Born-Again Believers: Evangelicals and Charismatics

VOYA - Kim Zach

The most impressive thing about this thirteen-volume Religion and Modern Culture series is the quality of the illustrations. The majority are photo montages, the artistic merging of mixed media paintings, collage, and photography. Page backgrounds resembling sponge-painted parchment in soft neutral shades add further dramatic flair. Unfortunately the text makes up less than half of these beautiful pages. Margins are unnecessarily wide, select quotations are over-enlarged, and sidebars often eclipse the main text. Each volume is written by the same author (in some cases with the assistance of his wife or son). All begin with an identical introduction that discusses the evolution of religious diversity, the overall series theme, before being divided into six or seven chapters that address the main theme of that individual book. In The Growth of North American Religious Beliefs, chapter topics are Christianity and Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, North American Santeria, and other faiths. Born-Again Believers covers evangelical history, conversion, evangelical beliefs, famous evangelicals, growing up evangelical, and good news. Glossaries are presented as sidebars but illogically and in many instances only contain a single word. The sections at the end of each book are sketchy. The selections for further reading, for example, appear random and include other books by the author. The list of Web sites in For More Information and the index entries are by no means as complete as they should be. Most troubling is the lack of source notes, which calls into question the validity of the information. In an extensive series such as this one, considering the credentials of bothauthor and consultant, one would expect better research procedures. A related problem is the overuse of a single source. In The Growth of North American Religious Beliefs, McIntosh mentions the same source eight times, lending a tone of imbalance to his research. Nevertheless this series, which also includes Prophecies and End-time Speculations; Color, Culture, and Creed; and Issues of Church, State, and Religious Liberties, could provide an overview for younger readers. High school students might start here, but they will need to look elsewhere for a more steady and reliable treatment of this important topic. A better choice for libraries might be the oWorld Religionso series from Facts on File/Infobase, recommended in the April 2007 VOYA World Religions Resource List for Teens as well researched, organized, and well balanced.