Reviews

In recent years there has been criticism of Christians working in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), particularly as a platform for Christian evangelism. While the critiques have been remarkably strong by non-Christians,See, for example, Alistair Pennycook and Sinfree Makoni, “The Modern Mission: The Language Effects ofChristianity,” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education…

As careers go, Dallas Willard’s is rather remarkable, in the sense of being both excellent and interesting. In addition to being a highly regarded technical philosopher at the University of Southern California, Willard has developed a brilliant “second career” in speaking and writing to the broader world of generally educated Christians about critical matters of…

That a volume such as Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion has bee npublished attests to the fact that fictional television has evolved into a venue through which the public receives a great deal of its information about life and society. In the introduction, editor Diane Winston writes, “television today is essential to…

Logic of the Heart is an attempt to demonstrate the rationality of faith (specifically, the Christian faith) by supporting a deeply Augustinian and Pascalian conception of reason. According to Peters, faith is rational insofar as it accounts accurately for the totality of the human condition. Properly functioning rationality, according to Peters, ought be described thusly:…

Paul Hiebert presents a definitive, one could say “exhaustive,” study on worldview: its concepts, characteristics, contexts, and some methods for analyzing them. He divides worldviews into small-scale oral societies, peasant societies, modern and post-modern ones and concludes with suggestions on transforming worldviews to fit the biblical pattern. The book is excruciatingly detailed, with 52 figures…

Tertullian once asked rhetorically, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” John Mark Reynolds has turned this question on its head and has offered an intelligent apology for embracing both schools of thought in order to defend and develop the Christian dogma. When Athens Met Jerusalem sets forth to be an introduction to Classical and…

Colin Gunton’s career in theology at King’s College, London spanned a period of just over 40 years and his untimely passing in 2003 has left British theology without one of its leading voices. Fortunately for those of us who did not have the privilege of being present in his taught courses, we have the benefit…

The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue by Mark Noll and James Turner, edited and with an introductory essay by Thomas A. Howard, was born out of a lecture series at Gordon College. Howard situates the conversation optimistically within a developing rapprochement between Evangelicals and Catholics. Past Protestant-Catholic hostilities took place against…

All are influenced by something, from their culture to their political ideals to their faith, and Todd Ream and Perry Glanzer in Christian Faith and Scholarship insist that such influences, particularly faith, should be embraced instead of ignored. With prolific references andsources, Ream and Glanzer demonstrate the reasonableness of wedding Christian faith and scholarship in…

The possibility of fostering a relationship between religious faith and disciplinary forms of learning is now a common cultural feature of many Christian colleges and universities. What began at Reformed institutions as the movement to integrate faith and learning has now spread in various forms to a number of institutions. In addition, the promise of…

The most recent installment of Slavoj Zizek’s “Short Circuits” series presents a thought-experiment that “cross wires that do not usually touch” (vii). Editor Creston Davis introduces the electricians who dare to cross wires: on one side, the “militant Marxist” (4) and cultural theorist Zizek grasps the wire of secular atheism, while on the other side…

The genius of Knowledge and the Transcendent lies in its question. In a broad sense, the question is how God can transcend the human and still be known. The usual way of framing this creates something of a quandary, for the notion of transcendence is couched in terms of boundaries: What are the boundaries of…

At first glance it might appear that Thomas Kidd’s The Great Awakening is simply one more addition to the assortment of books on the topic, but upon further reflection it becomes clear that this work constitutes a significant revision of the eighteenth-century revivals. Examining the roots of evangelical Christianity in the British North American colonies,…

Having been struck by the title of the former book, I was reading it with a view to reviewing it when I came across the latter, and decided after a preliminary perusal that a review of both together would be more fruitful. As a teacher of the Classics (mostly in translation) at a Christian College,…

The contributions of Augustine and Thomas More to the development of the Western Intellectual Tradition certainly have been the subject of more than their fair share of scholarly evaluation. But usually such examinations focus on one or more of the sometimes slippery positions of the two authors, hidden often in allusion or late-career retractions, and…

In the introduction to American Providence (2004), theologian Stephen H. Webb observes, “The cultural elite dismiss the doctrine of providence as the illusory product of fundamentalist fantasies. Providence is caricatured as a theological version of hide-and-seek.” He concedes, “There is some truth to this caricature. When history is treated like a secret message, theology becomes…

Stephen Nichols’ book consists of eight chapters, a reading list and an index. The chapters deal with historical and contemporary figures and their influence on issues that mix the secular and sacred in American religion. Part of his thesis can be summarized as “Too often American evangelicals have settled for a Christology that can be…

Conventional historical opinion depicts late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-obscenity moral reformers as sanctimonious Puritans who considered sex an unpleasant necessity and open discussions of it loathsome and harmful. Yet this small band of self-righteous prigs exerted a disproportionately large amount of influence over the American public by manipulating the legal system successfully through federal…

Denis Lamoureux’s goal in this book is to demonstrate that Christians in general and conservative Christians in particular should have no hesitation in accepting evolution as a potentially complete scientific account of the origin and development of biological life. Lamoureux’s view would be described usually as “theistic evolution” but Lamoureux objects to this description of…

I became aware of The Shack by William Young (Windblown Media, 2007) the way I learn about many new books that I would probably never hear about otherwise: the father of one of my students sent me the novel via his daughter along with a request for an evaluation of its contents. It had not…