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John A. D'Elia, A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi + 271. $45.00.
Many evangelicals in the early twenty-first century have caught a vision for engaging society and have penetrated the walls of the broader academy in many fields. The quest to earn the recognition and respect of non-evangelical scholars is certainly not complete, but great strides have been made. John A. D'Elia argues in his study, A Place at the Table, that the story of how these gains were achieved cannot be told without discussing the life of George Eldon Ladd. In exploring Ladd's life, D'Elia tells the larger story of how the new evangelicals aimed to reengage the larger society through intentional, meaningful interaction.
Several scholars have studied Ladd's theology, but his life has received little attention; A Place at the Table offers the first book-length examination of Ladd's life. D'Elia's purpose is to examine "the motivation for George Ladd's contribution to evangelical scholarship," to probe the why behind his writing more than the what, and he uses an array of untapped sources to do so (xviii). D'Elia explores the contours of Ladd's childhood - poverty, harsh fatherly treatment, an inferiority complex, and an outsider feeling - to show how his experiences from those early years would haunt him for decades in his quest for significance in the broad scholarly world. As Ladd emerged from childhood, he found hope in a fundamentalist evangelical faith and...