Articles categorized as Book Reviews
Have Evangelicals Forgotten God?
Despite the “evidence of ongoing vitality, the evangelical movement shows disturbing signs of dissipating its energies and forfeiting its initiative.” While this sentiment has pervaded discussions about evangelicals over the past decade, the close association of Donald Trump with “evangelicalism” has raised it to a feverish pitch.
Hating “them” is easy: How can Americans live together in peace?
Without any kind of shared educational tradition, our public discourse hangs on assembling a bricolage of numbers and personal vignettes.
Is certainty sinful?
Enns wants us to trust in God—to have a faith “not so much defined by what we believe but in whom we trust.”
Which generous spaciousness for gay Christians?
The book is written for those for whom “simplistic, black and white answers on these questions will not suffice.”
In Defence of War: A reflection
Nigel Biggar’s masterful book on war does not quite win the argument against the pacifists.
What is marriage?
The argument is probably the most sophisticated natural law defense of marriage to date. Yet while rigorously argued, the book doesn’t require technical philosophical ability to be understood and appreciated.
Controversy and interpretation: A review of *biblical womanhood*
Rachel Held Evans’ book on biblical womanhood was entertaining, but ultimately dissatisfying.
Young evangelicals still at war? A review of “A Faith of Our Own”
Jonathan Merritt seeks a non-partisan faith, but leaving behind the left-right culture clashes is harder than it seems.
Sin and health
Evangelicals sit in a somewhat paradoxical relationship with these cultural narratives about homosexuality and weight. Ministries are tasked not only with fulfilling their institutional vocation of helping those with same-sex desires live faithfully but also with defending their legitimacy and distancing themselves from their problematic methods of the past (think shock therapy).
Real Marriage: A review (Pt. 2)
*Real Marriage* buries the mystery along with Ephesians 5. There’s nothing left of it, both in the book’s candid descriptions of sexuality and in its transparent confessions about the Driscoll’s struggles. And the prose inevitably follows: it is clear, but rarely sings and only infrequently stirs.
Real Marriage: A review (Pt. 1)
At the heart of *Real Marriage* is a commendation of “friendship.” But this is, in its own way, dissatisfying.
The christian consumer
Even ethical consumption stands in danger of being co-opted by the logic of brand identity and consumerism, and having its power muted as a result. Yet that does not excuse us as Christians from deliberating carefully about how to faithfully consume in a consumerist world.
The center of good news
Why we can’t understand the gospel—or ourselves—without the Trinity. A review of ‘The Deep Things of God.’
A sword between the sexes
Van Leeuwen’s book is a provocative and thorough study of both Lewis the author and Lewis the man.
Chesterton’s orthodoxy as the antidote to modernity
Chesterton is the anti-Nietsche—a poet-philosopher who understands that unless truth exists, the enterprises of art and beauty are rendered meaningless.