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THE VICTORY OF REASON: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success
Rodney Stark
Random House, 304 pages, $25.95

Rodney Stark is at it again. After two recent volumes extolling the benefits of monotheism and the rise of Christianity via its caring networks of interpersonal relations, the brash sociologist now turns to Christianity's support for reason.

Stark's argument is relentless: Christian theology, culminating in the great thinkers of the Middle Ages, such as Thomas Aquinas, inculcated trust in reason as a gift of God. On that basis, Christianity sustained a faith in progress that could easily morph into scientific and social innovations. The same trust in reason fueled a politics of human freedom and an economics of capitalist creativity.

Against the claim that Western progress occurred only as religion was overcome, Stark is unequivocal: "Nonsense. The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians."

The Victory of Reason is another bold, sharply argued defense of the Christian faith's social benefits. It is also an in-your-face challenge to antireligious assumptions of the modern academy. Disconcertingly, Stark argues without qualification, nuance, and the balancing of perspectives that academics love so much. Nonetheless, he may be right.
—M.N.

EXPLORING REALITY: The Intertwining of Science and Religion
John Polkinghorne
Yale, 208 pages, $24.00

Theologian-scientist John Polkinghorne (Science and the Trinity) looks at Jesus in history, the nature of time, various world religions, and the problem of evil ("Science can offer some help to theology here in support of the necessary cost of a world allowed to make itself"). He takes an in-depth look at the Trinity, from its roots to the error of tri-theism. "Not all is exhaustively understood, but, as with quantum theory, so with Trinitarian theology, we know enough to be assured we are moving in the right direction."

Polkinghorne discusses evolution, affirming unique human status but seeing human origins rooted in animal life. He examines the pros and cons of genetic development issues (including stem-cell research), noting, "Not everything that can be done, should be done."

There's plenty of challenging material, including discussions about when life begins (he says at 14 days after conception) and about genetic engineering of food crops (he idealistically calls for multinational companies to be respectful of the rights of small farmers).

Polkinghorne's brilliant, if controversial, thoughts on faith and science make this scholarly book well worth the effort.
—C.C.

DWELLING PLACE: A Plantation Epic
Erskine Clarke
Yale, 624 pages, $35.00

In 1979, Erskine Clarke published a sympathetic study of an antebellum Southern clergyman known as "the apostle to the Negro slaves" (Wrestlin' Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country). Although Charles Colcock Jones was a defender of slavery and a slave owner himself, he appeared in Clarke's narrative as a conflicted, but also sympathetic, figure. Now Clarke has returned with a much fuller account that includes not only Jones and his kin, but also the slave families who drew the water and hewed the wood at the Joneses' plantations on the Georgia coast.

The portraits of these slaves, especially from the extended family of Lizzy Jones, provide a poignant counterpoint to the chronicle of their white masters. Christian faith is central to the complicated story that Clarke has pain-stakingly pieced together. Charles Jones, his relatives, and his friends were mainstays in the socially prominent Presbyterian church. Many of the family's slaves also deeply internalized Christian faith, but in forms that whites mistrusted as corrupted by religious enthusiasm and moral antinomianism.

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January 2006, Vol. 50, No. 1