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Book Review: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

The oft-used analogy that “fish don’t know they’re in water” is a reminder that a worldview, or, in Charles Taylor’s more nuanced phrase, a social imaginary (26), often becomes so taken for granted that we do not notice it anymore. Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, reveals the water…
March 22, 2022
Article

Planting Churches or Selling Them? New Competitors for the Metaphors We Use

While the Bible offers a dazzling array of metaphors with which to think about the church, contemporary social scientists—informed no doubt by the influential Rational Choice Theory of Religion movement—often engage a market-based metaphor. With help from Gladys Ganiel’s Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, this article demonstrates why this is an attractive yet deficient frame for examining…
February 28, 2022
Article

Christian Higher Education as Sacred Liminal Space

Higher education institutions are encountering an unprecedented confluence of short- and long-term challenges. Despite the turbulent context, institutionally and individually we must perpetually work to sustain our liminal essence, while refusing to be defined by excesses. Because on these campuses, students are transformed into “whole and holy persons,” and equipped to engage in “God’s work…
February 28, 2022
ArticlePerspectives

Toward a Hermeneutic of Gravitas

This article briefly summarizes some recent psychosocial research that describes the posture of grievance from which many young adults operate today. It then recounts three stories of classroom encounters that illustrate how this posture affects the way young adults read classic Christian texts. Next, it analyzes this “hermeneutic of grievance” itself, showing how this reading…
February 28, 2022
Reviews

Three Views on Christianity and Science

“Views books” offer brief sketches of competing views on a target subject along with some arguments for and against each view. For Three Views on Christianity and Science, the target area is relating Christianity to the sciences. The three views or models on display are supposed to be independence or two-realms, dialogue, and integration. Generally,…
February 28, 2022
Reviews

Public Intellectuals and the Common Good: Christian Thinking for Human Flourishing

“America needs more private intellectuals.”Francis Joseph Beckwith, Twitter post, June 22, 2021, 10:36 a.m., https://twitter.com/fbeckwith/sta-tus/1407346836223021065. Emphasis added. So tweeted Baylor University philosopher and occasional public intellectual Francis Beckwith. Perhaps Beckwith had in mind a particular public intellectual’s unfortunate essay or social media misadventure. There is little doubt public intellectuals draw fire from all sides. Scholars…
February 28, 2022
Reviews

A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution

In his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” C. S. Lewis brushed off the then-growing fear that the authority of science threatened to supplant Christianity. He was not convinced and wrote, “The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever-narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of ‘Science’ mounts higher and higher corresponds…
February 28, 2022