Major Review: God and Guns: The Bible against American Gun Culture

When Stanley hauerWaS, whose foreword opens this consequential volume on firearms in America, returned home to Texas from the Divinity School at Yale, his father presented him with a gun, its stock crafted lovingly from the wood of a hickory tree he had felled himself. Hauerwas’s father understood that hickory is one of the hardest woods, perfect for withstanding the force of a projectile that might shatter a more yielding wood and, if shooters were careless, propel them violently backwards, resulting in possible injury. The scholars of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, ancient Judaism, and Christianity whose essays appear in this volume address what happens on both ends of the gun, why it happens, and why guns may rightly constitute an affront to people of faith.