Canter Bridge

One of American evangelicalism’s sympathetic critics once asked whether there is such a thing as a Christian mind. For all sorts of reasons—some more than justified—questioners, skeptics, and malnourished pilgrims have produced negative responses to the query.

But perhaps things are better than all that.

If encouragement may be taken from Books and Culture: A Christian Review, there is hope for the kind of wide-ranging integration of faith and the intellect that is so routinely dismissed as implausible by the cynical, the misinformed and those who have yet to discover the intellectual renaissance among evangelicals that has populated university departments (philosophy and physics spring to mind as parade examples) with proponents of robust biblical faith.

A publication of the Christianity Today empire, Books and Culture provides a forum for some of the most incisive writing and cutting-edge thinking to be found among Christians anywhere. One is not talking about puff pieces and cotton-candy testimony.

Rather, the kind of thoughtful and self-critical engagement with the Great Conversation and myriad contemporary issues that one expects in the fat intellectual monthlies and the Reviews of the New York and London Times are on offer here, and in abundance.

This reviewer – who fights his wife for possession of each issue and sometimes finds them tucked away in bedroom squirrel-holes of which she believes him to be ignorant – has watched this young-ish paper emerge as something of a renegade among evangelical organs and find its voice and stride within just a few years. Its trajectory has not been far from astonishing.

Christian Century was once known for thought of this quality and still hits the occasional home run. If it can sustain its current run, Books and Culture looks rather to be the .325 hitter of which franchise glory is made.