Book Review

Reviewed by Matthew J. Milliner, Art, Wheaton College What is “theology and art,” this hybrid category of inquiry that has sprung up like bamboo in and across neatly divided academic plots? Should it be categorized as art practice, art history or musicology, philosophy, theology, or something different still? Whatever the answer (and there may not…

Reviewed by Kenneth L. Waters, Sr., Theology, Azusa Pacific University As a phenomenon of the African American church, Afro-Pentecostalism is expressive of an African heritage, a Holiness-liberationist perspective, the pivotal leadership of W. J. Seymour, and the enduring legacy of the Azusa Street Revival. Fourteen scholars come together in an edited volume to explore various…

Reviewed by Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, Theology, Boston University Harvard philosopher George Santayana once wrote regarding religion: “The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in.”George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, vol. 3: Reason in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 6;…

Reviewed by Perry L. Glanzer, Educational Foundations, Baylor University Do not let the title of this book fool you. Mike Higton, Academic Co-Director of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, and Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of Exeter, has not written this book for scholars working in Christian colleges and universities. Instead, he penned his…

Reviewed by Karen S. Buchanan, Academic Affairs, George Fox University In Faith and Learning: A Handbook for Christian Higher Education, David S. Dockery, President of Union University, and his twenty-four co-essayists explore the “place of Christian faith” on the university campus. Dockery asserts that the “calling of Christian higher education is to “reflect the life…

Reviewed by Gary S. Selby, Communication, Pepperdine University Just when we thought were we beginning to get a handle on the “integration of faith and learning,” ACU press has released a new volume, Beyond Integration, which questions whether the conception represented by that slogan is even “now beginning to demonstrate its limits” (15) and, if…

Reviewed by George F. Pickens, Theology and Mission, Messiah College Even though I have been a student of World Christianity since before that term was widely used, I confess that the idea of reviewing yet another volume which claimed to examine Christianity around the world was not initially appealing. For a myriad of reasons, interest…

Reviewed by Benjamin B. DeVan, Ethics and Theology, Durham University “Of making many books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). This aphorism traditionally attributed to King Solomon especially applies to books about sex, which proliferate in print and online faster than the proverbial jackrabbit, and exponentially exceed in number Solomon’s “seven hundred wives of royal…

Reviewed by Carl A. Ruby, Student Life, Cedarville University In the final chapter of Amanda Rose’s narrative account of the consequences of our nation’s current approach to immigration policy she observes, “The U.S.– Mexican border is a place of extreme behavior, a place where social and economic ills are played out with terrifying and tragic…

Reviewed by Louis Markos, English, Houston Baptist University C. S. Lewis knew his Aquinas well. Not only was he familiar with Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God; he was well aware that the Angelic Doctor could only conceive of two possible reasons to doubt God’s existence. In Part I, Question 2, Article 3 of…

Reviewed by Tom Lehman, Economics, Indiana Wesleyan University Imagine a situation in which someone you know to be innocent is wrongly accused of crimes she did not commit, and the prosecution in the case is the actual perpetrator of those crimes. However, the accused innocent is not particularly appealing, is not always cooperative, is easily…

Reviewed by David A. Hoekema, Philosophy, Calvin College “In spite of the indispensable use of images in our yearning to make sense of reality, there has not been sufficient attention to the aesthetic in the debate between theism and naturalism” (3). This opening comment conveys the motivation for a wide-ranging and provocative book by a…

Reviewed by Edward C. Polson, Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice, Messiah College In Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat examines some of the most significant changes that have occurred in U.S. religious life since the 1950s. He explores the impact that the declining significance of both…

Reviewed by Shaun C. Henson, Theology and Religion, University of Oxford Distinction and novelty are necessarily rarer descriptors for books on the dialogue between science and religion nowadays, due partly to a thematic overlap caused by the sheer number of them in production in recent decades. Alexei Nesteruk, a senior lecturer in mathematics at the…