Extended Review

“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” opens John S. Feinberg in Four Views on Heaven (23). Trying to circumvent, downplay, or ignore our mortality, as well as demurring to talk candidly about death, has bedeviled humanity from time immemorial, satirized by the likes of Monty Python’s classic “Parrot Sketch” and…

My thanks to Benjamin B. DeVan for his review. I have to protest, however, that he has not laid out the continuous philosophical case that the book advances. I can only assume that past experience misled him into conflating my claims with others he had previously encountered, with the result that he missed the larger “narrative…

Kevin N. Flatt teaches history at Redeemer University. Does the discipline of history need a reformation? Mark Sandle and William Van Arragon think so. In this brief but far-ranging and thought-provoking book for students, the two historians from The King’s University, a Christian liberal arts university in Edmonton, Alberta, offer their take on what is wrong…

Benjamin B. DeVan teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University. In the episode “Honor” for AMC’s series The Walking Dead, teenage protagonist Carl Grimes suffers a fatal wound.“Honor,” The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 9, AMC, February 25, 2018. His family tries to make him comfortable and listen to his last words. Carl recounts a vision beneath a shattered stained glass window…

Deborah C. Bowen is Professor Emerita of English at Redeemer University. David Lyle Jeffrey’s voice has been loud and clear now for upwards of 40 years, telling the story of what he describes as “the magnificent fruitfulness of Holy Scripture in the work of English poets” (vii). His related concern to counter a growing lack…

Joshua R. Canada is Director of Strategic Partnerships in the College of Liberal Arts, Azusa Pacific University. On April 28, 2018, society lost one of its premier scholars. At age 79, James Cone, a central figure in the development of Black liberation theology, went on to glory. Cone’s 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power,…

William Boerman-Cornell is professor of education at Trinity Christian College. In Europe, and to a lesser extent North America, colleges and universities are being asked to justify student tuition expenditures in terms of direct monetary payoffs in post-graduation salaries. The value of philosophy departments in small private colleges and large universities alike has come under question…

Lenore M. Knight Johnson is associate professor of Sociology and co-director of the Honors Program at Trinity Christian College. Crumbling public schools. Gun violence. Loss. Failure. Death. Grief. The stories we commonly hear of Chicago paint a grim picture dominated by all that is broken in the third largest city in the United States. Yet…

Justin Ariel Bailey is assistant professor of theology at Dordt University. His research explores the intersections of Christian theology, culture, and ministry, and his forthcoming book is entitled Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age (IVP Academic, 2020). Every semester, I teach a Bible survey course, mostly to freshmen undergraduates. Early in…

Rebecca C. Hong is Senior Director of Educational Effectiveness and Assessment at Loyola Marymount University. On September 6, 2018, Amber Guyger, a white female off-duty Dallas police officer entered the home of Botham Jean, an unarmed 26-year-old black neighbor, and fatally shot him to death. Guyger testified that when she entered the home of Jean,…

Jeremy Norwood is Professor of Sociology at Spring Arbor University and serves as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Global Studies, and Criminal Justice. One of the most widely circulated phrases regarding armed conflict in East Africa is the adage that “when two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.” The phrase refers…

Melissa Rovig Vanden Bout is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity Christian College. How shall American Christians understand our relationship to racism? There are a great many possibilities open to us, and our present time functions as a crucible for this decision. We could deny the scope or power of racism, locate it in a…

Timothy Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Literature and Languages and Co-Coordinator of Adjunct Care at Trinity Christian College. Prior to assuming a full-time role in the fall of 2018, Professor Hendrickson served Trinity in an adjunct capacity for seven years. Despite its modest length (under 170 pages, excluding appendices and index), Herb Childress’s The Adjunct…

Allison Backous Troy is an independent scholar and essayist. Every Easter season, a popular meme from The Simpsons circulates around the social media pages of Eastern Orthodox Christians in America. The meme depicts the citizens of Springfield leaving an Easter service, and a lone Orthodox clergyman, complete with a bishop’s staff (adorned with a gold-gilded…

Michael Vander Weele is Professor of English Emeritus at Trinity Christian College. If you looked up this review, chances are good that you will want to read this collection of essays for yourself—unless you have not read anything by Marilynne Robinson yet, in which case do that first. When I read page 128, part of…

The title of this review essay should challenge Christians as much as Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia challenges nearly everything about modern society. Humanity has created a planet that is reacting very unfavorably toward its makers. Latour’s challenge—or rather, Gaia’s—is first to our belief that we are rational and second that our profound irrationality generates collective…

Robert Boyd is a professor at Fresno City College, where he has taught philosophy and theology of religions since 1996. While Boyd has maintained his primary interest in the field of critical reasoning, much of his current research deals with issues connected to the philosophy and theology of religions. He recently published two impressive volumes…

It is exciting to see the wealth of new scholarship being produced around the interrelationships between the Christian faith and human cultures, as Christians ask important questions about how religion relates to other aspects of human cultures, how Christianity relates to particular cultures (or to particular aspects of cultures), and how the Christian church should…

The Protestant Reformation made the Bible accessible not only to theologians and priests, but also to everyday people. Interestingly, though, certain branches of that same movement were deeply distrustful of the paintings, statues, icons, and stained glass windows that adorned churches, viewing them as objects of idolatrous worship rather than as doorways and windows to…

Amid the constant reminders throughout 2017 of the need to reckon collectively with racism as a system embedded within the American social, political, economic, and cultural landscape, two important collections emerged offering reflective tools for this work. Acclaimed author and national correspondent for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power: An American…