Category: Reviews (Books)
D. B. Hart’s Inquisitor
“It is hard to understand the psychology of pious Christians who calmly accept the fact that their neighbors, friends, and relatives will perhaps be damned. I cannot resign myself to the fact that the man with whom I am drinking...
Political Modesty, for Better and Worse
Confessional Reformed Protestants are a tiny sliver of the broader Christian community. Still, when it comes to intellectual heft we like to think we punch above our weight. While this may not always be true, David VanDrunen’s decade-long effort to...
Race and Black Theology Reading List: An Annotated Bibliography
By the Mere O Editors The ongoing evils of police brutality have revealed to a wider (and whiter) audience the structural and systematic prejudices under which blacks live in the USA, and in many other places around the world. White...
Book Review: Philosopher of the Heart by Clare Carlisle
Søren Kierkegaard still makes people either love him or hate him. Even many who have dedicated their life’s work to studying his authorship approach him biographically with either veneration or suspicion. Some biographies offer rather seraphic portraits of Kierkegaard, whereas...
Natural Law from Noah to Milton Friedman: A Review of David Vandrunen, “Politics after Christendom”
In recent decades, Protestant theologians have rightly restored Natural Law to its vaunted place in their ethical and theological lexicon. Among those legions to be credited with restoring it is David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and...
The One God of Katherine Sonderegger
“Theology awakens a grateful heart.”[1] Thus the first words of Katherine Sonderegger’s remarkable Systematic Theology fall. I began reading theology years ago out of a longing to know the Lord. Desire drove study. It still does.
Deus Ex Machina Reversed
J.R.R. Tolkien’s attempted science fiction Time-traveler was began in contest with CS Lewis (who chose to work on space travel). But Tolkien posited the impossibility of time travels, and we see his hostile skepticism toward analogue machine technology when he...
Two Cheers for Gregory’s Augustinian Civic Liberalism
In a recent essay, “Liberalism, the American Right, and the Place of Love in Politics,” Jake Meador attempts to move beyond the terms of the recent, ostensibly existential, debate within American conservatism. The opposition between libertarian proceduralism — represented by...
Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children’s Books
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the...
The Education of Ross Douthat: Reviewing The Decadent Society
“History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions” -T.S. Eliot, Gerontion “TRUMP HAD A CEILING HE ALWAYS HAD A CEILING I TOLD YOU HE HAD A CEILING I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU I TOLD...