Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
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 …
I remember driving in the south and southwest during the late 1950s and early 1960s on family vacations. We’d see rows and rows of tall, narrow trees (many probably being tower poplar) planted between fields. “Why did they do that?” I asked my parents. They were windbreaks, they told me, used to stop the soil …
Generous Calvinism may seem like an oxymoron, but in Saving Calvinism Oliver Crisp helps file the rough edges off a narrow, ossified version of this venerable tradition. The result is a Calvinism that embraces the breadth of its own heritage.
Do leaders make the church or do the people? The story goes that a small group of radical, white, male leaders created social Christianity, supported by the middle classes. Heath Carter’s account of Chicago, labor and the churches offers a different tale.
Augustine, the great church father, has been such a giant on the theological landscape for so many centuries, he has become a huge, lifeless statue to some. In The Mestizo Augustine Justo González pumps life back into our view with a fresh and fascinating look at the humanity and the competing cultures at work within …