Through the Eye of a Needle is a tremendous achievement, even for a scholar who has already achieved so much. Its range is as vast as its originality, and readers will find everywhere the kinds of memorable aperçus and turns of phrase for which its author is deservedly famous. What is unusual about this work is its structure. The argument emerges in short segments, sound bites for readers, which are then compounded into large chapters. This means that nowhere does a long and elaborate treatment of a complex theme impede the movement of the overall exposition. The various parts are held together by a thread that the author himself provides through numerous programmatic statements of what he is trying to do as he goes along. These statements, usually cast in the first-person plural, serve as welcome guideposts. They are reminders that Peter Brown is one of the greatest teachers of our time. His unique and irresistible ability to guide auditors and readers, to tease, enchant, and instruct them, is fully on display here. There can be no doubt that we are in the presence of a historian and teacher of genius.

… it’s worth noting that Williams remains frustratingly inaccessible to many readers, almost infamously so. At the last meeting of my Williams reading group, one of the members, a priest—himself an agile thinker and able theologian—confessed in dismay, “I’m afraid I had trouble grasping this essay!” According to a recent introduction to Williams’ theology, Christ the Stranger by Benjamin Myers, that difficulty is intentional. For Williams, speaking of and to God involves pain, confusion, darkness. “God,” Williams once wrote, “is what we have not yet understood, the sign of a strange and unpredictable future.” No wonder, then, that writing that presumes to gesture towards this God would be correspondingly strange, demanding, and elusive.

…Few books illustrate this tension between analytic distance and normative involvement more than John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America. It is an imaginative and intelligent engagement with the critical literature I have been referring to, including the very different intellectual programs of Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. Modern’s book is also argumentatively elusive, presenting itself as a series of studies rather than consecutive exposition. The case studies are not what one might predict, given the title: evangelical understandings of mass media; the development of the category of “spirituality” in the matrix of phrenologists and spiritualists; prison reform at Sing Sing; and fantasies about machines—with fragmentary comments on Moby-Dick throughout.