My latest: on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis in LARB

This morning The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.

Click here to rest the rest. (See also Francis Spufford’s review and Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson.)

I’m in LARB on Hauerwas, Barth, and Christendom

This morning Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay review of mine on Stanley Hauerwas’s latest book, which came out earlier this year, titled Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth. Here is the opening paragraph:

THIS YEAR STANLEY Hauerwas turns 82 years old. To mark the occasion, he has published a book on Karl Barth, who died at the same age in 1968. The timing as well as the pairing is fitting. Barth is the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and probably the most widely read of any theologian over the last 100 years. As for Hauerwas, since the passing of Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971, he has been the most prolific, influential, and recognizable Christian theological thinker in American public life. Barth somehow graced the cover of Time magazine in 1962, even though he was a Swiss Calvinist whose books on technical theology are so thick they could stop bullets. Hauerwas has never made the cover, but in 2001 Time did call him “America’s best theologian.” That fall, Oprah even invited him onto her show. In short, given Hauerwas’s age and stature, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth has the inevitable feel of a valediction.

Click here for the rest.

This is now my fifth time writing for LARB; the first came in the fall of 2017. It is never not a pleasure. It’s a challenge writing about Christian theology for a highbrow audience that is neither religious nor academic—but one I’ve learned to relish. Usually my essays there come in between 4,000 and 5,000 words, but this one is shorter, at about 2,000. I hope it does both Hauerwas and Barth honor; I try to use the occasion to raise some important issues. Enjoy.

New piece published in LARB: an essay review of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures

This morning I'm in the Los Angeles Review of Books with a long essay review of History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology, which are the book form of N. T. Wright's Gifford lectures. Here's the opening paragraph:

DOES GOD EXIST? An affirmative answer is presupposed by the world’s major religions traditions, particularly those that claim Abraham as forebear. Contemporary atheists, however, are far from the first to wonder about the question. Ancient philosophers and Abrahamic believers of every stripe have grappled with it in one form or another. For Christians who reflect on the matter, the catchall term is “natural theology.” But there is no one habit of thought or mode of analysis captured by that title. Rather, it gathers together a complex heritage marked as much by internal disagreement as by shared inquiry. That heritage is in part a genealogy. In order to come to terms with natural theology today, therefore, one must have some sense, as it were, of the family history in view.

Keep reading here!

New essay published in The Los Angeles Review of Books: "Enter Paul"

I have a new essay published this morning over in The Los Angeles Review of Books, titled "Enter Paul," on Paula Fredriksen's two latest books, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle and When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (both from Yale University Press). Here's a sample:

"Put it this way: an itinerant rabbi from the Galilee — the backwaters of Palestine — leads a popular movement among the Jews, one that comes to an ignominious end when he is executed for sedition by the Roman authorities. Some of his followers form a small community in Jerusalem, proclaiming that not only was this rabbi and prophet the longed-for Messiah of Israel, but he is alive, in glory with God, vested with impregnable power and heavenly authority. These messianic Jews share goods in common and worship daily at the temple, praying and waiting eagerly for Jesus’s imminent return, when he will drive out the pagan occupiers and restore his people’s fortunes.

"Pause the frame there. Nothing about this picture offers even a hint that this same community — one defined by exclusive loyalty to Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and Lord — will, centuries hence, find itself filling the Roman Empire, legalized and endorsed by that same empire, dominated by gentiles, not Jews, and led by men like Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis.

"How did this happen? Why did it happen? To answer, we need to leave Augustine behind and follow Fredriksen into the world of the eastern Mediterranean in the first century of the common era, specifically Jewish life under the thumb of the Roman Empire."

Read the rest.

Just published: a review essay of Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith in the LA Review of Books

I've got a review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed and James K. A. Smith's Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. It's called "Holy Ambivalence." Go check it out.

New essay published at the LA Review of Books: "Public Theology in Retreat"

I've got a new essay available over at the Los Angeles Review of Books called "Public Theology in Retreat." It's ostensibly a review essay of three books published by David Bentley Hart in the last year, but I use that occasion to ask about the role of public theology in contemporary U.S. intellectual culture, using Hart as a sort of Trojan horse. Alan Jacobs's essay in Harper's last year serves as a framing device, and I look at Hart as an exception that proves the rule—even while portraying Hart's thought to a largely non-theological audience as a kind of specimen, to intrigue and possibly attract unfamiliar and potentially hostile minds. We live in perilous and fickle times, after all. Why not give theology a try? There have been stranger bedfellows.

My thanks to the editors at LARB for publishing a work of straightforward theological exposition like this; I know it's not their usual cup of tea. I confess that I have steeled myself for more than one failure to read the actual argument of the piece, but so it goes. Mostly I'm excited to see what charitable readers make of it, from whatever perspective. So check it out and let me know what you think.