I've had the pleasure recently of reading three quite different books that discuss issues across the boundaries of my personal/political/professional interests. They are all very good, so I thought I'd share about two of them today, and hopefully get to the third tomorrow.
The first is Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl. What is so special about this book is that it is not primarily a prescriptive work, telling evangelical women how they should deal with the tensions that face them in relating to feminism and their place in theological institutions. Rather, it's a descriptive and analytic book, based on interviews that the authors conducted with a large group of academic women who considered themselves (or had once considered themselves) evangelical. It was in many ways a painful book to read, confronting me with the reality of many tensions I prefer to ignore, as I listened to other women say things I'd often thought. But it's a powerful and passionate book, and I found it a liberating read. Thanks to Stephen at Greenflame for recommending it!
Closer to my own field of evangelical history, a terrific new book by D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Hindmarsh is dealing with all these fascinating questions that confront the evangelical historian: why does the genre of conversion narrative just explode in the eighteenth century, what does this trend do to the Christian understanding of self, how does that relate to evangelical culture as well as the broader cultural shifts that make up 'modernity'. He warms my heart (heh) by dealing closely and carefully and sensitively with the source material - hundreds of conversion narratives - and making fine and convincing distinctions between the conversion narratives that came out of the different cultures within eighteenth-century evangelicalism. He sets the bar high for the rest of us, bless him!
The first is Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism and the Theological Academy by Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Christine D. Pohl. What is so special about this book is that it is not primarily a prescriptive work, telling evangelical women how they should deal with the tensions that face them in relating to feminism and their place in theological institutions. Rather, it's a descriptive and analytic book, based on interviews that the authors conducted with a large group of academic women who considered themselves (or had once considered themselves) evangelical. It was in many ways a painful book to read, confronting me with the reality of many tensions I prefer to ignore, as I listened to other women say things I'd often thought. But it's a powerful and passionate book, and I found it a liberating read. Thanks to Stephen at Greenflame for recommending it!
Closer to my own field of evangelical history, a terrific new book by D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Hindmarsh is dealing with all these fascinating questions that confront the evangelical historian: why does the genre of conversion narrative just explode in the eighteenth century, what does this trend do to the Christian understanding of self, how does that relate to evangelical culture as well as the broader cultural shifts that make up 'modernity'. He warms my heart (heh) by dealing closely and carefully and sensitively with the source material - hundreds of conversion narratives - and making fine and convincing distinctions between the conversion narratives that came out of the different cultures within eighteenth-century evangelicalism. He sets the bar high for the rest of us, bless him!
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