Category: Reviews (Books)
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...
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...