Category: Reviews (Books)
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...
Engagement Without Fear: Responding to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
To anyone paying attention to church participation in North America over the last forty years, things are not now, nor have they been, very good. The jeremiads have been spoken, the eulogies written, and the post-mortem begun, while the patient...
Authenticity and Prodigality: Response to Brandon McGinley’s “The Prodigal Church”
Ed. Note: This is the first response of three we will be publishing as part of a brief symposium on Brandon McGinley’s book The Prodigal Church. One of the ways that Catholics tell the story of modernity—think for instance of Charles...
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Maxine Eichner was a lawyer with a new baby girl. At work, she felt pressured to keep up with the long work hours of her peers, but in her heart, she longed to be home with her baby. One day,...
Befriending Books: On Reading and Thinking with Alan Jacobs and Zena Hitz
We like to think, of course, that we think; but what people allow to pass for thinking is usually about 90 percent reshuffling of images. —Robert Farrar Capon Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you...
Love, According to E. B. White
I often feel great pressure to craft perfect answers. Whether it’s a question from my eight year old or from a friend in Bible study, my mind goes through all the angles to create a proper response. I don’t want...
Book Review: Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher
I have been reading Rod Dreher’s dispatches from St. Francisville religiously for years now, and I eagerly awaited his newest book, Live Not By Lies. I became a regular reader of Dreher’s work around the same time I converted to...