Review essay: When the dancing turned to mourning: Theological responses to the pandemic

Abstract

This review essay considers four books published within the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through how each of these texts offers a timely Christian response to, and not explanation for, the challenges that we face: innumerable deaths, the inability to worship together, deserted streets and shut-up businesses, the place of viruses in the Earth’s ecology, and the apparent absence of God as the innovations of modern science seem to be our only salvation.

Reviewed works:

John C. Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? (Epsom, Surrey: The Good Book Company, 2020)

Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK: 2020)

Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2020)

Robert Keay, Reframing Pandemic (The Window of Christianity series; New York: Basiliad Publishing, 2020)