Book Reviews

New Religions for a Godless World

We’ve all heard by now of the rise of the “Nones,” that growing demographic that, when filling out a census, marks their religious affiliation as “None.” While until recently they made up only the smallest minority in America (and the rest of the Western world) they may now come close to forming a majority, especially among the younger generations. A common narrative among Christians is that people are migrating away from traditional Judeo-Christian faiths in favor of liberal secularism. But …

A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife

It is more than a little ironic, and more than a little disturbing, that some of the most prominent “Christian” scholars in the world are not Christian at all. At least, not by a definition that would require their assent to the doctrines outlined in the historic creeds and confessions. To the contrary, many of the most significant scholars at the most significant universities tend to deny the doctrines of the Trinity, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, of his …

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How Everything Became About Race, Gender, and Identity

You can’t read the news, you can’t scroll through Twitter, you can’t browse a bookstore, you probably can’t even talk to a neighbor without realizing that somehow everything has become about race, gender, and identity. In a short period of time we’ve been introduced to a whole new vocabulary that conveys a whole new set of ideas. We’ve been told that language can be violent and that the sciences need to be decolonized. We’ve been told that there is no …

A Way With Words

Books often arrive in topical waves as an event or emphasis within the church or within wider society sparks many writers to address a common concern. This is the case right now with a whole crop of new books that have significant thematic overlap: Scott Saul’s A Gentle Answer: Our ‘Secret Weapon’ in an Age of Us Against Them, Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers , Gavin Ortlund’s Finding the Right Hills to …

Is White Fragility a Helpful Resource for Christians?

For the past couple of weeks I have been laboring to write the third and final part of my review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The first two parts took an unusually long time to prepare, but in the end I was pleased with the results. In the first article my goal was to summarize the contents of the book as a kind of narrative that explains what the world should be like, tells what the world is actually like, …

The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

When historians look back on the twenty-first century Western world, surely few things will strike them as being more deranged and more sinister than its insistence that biology has no bearing on an individual’s gender. While society has long acknowledged the rare existence of gender dysphoria, a psychological condition marked by discomfort with one’s biological sex, it now celebrates full-fledged gender fluidity. Only our contemporary context could make sense of a phrase like “some men get periods” or a headline …

How To Talk About God in a Skeptical Age

The gospel of Jesus Christ is fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable. Just as God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, so, too, is the good news of what Jesus Christ has done. But the methods and strategies Christians use to explain and defend that gospel can vary as much as humanity does. While there have always been many who are skeptical about Christianity’s truth claims, contemporary Western unbelievers represent a new type of skepticism. For this reason Christians do well …

Hope When Life Unravels

Christians are well-resourced when it comes to books on suffering. Such books can typically be divided into two types: Those that are structured around theological themes and those that are structured around lived experiences. So some people begin with an examination of what the Bible has to say about suffering while other people begin with their own experiences of suffering and apply Scripture to them. There is value in both approaches. Adam Dooley’s Hope When Life Unravels falls squarely in …

The Gathering Storm

If you know much of anything about Albert Mohler, you’ll probably be quick to understand the title of his new book, The Gathering Storm. Mohler is a lifelong student of Winston Churchill and has borrowed the title from the first volume of Churchill’s massive work on the Second World War. However, he hasn’t merely borrowed the title, but also the central argument: “the first task of faithfulness lies in understanding reality. Understanding the storm and seeing it for what it …

Write Better

Andrew T. Le Peau has had a significant influence on Christian writing not first through his own books, but through his long career as an editor. While he has authored a number of popular books and Bible studies, his greater work has been influencing a generation of writers as an associate publisher for editorial at InterVarsity Press. It is through this work that he has shaped many bestselling books and through this work that he has gained a lot of …