Since I announced the publication of The End of Secularism on Southern Appeal and a few other sites, I’ve done several interviews and many of the early readers have had time to post reviews.  Here are a couple I thought might interest you.

First, we have the bestselling thriller writer Andrew Klavan:

Anyone who works in the writing business will understand: I don’t have time to read books sent or lent to me unrequested. What with informational reading, professional reading and reading for my craft and spirit, even books I want to get to sometimes have to wait as long as a year.

Plus I don’t remember ever having met Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University so I don’t know why he had his publisher send me his new book The End of Secularism. But I’m startled to report I glanced at it while laying it aside, then picked it up again, then read it through. This is a very well written, concise and learned primer on the secularization of the public square. It gives a fair recital of the arguments in favor of it, and a strong but sensible and moderate outline of the arguments against. It has a firm grasp of history and neither falls for the usual “This is a Christian country!” rhetoric that makes its way onto television nor accepts the “separation of church and state,” pieties that were rendered obsolete by the state’s aggressive intrustion into what Dr. Baker calls “the life-world,” ie. our values and private lives. It’s a book you’ll be glad you read the next time you get in an argument about religion’s role in politics.

I wish I had time to write a full review of this book in a respectable venue (as opposed to this Blog of Ill Repute!). I just don’t. But if anyone from First Things or World Magazine or even the Weekly Standard or NRO is skulking through here and sees this, I think the book is well worth discovering.

And next, a friend of both mine and Feddie’s, Paul Cella at What’s Wrong with the World:

Hunter Baker of Houston Baptist University has produced a rare book. It is a book of serious explication both accessible to layman or beginner at the subject, and illuminating to those long immersed in its twisted passageways and forbidding streets. That subject is secularism, a tormented subject indeed in American history. For definition, my friend admirably gives, early in his book, several useful definitional statements: “private religion is at the heart of secularism.” “Secularism means that religious considerations are excluded from civil affairs.”

But the essence of secularism, according to him, is a cheap rhetorical trick. It is the pretense that you can kick out the supports for the edifice of traditional morality, stand in some bewilderment as it falls in a cloud of dust, and then proceed about in the ruins, appealing like some madman to a vague consensus in order to convince everyone a new structure has already been built. How the secularist has convinced so many with this particular chicanery is a story, perhaps, for our psychologists or novelists.

For our philosophers and historians and simple readers like me, Hunter gives us a serviceable narrative, succinctly composed and carefully worded, which not only summarizes the state of things now, but also incorporates some unappreciated scholars and thinkers into the conversation.

There is no sense in hiding my view that it will be a blow not merely for clarity, but for justice and truth as well, when the end of secularism has come. It is little to be doubted that when that day dawns, Hunter will have had his part in the victory.

In due time we will have occasion to excerpt Hunter’s new book The End of Secularism. For now I’ll leave readers with what may be my favorite part. To some bewildered secularist who, faced with a strongly argued religious position, throws up his hands in frustration and shouts, “why do religious people always have to make things so difficult!” — we can answer, with Hunter, that the reason people “bring their comprehensive views to bear” on political reality, “is that they have integrity.”

And friends, someday I shall be done promoting this book which I very much hope many of you will find well worth reading.  At that time I will return to joyously conducting conversations at this site on the merits of SEC football and north Alabama barbecue.