Gary A. Anderson

Swings in the business cycle are as psychological as they are economic. The Economist put the matter in sharp relief: “Much in modern economics is taken on trust. Even the most basic goods depend on complex links between suppliers strewn across the globe. The glue that binds the whole system . . . . Continue Reading »

Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought by Joshua A. Berman Oxford University Press, 264 pages, $39.95 In every nation but one of the ancient Near East, the king made the law. In Israel alone, kings were not supposed to promulgate law but to obey a law given by someone . . . . Continue Reading »

The Nature of Biblical Criticism by John Barton Westminster John Knox, 206 pages, $24.95 John Barton, professor of Holy Scripture at Oxford University, is a leading biblical scholar. This is not because he has written a number of leading monographs that have changed the way we read a biblical book . . . . Continue Reading »

The One Who Is to Come by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J. Eerdmans, 224 pages, $18 Joseph Fitzmyer is one of the leading biblical scholars of the past generation. He came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, during the same era as Roland Murphy and Raymond Brown, and it is not unfair to say that under the . . . . Continue Reading »

Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews _ by Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson _ Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30 The idea of the resurrection of the dead is basic to both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. As Paul wrote, “If Christ has not been raised then our . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from his prison cell in Nazi Germany to a young couple who had just married: Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race until . . . . Continue Reading »

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque:Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam by sidney h. griffith princeton university press, 236 pages, $35 Certain historical moments so profoundly shape subsequent events that one’s curiosity about them can never be exhausted no matter how many books one . . . . Continue Reading »

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by robert alter w.w. norton, 560 pages, $35 The appearance of Robert Alter’s translation and commentary on the Psalms is being treated as a major literary event, with a lengthy review in the New Yorker of all places. What other biblical commentary . . . . Continue Reading »

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness ­Testimony by Richard Bauckham Eerdmans, 538 pages, $32 Modern interpreters have among their chief objectives the goal of being able to read the Bible just as they would any other book”which means seeing the Bible as having been . . . . Continue Reading »

Few movements are as difficult to understand as modern Zionism. In conversations with well-educated people, I often meet with great surprise when I inform them that Zionism began in the nineteenth century among secular Jews. They are even more surprised to learn that when the movement started . . . . Continue Reading »