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November 2014 Vol. 52 No. 3

The award-wining biographer of Emily Dickinson and author of other distinguished scholarly works has gifted readers with another exemplary study. Here Lundin (Wheaton College) explores what he takes to be a vital nexus between language, literature, life, and most especially for him, Christian faith. In an increasingly disenchanted and secular Western culture, bereft of the traditional religious beliefs that have helped sustain human existence in a seemingly indifferent universe, Lundin argues that modern literary masters, fueled by the eternally creative power of the word, cannot only resurrect a living sense of the numinous in individuals but also project redemptive ways of being-in-the-world modeled on Jesus's ministry of compassionate caring. In this joyous exercise of lucid thinking, anchored in the bedrock theology of Karl Barth, Lundin adroitly fashions considerations of poetry, fiction, cultural critique, and incidents from his own past involving loss and recovery into an efficacious counter-narrative that affirms a "hermeneutics of testimony"--which leaves existential space for the animating force of Christian principles and practices--against a reigning "philosophical naturalism" that dispenses with the indispensability of the Judeo-Christian God.

--H. I. Einsohn, Middlesex Community College

Summing Up: Highly r ecommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.