In teaching theology, one of my abiding concerns is not just that students gain a clearer understanding of the grammar of the Christian faith, but that they meet the manifold figures along the way who have shaped their thinking unbeknownst to them.
Only a Stubborn Past Can Survive: A Review of The Nickel Boys
In Jonathan Lear’s book, he puts front and center the paradox of how a culture carries on when everything which has sustained it has crumbled away, or—in the case of the Crow people—been taken from it.
Making Nothing of Evil, and Everything of God: A Review of That All Shall Be Saved, Part 2
Hart’s argument is forceful, analytically clear, and compelling, in that it begins where theology should properly begin: with God. I offer this commendation of Hart’s work not as a commendation of his conclusions, for four reasons which remain unanswered, and to my mind, must be accounted for. The second part of this review discusses these concerns.
Making Nothing of Evil, and Everything of God: A Review of That All Shall Be Saved, Part 1
The framing of the book is important, because it shifts the question away from moral agency, the analytical justice of God’s behavior, and biblical hermeneutics of the afterlife, and toward one singular question: the nature of God as the creator of all that is.
The Christ-Haunted Midwest: A Review of Interior States
Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in collection of essays not as a journalist documenting the remnants of Christian culture, but as one who is a translator of a foreign land for wide-eyed secular observers.
Fiction and Human Frailty: A Review of Prophets of the Posthuman
For Lake, literature is not simply illustrative or instrumental to the task of diagnosing and combatting technocracy: it is the world within which we are cultivated. In the act of reading, we enter not only a set of illustrations which give us principles to live by, but also new parables which instruct, perplex, and guide us into new living. To learn how to be a new person, in other words, we must submit to the art of reading.