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Wondering what to do with that gift card you received for Christmas? Wanting to start the year off right with a compelling read about rethinking everything you thought you knew about the doctrine of salvation? Have I got a book for you! David Congdon’s (ed.) Varieties of Christian Universalism: Exploring Four Views (Baker, 2023) will not disappoint. David and his collaborators present a reliable and excellent roadmap to the primary varieties of Christian Universalism. Those who have never considered universalism before will benefit from the careful and ordered tour, and those who have long considered it will be delighted by the clarity and detail of the positions exhibited. This volume is well worth engaging. I tweeted some quotes from this book as I read it, and I’m going to link those in below for your consideration. But I also must say that Congdon’s contributions to this volume are more than worth the cost of picking up a copy in and of themselves, and the chapters from Gregg

Karl Kautsky was a leading German-language democratic socialist politician and theoretician at the end of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th century. He wrote an interesting text called The Foundations of Christianity (Ger: Der Ursprung des Christentums ) in 1908. I haven’t read it at this point, though I’d like to remedy that someday. Kautsky; George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) However, I was reading about Kautsky and came upon a passage that described his “notebook” method of research and reflections, especially in regards to his work on the above-named volume, and I found it fascinating. This jumped out at me because, as someone who researches and writes, I’ve tried various methods to keep my materials organized and productive, and I don’t feel like I’ve found a way that really works for me yet. This frustrates me. Additionally, I recently read a post by Elissa Cutter about “Journaling as a Means of Research” that I found interesting.