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Religious Studies Professor Wins Book Award

News Categories: Books by Faculty | Religious Studies | Research

/_Assets/uploads/images/Speech_Night_Finalist.jpgA book by Peter J. Thuesen, Professor of Religious Studies, has won the 2010 Christianity Today Book Award for History/Biography.  Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2009) was selected by the magazine’s judges from among 472 books nominated by publishers.  This year, the magazine made 12 awards in 10 subject categories.  In choosing Thuesen’s book as the History/Biography winner, the judges commented: "Surprisingly, Thuesen makes the history of a doctrine-one riddled with arcane terminology and hair-splitting distinctions-not only accessible but also engaging. He has produced an intellectual history that puts ideas in their social context and takes seriously the lives of the men and women who thought about them."

Past recipients of the Christianity Today Book Award for History/Biography have included the prominent historians Allen C. Guelzo, George M. Marsden, Mark A. Noll, Harry S. Stout, and Grant Wacker.  Winners in other categories have included the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the philosophers Antony Flew and Charles Taylor, and the popular religion writers Kathleen Norris, Eugene H. Peterson, and Philip Yancey.

Thuesen, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at IUPUI, writes in his book that the Christian doctrine of predestination has been the "elephant in the living room of American denominationalism"-an unacknowledged source of discord in churches across the denominational spectrum.  These American conflicts mirror centuries-old disputes in Christianity over whether, and on what grounds, God foreordains the eternal destinies of individuals.  Thuesen’s book examines this pre-American background and includes a glossary of theological terms to assist the reader.  Marc Arkin, a Fordham University professor who reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal in June 2009, commented that Thuesen "pays noble tribute to that sense of awe before the divine that theology captures only through a glass darkly."

[More information about Predestination]

[Oxford University Press website]

Published on: January 22, 2010