Reviews

Richard Horsley attempts to employ a more nuanced, historically and socially contingent approach to the interpretation of Scripture in order to lead us to embrace a call for economic justice. The end result is an interpretation of Scripture that portrays modern market capitalism as a violation of the original covenantal principles of economic justice. For…

At bottom, this is a wonderfully simple book. It gathers essays from scholars of high academic standing to tell us what we learned in kindergarten: we need to listen in order to understand; we need to put ourselves in another person’s shoes; we need to see things through another’s eyes. This collection of authorities gives…

Rodney Stark sums up the argument of God’s Battalions tersely: The thrust of the preceding chapters can be summarized very briefly. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They…

Initially, the title of this book made me think it could provide a much-needed critique of the ubiquitous notion of “human development” that, for centuries, has influenced a variety of fields from psychology to education to political science to philosophy to history. “Development” is indeed a commonplace term that deserves significant analysis, but this book,…

Peter J. Leithart is the organizing pastor at Trinity Reformed Church, a Christ Reformed Evangelical congregation, and the Dean of Graduate Studies and Senior Fellow of Theology for New Saint Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho. Deep Exegesis is a clear, optimistic, and well-written book, with wide-spanning and interdisciplinary implications. Impressively, Leithart returns frequently to his exegesis…

Stratford Caldecott’s finely-written book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, advocates a return to (Christian) Pythagoreanism as the founding spirit of liberal arts education. Caldecott understands true education as centered on the liberal arts, which he interprets in the spirit of their classical roots as trivium and quadrivium. He argues that education has been disenchanted, because it…

Scholarship by and about the non-Western Christian world is proliferating in recent years, and the picture that is emerging bears remarkable similarities to Christianity in the West. While the immediate focus of this work by Mark A. Noll, distinguished author and professor of history at Notre Dame, is on Christianity in the United States, ultimately…

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” W. B. Yeats’ oft-quoted line is useful in capturing any number of problems. When applied to the Christian life, it can suggest that we did not try hard enough to understand how — with Christ at the center — everything can hold together (Colossians 1:17). When applied to…

Philosophers Keith Yandell and Harold Netland offer an excellent historical and apologetic study of the Buddhist tradition. Chapter 1 describes its origins in India under the title “Early Buddhism.” Chapters 2 and 3 chart changes and innovations as “The Dharma Goes East” to China, Tibet and Japan and as “The Dharma Goes West.” Chapters 4…

Once a moderately well-known poet and public intellectual in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, Ruth Pitter has been almost forgotten save as a footnote in biographies of C. S. Lewis. Yet her work won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry and the William E. Heinneman Award. She was the first woman to receive…

On May 28, 2007, the recent creationist organization Answers in Genesis opened its 27-million-dollar Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Although the organization projected 250,000 visitors to the museum in its first year, 404,000 people paid to see the museum during its first year of operation. Despite the economic slow down in 2008-2009, almost one million…

In Christianity and Human Rights Frederick Shepherd has assembled a strong collection of contributions to one of the fastest growing areas of research in international relations, political thought, development studies and the study of religion: the history, theory and future practice of human rights. Shepherd’s volume is particularly worthy of attention because of three features:…

Renaissance artists loved to paint the past, and, in their enthusiasm, they plundered the storehouses of both history (the Life of Moses, the Fall of the Roman Republic, the Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection) and legend (the Heroes of Greek Mythology, the Tales surrounding Troy, Romulus and Remus). Their paintings and frescoes still have the power…

As both an industry insider and a Christian scholar, Brian Godawa’s situation is unique and vital to both a Christian understanding of culture and a cultural understanding of Christianity. From this tenuous place Godawa delivers his critique of Hollywood’s treatment of Christians and Christian subject matter, but he tempers it with a call for a…

The title of James K. A. Smith’s book, The Devil Reads Derrida, might prove misleading to those (non-Derrideans) who believe that a text should possess a coherent meaning and that this meaning be evinced in the title. For in fact, the most important word of the title isn either “Derrida” nor “Devil,” but the innocuous…

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? belongs to a series by Baker Academic called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” The editor, James K. A. Smith, provides the rationale for reading Merold Westphal’s contribution: “For ‘peoples of the Book,’ whose way of life is shaped by texts, matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and…

Modern philosophical ethics have tried often to show how ethics can be independent of theology—with limited success. John Hare is a Christian philosopher, currently holding the Noah Porter Chair of Philosophical Theology at Yale, who has devoted much of his career to exploring these limits. This book continues the exploration by presenting a history of…

Holmes Rolston was a mainly unnoticeable, slightly unconventional parish pastor in a small and irrelevant village in rural Virginia. His church elders fired him, despite his family’s pedigree of many generations of distinguished Presbyterian ministers, because he seemed more concerned with preaching about celebrating and protecting God’s revelation in the beauty of nature than in…

Baylor philosopher Scott H. Moore is impatient with Christians who choose confrontation and condemnation as their weapons against secularizing and dehumanizing tendencies in contemporary society and politics. In the closing chapter of this small book on a dauntingly large subject, he calls for an embrace of “hospitality and the culture of life” that would involve…

Several years ago, when teaching a humanities course, I discovered the now-popular martyrdom story of Perpetua and Felicitas. In several history and humanities classes since then, I have introduced my students to The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas using the narrative as an opportunity to inquire about authority, power, and gender. Some students have surprised…