Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care
Edited by David Paul Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun (Calvin Press)
Movements of Christian concern for the environment generally rally around the ideal of stewardship. They do this, in part, to guard against distorted interpretations of God’s call in Genesis 1 to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over its creatures. The contributors to this volume investigate whether “stewardship” language has its own underappreciated flaws. As editors David Paul Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun write in their introduction, “If we understand that humans are simply stewards, the richness of our ‘job description’ is lost, and we become merely managers of the creation. We narrow the scope of our responsibility and absolve ourselves of many other tasks.”
A Snowflake Named Hannah: Ethics, Faith, and the First Adoption of a Frozen Embryo
John Strege (Kregel)
John and Marlene Strege wanted to have a child (infertility issues had interfered). They also wanted to take a stand for human dignity at a moment when scientists were seeking access to frozen human embryos for their research potential. The steps they took in response led to Hannah, recognized as the first frozen embryo to be adopted. As John, a writer for Golf Digest, explains in this memoir, “Our adoption of frozen embryos evolved into a cause greater than ourselves by igniting a pro-life movement of a different sort, and a necessary one as science began to outrace ethical considerations.”
Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
Gene Edward Veith Jr. (Crossway)
When Gene Edward Veith watched two hijacked planes slam into the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, he figured that postmodernism had exhausted itself as a viable belief system. The carnage in downtown Manhattan looked more like an objective reality than one socially constructed “perspective” among many. In Post-Christian, Veith, provost at Patrick Henry College, revises his earlier stance, arguing that postmodernism has reasserted itself in new guises, growing more aggressively intolerant of Christian truth claims along the way. The good news, he claims, is that increasing numbers of people are alarmed by the movement’s drift into “self-contradiction and catastrophe.”
