Category: Reviews (Books)
Book Review: “Faultlines” by Voddie Baucham
Voddie Baucham. Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe. Washington: Salem Books, 2021. 270 pp, $24.99. Racism has reentered the public discourse with renewed vigor. Gone are the days of rosy optimism filled with racial reconciliation conferences and...
Book Review: Listening to a Continent Sing by Donald Kroodsma
Donald Kroodsma. Listening to a Continent Sing: Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 336 pp, $21.95. It’s early spring as I sit on my porch reading the opening pages of Listening to...
The Beatitudes Through the Ages: An Interview with Rebekah Eklund
Interview with Rebekah Eklund for Mere Orthodoxy “Whence then doth He begin? and what kind of foundations of His new polity doth He lay for us? Let us hearken with strict attention unto what is said. For though it was...
Book Excerpt: Either Way, We’ll Be All Right by Eric Tonjes
The cross is not simply about rescue but also about restoration. The cross is not primarily about escape from some future punishment but rather about healing our relationship with God. Christ’s death brings us back into communion with our Creator:...
Book Review: Reparations by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson
I In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance & Repair (Brazos Press, 2021), Presbyterian Church in America ministers Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson lay out their biblical and historical case for the American church making reparations to African Americans....
The Austen Years: A Review in Six Movements
Rachel Cohen. The Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. 304 pp, $28. “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been...
Review: Cajetan on Sacred Doctrine by Hieromonk Gregory Hrynkiw
Hieromonk Gregory Hrynkiw. Cajetan on Sacred Doctrine. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020. 352 pp. $75 If your theological education was anything like mine, you learned that Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, was Martin Luther’s grand inquisitor....
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...