Book Review

What is neo-Calvinism? The authors describe it as holistic, organic, and modern in its orthodoxy (8). Still, these terms are pregnant with meaning and need explanation. Thankfully, Brock and Sutanto have provided an excellent text to help us understand neo-Calvinism within its own theological genesis. There is a particular salience to the book’s emphasis on…

One exercise on political partisanship I enjoy doing with my classes is to read out a list of words and phrases while the students work together to classify them as either red or blue—Republican or Democrat. It starts off simply with broad groups in the population: the students all “know” that farmers are red while…

Matthew Martens is convinced that the United States criminal justice system desperately needs reform. While he is eager to have his fellow evangelicals contribute to “meaningful dialogue and charting a way forward” in that task (2), he sees two obstacles that keep that from happening. One is that we evangelicals are poorly informed about the…

Kevin Vallier has written a valuable exposition and critique of what he describes as radical religious alternatives to liberalism. Vallier is an Eastern Orthodox political philosopher at Bowling Green State University and a strong defender of the liberal tradition in politics. Liberalism in this sense refers broadly to such things as constitutional government, respect for…

This is just the book for which I—and many others—have been waiting. It is an objective, comprehensive, and credible assessment of over 500 colleges and universities who claim some connection with the Christian tradition. In fact, no one has tried a credible assessment of such a massive number of schools. This book offers a wonderful…

Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art provides a valuable Christian framework to traditional art critical practice. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt combines an established framework, repeated themes, and a wide range of examples, resulting in content that is accessible to all readers, including novice art viewers. In her introduction, she proposes…

It seems that we have never had so much free time and so little idea how to use it. As is often the case, contemporary music articulates our pathologies: The progressive rock band, Styx, in their song, “Too Much Time On My Hands” confess, “I’ve got nothing to do / and all day long to…

Geoffrey Galt Harpham has argued that conversation about crisis is fundamental to the humanities in the United States, an insight I extend to the liberal arts more generally.Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Certainly, crisis-talk has spanned my own career. From internal academic anxiety…

I have taught at Houston Christian (formerly Houston Baptist) University since 1991, and I am happy to report that the university has spent the last two decades intentionally recruiting, encouraging, and equipping professors committed to the integration of faith and learning in every discipline of the modern university. I, along with dozens of my colleagues,…

A number of biographies have been written about Warren Hamilton Lewis’s younger brother, C. S. Lewis, but Don King is the first scholar to undertake a biography of the elder brother who played a key role in the founding of the Inklings, that remarkable group of friends in Oxford whose writings have become a permanent…

In an era when the humanities are taking a beating in academic curricula and in church life, a work arrives to remind us of the revitalizing power of imagination that these disciplines offer. Edgar Allen Poe captures the human longing in his short story Morella: “It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness…