Articles

I had high hopes for this book. It is written by a senior scholar, published by a major university press, and touted by an impressive array of academic luminaries. To its credit, the book is well written and thought provoking, forcing readers to reflect seriously about serious matters, which is no small accomplishment. In the…

In his gloss on the Creation account in Genesis, the author of John’s Gospel narrates the Christian origins of existence: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was…

Don King, a well-known scholar in the field of C. S. Lewis studies, has made a substantial contribution to our knowledge of a fascinating and important woman. Joy Davidman is not well known. Indeed, most people who are aware of her can only imagine her as the heroic and tragic cancer victim and wife of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

In response to the fundamentalist atheism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens in their recent popular books, Ian Markham seeks to “locate understand this skepticism (perhaps even make case with a bit more rigor) and then provide an account of faith that is compelling, readable, and informed” (6). His subtle, concise Christian apologetic…