Sign up for our free newsletter:

Time to begin looking ahead at the books of 2006. Leading our first report on coming attractions is a new edition of George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford Univ. Press). The March/April issue of B&C features an excerpt. A book that may seem far afield but that in fact complements Marsden's landmark study is D. G. Hart's John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist, just out this month from P&R. "However offbeat Nevin's thought may sometimes appear," Hart writes, "his assessment of popular Christianity in the United States was arguably the most astute from the perspective of historical Protestantism that any American Reformed or Presbyterian ever formulated." Quite a claim! Check it out.

One of the most anticipated books of the year is Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, due any day now from Viking. Look for Edward Blum's review in our March/April issue. And save a place next to Stout for Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Univ. of North Carolina Press), coming in April and also to be reviewed in our pages.

As the grandson of missionaries to China (where my mother lived until the age of ten), I am interested in missionary biographies and memoirs. I've seen some essays by Tim Bascom that have whetted my enthusiasm for his book Chamelon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia, coming from Houghton Mifflin in June. And speaking of biography, Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan is due next month from Knopf; that too will be covered in B&C.

The cover-package of our May/June issue will focus on preaching and the state of the pastorate. And the subject of preaching brings to mind At Canaan's Edge (Simon & Schuster), the concluding volume of Taylor Branch's trilogy on America in the era of Martin Luther King, Jr. Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, coming from HarperSanFrancisco in March, collects sermons by Frederick Buechner, some of them appearing in print for the first time.

Several years ago in the pages of Books & Culture, Alan Jacobs named Wole Soyinka and Czeslaw Milosz as the greatest living writers. Milosz has left this world, but the Nigerian Nobel laureate is still writing. A new memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, is due in April from Random House.

A writer very different from Soyinka, but resembling him in his willingness to say what he thinks, is Harvey Mansfield, the distinguished professor of government at Harvard University. It's Yale University Press, however, that will be publishing Mansfield's Manliness in March. No doubt this book will be on Larry Summers' reading list. Also known for calling it as he sees it is Richard John Neuhaus, whose Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth will be published in March by Basic Books.

Finally, if you are a fan of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, you are in luck—but you'll have to wait until July for Pegasus Descending (Simon & Schuster). It will be odd to read about Robicheaux post-Katrina.

We'll be back with more coming attractions down the road.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.

Read more from 'Books & Culture Corner'

				Try an Issue of Books & Culture Free! Name Street Address City/State/Zip E-mail Address No credit card required. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. Offer valid in U.S. only. Click here for International orders. If you decide you want to keep Books & Culture coming, honor your invoice for just $19.95 and receive five more issues, a full year in all. If not, simply write "cancel" across the invoice and return it. The trial issue is yours to keep, regardless. Give Books & Culture as a gift Buy 1 gift subscription, get 1 FREE!

Free Newsletter Sign up today for the ChristianityToday.com Books & Culture Newsletter    RSS Feed   RSS Help