Ephraim Radner

Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists by curtis w. freeman baylor, 478 pages, $49.95 When I’m in a gloomy mood, sometimes I’d like to be a Baptist. Instead of all the venal bishops, political synods, and ignorant commissions, I’d have some controllable integrity to my church . . . . Continue Reading »

Christopher Seitz and I recently formulated a “marriage pledge,” which First Things has hosted. It asks signers who are pastors to stop signing civil marriage licences as part of the Christian marriages at which they officiate, In this way, they will give public notice that Christian marriage is not what the state calls “marriage.” Continue Reading »

Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything ?by robert r. reilly? ignatius, 250 pages, $22.95 Robert Reilly provides a relentlessly unsparing examination of the ways in which a radically new, and certainly destructive, understanding of human life and morality has . . . . Continue Reading »

On July 14, 2014, the General Synod of the Church of England voted to permit women to be consecrated as bishops in their church. It followed a long, and sometimes bitter debate, and a vote in 2012 that barely fell short of the required two-thirds majority among lay representatives. Part of the decision—debated as to its enforceability—guarantees parochial opponents access to male priests and bishops. Continue Reading »

Before religious philosopher Louis Dupré began his long tenure at Yale, he wrote on Marx. Then came his religious phenomenology and study of mysticism. More recently, he has worked on a long survey of Western religious thought. Behind this varied scholarly output is the haunting concern of how . . . . Continue Reading »

The Anglican Communion has nearly eighty-five million members spread around the globe. Until the mid-twentieth century, these were concentrated among the Anglo-American immigrant churches associated with the British Empire. But by the 1960s, this concentration began a dramatic shift towards Africa . . . . Continue Reading »

The greatest cultural”and ecclesial”challenge we have to confront is the loss of a palpable sense that God’s life makes all the difference in the world to our social and political decisions. Many things have made this witness more and more difficult in our era, and they touch the wider world . . . . Continue Reading »

The tedium of repeated déj vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, with a proposal for a quick buck, relying on the political twitter of the times: “You’re an expert: Reframe Gibbon’s notorious chapter on the Romans and the Christians with some contemporary scholarship and cultural fillips, and we can put out a nifty pamphlet that’ll sell.” … Continue Reading »

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by candida moss HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of . . . . Continue Reading »

Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Jon D. Levenson Princeton, 288 pages, $29.95 In the wake of the religiously colored violence of 9/11 and the anxieties it spawned, numerous efforts in the West were made to engage Muslims in common discussions . . . . Continue Reading »