Book Reviews

“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

“Both sides of the “Christian America” debate employ the same strategy: posit a world in which everyone is either a Christian or a deist, show the American founders weren’t in your opponent’s camp, and then claim, as a result, that they must’ve been in yours.” - TGC

“Overall, these noteworthy essays represent a wide range of creative possibilities for updating our theological anthropology in line with a post-Darwinian setting, but they are less convincing when justifying the theological cost for doing so.” - Themelios