Published at Englewood Review of Books - April 2024

“From these bits of information, I guessed Elliot was part of the fundamentalist tradition in early twentieth-century America. Fundamentalism was the soil of my grandparents’ faith, and I loved and respected my grandparents, so I was curious. George Marsden’s quip that a ‘fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something,’ informed my expectations. I had, therefore, a vague sense of Elliot as a type but no sense of her as an individual. I thought Austen’s biography would be, at the least, interesting, a glimpse into history through the life of an individual. I was wholly unprepared for how deeply moving it would be.”

Published at Englewood Review of Books - June 2023

“Many, perhaps most Christians will be familiar with this cycle of a faith deconstructed and rebuilt. Life happens. Faith’s building blocks – scripture, reason, and tradition – lose their solidity, or change shape, and efforts to mortar them together in new forms can be a challenge. For some, reconstruction may seem impossible: scripture becomes a book of old myths, reason cannot accept the inexplicable suffering of innocents, and tradition languishes, becoming hollow words and stale habits.“

Published at Englewood Review of Books - July 2022

“Whatever else might be said about Johnson’s life as a scholar, the fact that he is lauded by both traditionalists and progressives is intriguing. It is also the least developed theme of his reflections.”

Published at Englewood Review of Books- March 2022

“And yet Abraham obeys God’s command and the story makes little sense except to hear it as a (perhaps the) paradigmatic act of obedience in the Bible: faith in God’s goodness even when the goodness of the act is, at best, hidden. And as a paradigm of faithfulness, it is often offered as a model to which people of faith should aspire in the vicissitudes of life.”

Published at englewoodreview.org - September 2021

“Uprooted is, in part, a reckoning with that decision. She wonders if she abandoned a community that needed her. “The place I love is hurting,” she observes and then asks, “What do I owe the people who invested in the land that raised me? What do I owe the places I’m from?”

Published at Englewood Review of Books - March 2021

“In and through the terrible sonnets Hopkins asks: how does a person of faith live in an experience that appears to deny faith? Or more directly, is faith absent in despair and doubt? Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt, an earnest and beautiful book by Diana Gruver, addresses these questions.”

Published at englewoodreview.org - October 2020

“These two convictions — first, that Christians should advance justice through politics, and, second, that justice will always be imperfect in the temporal kingdom — can be a challenge to hold simultaneously. One says, “Achieve justice now;” the other says, “Justice will only be complete in God’s Kingdom.” The lens of “now” can blinker things eternal; the lens of “in the hereafter” can cloud things temporal. At best, they leaven each other, even as they compete for primacy of place in our allegiance.”

“Here’s the story and a bit of a spoiler, that isn’t really a spoiler because, of course, she wrote a best-selling memoir: Tara is raised by fundamentalist, survivalist parents and Educated traces her journey from barely home-schooled to a PhD from Oxford. The prose is spare and the story told gently, even as she remembers horrific events.”