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Reviews

Science and the Quest for Meaning

In his book, Science and the Quest for Meaning, Alfred Tauber draws from post-positivist studies of science in an effort to bring coherence to the worldview of secular humanism. His “integrative project” abandons the fact-value dichotomy that served once as positivism’s central tenet and sets out to reconstitute the relationship between knowledge and meaning. As…
October 15, 2010
Reviews

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself & God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty

These two works, When Helping Hurts and God Knows There’s Need, both address the salient and timely concern of how Christians should address poverty. With these commonalities in mind, important differences inform each argument and approach. The foreword of When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor and Yourself begins with the…
October 15, 2010
Reviews

Religious Ideas for Secular Universities

With Religious Ideas for Secular Universities, John Sommerville continues a line of enquiry he began in his 2006 book, The Decline of the Secular University. There, he argued that the American university has found itself on society’s sidelines by excluding religion from academic discourse. In doing so, it refused, or at least failed, to address…
October 15, 2010
Reviews

An Introduction to Religion and Literature

Literature tries to depict something – people, a culture, a historical situation, or images that stir the imagination – but depicting and explaining can work together. Mark Knight’s strength is to hear the sounds in literature and offer a critique of those who do not hear them in a Christian manner. The introduction provides an…
October 15, 2010
Reviews

Business as Mission: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice

Christian colleges and universities are filled with a diverse body of students and faculty who are dedicated to the great commission (Matt. 28:19-20) and to the greatest commandments (Matt. 22:37-40). Many in this diverse group eventually will find themselves operating in the global marketplace, perhaps the last great frontier of missions. Functioning effectively in this…
October 15, 2010
Review Essays

The (Re)Turn to the Person in Contemporary Theory—A Review Essay

Introduction “Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist.”Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994 ), 308. So claimed Michel Foucault in his intellectual archaeology of modernity, The Order of Things. Indeed “man,”I am framing this with the gender-specific term “man” in this…
October 15, 2010
Review and Response

Escaping the Cage of Secular Discourse—A Review Essay

Steven D. Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse is an important book.Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard University Press, 2010),280 pp. $26.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780674050877. I will be offering a point or two of criticism. That, however, takes nothing away from my judgment that Smith’s book is an intellectually imaginative and compelling…
Nicholas Wolterstorff
October 15, 2010
Review and Response

A Response to Nicholas Wolterstorff

It is an honor to have The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse reviewed by a person and scholar of the stature of Nicholas Wolterstorff – and a relief to see that the review is generally favorable. Wolterstorff presents the principal arguments of the book succinctly and sympathetically and offers some perceptive criticisms. These criticisms prompt me…
October 15, 2010