Reviews

One of the first things I did as editor of this journal (CSR) was commission a review of church historian Mark Noll’s excellent and challenging book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which was first published in 1994 by Eerdmans and now, again, with new material in 2022. That review was by Gordon College professor…

Let’s start with my least favorite part of this book: its title. To be fair, it is my least favorite part because this book serves as an excellent example of robust Christian reflection on technology and the specific challenges of particular professional fields. While people in those professional fields will find the book most immediately…

I once heard a sarcastic remark after attending a poetry reading. Perhaps I made the remark. At any rate, the reading featured a past-middle-aged poet reading newish poems from the latest book—the tenth or so—this poet had written. The sarcastic comment: “I sip my coffee as I gaze on the birdfeeder out my window. I…

Perry Glanzer begins his ambitious and stimulating book with a story that is both uncannily prescient and deeply disturbing. He tells us that the impetus for his work dates from the 1990s when he spent an extended period of time in Russia and Ukraine studying post-communist moral education. Again and again in Russia, teachers confessed,…

There is now a well-developed Christian literature addressing the dualism of mind- body, and the consequences for our health and flourishing when this dualism is taken for granted, ignored, or unchallenged. Theologian Norman Wirzba suggests there is another dualism that similarly threatens our spiritual-physical-social health; this is the dualism between humanity and the rest of…

Few other poets writing in English during the second half of the 20th century wrote as well as the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), and none wrote as well about that interweaving of faith and doubt that forms part of the fabric of most (if not all) thinking Christians’ experience. If you have ever…

“Views books” offer brief sketches of competing views on a target subject along with some arguments for and against each view. For Three Views on Christianity and Science, the target area is relating Christianity to the sciences. The three views or models on display are supposed to be independence or two-realms, dialogue, and integration. Generally,…

“America needs more private intellectuals.”Francis Joseph Beckwith, Twitter post, June 22, 2021, 10:36 a.m., https://twitter.com/fbeckwith/sta-tus/1407346836223021065. Emphasis added. So tweeted Baylor University philosopher and occasional public intellectual Francis Beckwith. Perhaps Beckwith had in mind a particular public intellectual’s unfortunate essay or social media misadventure. There is little doubt public intellectuals draw fire from all sides. Scholars…

In his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” C. S. Lewis brushed off the then-growing fear that the authority of science threatened to supplant Christianity. He was not convinced and wrote, “The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever-narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of ‘Science’ mounts higher and higher corresponds…