Ephraim Radner is one of the most profound and creative theologians of our day. In A Time to Keep he examines some fundamental questions that lie at the root of how we understand ourselves as human beings. Every careful reader will come away from this book with significant new insights as to where the human project sits in the modern age. A Time to Keep is a dizzyingly learned biblical and natural theology of human existence in which the mystery of humanity reveals the scriptural figure of Christ. We have forgotten that we will die, forgotten that our days are given in, and limited by, a context of divine generosity, generation, and death. In the cacophony of debates over the beginning and end of life, over marriage and sexuality, over the very future of humanity, Radner calls us to the patient discipline of numbering our days. This book is, among other things, one of the richest and most compelling Christian theologies of human sexuality to appear in decades. It should be ranked alongside works by Karl Barth and St.

John Paul II as an indispensable touchstone for ongoing Christian reflection on the meaning of our embodied, procreative, and variously fruitful vocations as creatures of God. For pointing to the fundamental nature of finitude and creatureliness and for writing in a manner manifesting that very mode of being, we are in Radner's debt. The book is commended, though the reader must be warned that, as in life, time will be taken to assimilate it. Radner's prose is thoughtful, and he clearly names the complexities of contemporary life and presents a rich vision of the ways in which Christian wisdom calls humans to lives of meaning and purpose amid finitude. Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guaranteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception.This establishes Radner as not only an unusually profound analyst of ecclesial and ecclesiological issues (his previous books have shown that in abundance), not only a theological essayist of near-genius, but a truly systematic theologian in the best sense, someone who can connect the great themes of dogmatic orthodoxy and scriptural figure to the challenges of our culture, which seems increasingly adrift from any idea of what common humanity--let alone common created identity--might amount to.