Review of Stuart Banner, The Decline of Natural Law: How American Lawyers Once Used Natural Law and Why They Stopped, Oxford University Press, 2021.  “We hold these truths to be self evident…” is not how one would begin an argument in a modern courtroom–at least, not if you intended to actually win your argument. Nevertheless,… Continue reading

Review of Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Bruce Gordon, who a number of years ago wrote what I understand to be the standard biography of John Calvin, has written a new biography of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli, although the subject of a substantial amount of name… Continue reading

 Review of Aaron Griffith, God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.            I’ve always approached the concept of criminal justice with a heap of cynicism. It’s hard to know how to think about these things. Law and order seems to be an unobjectionable concept, until you begin… Continue reading

Review of Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Makoto Fujimura, an American artist of Japanese heritage and training, has put together a remarkable little book on the relationship of art—broadly construed—to faith. One would have to think so given the blurbs he received: who else can lay claim to endorsements… Continue reading

Review of Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Mark Noll’s Civil War as Theological Crisis isn’t a new book. It’s a book that I first heard of as an undergrad—and that remained on my “to read” list through graduate school, never graduating to the “have read”… Continue reading

Review of: R.B. Bernstein, The Education of John Adams New York: Oxford, 2020. John Adams will never be the most popular of the Founding Fathers. He did not have the commanding grace of Washington, the elegant pen of Jefferson, or Franklin’s way with a coonskin cap. Paul Giamatti is a compelling actor, but there is… Continue reading

Book Review: Wirzba, Norman. Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Humans are fundamentally eaters. And yet today, we as a culture give less thought to how we eat than perhaps at any time before in human history. We fail to answer the fundamental question of why… Continue reading

Review of Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. New York: Workman Press, 2012. This blog has been years in the coming, and whether it survives a fortnight is a question yet to be resolved. But if it does manage to survive longer than Wimbledon outside pandemictide, its… Continue reading