Playing for Virtual Transcendence

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35. Reviewed by Kevin Schut In Virtually Sacred, religious studies scholar Robert M. Geraci tackles the topic of...

Playfulness and Profundity

Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life, by Robert M. Geraci. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35.Reviewed by Daniel J. HolmesIt requires a certain sense of academic playfulness to take a theological approach to...

Navigating a Secular Age

How (Not) to Be Secular by James K. A. Smith. Eerdmans, 2014. Paper, 152 pages, $16.In early August I went backpacking in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. The terrain was unfamiliar to me, and I knew very little of what to expect other than what I...
No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

No More Idols: Taking Measure of a Modern Prophet

Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. Regnery Gateway 1993. Cloth, xi + 432 pp., $24. As breathing returns after our swoon, as a glimmer of consciousness breaks through the unrelieved darkness, it is difficult for us at first to regain our...

Words and Deeds

Maya Angelou (1928–2014)There is a scene near the end of Old Goriot in which the young Rastignac, still new to Paris and Parisian society, observes that “[n]oble natures cannot dwell in this world.” In Balzac’s eponymous novel, Goriot, having literally given...