Books

In this deeply researched and illuminating monograph, Elizabeth Clark examines the development of early church history as an academic field in the U.S.

Late in life, my mother confessed that she never enjoyed cooking. "But," she said, "I did take satisfaction in serving simple meals to my family." Well, there's no such thing as a simple meal anymore.

Until I read Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, I would not have said that I was a connoisseur of the world of O.

Of the rewriting Christ and Culture there shall be no end. Miroslav Volf is too sophisticated a theologian to rehash or imitate H. Richard Niebuhr's celebrated fivefold schema, but A Public Faith remains in the shadow of Niebuhr's defining work.  

Paul Harvey's introduction to the history of African-American Christianity emphasizes both the fraught relationship between black and white Christians and the tensions within black religious institutions and communities.

We need states to take in enough revenue to provide the services people rely on. We need this more than we need tax-free online shopping.

A. N. Wilson's literary biography aims to bridge the gap between the Commedia and nonspecialists who, allegedly abandoned by the professionals, are like sheep without a shepherd.

In this splendid book Belden Lane has made a double contribution—to the reordering of our perspectives on creation and to our understanding of the Reformed tradition as a contributor to this reordering.

When black theologians focused on nontraditional and extra-Christian sources, white theologians had an excuse to ignore them. Not anymore.

In Redeeming Mulatto, Brian Bantum addresses the American tendency to understand race relations in binary terms.

Two years before he died, Reinhold Niebuhr published one of his best-known articles. He didn't write it alone.

The average house size has nearly doubled since 1970. Yet self-storage units, once nearly nonexistent, are a booming business.

Drawing on Harry S. Stout, Stanley Hauerwas argues that the Civil War became a total, unlimited war because the demand to participate assumed a sacral status.

Slogans are necessary, Jenson says, both for practical reasons (we need shortcuts in arguments) and rhetorical ones (we need vivid ways of summing up a position). But problems arise when slogans become "untethered from the complex of ideas and practices which they once evoked."

In the long struggle for freedom in South Africa, parts of the church played a major role, even as other parts colluded with the apartheid regime. Few actions in that struggle were more important than the Belhar Confession.

These seven books offer help in thinking about the structure and content of clergy peer groups.