Take & read: New books in theology

Last fall a jury found an Iowa father guilty of murder after his four-month-old son, Sterling, was found dead in a motorized swing. The baby, who weighed less than five pounds at death, was left in the swing for over a week. He was not bathed or changed that entire time. The county sheriff told jurors he found maggots and larva in the layers of urine-soaked blankets and clothing on Sterling’s body. The father “was aware of what was going on and he chose to do nothing,” said assistant Iowa attorney general Denise Timmins.

That I can still fetch this story from memory indicates how horrified I was to read about it. As a person, I was aghast. But as a preacher, as a Christian for that matter, I felt cowed. I wondered if the gospel I preach, the gospel I believe in my bones, is adequate to account for a world with such a story in it. I’m haunted by the hunch that plenty of parishioners have read a story like Sterling’s in the newspaper and—because the gospel I’d given them was too short in its scope and too small in its dramatis personae—were left so ill-equipped for what Brian Powers calls “naming the wrongness of the world” that they quietly slipped away.

In Full Darkness: Original Sin, Moral Injury, and Wartime Violence (Eerdmans), Powers makes plain the balm the church forsakes when it jettisons the language of sin. A veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Powers shows that the language of original sin and the fallenness of creation not only provides a narrative that the world needs, it offers a path for veterans, traumatized by war and shamed by their participation in it, to find redemptive healing.