Category: Reviews (Books)
The Hole in Our Soul Care: Searching for a Road Forward for Pastoral Care
Early in his book The Logic of the Body: Retrieving Theological Psychology, Matthew LaPine comments that, unfortunately, “there is a path out of the church that runs through the counselor’s office” (p. 36). As a Christian and a counselor I...
A Shot Off the Mark: Reviewing Christakis’s “Apollo’s Arrow”
The most interesting part of Nicholas Christakis’ new book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live is, unfortunately, its title. The book was mostly written in August 2020, published in October 2020, and...
Sin for Its Own Sake? The Theft of the Pears and the Divine Image in Augustine’s Confessions
The complex recounting of the “theft of the pears” in Book 2 of his Confessions is often distilled into Augustine’s famous evaluation of the act: “I simply wanted to enjoy the theft for its own sake, and the sin” (nec...
To See God in the Darkness: On Tish Harrison Warren’s “Prayer in the Night”
I praise you because you are artist and scientist in one. When I am somewhat fearful of your power, your ability to work miracles with a set-square, I hear you murmuring to yourself in a notation Beethoven dreamed of but...
Christianity and Culture in an Age of Crisis
Christian concerns with the culture go all the way back, dating beyond the legacies of Justin Martyr and Augustine to the earliest generations of Christians. But even here, in the first centuries, negotiations with culture were not straightforward: for every...
Becoming a Perennial: A Conversation with Grace Olmstead
In Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind (March 2021) Grace tells the story of her hometown of Emmett, Idaho, where her great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived and farmed, and where her grandparents and parents still live. Through...
Book Review: Boomers by Helen Andrews
Helen Andrews. Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. New York: Sentinel, 2021. 238 pp. $27 In autumn of 1912, the British journalist Lytton Strachey declared to Virginia Woolf his opinion of the Victorians: they “seem...
Book Review: Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley
“It is precisely because the Christian faith is the recognition of a work of God—a work that began in the dawn of time and continues in this era—that its essence is a fruit of the ages, while its form is...
Book Review: “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” by Carl Trueman
As befits a historian, Carl Trueman has written his impressive book on the ‘sexual revolution’ (SR) as being largely a history of ideas. This history is built of two components. The first element is largely framed in terms of contemporary...
Book Review: Orthodox Anglican Identity by Charles Erlandson
“To be an Anglican is to talk about what it means to be an Anglican.”[1] This has certainly been the case so far in the twenty-first century, with no fewer than four books on the subject published in the past...