Books
Clash of cultures?
What happens when an anthropologist who happens to be a Pakistani, a former diplomat and a member of the Incident Management Team of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shows up at 100 American mosques armed with questionnaires and a few white student research assistants? For the most part, nothing very controversial.
Diverse and devout
The U.S. would seem to be prime ground for deep and chronic social conflict. Yet the evidence indicates that Americans get along fairly well in spite of having many different religions, including the growing number who subscribe to "no religion."
A review of The Shape of Participation
If you share my concern about the theological thinness of much of the
current craze of construing Christianity as a practice, get Roger
Owens's book. Even more, if you care about the theological identity of
the church, you will find The Shape of Participation to be this decade's finest work of ecclesiology.
A review of The Seven Pillars of Creation
Creation has long been a neglected child in biblical-theological studies; it is ground often left to creationists and naysayers. Only in recent years has the Bible's creation theology been addressed in a major way, not least because of the impact of the environmental movement.
Free for what?
Franzen has turned his considerable novelistic talents to a kind of inquisitorial examination of the American ideal of freedom. He shows how freedom is negatively construed—focused on what we are free from and not on what freedom might be for, what worthy ends it might be used to pursue.
Fall books: Reviews
Our fall books issue includes reviews by Robert Westbrook, Susan R. Garrett, Stanley Hauerwas, Randall Balmer, Anne Blue Wills, Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Shirley Showalter, Amy Frykholm and Brian Doyle.
