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Having been struck by the title of the former book, I was reading it with a view to reviewing it when I came across the latter, and decided after a preliminary perusal that a review of both together would be more fruitful. As a teacher of the Classics (mostly in translation) at a Christian College,…

The contributions of Augustine and Thomas More to the development of the Western Intellectual Tradition certainly have been the subject of more than their fair share of scholarly evaluation. But usually such examinations focus on one or more of the sometimes slippery positions of the two authors, hidden often in allusion or late-career retractions, and…

In the introduction to American Providence (2004), theologian Stephen H. Webb observes, “The cultural elite dismiss the doctrine of providence as the illusory product of fundamentalist fantasies. Providence is caricatured as a theological version of hide-and-seek.” He concedes, “There is some truth to this caricature. When history is treated like a secret message, theology becomes…

Stephen Nichols’ book consists of eight chapters, a reading list and an index. The chapters deal with historical and contemporary figures and their influence on issues that mix the secular and sacred in American religion. Part of his thesis can be summarized as “Too often American evangelicals have settled for a Christology that can be…

Conventional historical opinion depicts late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-obscenity moral reformers as sanctimonious Puritans who considered sex an unpleasant necessity and open discussions of it loathsome and harmful. Yet this small band of self-righteous prigs exerted a disproportionately large amount of influence over the American public by manipulating the legal system successfully through federal…

Denis Lamoureux’s goal in this book is to demonstrate that Christians in general and conservative Christians in particular should have no hesitation in accepting evolution as a potentially complete scientific account of the origin and development of biological life. Lamoureux’s view would be described usually as “theistic evolution” but Lamoureux objects to this description of…

I became aware of The Shack by William Young (Windblown Media, 2007) the way I learn about many new books that I would probably never hear about otherwise: the father of one of my students sent me the novel via his daughter along with a request for an evaluation of its contents. It had not…