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91 BOOK REVIEWS several other sections of the book. Given the rather encyclopedic nature of the material being presented,Hughes’s writing style only compounds perceptions of this problem. The paragraph that begins on page 264 highlights this challenge as Hughes opens with a rather lengthy block quote from Farley’s work and then spends the next couple of pages making three summative points that, in the end, begin to blur together. For readers looking for a rather encyclopedic introduction to how Schleiermacher, Newman, Dulles, and Farley understood the role of theology in the Christian university, Brian Hughes’ Saving Wisdom: Theology in the Christian University can prove to be an adequate choice. The overview he provides of the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Henry Newman,Avery Cardinal Dulles, and Edward Farley is thorough and full of important details. However, his work offers little in terms of the comparative and critical details he initially promised. His concluding chapter concerning the underlying soteriology driving the work of these four theologians is interesting and worthy of further reflection. However,it does little in terms of offering Christian universities an understanding of a way forward in terms of the critical role theology should play. Individuals eager to read and consider Hughes’book and the subject he considers will thus be pleased to know that in few months they will see Oliver Crisp, Mervyn Davies, Gavin D’Costa, and Peter Hampson’s (editors.) Theology and Philosophy: Faith and Reason (Continuum, January 2012) and Peter Hampson, Gavin D’Costa, Mervyn Davies, and Oliver D. Crisp’s (editors.) Christianity and the Disciplines: The Transformation of the University (Continuum,June 2012). This two-volume set will likely prove to be a helpful contribution to how we understand the role theology is to play in the university. For now, however, we will just have to wait. Todd C. Ream John Wesley Honors College Indiana Wesleyan University G. K. Chesterton: A Biography. By Ian Ker. NewYork:Oxford University Press, 2011. Pages: xiv + 747. Hardback: ISBN 978–0–19–960128–8. $65.00. Every Newman scholar knows Ian Ker’s standard biography of Newman, where Ker’s clear style, responsible handling of detail and capacity for wide sympathy complement his immense knowledge of nineteenth-century British Catholicism.1 His new biography of G.K.Chesterton echoes his Newman biography in many ways,most of all in being an achievement of monumental proportions—like Chesterton himself, indeed,but rather more orderly.Not because he is a man of few ideas,but because he had both many ideas and many audiences,Chesterton’s lively body of work can seem formless. Ker’s careful labor gradually brings order to the profusion. Ker is inevitably somewhat ensnared in repetition as he works to organize Chesterton’s profuse thirty-year production of articles, introductions, addresses, studies, commentaries, poems, stories, plays, biographies and controversial works. He returns too often, for instance, to an unimportant jest about sharpening pencils; 1 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman:A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Newman Journal V9 Issue 1_Newman Journal V9 Issue 1 2/1/12 10:13 AM Page 91 moreover, some proofreading errors slip by, including one that substitutes “Chesterton”for“Dickens”(173).Sometimes with too little warning Ker departs from chronology for the sake of coherence. Once, for instance, an apparently unmotivated account of all Chesterton’s secretaries is revealed finally as setting the stage for the entry into the Chestertons’ lives of Dorothy Collins, the cherished assistant of their last years. Similarly, the tangles of Edwardian politics, or of the financing of Chesterton’s brother’s newspaper,seem intrusive,and are considerably less sparkling than any pages on which Chesterton himself appears; nevertheless they do provide necessary background materials for Chesterton scholars. Ker’s method of canvassing all available documents of course has drawbacks in uneven coverage; a mere sketch of Chesterton’s deeply significant childhood sorts oddly with a flood of detail about his six weeks’ visit to the University of Notre Dame late in life. Yet there are advantages, as with careful documentation, Ker rescues Chesterton’s tender and exasperating role as husband from the icy contempt in his sister-in-law’s account. Moreover...

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