Skip to main content

Articles

Reviews

Earthly Powers, Sacred Causes, The Stillborn God & A Secular Age

Taken together, these four books provide one an opportunity to survey the broad and deep questions that are interwoven with secularization and religion in Western Europe and North America over the past few centuries. Each has a distinct purpose and framework making for a wide-ranging treatment of the many issues they raise. I read all…
July 15, 2008
Review Essays

Bonhoeffer in America

In September of 1930, the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York for his first visit to America. As a teaching fellow at Union Theological Seminary, the young Bonhoeffer spent the next year meeting colleagues like Jean Laserre, a French pacifist, and Frank Fisher, a black seminarian who introduced Bonhoeffer to Abyssinian…
July 15, 2008
Review Essays

Poetically Negotiating the Love of God: An Examination of John D. Caputo’s Recent Postsecular Theology

The Prestige, a 2006 film about competition and revenge between two antagonistic Victorian era magicians, takes its title from the last of the three acts that characterize all successful illusions. Every magic trick begins with Act 1, “The Pledge,” when the magician presents to the audience some rather ordinary and unsurprising object or situation; for…
July 15, 2008
Article

Defending Human Personhood: Some Insights from Natural Law

The Christian affirmation of human personhood is based on a philosophical and theological understanding of human beings made in the image and likeness of a Creator-God. Yet, as Dennis M. Sullivan points out, not all participants in ethics discussions share these preconceptions, leading to contentious debates over human value at both the beginning and end…
April 15, 2008
Article

The Prospect of Christian Materialism

The idea that persons are or contain a nonphysical soul that is capable of existing after the destruction of the human body is customarily called “dualism.” Over the course of two millennia, the Christian tradition has been solidly in the dualist camp. Most Christians have affirmed the existence of the soul, its survival of death…
April 15, 2008
Article

Popular Cultural “Worlds” as Alternative Religions

To what extent can popular culture be understood as a collection of religions? Using a biblically informed appropriation of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative as a threefold mimesis as his conceptual grid, Theodore A. Turnau explores how popular cultural texts can function as alternative religions. He focuses on two case studies: a group of romance…
April 15, 2008
Reviews

Faith and Secularisation in Religious Colleges and University

While a plethora of books about religious higher education have hit the market recently, the vast majority of this scholarship focuses on Christian institutions in America. James Arthur’s new book, however, provides a fresh angle not used in previous works. Arthur, who is Professor of Education and Director of the National Institute for Christian Education…
April 15, 2008