Charles Matthewes on “Narrow” Audiences
While browsing in the Eerdmans booth at the American Academy of Religion meeting, I got sucked into Charles Matthewes new book, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times. While it’s not absolutely central to the theme of the book, this comment in the Introduction stuck with me:
It may seem oddly limiting to write a book primarily addressed to Christians; that may seem a strangely narrow audience. But the appearance of narrowness deceives. It is ironic that explicit appeals to Christians are all-too-easily labeled “narrow” or “sectarian” when there are roughly 250 million Christians–of quite diverse flavors, of course–in the United States today, and more than 2 billion around the world. How “broad,” in comparison, would be an argument addressed to readers of the New York Review of Books?
