August (Web-only) 2004

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While commentators right and left wring their hands over the decline in reading, here at B&C we have another problem. We know you're already converted. But there are so many books we want to tell you about, and not enough room in our pages (not to mention space in the editor's office). Hence the annual roundups of the year in books which we have offered for several Decembers now. This year, we are adding a new feature: a three-part midyear book report, beginning this week.

First, two books about marriage. Independently of each other, B&C and its sister publication, Christianity Today, planned a number of articles on marriage (the B&C package will appear in our September/October issue, now at the printer). No surprise there. The subject has been in the news. And books on marriage, of course, are a staple of the publishing industry, secular and Christian: there are literally hundreds to choose from just among the new arrivals.

It's remarkable, then, that from that enormous range of materials both B&C and CT—again, acting independently—chose to run excerpts from the same book: David P. Gushee's Getting Marriage Right: Realistic Counsel for Saving & Strengthening Relationships (Baker). Remarkable, too, that both publications interviewed University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, whose book Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands was published this spring by University of Chicago Press. Maybe those books are worth a closer look. Either or both, I think, could serve as the point of departure for a timely Sunday school class or book group.

In the churches I attended as a boy, we said the Lord's Prayer every Sunday. That seems to be less common in evangelical ...