One of the books I hope to buy and skim this year is Mark Noll's The New Shape of World Christianity. From what I hear, it is intended as somewhat of a corrective to Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom.It also gets put in my new category, "scholarly coping mechanisms." I haven't read the book yet, so it is just a warning category right now. My new category relates to an earlier post on how certain ideological tribes within scholarship (both liberal and conservative) crank up their scholarly machines to address "naughty data" that has emerged. Rather than following the data to its most probable conclusions, they apply their considerable intellect and creativity to possible ones that are more convenient for their tribes.
Now I do suspect that there may be some skew to Jenkins' book as well. But I'm putting Noll's new book on the "coping mechanism" list until I get a good sense of whether he is legitimately correcting Jenkins or whether this is another example of scholarly coping mechanism.
