God on Trial: Dispatches from America's Religious Battlegrounds. By Peter Irons. New York: Viking Press, 2007. 362 pp. $26.95.
One doubts if Peter Irons ever has been accused of writing a ponderous book. Over the past several decades, the prolific Irons (professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, San Diego) has penned a succession of elegant volumes examining the myriad and complex ways in which broad developments in constitutional law and civil liberties have impacted the lives of individual Americans. Some academics have slighted these works, claiming that they suffer from being overly "journalistic" or "narrative" in style, but it seems ...