Philip D. Byers

Reviewed by Philip D. Byers, Graduate Student in History, University of Notre Dame Through sheer happenstance, I had the good fortune to begin reading Alison Collis Greene’s book No Depression in Heaven only days after concluding Marilynne Robinson’s recent novel, Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). While Robinson’s eponymous protagonist lives in the 1950s, much…

Reviewed by Philip D. Byers, Graduate Student in History, Washington University in St. Louis For the latter half of the twentieth century, the ubiquity of the word “evangelical” in common parlance bore little correlation to the degree to which social commentators and water-cooler politicos actually understood the movement. Thankfully, diligent work by a generation of…

Reviewed by Philip D. Byers, Residence Life, Bethel University David R. Swartz has produced a book that is at once innovative historiography and enlivening prose. Using the 1973 Thanksgiving Workshop of Evangelical Social Concern and its resulting “Chicago Declaration” as his framework, Swartz narrates and analyzes the mid-twentieth-century progressive movement in American evangelicalism. Examining many…

The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue by Mark Noll and James Turner, edited and with an introductory essay by Thomas A. Howard, was born out of a lecture series at Gordon College. Howard situates the conversation optimistically within a developing rapprochement between Evangelicals and Catholics. Past Protestant-Catholic hostilities took place against…