Theology That Bites Back
So then, it is not often you get word (all in one day) that a book of yours has gotten itself reviewed in two different magazines. Naturally enough, I took this as a sign, and hastened to my computer in order to tell you all about it. What is it a sign of? Well, these …
So I like to read, and consequently I have continued to do so. The list of books I read in 2017 is now posted here. I also like to let people know when I have read a hot one, and so that is why I have a monthly feature informatively called The Book of the …
I really enjoyed Taleb’s book The Black Swan, and picked up his Antifragile shortly after it came out. I started it, and was enjoying it, but stalled out for some reason. I don’t remember. It was dark. They were big. His book found itself in my lamentably large and scattered collection of partly read books. …
The Grace of Shame: 7 Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals Tim Bayly, Joseph Bayly, and Jürgen von Hagen This is a book about repentance, and it is also—fittingly—a book of repentance. In it, Tim Bayly tells the story of a man under his ministry years ago, struggling with homosexual temptations. He was …
Princeton University Press has a series of “biographies” of great religious books, which is in itself a great idea. I had only read one of them before—Alan Jacobs’ bio of the Book of Common Prayer—and so I came with enthusiasm to George Marsden’s “life” of Mere Christianity. The book did not disappoint, and was really …
Reading a book with as many charts and graphs as this one had shouldn’t have been so much fun, but it really was. This month’s selection for the book-of-the-month is The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein. This book was a blast. Some of the points made here are commonplaces for conservatives—e.g. the …
For those who—unlike myself—function with tidy minds, I must begin by acknowledging that there was no Book of the Month/July 2017. This is because it was dark, they were big. It won’t happen again. Those responsible have been sacked. And for this round, I want to do something a little different. I read this book …
Rod Dreher is to be commended for many aspects of The Benedict Option. But at the end of the day, it reminds me of a fistful of pearls, with no thread available to make the necklace. I am glad I read it, and I am glad for the stand that Dreher is taking against various …
I will not have a lot to say about this next chapter of The Benedict Option, the chapter on “Eros and the New Christian Counterculture.” I do have some cavils here and there about how much monastics have to teach us about human sexuality, but in the main this is a really solid chapter. Dreher …
Out of the Ashes really is a marvelous book, and Anthony Esolen is a baller. He tackles the same problem that Rod Dreher is addressing in The Benedict Option—which is the apostasy and resultant deterioration of a formerly Christian culture—but he does it with a lot more verve. In fact, any more verve and it …
