Category: Reviews (Books)
Book Review: Jean Vanier: Portrait of a Free Man by Anne-Sophie Constant
In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Jean Vanier writes that: [t]he threat of today’s world with its globalized economy is not just unfettered capitalism but overwhelming commercialization. Advertising and public relations try to shape our cultures, thoughts, imaginations...
Book Review: My Father Left Me Ireland by Michael Brendan Dougherty
In the recently released memoir, My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home, Michael Brenden Dougherty, senior editor at National Review, traces his personal history as the son of an absent Irish father. His journey to make...
Book Review: Dignity by Chris Arnade
One of the most important explorations of political theology in recent years is Andrew Willard Jones’s book Before Church and State. Jones’s argument is that our modern social norms, including our political system, are built on the idea that conflict...
Book Review: The Kingdom of God Has No Borders by Melani McAlister
By John Thomas In her book released last summer, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, author and George Washington University Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Melani McAlister recounts the last 50 years of evangelical history through the...
Tolkien and the Golden Age of Fantasy
By Thomas Sieberhagen For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is. –John-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not...
To Read Without Pleasure is Stupid: On the Novels of John Williams
By E. J. Hutchinson As we (or, at least, I) eagerly anticipate reading Charles J. Shields’ recently published The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, the first biography of John Williams, it seems a propitious time to provide a brief...
Book Review: The Dignity Revolution by Daniel Darling
It is inherent to sin’s nature to rationalize itself. This is hardly a new insight. After all, the almost immediate response of Adam and Eve in the aftermath of the world’s first sin was to justify themselves by shifting the...
Book Review: The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap
By Jeremiah Lawson In a time when the President has openly questioned what the United States get from being in NATO and fears that Russian and Chinese influence threaten the stability of the Atlantic American-European order, now would not seem...
A Christian Ethic of Sex in a Pornographic Age
By Joshua Heavin In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the church had no shortage of theological controversies and societal crises at hand. Yet several prominent theologians nonetheless devoted significant time to writing about marriage and human sexuality. St....
Book Review: Music as an Art by Roger Scruton
By Jeremiah Lawson As a written practice, Western music goes back at least a thousand years. Over the centuries music has been made in the service of churches and courts, and from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries was...