Responding to My Critics, II

(Part I.)

At this point I am aware of five reviews of Why Christians Should Be Leftists, my still-new book, that have appeared in Major Periodicals. Not that I don’t consider Adam Roberts’s substack or Alan Jacobs’s blog to be Major Periodicals, but I recognize that my definitions of these things may seem eccentric. Anyway, two of these reviews, by those mighty fortresses Kaya Oakes and James K.A. Smith (a Calvin man!), were extremely positive and really quite encouraging. Another, by Todd Shy, is thoughtfully ambivalent — it turns out that thoughtful ambivalence was something Shy liked in my earlier books, and misses in the new one. I wish he liked the book better, of course, in the same way that one wishes to be universally admired and adored, but you can’t really be mad at someone who has actually read all of your stuff and discusses you as though you’re a Real Writer with a Body of Work.