Book Review

Modern authors tend to view American evangelicals as a monolithic assembly, rarely describing the varying facets of their beliefs. In his book “Swords and Plowshares: American Evangelicals on War, 1937–1973,” Timothy D. Padgett attempts to dispel this misconception.

Here are some of the top books to help you understand the history of American foreign policy.

Dmitry Adamsky’s outstanding Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy explains the religious imagination that has swept not only through the Russian nuclear arsenal since 1991, but also into all levels of the country’s nuclear tirade, military forces, and even Russian foreign policy more broadly.

Did the American people lose their sense of tragedy after the Soviet Union fell, or is something else afoot?

Putin’s Russia still has numerous challenges today from corruption to slow economic growth, but Chris Miller argues in Putinomics that the federation should be compared to fellow petrostate Venezuela since both were similar in the late 1990s.

While Lewis and Tolkien’s faith and contributions are well-known, most do not realize they both fought in the First World War as young men. Even fewer recognize how their time in the western front’s trenches influenced their faith and later works. However, in A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War, Providence senior editor Joseph Loconte explains in his typical, approachable prose how the war affected these two men deeply and how those experiences influenced their writings and faith.

If we follow scripture as understood by Hazony, perhaps then we face his “either nation or empire” mentality. From other Christian perspectives, an appeal could be made to the varying levels of political organization available to polities over time, ranging from the city to the nation-state, to regional federations, and so on. Hazony’s account, however, allows no such appeal.

In More Than a Doctrine, Randy Fowler argues that, even though President Eisenhower didn’t have a reputation for being a powerful orator, his speeches had a profound effect on the Middle East.

In Safe Passage, Kori Schake details how transitions in geopolitical power lead to violence, except when the United States slowly and peacefully took over the hegemonic role Great Britain played.