Recommended Books (Spring 2021)
Christians are most in need of building strong communities of faith and practice during times of cultural strife and alienation. Rod Dreher’s recent publication, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, builds on his earlier work to argue this point well. Specifically, he reports that persecuted Christians in the Soviet Union clung desperately to good literature and historic theological works as they labored to remain...
Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies: A Review
Christianity Today’s Samuel James says that it presents a “surprisingly weak case.”[1] Southern Seminary’s Al Mohler offers a more favorable review: “I think it’s, if anything, an even more important book than The Benedict Option.”[2] Undoubtedly, these men put forward contrasting analyses of Rod Dreher’s newest book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.[3] I first encountered Dreherupon reading his book, Crunchy Cons,...
Recommended Books (Winter 2021)
What societies read, or do not read, has a significant effect on the nature of political discourse in modern democratic countries. Historian Paul Johnson argues that the press, as we now know it, first set “the pace of political change in all the advanced societies” during the 1820s with the invention of the steam press.[1] In the intervening two centuries, the printing industry has gone through massive changes that have surely...
Recommended Books (Autumn 2020)
Explorers have fallen on hard times in our culture. Perhaps we were so dazzled by the extent of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century feats that our capacity to wonder at the challenge of adventure has been short-circuited. More likely, though, most Americans, who are soaked in luxury and decadence, have lost the will to shed their cushy lifestyles and embrace the sacrifice of exploration. For, to survive perilous journey, we must...
Recommended Books (Summer 2020)
Words are powerful. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into existence and ordered it according to its kind. At the crux of history, the “Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14), and through His Spirit all of our disordered desires are being refashioned into a new harmony that will be consummated when His name will be on our foreheads (Rev. 22:4) and all creation will have been reconciled to the Word (Col. 1:20). As image-bearers of God,...
Book Reflection: The Making of Stanley Hauerwas
Recently I read The Making of Stanley Hauerwas, a book adapted from David Hunsicker’s doctoral dissertation. Hunsicker is a Presbyterian minister in Alabama and former theology professor. Published dissertations usually aren’t a type of reading material that gets me very excited, but the subject matter of this one intrigued me. For the last thirty years, Stanley Hauerwas has been among the most discussed and debated theologians in the...
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