Jared Diamond, the professor of geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and who got his fame from voluminous books like The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse has recently published a new book, titled The World Until Yesterday.
I haven’t read this book yet, but the website Salon.com published an exerpt from the book dealing with religion. I want to share some observations…
Recently, the catholic theologian Paul Allen (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) published a great book on theological method, titled Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark 2012). For many, theological method indeed is something to be perplexed about. Is there really something like a theological method? Many atheists even argue that theology has no place at a university, because it has no method.
Allen apparently argues to the contrary. He gives a historical overview of how the development of theological method, describing key figures, both catholic and protestant. He shows how theological method has developed in a continous dialogue with developments within philosophy, science, and the wider culture.
So, to give readers an impression of what the book is about, I asked Paul some questions about his new book, about theological method, the relation between science and religion, and whether an atheist can be a theologian…
Bart Ehrmann is a very well-known New Testament scholar, and an atheist. But even though many atheists deny that Jesus is a historical figure, Ehrman is not one of them. He recently wrote a book Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, that will be released tomorrow (March 20, 2012). Ehrman answers the question in his book affirmatively: yes, Jesus did exist. He may not have been the person as depicted in the gospels, but there is hardly any doubt that he was a historical figure. Although I doubt whether Ehrman’s ideas will pose a challenge to Christian theology (the quest for the historical Jesus is hardly an issue in theology anymore), I am interested in the way he makes his case.
See the trailer for his upcoming book here:
For Europeans: get your copy (no shipping costs) HERE.
Today I ordered the new book by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, published by Belknap/Harvard University Press. I was especially struck by the following description:
Exploring intellectual authority within evangelicalism, the authors reveal how America’s populist ideals, anti-intellectualism, and religious free market, along with the concept of anointing—being chosen by God to speak for him like the biblical prophets—established a conservative evangelical leadership isolated from the world of secular arts and sciences.
Since Giberson is familiar with the evangelical scene, I expect an authoritative description that will also shed some light on the evangelical/creationist/fundamentalist mindset, which is apparently so different from my own. I hope to be able to come back to the book in due time.
According to Giberson’s blog, the book was recently nominated for the 100,000 dollar 2013 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.