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Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I had high hopes for Reenchantment of Nature. I was seeking a good text that would strongly link environmentalism and Christianity. Unfortunately, this text disappoints. It reads like a dry, haphazard, graduate school lecture (and I have a masters degree). After reading the text, I had to go back and re-read the introduction to see what McGrath cited as the point of the book. The real premise for the book appears to be an academic paradigm war between McGrath and Richard Dawkins. As with most academic wars, those seeking knowledge are left wanting as the "experts" pontificate in elusive terms.I wish I could recommend this text more highly. The topic area does need some good discussion. However, this text is simply not accessible to the average person.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I had high hopes for Reenchantment of Nature. I was seeking a good text that would strongly link environmentalism and Christianity. Unfortunately, this text disappoints. It reads like a dry, haphazard, graduate school lecture (and I have a masters degree). After reading the text, I had to go back and re-read the introduction to see what McGrath cited as the point of the book. The real premise for the book appears to be an academic paradigm war between McGrath and Richard Dawkins. As with most academic wars, those seeking knowledge are left wanting as the "experts" pontificate in elusive terms. I wish I could recommend this text more highly. The topic area does need some good discussion. However, this text is simply not accessible to the average person.
Rating: 
Summary: An important thesis, fairly well presented.
Review: The book isn't perfect but it's certainly much better than reviews posted in this forum suggest. In particular, the review from Publishers Weekly, though it offers some reasonable critiques, is wrong to conclude, "McGrath's material could have been more effectively presented in one well-crafted magazine article." Yes, there is some repetition, especially in the introduction, first two and last two chapters, but no more so than one finds in the writings of Richard Dawkins (whom McGrath takes to task). Dawkins has famously stated and restated some obviously challengeable views, views that he himself takes for granted and has not critically examined. McGrath, with Oxford doctorates in both theology and molecular biophysics, is highly qualified to address Dawkins' polemics.
The author states that this book has a twofold thesis: "to persuade Christians that they ought to be taking nature a lot more seriously, and anyone concerned with nature that they ought to be taking Christianity a lot more seriously than they have to date. But above all, this book aims to set out the intellectual excitement of engaging with nature and recovering that lost sense of wonder." Although he wanders back and forth between his two stated objectives, McGrath does make his points, and does so without the historical disconnection (and skewed take on Christian ethos) that arises in Lynn White's influential 1967 essay, or the inattentive preaching of Richard Dawkins. As someone who reads more than a little on the issue of the gathering ecological crisis, this reader can vouch that the anti-theistic themes to which McGrath responds have been too often asserted and too seldom challenged. As McGrath argues, the 'Christianity is destroying nature' assertion (E O Wilson being one example among many) is misguided, or worse.
Theism (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, theistic Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha'ism) asserts that humans are liable stewards of planet Earth and that nature is to be revered for its divinely assigned significance; it is quite a different viewpoint that insists that humanity is a quasi-ultimate, yet purposeless, accident of "blind" mechanism and that all of nature is but an assemblage of meaningless 'selections'. In this view, whatever significance Nature 'has' is fleetingly assigned to it by (Enlightened?) "Humanism". It is this historically recent and relativistic version of ethics (i.e., Enlightenment modernism, scientism, nihilism, atheism, postmodernism, so-called 'humanism') that has denied ontological reflection and has ideologically underwritten the large-scale rape and pillage of our planet. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the world witnessed, most notably in the Soviet Union, the extent to which an atheistically dominated society will render nature a mere economic commodity, significant first and last for its humanistic quotient. Lynn White accused Christianity of being the most dangerously anthropocentric philosophy of human history -- but it is cold scientism (not to be confused with science) which boasts of "unweaving the rainbow" and demands that humans answer only to human "scientific" wisdom (see again E O Wilson). It is this philosophy that has spent the past century blindly unweaving Earth's ozone layer. Christianity hasn't made "greenhouse gasses" -- scientific "genius" has. To speak this way, Dawkins says, is just so much belligerent, 'anti-science' screed, but it is simply an unfettered observation. In the theistic view, nature must be respected for its intrinsic significance; in the 'Enlightened' atheistic, and postmodern views, nature must be respected essentially because it suits humanity's material interests and intellectual curiosity to do so (there is nothing 'higher').
As to Dawkins paranoiac defenses of (what he calls) science: adducing science's limits and/or scientist's miscues, does not equate to 'anti-science'. Not unless one directly equates science itself with human foolishness. That would be an irrational leap, and McGrath, a trained scientist, certainly does not suggest such equivalence. It seems that very few would. Dawkins does battle with a theistic 'boogie-man' malignancy that exists primarily in his own mind. Why?
In debunking a demagogue of atheism of Dawkins' stature, McGrath will be a very unpopular figure in certain circles. His book "Dawkins' God", not yet available in the US at this writing, will predictably draw the wrath of the smug, 'Enlightened' crowd. So far, McGrath seems to be flying beneath the radar of those who will pathologically reject his arguments. Perhaps this will change, his thesis here surely warrants a broad hearing. This is a book that needed to be written (incidentally, McGrath is kinder to Dawkins, if not Dawkins' ideas, than I may have suggested in this review).
Certainly the book could be better. Likely 20 pages could have been eliminated (my Doubleday hardcover edition is 186 pages) while improving the readability of the text. The author's two stated thematic objectives might have been better separated or developed as two books. Nonetheless I rate it as better than four stars, simply because McGrath presents, in a restrained and erudite manner, a set of strong arguments that must be heard.
Rating: 
Summary: I liked it.
Review: This was a good book for me. I am not the most green conscious person, but I feel I should be. I mistrust environmentalists because a lot of them got some funky spiritual ideas. Probably what this book does best is defend Christianity against the charge that it is to blame for our coming enviormental crisis. McGrath without excusing Christians, does not scapegoat Christianity as being a philisophical underpinning which enables Western people to rape nature. No he has other ideas about where we get those Ideas. But I wouldn't want to spoil it.
Rating:
Summary: I liked it.
Review: This was a good book for me. I am not the most green conscious person, but I feel I should be. I mistrust environmentalists because a lot of them got some funky spiritual ideas. Probably what this book does best is defend Christianity against the charge that it is to blame for our coming enviormental crisis. McGrath without excusing Christians, does not scapegoat Christianity as being a philisophical underpinning which enables Western people to rape nature. No he has other ideas about where we get those Ideas. But I wouldn't want to spoil it.
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