Reviews

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…

Rob Warner, sociologist and head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at University of Wales, Lampeter, produces an intriguing analysis of the evolution of English pan-Evangelicalism during the latter half of the 20th century in his recent work Reinventing English Evangelicalism. Following Callum Brown’s advocacy of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of…

What does it mean to be an evangelical Christian? This is the question explored by a collection of prominent Christian scholars in The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities. The book was released first as a British imprint under the title: The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Apollos, 2008). The impetus for this collection…

The relationship between anthropologists and missionaries is a particularly intriguing one. It is full of the stuff that is fertile ground for academic engagement, not least because of a certain overlap of interests coupled with long-standing tension. The collection of articles found in Anthropology’s Debt to Missionaries, written predominantly by anthropologists, provides a valuable, though…

My prolific bookseller friend has insisted that Beyond Homelessness is one of the most important books of 2008.Byron Borger, review of Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/review/beyond_homelessness_christian/ (accessed November 2008). I find it hard to disagree. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh assert that…

A few decades back, Walker Percy told the parable of a Martian who, upon visiting our planet, is overwhelmed by how much humans talk. After asking about all the gabbing, the alien receives a cross-disciplinary bibliography on linguistics and speech physiology and information theory. “’But wait,’ says the Martian, ‘What about the actual event of…

This collection of essays explores the intersection of language learning, social justice and spirituality. Discussions of the relation of spirituality to language teaching have opened up only recently, sometimes with alarm and acrimony by secular critics of Christians in the field of teaching English as a second language. David Smith has authored or coauthored four…

A recent article in The Economist, “Evolution: Unfinished Business”, reflecting on the development and dissemination of Darwin’s theory on the 200th anniversary of his birth, considered the results of a poll on the public’s acceptance of the theory of evolution within several Western countries. In the US, the bar graph showed that roughly 40% of…

Some critics have claimed that James Baldwin was the last African American writer for whom the church was a necessary subject and context. Such a claim attempts, I think, to point to the changes that had been ongoing within African American culture since the turn of the century. At least as early as W.E.B. Du…

In the spring of 2008, the movie Expelled hit the theaters. Ben Stein, famous for his dead-pan act in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, interviewed scientists who claimed that their disagreement with the Neo-Darwinian party line jeopardized their careers and made them the targets of discrimination. While some of the claims of this movie are almost…

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Tertullian, the 3rd century B.C.E.) is really the basic question addressed by this new book, which is part of the Liturgical Studies Series of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Calvin Stapert’s small book undertakes an enormous task, sketching a brief history of documents that refer to…

Robert B. Stewart is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he holds the Greer-Heard Chair of Faith and Culture. It is there that he also directs the annual Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, which is a five-year pilot program that provides evangelical and non-evangelical scholars opportunities to come together to…