Shelf Life

Robert Letham, A Christian's Pocket Guide to Baptism: The Water that Unites . Fearn: Christian Focus, 2012. Paper. $7.99. Baptism is one of the more regularly practiced rites in the church, but is likely one of the least understood. Though churches use water and baptize in the name of the triune...

The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories by David Bentley Hart Eerdmans, 2012 $25.00, paper, 176 pages My Dinner with D. B. Hart Though much has been written, and continues to be written, on the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, far too few critics have celebrated, or even noticed, the distinctly...

When someone is known by one name only, it can mean a few things: memory loss, a screaming coach, or the person in question has become a pop culture icon. Stallone. Schwarzenegger. Willis. Three names that are synonymous with explosions, guns, and one-liners. Three men who are aging, but seemingly...

"A near-perfect movie," said Time magazine's Richard Corliss in reference to Kathryne Bigelow's film, The Hurt Locker," a tense military drama following an elite Army bomb squad unit which turned out to be one of the most critically acclaimed films that year, taking home Best Picture and Best...

Simonetta Carr, Lady Jane Grey (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), $18.00, hardcover. One of the most encouraging trends in Christian children's literature is the publication of more stories that our kids will not like. If our children like all their books in the same way they like...

Some may say producer/director Peter Jackson's latest J. R. R. Tolkien adaption is an unexpected disappointment of phantom menace proportions because Jackson himself has been corrupted by the power of the One Ring. Others may say this movie was a long awaited pleasant return to Middle Earth. A...

David B. Calhoun, Our Southern Zion: Old Columbia Seminary, 1828-1927 , Banner of Truth, 2012, 380 pages, cloth, illustrated, and index. The city of Columbia was created the capital of South Carolina by the state legislature in 1786. It was intentionally located near the geographic center of the...

Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012) 848pp. The new volume by Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant (KtC), has gained high praise among many Reformed Baptists. This is due in part...

Sam Allberry, Lifted: Experiencing the Resurrection Life (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2012). 142 pages. First published in the UK by Inter-Varsity Press in 2010. Introduction Many people recite the Apostle's Creed each Lord's Day and profess the resurrected Christ, but the power of the...

James D. Bratt and Ronald A. Wells, eds., The Best of the Reformed Journal (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 343 pages. A Spirited Discussion On the surface, this volume is an oddly delightful anthology of pithy readings culled from the four-decade run of The Reformed Journal (1951-1990). But, as the...