Recently in Books Category

North Korean missile tests, Iranian nuclear ambitions, GM going bankrupt ... can The End be far off? Morehead's Musings reviews Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (Lexington Books: 2008), suggesting apocalyptic anxiety is less a religious doctrine than an aspect of the human condition. The book discusses apocalyptic themes in a variety of films such as the Matrix trilogy.

William Lobdell was the LA Times religion reporter for many years. In his new book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace, Lobdell tells the story of how he lost his faith. I assume that the essay on the same topic that he wrote for the LA Times in 2007 gives a taste of what the book offers.

I updated my Now Reading list (three clicks down the sidebar), adding a slot for Christian books. My first will be John Polkinghorne's The God of Hope and the End of the World (Yale Univ. Press, 2002), which should provide several posts during March. Does anyone have any suggestions for the next book? I'm amazed at the number of general interest Christian books that cycle through the New Books shelves at the local library.

This is the second post drawing on E. Brooks Holifield's Theology in America: Christian thought from the age of the Puritans to the Civil War (see first post here). The broad themes Holifield draws from American religion in the 19th century -- a continuing quest for reasonableness and rationality, avoidance of theological "speculation," and appeals to internal and external "evidences" to support belief in God and the Bible -- are observed in the theological content and style of almost every American denomination. It is other factors that distinguish them from each other. Restorationists, those who would "return the Church to its primitive purity, return theology to the people, and return reason to theology," emerged as an identifiable movement in the early 19th century. Interestingly, Mormonism is not grouped with the Restorationists.

One approach to understanding early Mormonism and its doctrines is to compare it with other denominations of the same period. In E. Brooks Holifield's book Theology in America, Mormonism is covered in Chapter 16, "The Immediacy of Revelation," which also discusses two other movements that claimed new revelation as the basis for their theological innovations.