Andrew A. Bonar's biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, the young yet pioneering Scottish minister who revolutionized Bible readings at home and abroad, offers a meticulously detailed yet lively telling of his life story. Born to a middle-class family in Edinburgh in 1813, the young Robert demonstrated intellectual ability at an early age. Upon attending the city's university, he quickly became regarded as a remarkably gifted religious scholar. His intuitive skills and theological knowledge exceeded all expectations, and he became an assistant to John Bonar of the famous Bonar family. Robert Murray M'Cheyne was appointed a delegate of the Church of Scotland when it organized a visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. By all accounts this journey was spiritually fulfilling for the young minister, with the major findings and progress of the voyage recorded in his work entitled Narrative of a Visit to the Holy Land and Mission of Inquiry to the Jews.

For most of his sixty-year career, the Reverend Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a "McCarthyite" opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists, and distrusted by the center, he became a lightning rod in the early American culture wars. Markku Ruotsila's Fighting Fundamentalist, the first scholarly biography of McIntire, peels off the accumulated layers of caricature and makes a case for restoring McIntire to his place as one of the most consequential religious leaders in the twentieth-century United States. The book traces McIntire's life from his early twentieth-century childhood in Oklahoma to his death in 2002. From his discipleship under J. Gresham Machen during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, through his fifty-year pastorate in Collingswood, NJ, and his presidency of the International Council of Christian Churches, McIntire-Ruotsila shows-stands out as the most important fundamentalist of his time. Based on exhaustive research in fifty-two archival collections-including the recently opened collection of the Carl McIntire papers and never-before seen FBI files-Ruotsila looks beyond the McIntire of legend. Instead, Ruostila argues, McIntire was a serious theological, political, and economic combatant, a tireless organizer who pioneered the public theologies, inter-faith alliances, and political methods that would give birth to the Christian Right. The moral values agenda of the 1970s and after would not have existed without the anti-communist and ant-New Deal activism that McIntire inaugurated in the 1930s.