A review of

Where the Conflict Really Lies:
Science, Religion, and Naturalism
Alvin Plantinga
Hardback: Oxford University Press, 2011

Buy now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Shaun C. Brown

[ Read an excerpt from this book ... ]

Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, remains one of the preeminent voices in contemporary philosophy of religion.  In 2004–2005, he presented the prestigious Gifford Lectures, which are presented at Scottish universities each year.  Plantinga follows a long line of distinguished scholars, like William James, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, and Stanley Hauerwas.  Where the Conflict Really Lies stems from these lectures.  Similar to Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Plantinga’s main argument is in larger print, while more technical details and additions are in smaller print.

Plantinga summarizes his basic argument: “there is a superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism” (ix).  Plantinga notes that the view that a tension exists between science and religion goes back to the seventeenth century and has been held by both people of faith and secularists.

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Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers
Charles Dickens

Today is the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth…

O GOD! who by Thy prophet’s hand

Didst smite the rocky brake,

Whence water came, at Thy command,

Thy people’s thirst to slake;

Strike, now, upon this granite wall,

Stern, obdurate, and high;

And let some drops of pity fall

For us who starve and die!

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What is your Primary Identity?

The Borders of Baptism:

Identities, Allegiances, and the Church

Michael L. Budde
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2011.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

Review by Chase Roden

What is your primary identity? Are you an American — or Canadian, Nicaraguan, or Texan first and foremost? Are you a mother, father, or daughter first? A Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian? Or does your faith inform your identity more than any of these allegiances? In The Borders of Baptism, professor of political science and Catholic studies at DePaul University Michael L. Budde explores this question from a wide variety of angles. What if, he asks, the identity-forming power we give to the state were reserved for the Body of Christ?

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Another in our occasional series of excerpts from classic books…

A People’s History of the United States

Howard Zinn

Paperback: HarperCollins, 2010 edition.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

A Review of Saving the Seasons. How to Can, Freeze or Dry Almost Anything. Mary Clemens Meyer and Susanna Meyer. Paperback: Herald Press, 2010. Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ] Reviewed by Kate Roden.

Scroll down to the end of the review
for the recipe for Strawberry Freezer Jam
from this book!

Saving the Seasons is the newest cookbook from the publishers of the trifecta of beloved Mennonite cookbooks: Simply in Season, More with Less, and Extending the Table. This new work lives up to and expands the ideals of its predecessors.

In the nearly 35 years since More with Less first appeared on the scene, American kitchens have undergone some big changes, and not just in the shift from “autumn harvest” appliance colors to stainless steel.  In much of the country, the locavore movement is in full swing, folks are prioritizing where their food comes from and how it gets to them. They are looking for farmer’s markets and buying up farm shares and subscriptions on such sites as http://www.localharvest.org/csa/.   Vegetable gardens, chicken coops and beehives are popping up in urban neighborhoods, and with the current DIY climate, and the financial necessities many families are facing, the More with Less approach to homemaking has new relevance.

The upsurge in interest in various arts of domesticity and homesteading means this book comes out at exactly the right time for a new group of novice gardeners who are wondering what exactly they are supposed to do with the 10 pounds of pickling cucumbers they accidentally grew.

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“A History of Our Brokenness”

A Review of
Pandora’s Seed:
The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization .
By Spencer Wells.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

[ Watch two videos of Wells talking about this book... ]

Pandora’s Seed:
The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.
By Spencer Wells.
Hardback: Random House, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

When we, as the Church, think about the Fall of humanity, our minds tend to jump to the Garden of Eden and the familiar story of Adam, Eve, the serpent and the forbidden fruit, and undoubtedly this is an essential part of the biblical narrative.  What we tend to gloss over, however, are the ways in which waves of brokenness surged forth through time and space from the epicenter of Eden toppling and subjugating not only humanity but all creation.  The Fall, of course, brought on the immediate consequences of pain in childbearing and in working the Earth, but it was not long before we encounter murder, lies, and the amassing of people and power in cities, and then Creation forcefully lashing out at itself with a massive flood.  The parallels between this biblical story of the Fall and its aftermath, parallels in a striking way, the scientific account of the development of early civilization presented in Spencer Wells’ new book Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.  Wells is a heralded geneticist, and “Explorer-in-Residence” at the National Geographic Society.  His previous two books The Journey of Man and Deep Ancestry, probe aspects of our evolution and development as humankind, as well as our genetic history.   I should be clear before I go any further that any theological parallels that I note in conjunction with Wells’ research are my own and not his.

Wells’ thesis is that our development of agriculture about 10,000 years brought with it many “unintended consequences” that have plagued humanity over the intervening millennia, and he narrates a very different story than that put forth by modernist champions of “progress” over the last two centuries.   In his words: “The biggest revolution of the past 50,000 years of human history was not the advent of the Internet, the growth of the industrial age out of the seeds of the Enlightenment, or the development of modern methods of long-distance navigation.  Rather it was when a few people … decided to stop gathering from the land, abiding by the limits set in place by nature, and started growing their food.  This decision has had more far-reaching consequences for our species than any other.”  While I realize that discussions of dates and timelines in relation to the earliest eras of human development are open to some degree of leeway and interpretation, I suspect that most people could accept 10,000 years as a possible length of post-Fall human history, so for the sake of this review let us assume that what we know from the biblical narrative as “the Fall,” occurred essentially simultaneously with the development of agriculture as Wells describes it here and see how the consequences he describes fit with those noted in scripture.  Wells makes his case with chapters that focus on specific consequences, each of which begins with a relevant story from his global travels.

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The four essays in this collection first saw life as the Terry Foundation lectures at Yale University, whose purpose is “to engage both scholars and the public in a consideration of religion from a humanitarian point of view, in the light of modern science and philosophy.” Previous lecturers (all published by Yale UP) include Alvin Plantinga, Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Ricoeur, Margaret Mead, Jacques Maritain and other luminaries.

Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, is best known for her fiction. Her novel Gilead, a small-town preacher’s survey of his long life in 1950s Iowa, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

In this collection Robinson goes after some big guns, peddlers of what she calls “parascientific literature”:

By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economic and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions. Its author may or may not be a scientist himself. One of the characterizing traits of this large and burgeoning literature is its confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them. (32–33)

Among purveyors of parascientific ideas Robinson includes Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, and Sigmund Freud, the subject of her third essay (“The Freudian Self”). She asserts that these men (no women make her list) dismiss anything that can’t be explained by appeal to genetic or economic self-interest. Thus, what we call the mind is merely electrical signals sparking in the darkness, religion is a prion-like infectious meme (Dawkin’s well-known carrier particle of culture) that made the jump from an ancient shaman, and metaphysics counts for nothing.

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A Brief Review of Green Mama: The Guilt-Free Guide to Helping You and Your Kids Save the Planet By Tracey Bianchi Paperback: Zondervan, 2010. Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ] Reviewed by Jeni Newswanger-Smith.

It’s hardly a secret that evangelical Christians have arrived late to eco-awareness and environmental protection.   Thankfully, more and more of us have embraced care of creation as part of our God-given responsibility; a way to work, quite literally, for the Kingdom of God.  In her book Green Mama, Tracey Bianchi offers multiple ways to incorporate better care of the environment into our everyday lives.  She supports her information with solid research and softens the fear with compassion and understanding for those who might not be ready to make big steps, yet.

Bianchi, herself a mother of 3 young children, understands some of these facts and some of the research she writes about can become overwhelming.  She encourages the reader to avoid compassion fatigue, both in oneself and in thrusting it upon our children.

Bianchi addresses a wide range of topics, from teaching one’s children to simply love the earth by learning about local animals and habitats to ways in which less chemical-laden products can be used to clean our homes.  She isn’t naïve, she knows all these things may be super overwhelming for the newly convicted, and she repeated advises the reader to pick just one or two things to change at a time, in order to avoid giving up. At the end of each chapter, Bianchi suggests some ways to evaluate your current choices and then make minor changes (e.g., shorter showers, reusable water bottles, reading labels thoroughly, buying more organic produce).

Bianchi offers many way to further your own research, through other books as well as online resources.  Each chapter includes multiple additional resources (websites and books).  Her “Green Mama Guide” at the back of the book is an additional easy way to find out more information.

Overall, Green Mama is an invaluable resource for people beginning to explore how to take seriously God’s command to care for creation.  It would also work well as a check point for people who may have gotten bogged down on the journey.

An excerpt from the new book:

The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.
Steven D. Smith.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Read our review of this new book…

After Rachel Held Evans witnessed the televised execution of a woman in Afghanistan in 2001, her lifelong identity as a Christian well-versed in apologetics, is threatened and eventually abandoned.  Because she knows and has polished the answers for her entire life, her questioning is pointed at the weakest links of the Christian argument.  This fury of questions is the high point of Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions.  Evans’ bravery in the struggle to ask difficult questions is the hallmark of this striking new memoir.

Evolving in Monkey Town seems to be a Christian tale for Christians.  Published by Zondervan, it is the singular experience of an honest person raised within a Christian culture who — no matter what steps she makes away from that upbringing — is largely formed and informed by that upbringing.  There are people who will relate to Rachel’s story very much because when raised in this context, it becomes so difficult to question (which was one of the key points in David Dark’s heralded book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, our 2009 Book of the Year, which incidentally was also published by Zondervan).  Those raised in such a way fear appearing as if they have no faith when voicing their doubts.  That Evans maintains faith while doing what equates to faithlessness in many Christian contexts  is another key strength of her story.

The defense of questioning the party lines of conservative evangelicalism while still loving Jesus doesn’t get much press.  Though the permission of questioning the faith may be granted on the back-country roads of church camps, it still takes a declaration of sorts to hold out a hand towards those whose doubts are bigger than any quick remedy.  Evans wants to bring freedom to readers who struggle in these ways against the mainstream of conservative evangelicalism.

Not being raised in church culture, I found some of her steps away to be somewhat timid.  Her questioning is big for her upbringing, but for those comfortable in the world, at times I wondered whether it necessitated a book.  It is her moments of going for the jugular of her doubt that kept me from being too high and mighty.  Fighting like only a true Pharisee can, she reminded me of Paul once his sight is restored after being blinded.  She can speak the language of those who doubt and therefore is best suited to ask the questions.