Very good. Alvarado joins some dots, here, which others fail to. And he writes really well. It's a reworking of an old manuscript, so the interaction with secondary sources is dated. But all in all, he makes some great points and reinvigorates the early-modern-liberal story with the inclusion of Gro ...more

Read the book twice because it is weighty and important. This book is a course in Christian political philosophy. Here the reader confronts Augustine, Calvin, Hugo Grotius, the author of Claims Against Tyrants, John Locke, and others.
As it points out, the development of constitutional thought is no ...more

Ruben Alvarado makes the argument that Calvinistic political theory is derived directly from the great tradition of western political thought reaching back to Saint Augustine and his "City of God." John Locke laid the foundations for modernist philosophy that discreetly removed the church from s pos ...more