James

Moore-Keish's James (Belief, WJK, 2019) is gracefully written and pastorally engaged, with genuine strengths in OT background and reception history, but readers should be aware of several interpretive commitments that sit uneasily with the text. The most serious is a pattern of placing contemporary ideological frameworks above the text: she questions whether the inspired doulos ("slave of God") metaphor at 1:1 is "necessary" today — a move unsupported by any other commentary in the field, including Johnson (AYB) and Allison (ICC), her own cited authorities, who treat the term as an honorific claim to prophetic authority; she applies a feminine pronoun to God at 1:9–11 without discussion or textual warrant; and in the "Further Reflections" on 1:17 she introduces Mary Daly's dismissal of classical theism as a male fantasy constructed to serve male power, presenting it without rebuttal alongside Athanasius and Aquinas as though it were a live theological option within the Christian tradition — which it is not, since Daly had by that point abandoned Christianity altogether. Dibelius, Johnson, Martin, and Allison all read 1:17 as a straightforward affirmation of divine immutability. She further warns that James's personification of desire as female (1:14–15) "damages women," that moichalides (4:4) reinforces harmful female stereotypes, and that the Akedah (2:21) requires child-abuse cautions — concerns raised by no other commentary in the field, including the feminist commentators Laws (BNTC), Spencer (KEL), and Reese (NCC), who read all three passages in their standard literary-historical and OT-prophetic contexts. Recommended with caution for supplementary pastoral use; not suitable as a primary commentary on James.