The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley

In 1905, then Secretary of War William Taft and a host of other American dignitaries took a tour of Pacific islands and Asian nations. James Bradley tells the story of this trip, along with the wider contest of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policies toward Pacific expansion and Asia, in The Imperial Cruise.

Roosevelt, with Taft as his right hand, engaged in secret diplomacy with Japan. The Senate would not have approved a treaty with Japan with terms Roosevelt wanted, and his own State Department would have strongly advised against his course. So Roosevelt sent Taft to consummate a secret deal that he could never acknowledge.

By the time Taft set sail, Japan was already responding to interactions with the West. It was remaking itself into an industrialized, militarized country in the western mold. Roosevelt saw in them American-friendly, quasi-civilized people who could expand Anglo-Saxon virtues into Asia without slipping out from under Anglo-American influence. As with almost everything related to the Pacific and Asian peoples, Roosevelt was very shortsighted.

In reading about the early 20^th Century, I’ve been struck by the pervasiveness of racism. Bradley explains how Roosevelt viewed everything through a racial lens. These were racial lenses were proudly worn by white elites at the time. The key to history was racial history. They saw the birth of civilization in the Middle East with the Aryans, who began moving west. Around the Mediterranean, where the Aryans mixed with other races, civilizations degenerated. In Germany, pure Aryans gave rise to Teutons, who inherited Aryan civilizing with values of democracy and individualism. These Teutons moved west and were further perfected in the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxon civilization leapt across the Atlantic and push aside the savages of North America. To Roosevelt, Manifest Destiny had not closed with the conquering of the continent; it was ready to spread into the Pacific. White men would continue to spread their civilizing influence, subjugating or exterminating lesser, browner races when necessary as white Americans had done to their Indian wards. White elites like Roosevelt saw their westward destiny in this racial history, and it was further confirm by science in Darwinian survival of the fittest.

History and science refute such notions now. Bradley (and I) certainly don’t try to justify the attitudes or actions of Roosevelt, Taft or others. Bradley is plainly critical of handling of Pacific islands and Asia. Roosevelt’s racial views blinded him to the abilities and patriotism of non-whites. He had the hubris to pursue diplomacy on his own, secretly, without advice from the State Department, Senate or anyone else who might raise the slightest objection or concern. He tutored Japan in the ways of western imperialism, but could not imagine how well they would learn the lessons. Bradley places at least some of the blame for World War II in the Pacific at the feet of Roosevelt, whose interventions created the powerful military empire we faced in those waters.

Roosevelt was an astute manager of his image and he understood public relations. Because of this, he sent his oldest (and nearly estranged) daughter Alice on the trip. She was a celebrity, and her presence assured a lot of press coverage. Her presence was also a distraction from Taft’s secret mission.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

First Samuel

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Water by Steven Solomon

Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Water by Steven Solomon (204)

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper, 2010.
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Steven Solomon’s Water is an epic history of civilization from its roots to modern time. Solomon’s thesis is that inventively mastered their water resources have risen and those that have outpaced their available water or innovations have declined. There are lessons in this history for us who live in an age where some nations already experience serious water scarcity and even relatively water rich nations are squandering their natural fortune.

The book generally follows sequences of technology, geography, and politics. In technology, it moves through waters many uses from irrigation to transportation, energy and sanitation. The geographic motion of the book is from east to west, starting the early innovations of Asia, sliding to Europe, then jumping the Atlantic to North America. The political trend begins with ancient, totalitarian hydraulic societies and moves on to gradually democratizing nations and the splintered, competitive, yet surprisingly workable and cooperative, market-oriented Western republics.

In the final chapters of the book, Solomon deals with the threat of water scarcity. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, are already facing water shortages. Those fortunate enough to have other sources of wealth, like oil, are importing virtual water, especially in the form of food. Control of water resources is becoming a matter of international diplomacy, national security, and possible war in much the way oil was in the last century. This is especially true in the arid, populous Middle East and South Asia. Many of the water poor live in lands that are highly populated, arid, unstable politically, and have long-standing enmities with neighboring countries.

Relatively water rich nations, like the United States, have problems, too. Much of it stems from using water inefficiently and for less productive activities. This is especially problematic in the dry western states, where long-standing, vested interests have sought to protect their subsidized access to water while others, sometimes more efficient and high value users, pay great premiums for the limited remaining available water. This isn’t strictly a western problem; eastern cities are also droughts, growing populations, industrialization, intensive agriculture, and aging infrastructure that strain their water resources.

While the problems are serious, Solomon seems hopeful that, as in the past, we may be able to develop technological, organizational, and political solutions to these issues. He objectively discusses national and international efforts to solve the looming water crisis. He seems to have more faith that workable solutions well arise in the more water rich, democratic West, where a combination of government regulation, free markets, substantial local control, and varied regional solutions are giving rise to innovation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Exodus
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Great Stink by Clare Clark
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
Water by Marq de Villiers
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

For those looking for a brief survey of technological history around the world, Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey would be a good start. With just a little preface to introduce ideas about how civilizations interact in relation to technology, Pacey dives into a historical narrative of the development of major technologies. He starts in A.D. 700 and continues almost to the time the book was published in 1990.

Throughout the book, Pacey describes the interactions between civilizations as a dialogue. Straightforward, direct transfer of technology from one civilization to another is rare in his view. The success and development of a technology that originated in a foreign culture depends a lot on the customs, organization, government, economy, and technology of the receiving culture. Very often, the adoption of a foreign technology spurs adaptions, improvements and even new inventions among the adopters. Even the rumor of a foreign technology can spur people invent, or independently reinvent, solutions to a problem. Pacey is keen to recognize this stimulus effect in cross-cultural dialogue related to technology.

In addition to recognizing the inventiveness found in many cultures, Pacey is careful not to overemphasize mechanical inventions, which might tend to put the focus on the West. He points out that the development of more efficient and productive crops and agricultural practices in Asia were also important technologies.

Another important technological improvement centered on organization and abstraction. As technologies became larger and more complex, they exhausted what could be experienced directly by craftsmen. Improvement depended on developing new ways of thinking about materials and work. Scale drawing and model-making became a way to deal with complex construction. New principles of organization were applied to work, such as specialization and division of labor, especially as people began to work with powered machinery. Some technological improvements even required a new way of understanding materials, spurring interest in the development of sciences, especially chemistry.

Pacey follows this progression through guns and railroads and into the 20^th century with computers, nuclear power, and flights to the moon. He doesn’t stop there. Instead, he takes a look, seemingly “back,” to survival technologies. Technologies related to agriculture, sanitation and environmental health in the 20^th century have a huge impact on the way we live today. In the decades since this book was published, the Internet has revolutionized the way we think about computing and communications, but in many ways our health, wellbeing and lifestyles depend on technologies that are centuries old and we cannot neglect them. Perhaps in an ongoing cross-cultural dialogue about technology, new and old, we can find solutions to current and future problems (climate change, water shortages, clean energy, food security and more) that are adaptable to the various needs, scales and organizations of cultures around the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Pacey, Arnold. Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990.

Revelation

Revelation is a difficult book to understand. It has much symbolic and apocalyptic language, and I am far removed from the time and culture in which it was written. I’m not going to clear it up in a few hundred words.

Even so, I’d like to offer a perspective on the book. It seems to me that Revelation is a source of a lot of fear and confusion. So much of the Bible is intended to encourage and edify believers that it is clear to me that fear and confusion are not the intent of the Apostle John or God in the writing of Revelation. As a believer wrestling with this part of God’s Word, however you may feel, do not be afraid.

I’ve seen and heard television and radio program focused on Bible prophecy, particularly Revelation. Some seem particularly alarming or sensational, and others seem to shoehorn current events into a particular interpretation of Revelation and Bible eschatology. Rarely have these programs increased my understanding. Eschatology is important; God addressed the end times, and we should do our best to understand what He said. However, we are not all called to be experts on eschatology, though we are all called to be imitators of Christ.

Some parts of Revelation are easy to understand. In the second and third chapters, Jesus Christ delivers through John messages to seven churches in Asia. Though written to those churches, it is still for us.  Christ’s encouragement and criticisms serve as a mirror into which Christians and churches can still can look to see themselves and how they are.

There are a few other things in Revelation that are plain, especially in light of straightforward teaching found elsewhere in the Bible. Jesus Christ will return. He will judge all the people from all of time; as believers we are already assured of God’s mercy and can expect a much different type of judgment that the one facing those who refused God and continued in their sins. We will all be bodily resurrected; God’s people will be resurrected in transformed, incorruptible bodies to live in God’s presence in a purified and remade creation forever.

Even though it is difficult, I encourage you to read Revelation. It is okay if you can’t understand it all. Ask God to help you understand. Read other books of the Bible; you may be surprised by how they can illuminate Revelation.

John also wrote

The Gospel of John

First John

Second John

Third John

Revelation. The Holy Bible. New King James Version.  Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

More from Keenan Patterson at Google+

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

Malmont, Paul. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

There is trouble in Chinatown. The war god that sets faction against faction in Asia stretches a tentacle across the world to stir plots and revenge in America. Heroes rise to meet this menace, very unlikely heroes: writers.

Malmont takes real life writers of pulp magazines, who he clearly regards with great respect and affection, and puts fictional versions of them in the middle of the kind of adventure they may have written. Some of these writers were legends in their time, but may be little know today. For instance, the main characters are Walter Gibson, who wrote The Shadow as Maxwell Grant, and Lester Dent, who penned Doc Savage as Kenneth Robeson. Other names may be more familiar to modern readers of genre fiction, especially L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein. H. P. Lovecraft plays a brief but pivotal role in a creepy way suited to his weird tales. Several lesser know pulp writers play lesser roles in the story.

I enjoyed these intrusions of biography into the wild fiction. I don’t think anyone would need to be a fan of pulps to enjoy the book. If someone enjoys adventure stories, he’ll probably enjoy this one. The characters sometimes discuss what might be real, if improbable, and what is pulp, a good yarn. Malmont puts the pulp first.

Malmont achieves the right balance of fact and fiction by throwing out the balance. It’s fiction first. The reality is informative and fun, but Malmont makes it work double duty. It is biography and history, but it also helps the reader connect to the characters and their world, which does much to serve the fictional story.

The best thing about the book is that it is fun. It’s a thriller that thrills. It’s a twisty tale that doesn’t try to throw the reader, but sweep them along.

Pauline Letters

The apostle Paul wrote most of the New Testament.  His letters to the early churches mix doctrine, biography, advice, and personal messages.  Paul was Jewish and belonged to a sect of zealots called the Pharisees.  He was an up-and-comer with a prestigious education and leadership roles beyond what was typical for a man his age.  He prosecuted the early church, especially congregations of Jewish converts to Christianity.  He gave it all up, though, after having a vision in which he was confronted by Jesus Christ and he eventually became a missionary and apostle to the Gentiles, planting churches in Europe and Asia.

Several themes recur in Paul’s letters.  Some of these are: the Gospel and doctrinal purity, Christian living, and relationships.

The Gospel

Paul was a preacher of the Gospel.  He frequently reminded people to remember and stick to the Gospel he taught with directness and simplicity.  There were a lot of false teachers who taught alternatives, often to draw followers and enrich themselves.  In Paul’s teaching, everything depended on Christ and what He accomplished through His life, death and resurrection; nothing could be added or subtracted from it.

Of course, some tried to add or subtract.  Some of the teachings Paul opposed were Judaizers, Gnostics, and legalism.  Judaizers proposed that to be Christian, one must be Jewish first.  This included conversion to Judaism, including circumcision, and observance of the law of Moses.  According to the Gospel, everything needed was satisfied in Christ.  The Gnostics came from the tradition of mystery religions, taught “secrets” and proposed a Christ who was resurrected as a spirit.  Paul would have none of that either.  The Gospel was plain and all significant events of Christ’s life for our salvation were publicly known, including his physical resurrection.  Both of these groups touched to some degree on legalism.  People wanted to establish rules to live by, either to control people or to aggrandize themselves or to suggest people had a part in their own salvation.  Paul’s Gospel asserted that Christ is all, His sacrifice atoned for our sins and His power in us enables us to do good.

Christian Living

If Christianity wasn’t about following rules, how were we to live?  Could we do whatever we wanted?  Of course, it is silly to think that God would save us from our sins just so we could do whatever evil came to us.  It was equally naïve to think we could, on our own, live up to any rule that is truly pure and perfect.

Instead, a Christian life should be typified by love, humility, gratitude, and obedience to God.  We are to honor Christ our rescuer by imitating Him.  This isn’t to win his favor, but to return the love He showed us and express gratitude for the mercy we did not deserve.  Christ empowers us to live in a new way, knowing Him and doing good instead of sinning and becoming more estranged from God.

Relationships

One of the most important ways we can show our love for God and be Christ-like is in our relationships with others.  Paul wrote about all kinds of relationships: marriage, parent-child, employer-employee (in those days sometimes master-slave), and fellow in the church.  We should treat others with the love, kindness and generosity that Christ shows to us, especially in the church.

The Pauline Letters appear in most Bibles generally from longest to shortest: Romans, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.  First and Second Timothy, Titus and sometimes Philemon are called the Pastoral Letters because Timothy and Titus were young pastors.

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Second Corinthians

Second Corinthians. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Paul was a missionary who established and grew churches in Asia and Europe. He also kept up correspondence with several churches. The Bible includes two of his letters to the church at Corinth, though some think the book we call Second Corinthians may be Paul’s fourth letter to that congregation.

Second Corinthians covers a lot of ground. The Corinthians were prone to get puffed up and too ready to listen to self-seeking teachers and set aside the Gospel and sound doctrine. Sometimes they seem like children, and sometimes Paul addresses them that way. Don’t judge them too harshly; modern Christians can too easily fall into the same errors and we have fewer excuses.

Part of the letter is informative. Paul writes about what is going on in his life, his travels, his missionary work, and news from other churches.

The letter is also a tool of teaching. In the instance of someone who had been disciplined for wrongdoing, Paul reminds the church to forgive and remember that the purpose of chastising is to lovingly return people to good relationships, not to punish them indefinitely. He reiterates the Gospel and reaffirms the belief in resurrection.



The letter is encouragement as well as instruction. Paul exhorts the church to live the kind of life they were called to, imitating Christ with purity, humility and generosity.

Paul defends himself, too. Other teachers visited Corinth. In some cases, they were not faithful to the Gospel, taught falsely, aggrandized themselves, and took advantage of their positions. Paul contrasted himself to these other teachers, reminding the Corinthians of his conduct among them, his humility and his support of himself without taking using the resources of the Corinthians. He especially emphasized his faithfulness and constancy in the Gospel.

In anticipation of a future visit, Paul sent a gentle warning. He wanted to come to Corinth and find the church in good shape, full of people dedicated to the truth and active in goods works. He wanted them to be the kind of people he was bragging about. He didn’t want to come to find a lot of problems.

Pau’s tone in this letter is interesting. I find it to be often humorous, especially in the ironic argumentation and the way he points out the absurdity of some of the things said against him and the faith. Paul speaks as an older brother with tough cajoling, a mother with gentle nagging, a father with loving discipline, and a friend with persuasive pleading, and a shepherd calling his sheep to safety.

Paul also wrote
First Corinthians
Romans

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Acts
The Gospels
King James Bible

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Elixir by Brian Fagan (245)

Fagan, Brian.  Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Unlike other authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.  In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely associated with ritual, often considered sacred.  Fagan’s interested in the human relationship with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.

Fagan describes three phases of the human relationship with water.  In the first stage, water is an unreliable, often scarce, and highly valued resource.  This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of water.  In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity, little considered and treated as if it were superabundant.  In the emerging stage, water is a finite resource we need to conserve.

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Most of the book is covers the first stage.  He discusses the historic relationship and management of water from around the world.  Some of these were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans.  Others are lesser known, like the highly ritualistic and religious Balinese system that is still operating.  Some we know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.

Because of this approach, Elixir is also a work of cultural and physical geography.  The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their environment.

The commodity stage is covered much more briefly.  To be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.  It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more difficult and remote sources of water.  Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant water.  Fagan points to arid and semiarid regions of Africa and Asia as locations poised on exhausting their water.  This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest, where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for more than a century.

For the stage we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.  Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have sustainable water supplies.

When it comes to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology and human ingenuity.  Even so, he implies that we should look to our past.

In the early stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it, immensely.  It is time to place a high value on water again, even without religious aspects.  Also, in the past water management was a very local affair, and surprisingly democratic.  Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies, they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the community.  Even in empires with powerful central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Acts

Acts. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Acts is attributed to Luke, author of one of the gospels. The gospels focus on the life of Christ, but Acts focuses on the apostles as they established the church. Much of the book tells of the missionary journeys of Paul, and Luke indicates that he accompanied the apostle on some of those journeys.

In his gospel, Luke described the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, made several appearances to his disciples, sometimes large groups of them, until His Ascension. Luke shows that the resurrection of Jesus was central to Christianity from the beginning, being preached by Peter immediately after Pentecost and by Paul repeatedly wherever he went.


Peter was a leader of the apostles and he is prominent in the early chapters of the books. During this time, the growth of the church was concentrated in Jerusalem until the persecution led to its dispersion. This dispersion, along with a vision God gave Peter, was the beginning of the gospel being carried to non-Jewish people, Gentiles, and the growth of the church in that sector.

With the shift to Gentiles, the book turns from Peter to Paul. Paul was a Jewish scholar and a leader of the prosecution of the church. His conversion is described in Acts. He was appointed by the other apostles to be a missionary to the Gentiles and rose to become one of the great teachers in the church.

Paul took three missionary journeys. In the first, he established or encouraged churches in Asia near the Mediterranean Sea. His second journey revisited some of these churches and expanded into Greece. His third trip focused on Ephesus, a major economic center of the Roman Empire.

His preaching in Ephesus, and the growth of he church there, lead to conflicts with the temple of Diana. In Ephesus, Paul begins to feel the call to carry the gospel to Rome. Before he goes, he revisits Greece and Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was also a place of conflict for Paul. He was welcomed by the church there, which celebrated the work he had done among the Gentiles, but he came into conflict with Jewish leaders. These men captured him and took him to Roman officials wanting to have him put to death. These Roman leaders were too scrupulous of their laws to laws to execute Paul on shaky charges that they probably saw as a sectarian conflict amongst the Jews, but some were willing to do a favor a keep him out of the way. This eventually lead Paul to appeal his case to Caesar, a right he claimed as Roman citizen, and he was sent to Rome under military guard.

Paul spent a couple of years as a prisoner in Rome, though he had great liberty and was allowed to preach and teach there. Paul was probably acquitted after a couple of years in Rome and received better treatment that he would later when, as a prisoner again, he wrote his letters to the churches.

Acts may come off as a biography of Peter and Paul. It is really a picture of the great commission in action as the church began preaching and making disciples first in Jerusalem (Peter), then the nearby districts (shifting from Peter to Paul), and finally to the entire known world (Paul’s missionary journeys).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Holy Bible (especially the Gospels (especially Luke))
Fathered by God by John Eldredge
Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller
The Joy of Supernatural Thinking by Bill Bright