Author: Jonathan de Vries

There are many articulate explicators and defenders of the intellectual and moral legacy of Christianity in the modern world. Writers like David Bentley Hart, Larry Siedentop and Charles Taylor are incredibly erudite and persuasive, yet their books do not easily fit into the category of leisure reading, given their need for full consciousness, uninterrupted focus, and ready access to dictionaries.

The name Chernobyl has lodged itself into the modern consciousness. It triggers many of the defining anxieties of the twentieth century: nuclear power, environmentalism, and the potential for humanity’s technological achievements to wreak untold destruction.

Eire is not negative about religion in general or Christianity in particular. A reader from a Reformed background should find Reformations informative and engaging, but the final page may leave the question in one’s mind of whether it was all worth the cost, not just in blood and strife, but in the very idea of Christian unity.

Throughout his survey, Rubin gives special emphasis to the role of Christianity in Western society, and he concludes the work by offering his forecast on Christianity’s role in a society based on the morality of self-fulfillment.

Debates between religion and science often seem to be paradigmatic of a conflict between two irreconcilable things.

Recent events have made Karen Armstrong’s recently published Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence tragically topical. New stories splashed across our computer and television screens do little to dispel the prevalent notion that religion is disproportionately linked to the less positive aspects of the human condition.

The true message of James, in Ellul’s view, describes a faith that is both transformative and existential. We cannot be Christians merely as an intellectual or spiritual exercise, nor can we be Christians in isolation from the world.