The best reviews are behind the paywall, but it is definitely worth going to your library and looking at the hard copy for these two reviews alone:
Kevin Schultz reviews George Marsden’s The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
A taste:
Among those historians who openly identify as believing Christians, George Marsden stands alongside perhaps only Mark Noll at the pinnacle of the profession. Every scholar of American history, believer or not, knows who Marsden is.
What has been so remarkable about his professional fame is the way he has blended the demands of the secular academy with his Protestant faith. By using the methods of the secular profession to answer questions provoked by his Christianity, he has written transformative books on American evangelicalism, the place of Christianity in higher education, and Jonathan Edwards, his biography of whom is the definitive one on America’s greatest theologian. Marsden has won all the big awards, too, including the prestigious Bancroft Prize and even a Guggenheim, and he served as the crown jewel in the University of Notre Dame’s free-spending attempt to gather the most talented Christian scholars in all of academia.
Randall Balmer reviews Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American EvangelicalismA taste:
In the spring of 1980 when I learned the improbable news that I had been accepted into a doctoral program, two people I much admired weighed in with their reactions. My adviser, for whom I had written a master’s thesis on biblical inerrancy, warned me darkly that the people at Princeton would “come after me” on the inerrancy question. I hoped that my father, an evangelical minister, might betray even a hint of pride that his eldest son had been admitted to study at an elite university. Instead, he became very quiet before expressing his fear that my intellectual pursuits would jettison my piety.
Thanks for the shout-out, John. Point of fact: none of the reviews are behind the “hard paywall,” but all of them are behind the “soft paywall”–meaning anyone can view any three of them (or other articles) in the course of a month. –Steve Thorngate, web editor, the Christian Century