Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Coming up with a great idea can be hard enough. Getting the idea adopted can be even harder. Why do some innovations change the world and others go nowhere? The reasons are many. In Originals Adam Grant highlights one factor in the story of the American suffrage movement. Lucy Stone launched the women’s rights movement …
The story is classic. The main character enjoys prominence and prestige only to sink into obscurity before slowly rising again. Mark Noll tells this tale in his benchmark book on the history of American evangelical scholarship (1880-1980), Between Faith and Criticism–a book full of insights which still bear fruit today. Some reasons for the decline …
In the last century millions were killed in genocide, a hundred million in armed conflicts, fifty million more in political purges. Has Jesus, acknowledged as the most influential person in world history, really made any difference? Thomas Cahill begins to answer this question in Desire of the Everlasting Hills by considering the written record of …
Is democracy worth fighting for and even dying for? Does it need greater goals than itself? What should be the shape of our social order? In an era gone by, Christian thought leaders believed they had a public role in answering such questions, and the public thought they did too. In 1943, as the Allies …
We seem to live in unusually contentious times. Tensions between established ethnic groups and against new immigrant groups seems on the rise. Many wonder if peace and justice still have a place in our future. In The Soul of America, Jon Meacham says the lens of history can offer a corrective perspective. Our current situation …
Napoleon and Wellington are historically joined at the hip because of their epic encounter at Waterloo. Yet other apparent similarities are striking: both were born in the same year (1769), both were born of prominent fathers who died when the boys were in early adolescence, both had four brothers and three sisters, both spoke French …
Derek Cooper’s An Introduction to World Christian History overviews two thousand years not only at 30,000 feet but at 500 miles an hour. You better not blink or you will miss a century or two.
We used to have fundamentalist Christians, but where are they now? I rarely hear anyone refer to themselves by that label. Do you?
The dramatic pendulum swing from a President Obama to a President Trump has left analysts, both right and left, scrambling to understand what happened. In We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the premier commentator from Black America, responds by collecting eight articles he published in The Atlantic, one per year, …
How do we know if our interpretation of Scripture is correct? One way is to weigh it against the general consensus of the church throughout its history. That is, by tradition. If we are coming up with a view that is at odds with the creeds or the historical views on the trinity, the full …