Book Reviews
Recommended Books (Spring 2021)
Christians are most in need of building strong communities of faith and practice during times of cultural strife and alienation. Rod Dreher’s recent publication, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, builds on his earlier work to argue this point well. Specifically, he reports that persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union clung desperately to good literature and historic theological works as they labored to remain faithful in the face of horrifying oppression. Perhaps even more important, reading as a family was essential for...
read moreRod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies: A Review
Christianity Today’s Samuel James says that it presents a “surprisingly weak case.”[1] Southern Seminary’s Al Mohler offers a more favorable review: “I think it’s, if anything, an even more important book than The Benedict Option.”[2] Undoubtedly, these men put forward contrasting analyses of Rod Dreher’s newest book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.[3] I first encountered Dreherupon reading his book, Crunchy Cons, a delightful invitation to the classical conservative worldview.[4] Dreher is known also as an editor and...
read moreRecommended Books (Winter 2021)
What societies read, or do not read, has a significant effect on the nature of political discourse in modern democratic countries. Historian Paul Johnson argues that the press, as we now know it, first set “the pace of political change in all the advanced societies” during the 1820s with the invention of the steam press.[1] In the intervening two centuries, the printing industry has gone through massive changes that have surely continued to have similar effects. Perhaps part of the reason that our current political dialogue is so strained and...
read moreRecommended Books (Autumn 2020)
Explorers have fallen on hard times in our culture. Perhaps we were so dazzled by the extent of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century feats that our capacity to wonder at the challenge of adventure has been short-circuited. More likely, though, most Americans, who are soaked in luxury and decadence, have lost the will to shed their cushy lifestyles and embrace the sacrifice of exploration. For, to survive perilous journey, we must jettison our excess accoutrements. The more extreme the trek, the more we must leave behind. Reading allows us to...
read moreRecommended Books (Summer 2020)
Words are powerful. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into existence and ordered it according to its kind. At the crux of history, the “Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14), and through His Spirit all of our disordered desires are being refashioned into a new harmony that will be consummated when His name will be on our foreheads (Rev. 22:4) and all creation will have been reconciled to the Word (Col. 1:20). As image-bearers of God, our words are also powerful and serve as an important aspect of subduing all of creation. As Christians, we...
read moreBook Reflection: The Making of Stanley Hauerwas
Recently I read The Making of Stanley Hauerwas, a book adapted from David Hunsicker’s doctoral dissertation. Hunsicker is a Presbyterian minister in Alabama and former theology professor. Published dissertations usually aren’t a type of reading material that gets me very excited, but the subject matter of this one intrigued me. For the last thirty years, Stanley Hauerwas has been among the most discussed and debated theologians in the Anglo-American world. He taught most of his career at Duke Divinity School and at Notre Dame for many years...
read morePining for the Glory Days: A Review of Randall Balmer’s Evangelicalism in America
by Joshua R. Colson The term evangelicalism means many things to many people. In contemporary usage, the term often refers to a bloc of white, conservative Christian voters. Indeed, pundits and pollsters regularly identify evangelicals with the Republican Party, free markets, and politically conservative causes. The identification of evangelicals with the Republican Party is apparently justified by the fact that eighty-one percent of white, self-identified evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.[1] However, on the verge of...
read moreRecommended Books (Spring 2020)
What an odd spring we have all had! Amid all the clamor about viruses and social distancing, one of the unintended benefits of quarantine has been increased free time (at least for some of us). Let’s not waste such a moment with insipid social media scrolling, binge-watching old (or new) television series, or shallow reading (what Charlotte Mason referred to as twaddle). Instead, we should steward this moment well with good books and fulfilling activities. Below we have provided some of our favorite reads from recent months that address a...
read moreBook Review of The Compelling Community: Where God’s Power Makes a Church Attractive
A constant temptation for us as pastors and church leaders is to do something that we think will make our church more appealing to those in our community. This desire is good, since we should all want to see our churches grow. But we must ask ourselves: At what cost? Mark Dever and Jamie Dunlop remind readers of The Compelling Community that the gospel, not our creativity, is ultimately what makes a church attractive. Dever and Dunlop purpose to encourage readers to trust in the power of the gospel and to do nothing to stand in its way....
read moreTheological Retrieval for Evangelicals: A Review
My first significant exposure to historical theology occurred during college in a course that covered the creeds and councils of the early Church. I was astonished by the brilliance of these early Christian pastors, theologians, and philosophers as they wrestled with important theological truths. They often did so in response to various heretical teachings from influential teachers such as Arius and Marcion. Reading primary and secondary sources for this course caused me to feel that I had entered into a foreign land that I was largely...
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