Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation
Yoruba priest, metaphysician, alchemist and popular public speaker Iyanla Vanzant's The Spirit of a Man: A Vision of Transformation for Black Men and the Women Who Love Them is a manual of spiritual exercises for the recovery of the soul of the African American man. Using story and ritual, Vanzant (featured at the Million Man March) urges African American men to reclaim the spiritual power inherent in black religious traditions. Dynamic and often controversial, Vanzant offers a penetrating vision of the transformative character of African American spirituality. (Harper San Francisco, $20 240p ISBN 0-06-251236-6) Editor Elmer Dyck (Regents College) gathers the voices of six outstanding evangelical scholars who explore ways to read the Bible in The Act of Reading: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Contending that Godliness rather than knowledge is the central purpose of such reading, these scholars, ranging from Gordan Fee to J.I. Packer, assess contemporary methods of biblical interpretation from deconstruction to the sociology of knowledge. The result is a balanced and informative statement of representative evangelical positions on the subject. (InterVarsity, $12.95 paper 168p ISBN 0-8308-1623-2) In In The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation, edited by Timothy Phillips and Dennis Okholm, proponents of both theological positions engage in a fruitful discussion of their theological common ground. The collection, which closes with an invigorating and thoughtful panel discussion between postliberals George Lindbeck and George Hunsinger and evangelicals Alister McGrath and Gabriel Fackre, is a groundbreaking dialogue between two groups that do indeed have more in common than anyone might previously have imagined. (InterVarsity, $15.99 paper 216p ISBN 0-8308-1869-3)Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.