Articles

The title of James K. A. Smith’s book, The Devil Reads Derrida, might prove misleading to those (non-Derrideans) who believe that a text should possess a coherent meaning and that this meaning be evinced in the title. For in fact, the most important word of the title isn either “Derrida” nor “Devil,” but the innocuous…

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? belongs to a series by Baker Academic called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” The editor, James K. A. Smith, provides the rationale for reading Merold Westphal’s contribution: “For ‘peoples of the Book,’ whose way of life is shaped by texts, matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and…

Modern philosophical ethics have tried often to show how ethics can be independent of theology—with limited success. John Hare is a Christian philosopher, currently holding the Noah Porter Chair of Philosophical Theology at Yale, who has devoted much of his career to exploring these limits. This book continues the exploration by presenting a history of…

Holmes Rolston was a mainly unnoticeable, slightly unconventional parish pastor in a small and irrelevant village in rural Virginia. His church elders fired him, despite his family’s pedigree of many generations of distinguished Presbyterian ministers, because he seemed more concerned with preaching about celebrating and protecting God’s revelation in the beauty of nature than in…

Baylor philosopher Scott H. Moore is impatient with Christians who choose confrontation and condemnation as their weapons against secularizing and dehumanizing tendencies in contemporary society and politics. In the closing chapter of this small book on a dauntingly large subject, he calls for an embrace of “hospitality and the culture of life” that would involve…

Several years ago, when teaching a humanities course, I discovered the now-popular martyrdom story of Perpetua and Felicitas. In several history and humanities classes since then, I have introduced my students to The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas using the narrative as an opportunity to inquire about authority, power, and gender. Some students have surprised…

In recent years there has been criticism of Christians working in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), particularly as a platform for Christian evangelism. While the critiques have been remarkably strong by non-Christians,See, for example, Alistair Pennycook and Sinfree Makoni, “The Modern Mission: The Language Effects ofChristianity,” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education…