Christianity Today Book Review:  What Believers Can and Can’t Affirm in Those Who Affirm Same-Sex Marriage, by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek (Ohio Northern; Google Scholar; Author, Marriage, Scripture, and the Church: Theological Discernment on the Question of Same-Sex Union (2021) (reviewing Rebecca McLaughlin, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scripture and…

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Wall Street Journal Book Review: The Bible’s Hidden Contributors, by Peter Thonemann (Oxford) (reviewing Candida Ross (University of Birmingham), God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)): “The stupid, the lowborn, the gullible; slaves, women, and children.” For the second-century pagan writer Celsus, it was easy to sneer at the adherents of…

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Publisher's Weekly, Samuel T. Wilkinson: Humans are Meaningful by Design: Imagine a book about God with no pronouns for the deity. No mention of Jesus, heaven, hell, or salvation. Is it an atheist's dream? Not really. It's a debut trade book by a psychiatrist who embraces the science of evolution with an asterisk*. The *…

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New York Times: Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Beauty, Human Evil and the Idea of Israel, by Ezra Klein: Marilynne Robinson is one of the great living novelists. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal, and Barack Obama took time out of his presidency to interview her at length. Her fiction is…

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Religion News Service, Jordan Peterson Wrestles With God: In a new lecture tour to support a forthcoming book, the psychologist and public intellectual hews ever closer to Christianity, tantalizing fans who take their cues on converting from his secular but religiously curious thought. Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist, bestselling author and champion of manhood,…

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New York Times Op-Ed: Math Is the Answer to More Than One Question, by Alec Wilkinson (Author, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age) (2023): I am surprised at this late stage, in my 70s, to be thinking about God. In my defense, I might say that I…

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Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith, by Allen C. Guelzo (Princeton; Author, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024)): The First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Ill., opened in 1876, but its most famous congregant never crossed the church’s threshold. Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with First Presbyterian dates to an earlier location,…

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Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, Lessons in Leadership From the Hebrew Bible: America’s political class isn’t at its best. Public life lately seems to consist mainly of self-generated disasters, easily preventable crises and media-driven hysteria. Political leaders behave like spoiled children, outrage the public to no purpose, and loudly champion ideas they know to be…

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Hamilton Cain (Author, This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing), ‘Zero at the Bone’ Review: Writing Against Darkness (reviewing Christian Wiman (Yale Divinity School), Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair (2023)): The challenge of measuring the commands of religious belief against the unavoidable state of mortality and suffering goes back at…

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Christianity Today Op-Ed:  Keep Complaining to God. Just Don’t Ignore Him., by Drew Dyck (adapted from Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (2023): If you’re a Christian for long enough, you’ll notice that something sad starts to happen. A lot of the people who started the journey with you end up…

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John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar), GenXers and Evangelical Culture: Today’s post is a Q&A with Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent at Yahoo! News, and the author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation (2023). John Inazu: Testimony is a very personal book that also enlists your journalistic gifts and training. Can you describe…

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New York Times Op-Ed:  The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse, by Christopher Beha: I came to the work of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse — who receives the Nobel Prize in Literature this week — by way of “,” a novel cycle that began appearing in English just a few years ago. I’d been…

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Following up on my previous post, Abraham Lincoln’s Use Of The Bible In His Second Inaugural Address:  Christianity Today Book Review:  America’s ‘First Evangelical President’ Might Not Have Been a Christian at All, by Robert Tracy McKenzie (Wheaton College), (reviewing Gordon Leidner, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible (2023) & Joshua Zeitz, Lincoln's God: How Faith…

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Following up on last Sunday's post, America Doesn’t Need More God. It Needs More Atheists.: Christianity Today, Secular Figures Are Giving Faith a Second Look (reviewing Justin Brierley, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again (Foreword by N. T. Wright) (2023)): On one…

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Christianity Today Op-Ed:  The Streets Sent Me to the Pulpit, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton; Author, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Sept. 2023): My sophomore year of high school, I met a girl at a party. We talked on the phone for a…

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Christianity Today, Wheaton College Releases Report on Its History of Racism: Wheaton College embraced racist attitudes that “created an inhospitable and sometimes hostile campus environment for persons of color,” according to a a 122 page review of the school’s history released by trustees today. Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the…

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