A Try at Nobility

By: Stephen Gatlin

Joseph Bottum in the New Criterion has commented ably on some of the strengths and the signal weaknesses of Rieman’s book. My concerns here are not intended to overlap substantially with Bottum’s. Indeed, both Riemen’s and Bottum’s observations are well taken. By now, the demise of civilization (whatever this word may mean) is perhaps the greatest cliché among intellectuals everywhere. Mass society, especially perhaps of the American variety, is likely the most perturbing. The eminent Jacques Barzun has had the last word on this grand lament.

Ascetic Practice as a Tool for Comparative Religion?

By Nathan G. Jennings

What does asceticism have to do with the formation of religious subjectivity? Can asceticism provide a point of comparison between religions? Gavin Flood, in his excellent new volume, The Ascetic Self, answers these questions with the thesis that asceticism is “the internalization of tradition, the shaping of the narrative of a life in accordance with the narrative of tradition that might be seen as the performance of the memory of tradition” (p. ix). Flood treats the literature on asceticism that has accumulated over the past twenty years or so.

The Real Historical Jesus

Louis Markos

A review of Is Jesus the Only Savior? by James R. Edwards (Eerdmans, 2005).

Studies have shown that Christian youth are just as likely as their secular, non-believing peers to agree with the statement, “everything is relative.” They may have a deep relationship with Christ and a clear understanding of the basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy, and yet believe simultaneously (and without feeling any cognitive dissonance) that Christ is but one of many paths to God.

The Hook of Truth

Gerard Kreijen

A review of Edmund Campion: A Life by Evelyn Waugh (Ignatius Press, 2005 [First published by Longmans, 1935])

That the undisputed master of dark humor and satire should have produced what is arguably the most compelling short biography of a saint to date is perhaps even more extraordinary than the claim that, today, both the biography and its author deserve close attention. Indeed, few means serve better to confront the hollow relativism of our age than turning to the conversion of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and the life of Edmund Campion (1540-1581), the saintly subject of his 1935 book.

Homo Economus Christianus

By: Bart Flueren

Question: What do the author of The Journal of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, the corporation of Swedish Socialist Housewives, the Dutch Christian Democratic movement, Hillaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton all have in common? Third ways, apparently. Third ways, apparently. In his book bearing the same title, Allan C. Carlson sketches various movements in twentieth century Europe that—based on Christian values, the appreciation of the family, and agrarian forms of life—provided a way out of the false dichotomy between state-dominated socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Francis Collins: Deciphering God’s Language or Conquering Abundance?

By: Stephen Gatlin

The reference to the late Paul Feyerabend is clear immediately, and willfully. I speak of a tale of abstraction. God may be an artist, not a scientist at all. The “language” might be an “evil demon”. Not a bad thought, even if Descartes is a bad example!

First, Francis Collins is a nice guy, a sincere evangelical Christian in thundering contradistinction to his predecessor as the head of the Human Genome Project (HGP), James Watson. Collins is also a fine scientist. Who could not like a guy who rides a motorcycle and plays the guitar? But in, The Language of God, Francis Collins is out of his depth.

William H. Sheldon’s Psychology and the Promethean Will: Some Historiographic Observations

By: Stephen Gatlin

That an oversized reprint of William H. Sheldon’s Psychology and the Promethean Will (1936) should re-surface in this century is both felicitous and perturbing: the former because Sheldon was one of the shrewdest American psychologists of the twentieth century; the latter because his new publisher, Kessinger, deals in, as their advertising trumpets, “rare mystical reprints”. It is not surprising on one level that any effort on the part of a psychologist and medical doctor to be genuinely holistic—to integrate, in this instance, religion, medicine, and psychology after the fashion of William James—should meet with such a fate.

Jesus, the Libertarian

By: Joseph David Price

Whether America is a Christian nation is the question. Your answer may decide your politics. Quotes and conjectures about the view of the Founding Fathers abound, usually used to bolster the image of America as a Christian nation. Yet certain statements, particularly from those Founding Fathers whose life and work seems to be antagonistic to organized religion, are employed by the opponents of Christian America in order to refute its provenance.