Book Reviews Creed & Culture A Touchstone Reader Edited by James M. Kushiner, (Wilmington, Del.; ISI Books), 240 pages; $15.00 Reviewed by Craig M. Kibler April 2003

It’s not often that one discovers a true smorgasbord of intellectual delights, much less in the field of religious commentary, but that is what James M. Kushiner serves up in Creed & Culture. Kushiner avoids the trap of anesthetizing the reader by being a repetitive one-trick pony, which so much of the pretense that passes for stimulating discourse from a Christian perspective in this country offers. Instead, he challenges the thought processes through a diverse selection of essays on culture, literature and theology. Culled from articles that appeared over the past 15 years in Touchstone, they speak, as Kushiner writes in his introduction, “conscientiously for the gospel in a time in which creed and culture seem to be at grave risk.” “In a bent time,” he quotes the late Russell Kirk, “Touchstone speaks up courageously for sound doctrine. It does not evade the great questions at issue. Through its pages a conscience speaks to a conscience.” These essays most emphatically do not evade the great questions at issue, nor do they avoid sound doctrine. Whether it is modernity, scientism, atheism, faith, character formation, home schooling, “poetic knowledge,” literary morals, “moral imagination,” Christian imagination, the family, disunity and unity in the faith, these thoughtfully insightful pieces touch on issues impacting Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians today. In addition to Kirk’s “T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals,” Kushiner includes Thomas Howard’s “‘Brideshead Revisited’ Revisited” and “Recognizing the Church;” Vigen Guroian’s “Family and Christian Virtue in a Post-Christian World;” James Hitchcock’s “Christ and Culture: A Dilemma Reconsidered;” Huston Smith’s “Scientism: The World’s Littlest Religion;” and James R. Edwards’ “New Quest, Old Errors,” among others. In the end, this thought-provoking collection leads the reader to look forward with hope toward Howard’s conclusion in “Recognizing the Church: “May God grant, in these latter days, a gigantic ingathering, as it were, when Christians who have loved and served him according to patterns and disciplines and notions quite remote from those of the ancient Church find themselves taking their places once again in the great Eucharistic mystery of his one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.”

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