“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”   —James Baldwin, “A letter from a Region in My Mind” The New Yorker (1962) I appreciate this opportunity to discuss and debate the implications of my book Divine Variations. Many points were raised that I…

Terence Keel’s Divine Variations is a striking and provocative work of intellectual archaeology. Keel’s unearthing of theological patterns of thought in modern racist modes of thinking that have conventionally been understood as secular is arresting and illuminating. The book’s argument amounts to a serious re-consideration of received accounts of the history of ostensibly ‘scientific’ racism….

In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison notes that “regardless of the author, the readers of virtually all American fiction have been positioned as white.” She then raises a question: “What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced…

One of the least remembered facts of the John Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, often analyzed as a paradigmatic case study in the history of Christian fundamentalist history in North America is the influence of George Hunter’s Civic Biology textbook (1914) upon Scopes’s thought. After the controversy, Hunter removed certain parts on evolution from his…

“But, just as we got a little below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship which was going away the next tide for the West Indies, her name was the Charming Sally, Captain James Doran; and my master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in a little time I was sent…

What does historic Christian theology have to do with modern racial science? There are good reasons to believe the answer is “nothing.” Since Max Weber advanced his theory of secularization, arguing that modern people are disenchanted with Christian theology and have divided labor into religious and non-religious institutions, influential scholars including John C. Green and…

I want to thank the contributors to this volume for taking time to review my book Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil. I especially thank Kevin Vanhoozer for his introductory essay. Anyone wishing to get an accurate picture of my multi-faceted discussion as a whole in concise form can confidently refer to it….

John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is a wonderfully rich and interactive book which advances the arguments of previous authors in interesting ways. In this short review, I welcome this chance to respond, while nevertheless acknowledging that the depths of the book would require a much longer essay. I will be…

John R. Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is an important contribution to an important topic—namely, the theological challenge of animal suffering. Theodicy has traditionally been more focused on human suffering, but the emergence in the modern era of what Schneider calls “the Darwinian world” (the revolutionary new picture of nature that…

I have major presuppositional differences from Schneider regarding Scripture and creation. Although I agree with him that theodicy is nothing without eschatology, I also believe that eschatology is nothing without protology. One cannot take the Bible seriously about the end, without taking it seriously about the beginning. Schneider sees the happy ending of a new…

The foundational assumption of John Schneider’s book is that Darwinian evolution presents radically new problems for theology, for which his core proposal, which I can address only briefly, is offered as a solution. Yet of his four “interconnected unveilings,” presented as a “Darwinian problem,” only one arises from Darwinian theory itself, where it is viewed…

There is an old show business saying, often misattributed to W. C. Fields: “Never work with children or animals,” presumably because they will either behave unpredictably or steal every scene. John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil boldly ignores this advice, and the result is a startling new take on the problem…