While American evangelical leaders pay attention to sociological data, they more typically read George Barna or Thom Rainer, church growth experts who utilize social trends to chart the way forward for churches. But the person to whom these leaders should pay attention is Robert Wuthnow. Wuthnow, who holds a chair in sociology and is director […]
Wednesday, 07 January, 2009 by Sean Michael Lucas
In Growing Up Protestant, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth offers a fascinating account of northern mainline Protestant attitudes about families and children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bendroth, professor of history at Calvin College, begins her account with the domestication of the family in the North during the mid-nineteenth century. As programs of catechesis were replaced […]
Wednesday, 06 June, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
At the beginning of his essay on Charles Hodge's view of spirituality, Mark Noll writes, "This paper is a sympathetic account of a failure." In many ways, Charles Hodge Revisited reads like the academy's sympathetic account of what they deem to be a failure-the maintenance and defense of Old School Calvinism in nineteenth-century America. And […]
Wednesday, 30 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
In a 1970 article, historian George M. Marsden provocatively argued that twentieth-century American Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism owed as much to the previous century's New School Presbyterianism as to the Old School stream represented by Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. With their activist brand of piety and evangelistic-oriented vision of ministry, many New […]
Friday, 11 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
In Deconstructing Evangelicalism, Presbyterian historian (and contributing scholar to Modern Reformation) D. G. Hart joins both historical argument and theological prescription in his typically iconoclastic fashion. Claiming that the recent resurgence of evangelical history is nothing more than a historical and sociological fiction papering over the differences in the creeds, polity, and worship practices of […]
Thursday, 03 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
Frequent Modern Reformation contributer Philip Ryken's Written in Stone is a wonderfully accessible treatment of the Ten Commandments. Drawn from sermons first preached at Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, this book's great strength is its unoriginality. In an age where many evangelicals have jettisoned the moral law and some Reformed types have overreacted by making the […]
Thursday, 03 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
A collection of thirteen essays first published in Lutheran Quarterly, this little book quite literally harvests Martin Luther's reflections on a variety of topics-Luther on greed and poverty, on spirituality and worship, on baptism and righteousness. The result is an often enlightening collection of essays that would serve as a useful introduction to Luther's thought […]
Thursday, 03 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
In this brilliant and enlightening book, James M. Ault, Jr., initiates his readers into the world of a fundamentalist church. Ault, an independent Harvard-trained sociologist living in Northampton, Massachusetts, spent three years immersed as a participant-observant with the Shawmut River Baptist Church (he changed the name to protect identities) in Massachusetts in an effort to […]
Thursday, 03 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas
In his book Shepherds After My Own Heart, Timothy Laniak provides in-depth exegetical examination of the pastoral leadership theme throughout Scripture. Laniak, associate professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, marshals a wide number of texts to help transform the perspective of pastors and ministry leaders in a number of […]
Wednesday, 02 May, 2007 by Sean Michael Lucas