Where is God in Suffering?
Where is God in Suffering? Brendan Purcell. Veritas Publications, Dublin, 2016. The apparent injustice of bad things happening to good people—as well as the reverse—has for…
Political Religion and the Death of God
Political Religion and the Death of God. Linda C. Raeder. N. Palm Beach: Sanctuary Cove Publishing, 2017. Although it seems more appropriate to call this slender…
Varieties of Chinese Nationalisms and Their Implications on Religions
Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies. Cheng-tian Kuo, ed. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. A Varieties of Chinese Nationalisms and Their Implications on Religions This volume is…
Millennialism, Calling and Mores: Resituating Weber and Tocqueville in America’s Pursuit for Freedom
Max Weber in his sociological classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism addresses the question of what gives birth to rational capitalism in the west.…
Dostoevsky’s Discovery of the Christian Foundation of Politics
The neglect of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a political theorist can be explained in part by his choice of imaginative literature rather than discursive argument as his primary…
The Incarnation of the Poetic Word
The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy. Michael Martin. Kettering OH: Angelico Press, 2017. In these theological and philosophical essays on…
How to Recover China’s Censored Reality
Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China. Li Ma and Jin Li. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock Publishers),…
Why We Still Need Plato
Along with a growing number of my fellow evangelicals, I have learned to qualify the Reformation cry of sola scriptura by asserting the foundational authority of the…
Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Dalian Labor Camp with Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out…
Taxing Religious Leadership
Tucked away in the House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts—the massive overhaul of the U.S. tax system that has just passed the Senate and is…
The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao
The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. Ian Johnson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017. “For I saw it was impossible to do anything…
How Mormonism Shaped America
To those unfamiliar with the faith, it appears that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is enjoying a moment of fame in American culture: the…
An American Marriage: Mormons, Polygamy, and Federalism
The portrayals of the Mormon family in popular culture are schizophrenic: it is either a prosperous and proud, self-congratulatory nuclear family or a secretive cult in which…
Mormons in the American Imagination
In recent years, Mormonism has been the focus of unprecedented media interest. What some have called “The Mormon Moment,” spurred by Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and…
Liberal Democracy and Mormon Culture
Mormon Scholarship The obstacles confronting one to write about Mormon culture, specifically its religion and its relationship to liberal democracy are enormous: the conceptualization of liberal democracy…