J. Richard Middleton. Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God. Baker Academic, 2021. The binding (Aqedah) of Isaac is one of the most troubling stories in all Scripture. And it is not hard to see why. The story depicts God commanding a father to butcher […]
review
Enjoying the Old Testament: A Review
Eric A. Seibert, Enjoying the Old Testament: A Creative Guide to Encountering Scripture. IVP Academic, 234 pp. Francis Bacon famously observed, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…” For many Christians, the Old Testament is like spinach: we know it is good for us, but […]
Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History: A Review
John Dickson. Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History. Zondervan, 2021, 328 pp. Historian Howard Zinn observes, “all history, while recalling the past, serves some present interest.” Anyone who has spent time on the interweb talking to skeptics and atheists has likely encountered Christian history told from the […]
Hugs and Statistics: A Review of Us Versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community
Andrew Marin. Us Versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community. NavPress, 2016. 213 pp. Andrew Marin begins Us Versus Us by introducing us to a photograph of Marin himself and his wife hugging a gay man at the 2010 Chicago Gay Pride Parade (see below). They didn’t know the man but he was prompted […]
Seven Things I Wish Every Christian Knew About the Bible: A Review
Michael Bird. Seven Things I Wish Every Christian Knew About the Bible. Zondervan, 2021. Seven Things is an introduction to the Bible written by Anglican priest and New Testament scholar Michael Bird. The book is written in seven chapters addressing origins (chapter 1), inspiration and inerrancy (chapter 2), authority (chapter 3), the cultural distance between the biblical […]
The Unmaking of Patriarchy: A Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood
Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Brazos Press, 2021. In 2016, Beth Allison Barr’s husband lost his job as a youth pastor, a position he had held for more than fourteen years. The reason? He dared challenge the church’s complementarian stance on women in ministry. The church […]
According to Alisa Childers, People Like Me Are Going to Hell: A Review of Another Gospel?
I just finished reading Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel?. It is a hugely popular book that came out a year ago and has almost two thousand Amazon.com reviews. As I will note briefly below, it does have some diamonds embedded in the coal. But there is a lot of coal. Indeed, this is one of […]
The Early Reviews of Jesus Loves Canaanites
Jesus Loves Canaanites has now been out for 5 weeks and while a few brief reviews have been posted at Goodreads and Amazon, the first blog review was posted today by J.W. Wartick at his Reconstructing Faith blog. You can read it here: Genocide and the Challenge of Apologetics: Randal Rauser’s “Jesus Loves the Canaanites”
Canadian Primal: A Review
Mark Dickinson. Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning. McGill-Queens University Press, 2021. It was a rainy afternoon in February in the late 1990s and I was jogging by Fort Langley (east of Vancouver). The clouds had been socked in heavy and dark for days blocking out the spectacular, jagged peaks of the North Shore […]
Christianity Vindicated?: A Review of The Rational Faith Part 2
Jason A. Crook. The Rational Faith: A Review of the Evidence for Christianity. 2020, 267 pp. If you have read the first installment of my review of Jason Crook’s new book The Rational Faith (for Part 1 see here) then you know that I got sidetracked by outlining my disagreement with the way Crook sets up […]
The Decline into Secularism Reconsidered: A Review of The Rational Faith Part 1
Jason A. Crook. The Rational Faith: A Review of the Evidence for Christianity. 2020, 267 pp. In his new book The Rational Faith, Jason Crook, an international business lawyer by trade, turns his attention to developing an apologetic of the Christian faith. The book consists of nine chapters and seeks to build a systematic apologetic that Christianity […]
Atheist Polemic for Pastor Dan: A Review of God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction
Dan Barker. God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. New York: Sterling, 2016. At the beginning of chapter 2 of his bestselling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins infamously describes God as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, […]
How Do You Hear God’s Voice? A Review of God Calling: Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World
Jeffrey J. Kilmartin. God Calling: Spiritual Direction for People in the Real World. Wipf and Stock, 2020. God Calling by Jeffrey Kilmartin is a spirited and somewhat iconoclastic survey of a range of topics pertaining to spiritual direction such as discerning God’s will, identifying one’s calling, praying effectively, pursuing spiritual disciplines, and engaging in spiritual […]
An Atheist Review of Conversations with My Inner Atheist
The first review for Conversations with My Inner Atheist is out. Counter Apologist got a copy yesterday and reviewed it this morning. Wowsers, that’s fast. It’s also a very positive review. This is important because the purpose of the book is to steelman objections to my beliefs, so the fact that my exercise passed muster with […]
