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Review Essays

Theological Foundations for Creation Care: Replacing Apathy and Despair with Hope and Christian Virtues — A Review Essay

Andrew J. Spencer’s and Steven Bouma-­Prediger’s recent releases applying Christian theology to contemporary environmental problems share similar goals and face common constraints. As trade paperbacks, both books are intended to motivate an indifferent or skeptical Christian readership and theologically equip students to address hot-­button political topics. The authors self-­identify as Evangelical, utilize the language of…
November 6, 2024
Review Essays

The University and Community Engagement: Recent Approaches

If we’re going to do this,” DeAmon Harges told me, “we’re going to have to become friends.” The condition set me back on my heels. Of course, I wasn’t opposed to getting to know this Indianapolis-based nonprofit leader, rapidly becoming a national figure in community development conversations. But though I was far from reluctant to…
June 10, 2024
Review Essays

Two Visions for an Evangelical Reformation

Russell Moore and Karen Swallow Prior may not fit the stereotype of an “exvangelical.” Unlike the angry twenty-something who takes to social media to announce that they’re resigning from church, Moore and Prior both devoted several decades of their adult lives to serving the church through teaching, writing, and (in Moore’s case) denominational administration. Both…
June 10, 2024
Review Essays

Three Visions for America: Liberalism, Another Liberalism, and Anglo-American Conservatism

Debates rage over the best direction for American conservatism, particularly in the wake of Donald Trump’s disruptive presidency. The three books reviewed here provide distinct diagnoses and prescriptions for American politics. Only one book, Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is primarily intended as a blueprint for American conservatism. Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents assesses…
March 3, 2024
Review Essays

Embracing Finitude at Every Stage of Life

As I sat down to begin writing this review essay of these recently published books, the sun was rising on the first day of the forty-eighth year of my life. I did not plan to be writing a review essay on my birthday, but it seems fitting given the topics addressed in these books. Like…
March 3, 2024
Review Essays

Can Worldview Ever Again Matter?

Toward the end of the previous century, Dana Gioia broached the question whether poetry, which had fallen on hard times with the reading public, could ever again matter.Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1992). Although there were plenty of poets, numerous poetry journals, respectable poetry publishers cranking out new collections every…
November 13, 2023
Review Essays

Educating for Intellectual Virtues: What?, Why?, and How?

Each of the three authors of the books reviewed in this essay seems to have had a moment when he realized that imparting knowledge and skills, however important, is an insufficient goal of education. For Quentin Schultze, it was when one student dumped his notes and textbook (written by Schultze himself!) into a trash can…
November 13, 2023
Review Essays

Vocation and the Stewardship of Place

Reappraisal of the operative vocational theologies that dominate popular Christian scholarship and teaching are actively under way. As with many sub-disciplines and fields of theology, vocational theologies are being vigorously re-examined with greater attentiveness to context and the underpinnings of their guiding theological assumptions. Vocational theologies, maybe more but certainly not less than other fields,…
July 24, 2023
Review Essays

Living in a Democracy as a Fallen People

In the short space of about 30 years, we have gone from heralding liberal democracy (or liberalism) as the final political regime (see Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesisFrancis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1992).) to wondering whether it can or should survive. The big idea…
May 8, 2023
Review Essays

Signs Against Violence: A Review Essay

In his recent book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, journalist Jonathan Rauch makes a compelling case that our shared sense of reality is a product of a worldwide network of those committed to a set of principles and practices he sets out to articulate.Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of…
February 14, 2023
ArticleReview Essays

Winsome Conviction

Let’s start with the proposition that conversation about civility among evan-gelical Christians today has too much of the book of Proverbs and not enough of the book of Job. In contrast with the complex emotional world of Job (more on that later), the proverbists have a settled, centered comfortability with the world—so long as one…
July 15, 2022
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How (Not) to Lose Your Soul While Saving the World: World Vision, Tearfund, and the Precarious Rise of Evangelical Humanitarianism

In the late 1940s, budding American evangelist Bob Pierce visited Amoy, China, to preach the gospel at a girl’s school run by Dutch Reformed missionary Tena Hoelkeboer. Not knowing much about Chinese culture, Pierce told students to go home and tell their parents that they were going to become Christians. One of them actually did…
July 15, 2022
Review Essays

Reading Romans Relationally— A Review Essay

Mariam Kamell Kovalishyn is assistant professor of New Testament studies at Regent College. Three very different books on Romans emerged around the same time in 2019, authored by Scot McKnight, by Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh, and by Jackson W. Not one claims or seeks to be a commentary; rather, they each provide a sort of…
November 12, 2020
Review Essays

Learning to Be More Human— A Review Essay

Mark A. Peters is professor of music and director of the Center for Teaching and the Good Life at Trinity Christian College. He is president of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and book review co-editor for Christian Scholar’s Review. Whatever you learn, remember: the learning must make you more, not less, human.—Elie Wiesel…
January 15, 2020
Review Essays

Culture, Religion, and American Power—A Review Essay

By and large, the discipline of political science does not take religion seriously. The typical member of this particular scholarly guild sees religious belief and affiliation not as causes of political action, but rather as consequences of political or economic interests. Religion, at most, is a device that savvy elites use to hoodwink gullible masses…
John Owen
April 15, 2019
Review Essays

Families Living on the Margins— A Review Essay

Rebecca C. Burwell is a faculty member at Chicago Semester, where she teaches courses in race, social justice, and vocation. In 1942, during the Second World War, British academic William Beveridge developed a report entitled “Social Insurance and Allied Services” that identified five social issues that the British government would need to address once the…
April 15, 2018
Review Essays

Perspectives on Racial Segregation in Chicago—A Review Essay

Mackenzi Huyser serves as Executive Director of Chicago Semester. What is the Cost of Segregation in Chicago? This question was explored in a March 2017 report released by the Urban Institute in partnership with the Metropolitan Planning Council.Gregory Acs, Rolf Pendall, Mark Treskon, Amy Khare, “The Cost of Segregation: National Trends and the Case of…
November 15, 2017