Reviews

Policymakers (and therefore, citizens) in modern democracies confront a knot of intertwining problems, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to terrorism. Many of the threads have formed a rope called human migration, as drought, political instability or corruption, and neocolonial economic policies by the major powers interlace to drive seventy million (and counting) refugees from…

In the past few years, the symphony of women’s voices and the stories emanating from their own, often tragic, experiences in both the sacred and secular world have only grown louder, demanding that the church and society pay attention to women’s grievances and to their cries for equality and justice. By noting both the contributions…

The middle of a pandemic is usually not a good time to publish a book, especially when social and travel restrictions interfere with the traditional methods of publicizing and marketing a new book. However, the claims of conscience by Christians in this pandemic make the publication of Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction…

In his essential study on the role of prophetic religion in the death of Jim Crow, David L. Chappell writes, “White supremacists in the South failed to get their churches to give their cause active support.”David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North…

Perhaps the first thing to say about Adam Stern’s book is that it demonstrates deep erudition and analytical capability in the author’s quest to interrogate the concept of survival in a theological and political sense. Stern carries out his exercise primarily through interaction with texts by the Jewish scholars Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig,…

There is no mistaking the purpose of this book, as well as the author’s awareness of how this purpose will be received by her audience. In her opening sentence, Anthea Butler makes both clear: “White Evangelical Racism tells a concise history of the evangelical movement and—here is the hard part—the racist and racial elements that…

“Owning a piano does not make the pianist.” This wisdom from folklore also pertains to the fine art of parenting. Having children does not guarantee successful outcomes.Jerry Bigner and Clara Gerhardt, Parent-Child Relations: An Introduction to Parenting, 10th ed. (Pearson Publishing, 2018), 6. Hence, emotionally vested parents and coparents will go out of their way…

Evangelicals do not have a reputation for wise and irenic engagement with modern science. Scholars at The Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School have been trying to change this characterization of hostile defensiveness, especially through their “Creation Project” that has brought evangelical scholarly focus to the doctrine of creation over recent years, of which…

I first encountered Sherry Turkle years ago when a colleague in philosophy mentioned her to me as someone to keep an eye on. Later, I received from him a copy of one of her early books, The Second Self. Turkle’s more recent books, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, contain remarkable insights into how technology shapes…

To read Philippa Koch’s The Course of God’s Providence in 2021 is to realize that the gap between the world of the eighteenth century and that of the twenty-first century is much smaller in some ways than a reader might have believed had the book been published only two years previously. Prior to the COVID-19…