Philip Christman reviews What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba. He summarizes it. “One thing they’re not good for, argues Scialabba, is constructing secular substitutes for religion. Whether they’re Marx’s, Kant’s, or someone else’s, accounts of justice, human nature, or rights that try to specify once and for all the nature of human life are doomed to failure.”

In vain, men set themselves up as the mouths of god.

Susan Wise Bauer has a new world history book out. This is the second one, The History of the Medieval World: from the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Howling Frog Books has a good review, noting this is world history, not western civilization history. She writes:

Medieval history and literature is a favorite subject of mine, so it was a bit dismaying to realize how ignorant I am about nearly all of it. I particularly appreciated the chapters on Korean history, which is probably not very well-known to most people outside Korea–certainly not to me. The history of the Chinese empires and the great influence they exercised over so much of the east is fascinating. The many ever-changing kingdoms of India are terribly complex and difficult to follow, and I admire the effort that must have gone into making them comprehensible.

Many more reviews of this book are linked from a post on Dr. Bauer’s blog.

Danny Orbach’s book, Valkyrie: German Resistance to Hitler, focuses on the people who fought The Third Reich from within, people like Georg Elser, who bombed a beer hall just after Herr Hitler left. Reviewer Tom Segev writes:

Danny Orbach believes in the myth of German resistance. He rightly admires the courage of the few who dared to put their lives at risk for the sake of their country. Nonetheless, this young Israeli historian tends to assign them an exaggerated role in the history of the Third Reich. Yes, the Nazis used concentration camps and other means of suppressing resistance and intimidating would-be opponents of the regime, but the truth is that most Germans supported Hitler until the very end of the war.

Matthew Paul Turner talks about the abusive publisher of CCM magazine and how he was assigned to solicit an apology from Amy Grant for her divorce from Gary Chapman. The end of this account amazes me, but I guess I continue to be amazed at the blindness of abusive Christians, if they can be called that.

When Dr. John Rich was at the Boston City Hospital, he assumed the young black men who frequently showed up in his emergency room were somehow responsible for their violent wounds. But when he started interviewing them, he learned that many of them were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Some had been robbed, others had talked to the wrong girl at a party or been caught in the line of fire while walking home,” reports this NPR interview with Dr. Rich and Roy Martin, Rich’s urban cultural interpreter.

Dr. Rich is working to deal with the trauma these men have experienced in order to help them truly heal.

The Kingdom of God by Martyn Lloyd-Jones is up for a give-away from Crossway.

Caleb Land reviews Douglas Wilson’s book Five Cities that Ruled the World. Wilson is a reformed pastor in Idaho who has written many books and taken many strong stands, so you will find he has many opponents.