Category: Reviews (Books)
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...
Dr. Trueman’s Hauerwasian Turn
“My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that their most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a...
From Death to Life: A Theological Reflection on Marilynne Robinson’s Jack
In one sense, Marilynne Robinson’s Jack is a simple love story, one complicated by the harsh realities of Jim Crow, but still at bottom the beautifully quaint tale of how Jack Boughton and Della Miles met and fell in love...
Tuning is for Killjoys
More than ever, we need a subversive history of music. We need it both to subvert the staid accounts that misrepresent the past as well as to grasp the subversive quality inherent in these catalytic sounds in our own time....
Missing the Subtler Yet Greater Problem: Replying to “Jesus and John Wayne”
Author’s Note I wrote and submitted this essay in advance of the January 6th events at the Capitol. Since then there has been a deluge of think-pieces and journalistic treatments of the events and the role “evangelicals” had in them....
Accusations Aren’t Evidence: Responding to “Jesus and John Wayne”
Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” begins with a holier-than-thou character having a book, along with her sin, thrown in her face. She returns home with a bruised face and bruised pride to reflect on her sins. For many of us,...
Jesus Plus Masculinity for America’s Sake: Replying to “Jesus and John Wayne”
As I reflected on Calvin University professor Kristin Du Mez’s brilliantly provocative and painful, Jesus and John Wayne, I realized how many different intersections I had with her subject. After all, I serve as a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination...
Book Review: History and Eschatology by N. T. Wright
History and Eschatology is a dense but rewarding book based on NT Wright’s Gifford Lectures, in which Wright is attempting to redirect natural theology, bringing history and biblical exegesis to the questions of natural theology to see if that “might...
Catholicism in the Swamp: A Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. note: This is the third and final response in our symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. The American landscape has been a fertile seedbed historically for a very specific sort of Christianity. Methodism and Baptist expressions of the...