Our latest feature reviews, which cover the very best new books.
Feature Reviews
Julia Spicher Kasdorf – Poetry in America [Featured Review]
Reflecting on Nostalgia, Loss, and Flight A Featured Review of Poetry in America Julia Spicher Kasdorf Paperback: U of Pittsburgh […]
Crafting a Rule of Life – Stephen Macchia [Review]
Crafting a Rule of Life would be an effective adult education study, seasonal endeavor, or personal exercise in pausing to organize one’s thoughts and feelings around a central calling from God. While it provides a taste of Benedictine thought, the Rule of St. Benedict is not the featured flavor of the month. Instead, it is a quiet, historic partner in the background and is accompanied by other classic and traditional flavors meant to provide accompaniment for a modern person of faith’s journey.
Pam Hogeweide – Unladylike [Feature Review]
“The insistence to relegate church roles based on gender, rather than gifting has meant the minimizing of untold numbers of women solely because of their femininity.” So says writer Pam Hogeweide, both from personal experience and from hearing the stories of many other women. Those are the stories she tells in Unladylike: Resisting the Injustice of Inequality in the Church.
The Creative Society – Louis Galambos [Feature Review]
Looking back, perhaps with an eye to the future, Galambos believes “that America needed leaders who could manage the experts and do so in ways that served our national interests and were still consistent with American democratic values.” (219). While he found that “in business, as in government and the nonprofit sector, it took a combination of good leaders and professional expertise to keep an organization efficient as well as innovative” (238), in the end that is not enough. A society does need good leadership, but Galambos would do well to pay more attention to the issue of the character that a society’s narratives produce. The problem and the challenge is not leaders to manage the experts, but the ethos out of which the leaders and their experts operate. The innovative efficiency of experts needs more than a sprinkling of equity, it needs to be shaped by a story that attends to the top and the bottom as well as the middle–it needs community.
Gandhi and the Unspeakable – James Douglass [Feature Review]
Those of us who follow Christ would do well to meditate on the teaching and example of our Lord, who for the joy set before him ultimately suffered and died out of love for his enemies. For Gandhi, the cross-shaped life and death of Jesus provided a formative example to follow, and the world was never the same because of it. But for those who have died with Christ and have been raised with him, we have more than an example to guide us; we have the gift of resurrection life itself. I pray that we, by the grace of God, would look more and more like our Jesus every day.
