FILM REVIEW

The Company Men (R) centers on a year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company and how that affects them, their families and their communities. While the film takes appropriate potshots at CEOs making millions in bonusing while downsizing their workforce, it concentrates on the psychological and everyday details of the people affected by sudden unemployment. —Gordon Houser

BOOK REVIEWS

Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do by Phillip Cary (Brazos Press, 2010, $14.99) brings some common sense to teaching about the Christian life. Cary wants Christians to “rely on the gospel rather than put our trust in a bunch of supposedly ‘practical’ ideas that are actually doing us harm.” Cary addresses an evangelical subculture that may or may not fit Mennonites. While his tone can feel chiding, his directions are generally balanced, e.g., “It’s a both/and proposition—both God’s doing and ours, both his gift and our work. For God is our Creator, and his gift becomes our very being.”—gh

God and the Art of Happiness by Ellen T. Charry (Eerdmans, 2010, $35) looks at the treatment of God and happiness in ancient Greek philosophy, Christian thought and in the Bible. She shows how the Bible encourages the happiness and flourishing that accompany obedience to the Creator. Happiness, she argues, is not just some future, eschatological reality but is to be enjoyed in the present. She writes that “reverent devotion to the creator and redeemer of the world is the happy life, for it crafts one into an instrument of divine wisdom, love and goodness.”—gh