Reviews of books in theology, philosophy, architecture, aesthetics, and the arts.
Tiziana Proietti & Kees den Biesen
Drawing Matter · 2025
A review of Proietti and den Biesen’s study of the conceptual instruments through which Dom Hans van der Laan developed his architectural theory. The review considers how number, proportion, analogy, and material practice function not simply as tools for designing buildings but as ways of thinking through the relationship between human perception and architectural form.
ARCHITECTURE · AESTHETICS · VAN DER LAAN
From Epistemology to Soteriology
Hans Burger
Theologische Literaturzeitung · 2025
A review of Burger’s account of theological hermeneutics centered upon the person and work of Christ. The book’s movement from epistemology toward soteriology raises a larger question about theological interpretation: whether understanding revelation can be separated from the transformative event to which Christian claims about revelation refer.
HERMENEUTICS · CHRISTOLOGY · SCRIPTURE
The Justification of the Doubter
Samuel Shearn
Reading Religion · 2024
A review of Shearn’s interpretation of Paul Tillich through the relationship between faith and doubt. The study provides an occasion to reconsider doubt not simply as an obstacle to religious belief but as a condition internal to Tillich’s account of faith—and, consequently, to his understanding of modern religious existence.
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY · TILLICH · MODERN THEOLOGY
Sofia Singler
Drawing Matter · 2024
A review of Singler’s study of religious architecture across the work of Alvar, Aino, and Elissa Aalto. The book opens broader questions about collaboration, modernism, liturgy, and the relationship between architectural form and religious experience, while complicating the tendency to understand Aalto’s ecclesial architecture through the work of Alvar alone.
ARCHITECTURE · MODERNISM · SACRED SPACE
Becoming Cultural Mystics: Theology of Popular Culture
Nancy Usselmann
Reading Religion · 2020
A review of Usselmann’s theological approach to popular culture and the cultivation of a “sacramental vision” capable of discerning spiritual significance within ordinary cultural experience. The book raises questions about theological attention, popular media, and how religious interpretation negotiates the boundary between discovering meaning and imposing it.
THEOLOGY · POPULAR CULTURE · AESTHETICS
Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World
Paul M. Gould
Reading Religion · 2019
A review of Gould’s proposal for Christian apologetics centered not only upon argument but upon imagination, desire, and cultural formation. The book provides an occasion to consider the role aesthetics and cultural practice might play within Christian responses to modern disenchantment.
THEOLOGY · CULTURE · AESTHETICS
Cultivating the Christian Life
Jennifer Allen Craft
Reading Religion · 2019
A review of Craft’s account of place, artistic practice, and Christian formation. The book brings theological reflection on the arts into conversation with materiality and the particularity of place, asking how acts of making can participate in the cultivation of meaningful relationships between persons, communities, and their environments.
THEOLOGY & THE ARTS · PLACE · MATERIALITY
A Conversation Between Two Worlds
Edited by W. David O. Taylor & Taylor Worley
Reading Religion · 2018
A review of an interdisciplinary conversation between contemporary art and Christian communities. The collection considers both the tensions separating these worlds and the possibilities that emerge when artists, theologians, clergy, and critics allow contemporary artistic practice to challenge the assumptions through which the church approaches art.
CONTEMPORARY ART · ECCLESIOLOGY · THEOLOGY & THE ARTS
Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate
Edited by Peik Ingman, Terhi Utriainen, Tuija Hovi & Måns Broo
Reading Religion · 2018
A review of an interdisciplinary reconsideration of enchantment, sacralization, and secularity. Rather than treating the modern world as moving straightforwardly from religion toward disenchantment, the collection examines the shifting practices and relationships through which things continue to acquire sacred, enchanted, or transcendent significance.
RELIGION · SECULARITY · ENCHANTMENT