Among the Believers
At The New Republic, Mark Noll, a member of R&P’s editorial advisory board, reviews T.M. Luhrmann’s book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. In order to explore evangelical Christians’ prayer life and beliefs, Luhrmann went “native” by doing ethnographic work in Vineyard churches. Noll praises Luhrmann’s empathetic yet in-depth account. He writes , “The triumph of When God Talks Back is its virtuosic display of sophisticated social scientific expertise combined with an unusual degree of interpretive modesty that allows both skeptics and believers to read the book as reinforcing their own views.”