christianity - Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Christ in Camp & Combat: Religious Work in the Confederate Armies

By Scott J. Pearson | July 18, 2021July 18, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

The American Civil War comprises one of the most complex stories in a complex nation’s almost-250-year history. Further, the Christian religion is its own complex entity, even when just restricted to the southern states. In this work, Peterson seeks to combine both subjects in a study of the work of chaplains in the Confederate armies. He does a detailed job in collecting primary sources about southern religiosity during the war. However, on the historical front,…

Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence

By Scott J. Pearson | June 12, 2021June 12, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Theological memoirs (or memoirs in theology) have been “a thing” since St. Augustine of Hippo wrote his autobiographical and masterful Confessions in the fourth century. Butler Bass adds her voice to the mix with her story. In so doing, she hopes to encourage us to rediscover the Christian God and the Christian faith. While acknowledging the limitations of any experience-based, somewhat arbitrary categories, she organizes her work according to six personality traits of Jesus. None…

Religion-Philosophy

Can I Believe? An Invitation to the Hesitant

By Scott J. Pearson | August 7, 2020August 7, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Despite the academic publisher, this book is essentially a defense of (a conservative version of the) Christian faith to skeptics. Stackhouse deals with defending religion in general, but he obviously addresses Christianity in the most detail. Despite his expertise in teaching world religions, these other religions receive only superficial treatment. I take issue with Stackhouse’s description of Christianity in chapter 2. It contains a description of conservative Western Christianity. He does not describe progressive and…

Religion-Philosophy Society

Christianity and Culture by TS Eliot

By Scott J. Pearson | January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

I first read these essays while a senior at college. Now, about twenty years later, I reread them in a study on the English poet TS Eliot. Eliot uses language very carefully, as any poet should, but he is a poet approaching the world of an anthropologist. Further, he writes in an era (pre- and post-World-War-II) in which European culture was pulled apart at the seams and remade again. Eliot himself is an American transplant…

History Religion-Philosophy

Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity

By Scott J. Pearson | October 26, 2019October 26, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Review courtesy The Englewood Review, where it is originally published. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946-47 provided scholars of religion something new and unique to talk about. For millennia, scholars tried to work on the relationship between Judeo-Christian beliefs and Greek academics. The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated a dynamic ascetic community from the Hebrew tradition in Jesus’ time. In so doing, it overturned what had become a consensus position that Jesus represented…