THE OTHER JOURNAL:
J. Kameron Carter on
“Haiti and The God Question.”

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=932

…

In a nutshell, my problem here is not with the God-and-suffering or the theodicy question as such. My problem is with the way the God-and-suffering question is usually posed and with the presumptions that come with it. As a starting point, I will address how the God-and-suffering question, or the God-and-evil question, is often posed and how it works in the public imagination.

Often, the way the God-and-suffering question is posed prevents us from asking other important social, cultural, and political questions. By concentrating on the God-and-suffering question, we overlook questions about how the painful effects of natural disaster, such as the earthquake in Haiti, have been made worse due to certain social, cultural, and political factors. And I don’t mean social and political factors simply within Haiti itself—this isn’t about blaming the Haitians. I mean to call attention to how Haiti has come to be positioned internationally among the community of nations over a quite long period of time.

…

Read the full essay:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=932

[ Our review of J. Kameron Carter's
RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT ]

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/asortoficon.html

Among the works of art that one finds in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland is Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Painted in 1521, it remains a stark, almost shocking image to this day. The dead, nearly colorless Christ lies in profile with gangrenous wounds visible in his hands, feet, and side. With a tilted head and half-open eyes, his face is turned slightly away from the viewer. The dramatic effect of the painting is heightened by the fact that it is a life-size depiction, stretching across the wall the full length of Christ’s body, but with a height of no more than that of a coffin (200 cm x 30.5 cm). Moreover, the painting is encompassed by a tomb-like border with the traditional inscription that reads, in Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Holbein’s achievement is an austere representation of Holy Saturday, the day on which one cannot evade the fact that Christ died on Good Friday and before one can celebrate his resurrection on Easter morning.

This painting makes a memorable appearance in The Idiot, one of the major works by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the story, Prince Myshkin, an enigmatic Christ-like figure who becomes embroiled in the lives of those he meets upon his return to Russia, encounters a reproduction of the picture in a friend’s home. The painting makes a profound impression upon Myshkin, who goes so far as to suggest that it could destroy a believer’s faith.

According to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who analyzes the author’s life and work in his latest book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, the painting functions as “a kind of anti-icon, a religious image which is a nonpresence or a presence of the negative.” As Williams explains, in the Orthodox tradition, icons confront the viewer with a direct gaze as worshippers seek to encounter the divine through the icon. Within Orthodox iconography, he states, the only figures ever represented in profile are demons and, sometimes, Judas Iscariot. Thus, it is unsurprising that Myshkin, whose own physical description is “plainly modeled on the traditional Orthodox iconography of the Savior,” would be so shaken by Holbein’s depiction of the lifeless Christ.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/asortoficon.html

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
(Making of the Christian Imagination)
Rowan Williams.
Hardback: Baylor University Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/books/10garner.html

The word taxidermy derives from two innocent Greek roots — taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin) — that when combined suggest something slightly sinister. Taxidermy was Norman Bates’s hobby in “Psycho.” Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, practiced it on his neighbor’s pets. In horror movies, taxidermy often crowds the walls, derangement made manifest.

As Melissa Milgrom writes in her oddball first book, “Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy,” many people still dismiss the field as “a creepy sideline of the ‘Deliverance’ set.” And taxidermy’s problems go deeper than public relations. Many museums, eager to snag the “iCarly” demographic, are ditching their taxidermy collections in favor of Imax movies and robotic beasties. A lot of dusty, moth-eaten stuffed animals have piled up in a lot of half-forgotten museum closets. Beware which door you open.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/books/10garner.html

STILL LIFE: Adventures in Taxidermy.
Melissa Milgrom.
Hardback: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Sustainablog Review of
Scott Sabin’s new book
Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.

http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

…

For the environmentalist who doesn’t ground his/her passion, advocacy, and work in faith, Tending to Eden is replete with stories of eco-effectiveness. Plant with Purpose serves rural communities in the developing world, and much of their work focuses on replenishing depleted resources that keep farmers from producing enough to feed their families and communities.

For Sabin and his organization, that often comes down to a focus on deforestation. Whether trees are cut by large, industrial-scale timber operations or by indigenous farmers clearing land for crops, or turning wood into charcoal, the results are the same: degraded soils and watersheds that make even subsistence farming nearly impossible. Various kinds of reforestation activities serve to provide food, expand economic opportunity, and allow local residents to take a longer view towards their own survival.

Read the full review:
http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

Tending to Eden:
Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.
Scott Sabin.
Paperback: Judson Press, 2010.
Buy now:  [  Amaz0n ]

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

…
The jobs that Gabriel Thompson writes about in Working in the Shadows: A Year Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do make even the worst jobs I’ve held seem like a month at the country club. Donning workingman’s clothes, Thompson tackles jobs that, frankly, I wouldn’t even consider before reaching a significant level of desperation. In the course of picking lettuce in the fields of Yuma, Arizona, and hauling chicken parts around a processing facility in Russellville, Alabama, (among other occupations) Thompson explores this segment of American labor like a latter-day E. P. Thompson, relating their lives and working conditions with a minimum of editorial intrusion.

Gabriel Thompson’s agenda is neither one of the white man’s burden or migrant worker agitprop. Rather, he simply takes these jobs and reveals to the reader their backbreaking and often mentally stultifying requirements, at times performed in harsh (but not inhuman) environments. After weeks of picking lettuce, Thompson hasn’t gotten that much better at the job nor gotten past the pain that bending over repeatedly in the hot sun creates as much as he has “[forgotten] what it’s like to not be sore.” While working in the frigid poultry plant, he aspires to be promoted to the de-boning department, which, while more toilsome and monotonous, is less physically demanding than hauling around buckets full of chicken remains.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

Working in the Shadows:
A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.
Gabriel Thompson.
Hardback: The Nation Books, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Patricia Ward’s meticulously researched history uncovers a surprisingly extensive vein of Protestant (usually, evangelical Protestant) engagement with the mystical piety of late 17th-century French Roman Catholics. An early leader of that engagement was John Wesley, who attended to the French mystics carefully on the question of assurance and who later excerpted works of Madame Jeanne Guyon and François Fénelon for the Christian Library he prepared so his Methodist itinerants could read while they rode. In the 19th century, appreciative readers included the Presbyterian minister William E. Boardman, the moral philosopher Thomas Upham, and the pioneering holiness preacher Phoebe Palmer. In the 20th century, A. W. Tozer included several poems of Madame Guyon in his anthology, The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, and Moody Press was one of several evangelical publishers who kept her works in print.

…
Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Experimental Theology in America:
Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and Their Readers.
Patricia A. Ward.
Hardback: Baylor University Press, 2009
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

David Fitch Reflects on
Brian Mclaren’s New Book
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY

http://ow.ly/1bJZB

It feels a bit ominous to read the blog reviews of Brian McLaren’s latest – A New Kind of Christianity. The book is raising quite a stink. No surprise eh? One gets the sense there is something different going on this time versus the last couple book releases of Brian’s: The Secret Message and Everything Must Change. One gets the impression we are at a pivot point, a moment that upsets the whole terrain of theological allegiances having to do with the post evangelical emerging church developments of the last ten-fifteen years. It’s like Brian is shaking up the foundations of post evangelical theology. I read the book on my flight home from the ecclesia network national gathering  last week and here are some initial observations.

…

Read the full review:
http://ow.ly/1bJZB

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY.
Brian McLaren.
Hardback: HarperOne, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data — cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like pinballs in cyberspace.

The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s next target.

This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a veritable greenhouse of exposure.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

THE WATCHERS:
The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.
Shane Harris.
Hardback: The Penguin Press, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

NY TIMES Obituary for
Ralph McInerny
1929-2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/arts/16mcinerny.html

Ralph McInerny, a scholar of Roman Catholicism who taught at the University of Notre Dame for more than half a century and a prolific novelist whose books included the Father Dowling mystery series, died Jan. 29 in Mishawaka, Ind., near South Bend. He was 80.

The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, said his son Daniel.

Mr. McInerny, who taught philosophy and medieval studies at Notre Dame, was an expert on Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Catholic theologian and philosopher; much of his published scholarship included biographical and exegetical texts on Aquinas, and he edited a volume of Aquinas translations for Penguin Classics. He also wrote on the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, the 12th-century Spanish Arabic scholar Averroes and later thinkers and theologians, including Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard, Pascal and Descartes.

He was far better known, however, as a novelist, and especially as the creator of Roger Dowling, a former canon lawyer whose career was derailed by drink and who has become, in his rehabilitation, a parish priest in a Midwestern town called Fox River, where he runs across an inordinate number of murders and shows an unusual gift for solving them.

…
Read the full obituary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/arts/16mcinerny.html

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_15.html

Alain Badiou, often billed as France’s leading radical thinker, here collects a group of tributes he has written to philosophers who are no longer with us. Most of these names — all French-speaking, all but one male — will be familiar to American readers: Lacan, Sarte, Foucault, Derrida. But others will be less familiar: Georges Canguilhem, Francoise Proust. In the “Overture,” Badiou refers to the subjects of these eulogies as “friends, enemies and partners,” categories which are not impermeable. Even those he thought of as friends or teachers are subject to criticism from his Maoist, revisionist-Marxist position.

Badiou tells us that these pieces are his way of calling these thinkers as “witnesses for the prosecution” in his dispute with those who would prostitute philosophy — that is, those who propose the maxim, “Cling to your illusions, prepare to surrender.” Badiou and his absent allies for their part insist that we “cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.” Badiou’s readings of this pantheon are illuminated by this particular slant of light. The first essay, a very short piece on Jacques Lacan, is a fairly standard eulogy which becomes an attack on Lacan’s critics: “All those psychoanalytic dwarves, all those gossip columnists amplifying the mean cry of ‘He was standing in my way, and now he’s dead at last. Now pay some attention to ME!” This confrontational tone, modulated to suit but never totally absent, permeates all the pieces here. At one point he asks his audience to allow him to be “absolutely anecdotal and completely superficial,” but there is no noticeable drop in intensity anywhere.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_15.html

Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy.
Alain Badiou
Paperback: Verso, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/2010/02/reboot-review.html

We live in a world that is increasingly impacted by technology.  The speed at which life is lived seemingly increases exponentially every day.  As Peggy Kendall, author of Reboot puts it: “As we become hyperconnected, overstimulated, multitasked, hyperinformed, hectically scheduled, and manically entertained, we wonder why feel so tired at night” (p. 3).  I do believe most of us can identify with that statement.  Even as life in general becomes more complex and fast paced, those of us who have walked through life for a few decades wonder about the decreasing attention span of young people.  Many of us who preach for a living wonder whether we are an endangered species – ready to be replaced by multimedia shows.  And yet, even I, a middle-aged man, who didn’t purchase a computer until beginning a Ph.D. program in my late 20s (and that computer was rather primitive by today’s standards), find it difficult to live for even a few hours without checking email or Facebook.  Yes, we have become dependent on technology that only a few decades back was the stuff of dreams.  The innocence of Beaver Cleaver or Opie Taylor is a thing of the past – at least for most of us.

As people of faith, at that is the intended audience for this book, the question is – how do we live with this technology without it controlling our lives?  Peggy Kendall, a self-described middle-aged communication professor at a Christian college, writes in the hope that this book will help Christians look at “how our unexamined choices regarding technology may unintentionally be altering our fundamental operating system” (p. 7).  The areas that may be affected include our values, our relationships, and the way we view “our Creator.”  The author writes as one who embraces technology, including the ways in which it makes life more productive and efficient, but she recognizes that there is a dark side present that needs to be addressed.

…
Read the full review:
http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/2010/02/reboot-review.html

REBOOT: Refreshing Your Faith in a High-Tech World.
Peggy Kendall.
Paperback: Judson Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

THE ECONOMIST looks back at
Albert Camus’ Work 50 years later

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15211211

WHEN Albert Camus was killed in a car crash 50 years ago on January 4th, at the age of 46, he had already won the Nobel prize for literature, and his best-known novel, “L’Etranger” (“The Stranger” or “The Outsider”), had introduced readers the world over to the philosophy of the absurd. Yet, at the time of his death, Camus found himself an outcast in Paris, snubbed by Jean-Paul Sartre and other left-bank intellectuals, and denounced for his freethinking refusal to yield to fashionable political views. As his daughter has said: “Papa was alone.”

Today, by contrast, the French are proud to consider Camus a towering figure, while Sartre’s star has faded. Even President Nicolas Sarkozy, from the political right, has proposed transferring the writer’s remains from Provence to the Panthéon in Paris. Several new books mark the anniversary of his death, including an elegant illustrated volume by Catherine Camus, one of his twin children and custodian of her father’s estate.

The reader in search of literary criticism, or even the origins of absurdist thought, will not find it in the three new biographies. That by José Lenzini, a French former journalist, is the most unusual, retracing Camus’s last journey from Provence to Paris as a series of imaginary flashbacks through his life. The other two are more conventional but both finely drawn, digestible portraits of the football-playing “little poor child”, as Camus called himself, from Algiers, who came to leave such a mark on literature and moral thought.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15211211

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2010/janfeb/recommendedreading.html

James Lasdun employs all sorts of characters in his enjoyable short story collection It’s Beginning to Hurt. Lovable or not, they’re all sympathetic, with threads of humanness we can relate to. In “The Anxious Man” (my favorite), Joseph is consumed by the Dow and NASDAQ numbers—his wife has insisted on pouring some inherited money into stocks. But it’s not just the market. He wishes to have more faith that all will be well, just shy of holding any convictions himself—”convictions, he liked to joke, were for convicts.” His inability to assess people correctly wears on him. On vacation in Cape Cod, he and his wife accept a drinks-and-dinner invitation from neighbors they don’t know. Later, Elise, his wife, rants about how despicable “those people” were:

All this time, he realized, while he had been blithely enjoying himself, she had been assessing this couple, sitting in judgment on them, and quietly forming a verdict against them. On what grounds? He wanted to know. But as he opened his mouth to demand an explanation, he had felt once again the familiar sense of uncertainty about his own instincts.

Poor Joseph. Except we understand, because we’ve felt similarly.

Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2010/janfeb/recommendedreading.html

IT’S BEGINNING TO HURT.
James Lasdun.
Hardcover: FSG, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Interview with Michelle Brown
Author of CULTURE OF PUNISHMENT.

http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/the_culture_of_punishment/

In the new book “The Culture of Punishment” (NYU Press), criminologist Michelle Brown—an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio University—considers the intersection between culture and punishment, where “much of the popular knowledge about punishment is constructed.” Brown takes readers to the places where punishment is most likely to be accessed, including film, television, and the unfailingly popular prison tour, providing unique insights into how and why America has become the most punitive nation on earth.

Failure interviewed Brown to learn more about the consequences of mass incarceration, the challenges of getting Americans to reflect on the country’s approach to punishment, and to find out how her students react when given the opportunity to visit a death chamber.

F: What prompted you to write “The Culture of Punishment”?

MB:The idea developed across time, but once I began pursuing a degree in criminology it became clear that punishment was overlooked—not just theoretically but culturally. During the past ten years, I’ve spent a lot of time in prisons doing work with both prisoners and staff, and I became fascinated with the engagements between the people with whom I was interacting and what I was seeing in popular culture.

…

Read the full interview:
http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/the_culture_of_punishment/

The Culture of Punishment:
Prison, Society, and Spectacle.
Michelle Brown.
Paperback: NYU Press, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

Hands down, my favorite book title of this year is the new volume from the folks at The Other Journal: ‘God is Dead’ and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism, edited by Andrew David, Chris Keller, and Jon Stanley.

In addition to having a great title, you get an added bonus: it’s also a fabulous book!  Rather than playing the apologetic game on the new atheists’ rules, this volume brings together a creative mix of genres (essays, interviews, art and poetry) in a constructive vision that is only obliquely a ‘response’ to the new atheism.  And it includes some of the most significant voices in contemporary thought, including Charles Taylor, Stanley Fish, John Milbank, Merold Westphal, Luci Shaw, Stanley Hauerwas, and many others.

So I thought I’d pose a few questions to a couple of the editors, Chris Keller and Jon Stanley.  I hope you’ll enjoy listening in on the conversation.
—

JKAS: This book grows out of articles that originally appeared in The Other Journal.  Could you tell us a little bit about the journal?  How’d it get started?  What defines it?

Read the full interview:
http://ow.ly/14t8m

‘God is Dead’ and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.
David, Keller and Stanley, eds.
Paperback: Wipf and Stock, 2010.
Buy now: [ Wipf and Stock ] Use code ‘GID10′ for 40% discount!

Powells Books Reviews
Joel Brouwer’s new book of poetry AND SO

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities,” wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up-to-date — meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past — a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else. But since the poet cares most about making a poem (”an emotionally disturbing structure made of words” — X.J. Kennedy), and since words are his medium, he feels the pinch, caught between the language of living a decent life (”please pass the salt” or “wanna go to the movies?”) and the explanations of that life by news anchors and expert witnesses. The saltshaker is almost always too heavy an object to lift into the imagination, and the Sunday supplement stains both the palm and the mind with a toxic petroleum derivative. So the poet cultivates both an aversion to power asserted through language and an urge to wield that power more tellingly. We have spent the past hundred years thrashing the underbrush to drive our motives into the open, but what did we gain? And so, we come to Joel Brouwer’s And So, his third book.

Brouwer’s materials are situational. His scenarios are described as if at the very moment they become visible, before any conclusions may be drawn — but the characters within them seem to have been living in this condition for hours, days, or longer. Although the poems’ microplots entail social situations, they cancel or disregard the potential for shared values or acts that may be performed together to create a third way.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

AND SO: POEMS.
Joel Brouwer.
Paperback: Four Way Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

In one of the chapters in Zachary Mason’s dazzling debut novel, Odysseus — the wily warrior and canny voyager from Homer’s epic poem — emerges as the creator of his own legend. He’s a war-weary soldier who leaves the battlefield and finds refuge outside Troy, posing as an itinerant bard, a poet who begins by singing the classics and later takes “to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many.”

“It was when I was a guest in Tyre,” Mr. Mason’s Odysseus goes on, “that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero. What good is the truth when those who were there are dead or scattered? I took to rearranging the events of Troy’s downfall, eliding my betrayals and the woman-killing, and making a good tale of it.”
…

In “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” Mr. Mason — who is identified on the book jacket as a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, as well as a finalist for the 2009 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, given to writers under 35 — has written a series of jazzy, post-modernist variations on “The Odyssey,” and in doing so he’s created an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY: A Novel.
Zachary Mason.
Hardback. FSG, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Review of Merold Westphal’s
Whose Community? Which lnterpretation?
From Christian Scholars’ Review

http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/churchandpomodocs/cbensononwestphal.pdf

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? belongs to a series by Baker Academic called “The Church and Postmodern Culture.” The editor, James K. A. Smith, provides the rationale for reading Merold Westphal’s contribution: “For ‘peoples of the Book’ whose way of life is shaped by texts, matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and death” (9). Based on “To Read or Not to Read,” a2007 report from the National Endowment of the Arts, we are living in a post-literate or sub-literate culture where, it is safe to conjecture, the biblical text plays a diminutive role in the formation of Christian identity.  Friedrich Nietzsche’s once controversial claim-”there are no facts, only interpretations”-seems irrelevant in the absence of a text to interpret.

For the remnant of Bible-reading Christians, “matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and death” (italics added). Do not miss the qualifying clause. While we are no longer witnesses to the violence behind sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic persecution of Anabaptists, such violence is sublimated behind present-day Orthodox anathemas of iconoclasts or Emergent denunciations of Calvinist creeds. In short, interpretative practice
often fosters animus among brothers and sisters in the household of faith.

Read the full review:
http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/churchandpomodocs/cbensononwestphal.pdf

Whose Community? Which lnterpretation?
Merold Westphal.
Paperback: Baker Books, 2009.
Buy Now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2010/janfeb/transmissionroutes.html

…
Both Robert Wuthnow’s and Mark Noll’s new books puncture a number of commonplaces about global Christianity and America’s place in it, although they do so from notably different angles. Wuthnow is an eminent sociologist of religion who possesses a formidable capacity for memory and analysis combined with an abundance of research assistants. He synthesizes a vast amount of background reading, original research, and reinterpretations of standard datasets to survey the ways American Christians currently relate to the wider world.

One of Wuthnow’s stated aims in Boundless Faith is to refute what he calls the “Global Christianity paradigm,” a narrative of Western Christian decline and Southern ascent that has given rise to many of the hasty conclusions summarized above. (Inevitably, Wuthnow finds the source of this paradigm in Philip Jenkins’ influential book The Next Christendom, though Jenkins does not focus nearly as much on Western decline as readers of Wuthnow might be led to believe.) Wuthnow musters evidence from far and wide to push back strongly against the idea that the United States is a fading force in global Christianity. To the contrary, wherever his sociologist’s gimlet eye turns, whether to sources of funds, centers of theological education, or activities of local church members, he finds continued American activity and influence, and in many ways he finds that American Christians may be more internationally minded than they have ever been.
…

Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2010/janfeb/transmissionroutes.html

Jonathan Brink Reflects on
John Franke’s Manifold Witness, The Plurality Of Truth
For The Emergent Village website

http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/brink-response-manifold-witness

It’s not often that you run into a book that explores a deep tension within the church in such a succinct way, that you say, “I wish I had written that.” But John Franke has done just that.

Franke recently released, “Manifold Witness, The Plurality Of Truth” by Abingdon Press, a book that wrestles with the nature of truth and its apparent contradiction of plurality. How can truth be plural? Franke offers what is arguably one of the better responses to the common tension in the church as it grapples the shifting landscape towards postmodern culture.

Franke’s central thesis is,

“the expression of biblical and orthodox Christian faith is inherently and irreducibly pluralist.” (p.7)

At first glance, this kind of statement can be seen as a defense for cultural relativism. In other words, it seems like Franke is arguing for the idea that truth is relative. And if you close the book there, you’ll be missing out on a deeply informed argument away from this very idea.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/brink-response-manifold-witness

Manifold Witness, The Plurality Of Truth.
John Franke.
Paperback: Abingdon, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

In Laurel and Hardy’s Big Business, two door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen fight a bad-tempered homeowner. The manic tit-for-tat escalates from head banging to a demolished house and an exploded car. The three become more and more alike as their wiggy violence spirals without aim or purpose.

It’s funny because we know that that’s the way we are, from the cradle. You hit your brother; he hits back; you hit again, only harder. Aggressor and aggrieved become interchangeable, indistinguishable, and parents know there is little point in trying to figure out “who started it.”

As the Stanford scholar Rene Girard observes in the book-length interview Battling to the End, “The aggressor has always already been attacked” and so feels justified. Look at the Middle East.

But what if violence goes unchecked? “This is an apocalyptic book,” Girard states at the outset. The more probable such an endgame becomes, “the less we talk about it.”

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=12259

Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre
(Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture).
Rene Girard.
Paperback: Michigan State Univ. Press, 2009.
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Powells Books Reviews
THE POETRY OF RILKE
Translated and Edited by Edward Snow

Read this review:
http://bit.ly/6E2Fdk

THE POETRY OF RILKE.
Translated and Edited by Edward Snow.
Hardback: North Point Press, 2009.
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Charles Siegel Contrasts
Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH with
Jane Jacobs’ THE DEATH AND LIFE OF
GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.

http://preservenet.blogspot.com/2009/12/jane-jacobs-and-al-gore.html

As much as I admire the work that Al Gore is doing on global warming, I cannot help but shudder when I compare his Inconvenient Truth with Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I see how much American culture has changed in the last half century.

…

Read the full piece:
http://preservenet.blogspot.com/2009/12/jane-jacobs-and-al-gore.html

DEATH AND LIFE OF
GREAT AMERICAN CITIES
Jane Jacobs.
Hardback: Modern Library, 1993 edition.
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AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Al Gore.
Paperback:   Rodale, 2006.
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