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The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus. By Dallas Willard. Edited by Rebecca Willard Heatley. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015, Pp. xi, 191. $26.99.)
When a well-respected author is published posthumously it gamers attention, and The Allure of Gentleness by Dallas Willard (1935-2013) is no exception. Following in the same tradition as C. S. Lewis, Willard (former professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Southern California, 1965-2012) wrote with a characteristically conversational style. There was no pretense of academic learnedness, only a genuine desire to see lives changed by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. As an evangelical scholar, Willard's corpus defined and examined the role of spiritual formation in the life of the Christian, and his influence within evangelical circles cannot be overstated. Thus, and only because of his powerful legacy and the breadth of his other great works, I was a little disappointed by this latest book, The Allure of Gentleness.
The Allure of Gentleness is a compilation of materials sown together by Willard's daughter, Rebecca Willard Heatley, taken mostly from a series of talks on apologetics. As she says, "I felt like a tailor who has been blessed with a bolt of beautiful...