Boomers have always had a love-hate relationship with the generation before them, transitioning from "don't trust anyone over thirty" to calling them "the Greatest Generation." Most of those who brought us into the world are gone now, and the ones who are left are "full of years" to use the Bible's expression. Part of the …
Book Review: Daniel-Rops' A Fight for God
One of the things Americans politicians endlessly yammer about is the way they're "fighting" something or someone. It never ends--they fight special interests, they fight the President, and when they want to be more positive they're "fighting for you". The result of this mentality is obvious these days. But what if there's really something--or someone--worth …
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Book Review: Daniel-Rops' Sacred History
In the Nazi-Occupied France of 1943, the Gestapo visited the French publishing house Fayard to break the plates of a new book they were publishing. So what was the Gestapo stopping the presses on? How to Help the Allies When They Finally Get Around to Invading France? Hardly. The book they were so concerned about …
Book Review: Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
Political analysis and punditry can date awfully quickly. Nevertheless--and this is especially true in a place like the United States, whose structural continuity is exceptional--some pieces of political prose, especially when written in a historical context, can have relevance for several generations. One of those analyses--actually a series of essays not originally intended to be …
Book Review: Frank Bartleman's Azusa Street
Anyone who has been around Pentecostal academic circles (and yes, they do exist) has heard a great deal about the Azusa Street revival of 1906, an event which marks (but does not solely define) the beginnings of modern Pentecost. And they've heard many things about. But how do they know these things? How, for example, …
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Book Review: Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45
When we think of China today, we think of a nation growing very fast economically and taking its place as one of the great powers of the world. Getting to that point--or getting to that point again, if one takes a long view of history--took a course of great suffering and several unexpected turns (how …
Book Review: Laurence Leamer’s Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach
One day while growing up in Palm Beach, I stopped to visit my grandmother. As I’ve documented numerous times on this blog, I frequently found myself on the wrong end of Palm Beach’s brutal social system (well, the young part of it, at least.) In response to my complaints about the place, she, in some …
Book Review: Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide
One of the challenges of New Testament study at any level is simply putting ourselves--and the events and people depicted therein--into the world in which they actually happened and lived. The Greco-Roman and Jewish world at the turn of the first millennium has many features that are on their face unfamiliar to us, yet are …
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Book Review: The USS Essex and the Birth of the American Navy
Ever since World War II, most Americans have taken for granted that we should have a strong military establishment befitting a world power. That wasn’t always the case; in fact, it took some serious reality checks to convince a critical mass of the American body politic that any substantial military establishment was even necessary. In …
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Book Review: Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso)
One of the points that the late scholar Allan Bloom used to make is that Americans are no longer impacted by great books. Music, other cultural influences, yes, but books? I would have to confess that, much of the time, that was the case for me, too. But in the spring of my junior year …
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Positive Infinity 