, was given to Emma and me as an engagement gift and the advice in it has helped us more than we know.

Dr. Eggerichs writes about relationships between man and wife based on Ephesians 5:33. He believes that the deepest need of a man is to be respected, while the deepest need of a woman is to be loved. That simple explanation really resonated with Emma and me on our respective sides of the equation, but Eggerichs goes deeper. Men, he writes, are motivated to love when they feel respected. Women are motivated to respect when they feel loved. Out of this, according to Eggerichs, relationships develop into three different cycles.

This is the first review in a series of posts about books for married men.

It’s a pretty common recommendation for newlyweds to read, and for good reason. Dr. Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages is a relationship classic with editions for couples, singles, parents, divorcees, those struggling to feel God’s love…. I know without a doubt that it has helped Emma and I to understand and show love for each other - which makes us both feel more loved!

I got married last month, and lots of people have given me books about how to be a married man, how to treat my wife, how to understand (or at least cope with not understanding) my wife, etc, etc, etc. And I think that, if you’re married, being a real man depends very strongly on how you get along with your spouse. So I’ve decided that I’ll review each one of the books as I read them (or as I find the time to write reviews) with the goal of doing about one every week or two. Below is a list of the books I intend to review in this series; comment if you think I’ve missed any good ones!

This is the second post in a series where I’m reviewing each of the Design for Discipleship Bible study books.

When I reviewed DFD 3: Walking With Christ last month, I wrote that each chapter built on its predecessors in a grand process of maturing in Christ. Design for Discipleship 4: The Character of a Follower of Jesus again points out that process, in chapters at either end of the book, and then covers three somewhat separate and very practical applications of Christ’s teaching to the life of a man.

I recently finished reading Justo L. Gozalez’ The Story of Christianity, both volumes. A friend loaned me the book after I remarked that I felt uninformed about the origins of things like the Apostle’s Creed and the various Protestant denominations. Volume one works (basically) at the ascension until Luther’s revolution; volume two completes the Reformation and brings the reader into the present.

The book is great. It’s an engaging read, and while the author is Methodist, he gives an extremely balanced treatment to every form of Christianity, if slightly minimizing the Eastern Orthodox tradition. While the focus of the book is not theology, Gonzalez makes it easy to understand how world events influenced theology and vice versa. Patterns of cultural thought and world opinion make a big difference in how we view God!

This is the first post in a series where I’m reviewing each of the Design for Discipleship Bible study books.

Last week I finished the NavPress’ Design for Discipleship 3: Walking With Christ. I think the overall point of the study is summed up well in the first chapter, “We must remember… that there is no such thing as ‘instant maturity’ in following Jesus.” The book does what I think is a pretty decent job of setting up four crucial steps in that maturity in the later four chapters.