Reviews

In Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters, Christian Smith proposes an insightful theory of religion, differentiating between the nature of religion itself and the various effects of religion. Seeking such differentiation, the complex and overlapping relationship between an ontological understanding of religion and religion’s practical effects and impacts in and…

Tracing capitalism’s evolution, particularly its lending and borrowing elements, from its Smithian beginnings to its neoliberal present, North Park University philosopher and ethicist Ilsup Ahn warns that something radically new and deeply troubling is now afoot: “The neoliberal idea of debt is problematic because it is no longer conceived as a morally relevant issue but…

Reviewed by Emily S. Bosscher, First Year Experience, Trinity Christian College Over the past five years, the student population on college campuses has changed. Current students are equal parts less ready for college and adulthood but highly empathetic toward others around them, indecisive and yet yearning for mentoring relationships, filled with anxiety and the fear…

Reviewed by Joyce del Rosario, Ph.D. Candidate, Fuller Theological Seminary In full disclosure, since taking on this assignment as book reviewer, I have joined the national board of directors for the Christian Community Development Association, along with the author Dominique Gilliard. Recognizing this potential conflict, I still attempted to review this book as objectively as…

Black lives matter. This phrase, since its debut in 2015, has sparked much debate and has often been the source for conversation regarding racism and police brutality in the last few years. With the resurgence of public protests following the deaths of many African Americans at the hands of police, young activists took to the…

How is the presence of ubiquitous personal technological devices shaping human development and interpersonal relations? How might persons navigate this technological revolution in a way that deepens and enlivens personal development, relationships, and experience rather than truncates or diverts them? What does it mean to reflect Christianly about how people relate to technology? What spiritual…

Religion has been a matter of inheritance for most of Western history since at least the end of antiquity. From infancy, individuals were claimed by the religion of their parents or community through baptism, circumcision, or some other rite. One might be more or less closely affiliated with the religion’s institutions, practices, and beliefs, but…

Institutions of higher education have changed many of the world’s economies and societies. Entire societies have been influenced by changes in the availability of higher education to people who once did not have access to it, and many social movements have had their beginnings on college or university campuses. Globalization of economies and cultures continues…

Reviewed by Lenore M. Knight Johnson, Sociology, Trinity Christian College Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, best known for her explorations into the intersections of work, family, and personal life, departs from her previous work and dives into the world of American political divisions in her most recent book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning…

Reviewed by James S. Spiegel, Philosophy and Religion, Taylor University A long-standing criticism of open theism—at least since the emergence of the movement in the 1990s—is its failure to adequately account for God’s permission of evil. Why would God refrain from stopping rapes, murders, and child abuse when he could easily do so? The standard…

Reviewed by Michael J. Kallenberg, Denver, Colorado “But we can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another. – So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.” – Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S.…

Reviewed by Michael Buratovich, Biochemistry, Spring Arbor University On July 7, 2016, Answers in Genesis’s Ark Encounter opened to the public. This attraction features an enormous wooden replica of Noah’s Ark, 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high. The Ark Encounter and the exhibits housed within it argue that the Earth is…

Reviewed by David Brodnax, Sr., History, Trinity Christian College “The American founders read the Bible” (1). This first line in Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers aptly summarizes Daniel L. Dreisbach’s exploration of the Christian scriptures’ theological, literary, and rhetorical impact on the people who created American democracy. With this historical work, Dreisbach, a…

Yudha Thianto’s The Way to Heaven examines Malay translations of catechisms and Malay sermons composed by Dutch ministers preaching in the Indonesian Archipelago in the seventeenth century. A tremendous variety of languages were spoken in this vast region (the two loci of Thianto’s focus, Dutch colonial centers of Jakarta in Java and Ambon in the…

Since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, critics have charged that the principle of sola Scriptura has brought about “anarchy” in the life of the church. Scholars across the theological spectrum have taken on the Reformation, noting what they see as the empirical reality of “pervasive interpretative pluralism” (Christian Smith) or “unintended consequences” (Brad Gregory).…

Theology in the Public Sphere is written by one of the leading public theologians, Sebastian Kim, editor of the International Journal of Public Theology. Kim’s aims in this volume are threefold. First, in the context of the postmodern world, Kim attests that the role of the church is not to keep passive, but to be…

In the 1980s, I attended the Simon Greenleaf School of Law and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I knew that the professors under whom I sat at these two institutions— including John Woodbridge, Wayne Grudem, D. A. Carson, Gleason Archer, Harold O. J. Brown, Harold Lindsell, and Carl F. H. Henry—composed a remarkable list of evangelical…

In The Big Question, Alister McGrath does not set out to present an apologetic for God or science so much as to provide a personal account of how he has come to view the world from the perspectives of both science and religion and how this approach has given him a fuller, richer picture of…

In Global Gospel: An Introduction to Christianity on Five Continents, Douglas Jacobsen provides a valuable overview of the global Christian Church. With the ongoing expansion of Christianity since the first century, it has become increasingly difficult to navigate the “immense diversity across contemporary Christianity” (xv). Jacobsen takes on this challenge, providing a well-researched and comprehensive…