LAUSR

biography, particularly in the letters, to bring some human interest to his story. Pike’s mind operated at a level unreached by most humans. But he had feet of clay, and Aldridge is often at his best using Pike’s own words to demonstrate his struggles with “nerves,” what would likely be diagnosed as depression today, his short temper, and his health. But Pike also had a wonderful sense of humor, which Aldridge also weaves into his narrative from time to time. Pike’s admirable championing of women in missions, precisely because their minds were the equal of any man’s, is another area where the human side of the story comes to the fore. Aldridge’s subtitle, An Evangelical Mind, positions Pike’s story and Aldridge’s thesis as a minor corrective, if not a challenge, to Mark Noll’s seminal work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Writing in the mid-90s, Noll began, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Aldridge places Pike in the tiny bit of wiggle room left in Noll’s “not much.” There was at least room for Ken Pike. Aldridge further argues that Pike’s scholarship and his faith were integrated—not compartmentalized. There has been much discussion among evangelical academics in the past several decades about the meaning of Christian scholarship. Is there anything unique about it? Or is it simply committed scholarship that tends to focus on communities or issues of faith? Aldridge wants to argue, for Pike at least, that his faith profoundly influenced his theory of linguistics. Where other linguists took a mechanistic approach to language, Pike’s more fully orbed humanistic approach was influenced by the importance his faith placed on individual human beings. My only real criticism of Aldridge’s biography is that he assumes, in his readers, a fairly substantial knowledge of the history of evangelicalism. While that is likely a fair assumption for most readers, with the addition of a few more pages of background in the history of evangelicalism and of missions, the book might have been made more accessible to non-academic readers, and Aldridge’s thesis of Pike’s influence on the evangelical mind as it transitioned out of fundamentalism may have been rendered even more persuasive.