Iain H. Murray’s book, The Undercover Revolution: How Fiction Changed Britain, has a fascinating premise–that the sharp uptick in the popularity of novels in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly novels written by secularists both ambivalent and hostile toward Christianity and her moral and social norms, was the catalyst for the massive cultural shifts that…
Thousands of years ago, an advanced alien race arrived on our planet, disassembled a giant robot, and buried its pieces all over the globe. In our time, one day an 11-year-old girl wanders through some woods at night and falls in a pit–and into the palm of a huge metallic hand. For years the greatest…
This is one of the best middle grade children’s books I’ve read in a long time. It’s charming, the characters are genuine and realistic, the prose is poetic and creatively descriptive, and the plotting is tight without seeming unlikely. The story takes place in a steampunk version of New York City (although it’s never named…
Most people understand science as a clean, straightforward discipline that progresses in a linear fashion, as each generation builds upon the previous’ discoveries and research, inexorably culminating into a more complete understanding of the physical world. Kuhn shows this to be an utter misconception. Traditional, mundane, day-to-day science involves answering obscure and/or secondary questions within…
Nagel is a widely respected philosopher, but when he wrote this book he received a lot of criticism from within the academic realm. It is easy to see why. The basic thesis is pretty self explanatory from the title alone. What makes it extra fascinating is that Nagel is an atheist. He argues that evolutionary…
A devastating critique of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of life’s origins, and a rigorous defense of Intelligent Design as a legitimate and compelling scientific theory. Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science, and he ably traced the discovery of DNA and its contemporary challenges in his previous book, Signature in the Cell. Now, in Darwin’s…
This is a difficult book to classify, and thus to review. It’s not a book of economics, but rather about economics, particularly the modern focus on mathematics to the exclusion of ethics. It’s pretty abstract and philosophical. I almost gave up a number of times in the first 150 pages, as I slogged through Sedlacek…
In 1989 Greg Boyd was teaching Christian apologetics at Bethel University. He hadn’t discussed his Christian faith with his father much, if at all, since he’d last tried years before when he was in his late teens and recently converted. So he decided to try a new approach for engaging his 70-year-old skeptic dad in…
For hundreds of years there have been rumors of an undiscovered lost city deep in the jungles of Honduras. Explorers have sought it, and some (fraudulently, it turned out) claimed to have found it. But modern day explorers, using new imaging technology that can scan the jungle from the air and potentially identify non-natural structures…
Kirsten Powers is a self-described liberal Democrat, but she argues forcefully and persuasively that too often the left are anything but liberal–in the classic sense, meaning that they value religious liberty, freedom of speech, and the free exchange of ideas. The “illiberal left,” as she dubs them, instead deal with differing views by going to…
