Book Reviews

“Here’s my attempt to paraphrase [Byrd’s] basic argument: So-called ‘biblical manhood and womanhood’—especially as John Piper and Wayne Grudem teach it—uses traditional patriarchal structures to oppress women. Byrd argues that “biblical manhood and womanhood” is not all biblical. A lot of it is unbiblical.

“Today, in this lifeless and soul-numbing culture, hardly anyone reads poetry anymore. In the Introduction to The Hundredfold, Esolen blames the rise of free verse for the decline in poetry’s popularity, going on to give us a seminar in meter, rhyme, and poetic form that can teach us how to read poetry and how to appreciate it once again.” - Gene Veith

“This is not your average primer on Mormonism. It also isn’t what you might normally think of as an apologetic work against Mormonism. Instead, it seeks to lay out the theological perspective of the Mormon church in a systematic way.

On The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson… “Somehow some writers of biography end up sounding trite, both in their relating of their subjects’ stories and in the lessons they draw from them.” - Mark Ward

“Douthat’s central argument is intriguing…it’s quite likely that the Western neoliberal order will keep limping along for the foreseeable future.

“Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is a substantial work that makes a straightforward case. In Holland’s view, the teachings of Jesus constituted an ethical revolution that would gradually transform human consciousness, to the extent that we today find it hard to imagine credible alternative systems.” - Christianity Today

“…as soon as we discover what our Western eyes were missing, we realize that switching prescriptions has the potential to blind us to other realities in the text. Reading the Bible with Eastern eyes is no panacea, for the Bible is neither purely Eastern nor Western.” - TGC

“Virtue politics, following the ancient Greek philosophers, assumed that hierarchies would always exist in society, so that a principal task of politics was to ensure that those hierarchies would be just ones, based on real distinctions of merit between rulers and ruled.” - The Public Discourse

“Laughing at the Days to Come is a book about embracing and enduring life’s trials with divine joy. It is about gaining the kind of vision of that Proverbs 31 woman who can look into an unknown future and a long path of suffering and still rejoice. I think it’s fair to say that it’s written primarily for women, but there is no reason a man can’t read it and benefit just as much.” - Challies

Puritan writer Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646) thought contentment was lacking in his own day, too. In his excellent book The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, he defines contentment as “that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.” - TGC