The review section of this Spring 2026 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review dovetails quite nicely with the content of the special theme issue guest-edited by Bryan Gill, though the two parts were planned independently.
The bulk of the review section is devoted to three review essays. All three essays (especially the first two) examine themes relating to health. Interestingly, the first and third of these essays give significant attention to selected older books to set the stage for the importance of the final review of a newly published book.
First, we have “Flourishing 4.0: Four Cultural Movements in the Search for Meaning, Justice, Happiness, and Well-being,” written by Margaret Diddams, editor of Christian Scholar’s Review. What she labels Flourishing 4.0 in her title refers to the perspective offered by Tyler VanderWeele’s recent book, A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing. As Diddams explains, VanderWeele’s book is a major contribution to Christian reflection upon wholistic well-being. It proposes, she writes, “an integrative account that draws together physical health, personal virtue, relational well-being, and social conditions within a theological vision of flourishing grounded in God’s purposes for creation.” This book naturally has close links to the major Global Flourishing Study that VanderWeele and Byron Johnson have been directing in recent years, resulting in a spate of new publications.
Diddams proposes that we make best sense of VanderWeele’s integrative proposal if we view it against the backdrop of three earlier approaches to questions of meaning, well-being, and flourishing in the post-World War II era. These she dubs Flourishing 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
Flourishing 1.0 is represented by books by Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Paul Tillich, which focused on human meaning in relation to the atrocities and absurdity of the war period and the emerging material prosperity of the decades after the war. “Together they reveal,” Diddams writes, “that flourishing cannot be reduced to comfort or success but involves the struggle to remain fully human amid anxiety, suffering, and moral uncertainty.” Version 1.0’s focus on the interior life of the individual was complemented by Flourishing 2.0’s attention to “the social and moral conditions that allow communities to thrive.” Key representatives here are Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Plantinga Jr., and Nicholas Wolterstorff, with the latter two leaning heavily upon a theological notion of shalom as harmony of the self with God, other human beings, and the natural world. Flourishing 3.0 in Diddams’s narrative is the positive psychology movement as represented by books by Martin Seligman, Jonathan Haidt, and Mark McGinn. This movement draws upon the empirical resources of psychological science to illuminate how emotions, relationships, practices, and virtues contribute to human well-being.
Diddams proposes that one way to appreciate the accomplishment of VanderWeele’s new book is to see it as Flourishing 4.0, integrating the various dimensions of flourishing with a firm theological foundation and appreciation of the spiritual dimension of the life well-lived. As she writes, the biblical vision of flourishing encapsulated in the idea of shalom is flourishing that is “personal and communal, spiritual and material, grounded in the recognition that God’s redemptive purposes extend to every dimension of life. The challenge before us is not merely to identify and invest in the individual elements of flourishing but to discern how they belong together within the larger work of God’s restoration. VanderWeele invites us to see flourishing not as the pursuit of isolated goods but as participation in God’s restoring work—the shalom he intends for his creation.”
Our second review essay focuses on the intersection of theology, trauma, and sport. The authors, Nick Watson, formerly of York St. John University and co-founder of the Global Congress on Sport and Christianity, and John Swinton, from King’s College at the University of Aberdeen, explore the relationship between the global phenomenon of sports and a trauma-informed approach to well-being that is mindful of a biblical and theological understanding of the human person. They posit that “sports are an environment in which athletes (and coaches, support staff, etc.) of all ages and performance levels may experience trauma, and/or carry the burden of their existing trauma into sporting spaces. In short, trauma both ‘in’ and ‘from’ sport.”
Watson and Swinton review Trauma-Informed Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, edited by Jenny McMahon and Kerry McGannon, to show how social science can shed light upon the relationship between trauma and sport. They review Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger’s Spiritual Trauma Care to examine how psychology and theology relate to one another in the face of trauma. And they draw, thirdly and throughout, from former LPGA golfer Tracy Hanson’s memoir, Finding My Course: A Professional Athlete’s Journey through Pain to Purpose. In so doing, Watson and Swinton propose that the “sport-trauma nexus” is worthy of additional study and attention as an important arena for understanding, hope, and healing for those who have experienced trauma.
The third review essay for this issue is written by Gretchen Schwarz, retired professor of curriculum and instruction at Baylor University. In “Minding Our Rhetoric,” Schwarz proposes that rhetoric and media criticism can serve as important resources for the Christian church as it attends to the health of its life together, especially in the face of political polarization. The new book at the heart of this essay is Tim Perry’s When Politics Becomes Heresy: The Idol of Power and the Gospel of Christ. As Schwarz explains, Perry shows how ancient heresies such as simony, gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, and Donatism have seeped into the life of the contemporary church, especially the evangelical church’s ways of engaging social and political issues. Schwarz argues that some older works focused on rhetoric can help us to appreciate what is happening and what is at stake in the contemporary cultural moment of the church. She draws upon James Beitler’s Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church and Prophetically Incorrect: A Christian Introduction to Media Criticism by Robert Woods and Paul Patton to bring rhetorical tools to bear on the analysis presented by Perry. Schwarz concludes: “Language, in particular, rhetoric, the art of persuasion in whatever medium, can help win converts or lose the church respect, can enable Christians to communicate civilly with one another or tear communities apart, can point to Christ’s salvation or reinforce the national narrative that things and power are what we should seek. A study of rhetoric can reveal modern heresies that plague us now. These three books all point Christians to the importance of minding our rhetoric.”
In addition to these three review essays, we have one standard review:
Emmett Dulaney, professor of marketing at Anderson University, reviews Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Zondervan Academic, 2024).
