"For the Healing of the Nations"

The initial publishing foray of The Davenant Trust is a great one. The collection of papers presented at the Convivium 2014 is subtitled Essays on Creation, Redemption, and Neo-Calvinism. To give you a flavor of the papers, you can read a pre-Convivium post here and my concluding thoughts here and here.

The published versions of the conference papers are uniformly excellent. Each demonstrates a deep scholarly familiarity with its subject matter and an even deeper concern to address topics relevant to a wide sweep of neo-Calvinist thought in America. While every reader will not be equally interested in each essay, collectively the essays are important to anyone who takes seriously the effects of thinkers such as Dutchmen Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck as well as Americans who followed in their tradition including Cornelius Van Til and Rousas Rushdoony.

Other papers are not so inside-neo-Calvinist baseball. Topics range from Patristic use of pagan sources to English reformer Richard Hooker to John Calvin's nuanced understanding of the eschatological restoration of all things. Finally, the volume contains two essays by James Bratt, the Convivium's featured speaker, which together provide an excellent introduction to and summary of his magisterial biography Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (about which I last blogged here).

"For the Healing of the Nations" is well-edited and its print layout is clear. In other words, it is easy on the eyes. I highly recommend it and look forward with anticipation to what comes from next year's Convivium.