Books

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in Christianity. But why have so many efforts by Christians gone so tragically wrong?

Countries, not individuals, are the enemies and friends that Charles Kupchan has in mind in How Enemies Become Friends, and beginning with the book's title, he sets himself against the most influential school of thought in international relations.

Being the Jesus scholar that he is, Marcus Borg certainly understands the power of a story. In Putting Away Childish Things he offers up a didactic novel that explores some of the thorniest theological issues facing the Christian community.

“Today, we live with this illusion that we know the world," says William Dalrymple. "The reality, of course, is. . .that there's huge parts of the world which we know absolutely nothing about, particularly in areas of religion and philosophy." For most of us, India is one of those places.

The accepted baseline for study of the Psalms is genre analysis. Beyond that baseline, however, several interpretive options are available.

One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. But as United Methodist pastor Elise Erikson Barrett points out, we don’t much like to talk about miscarriage.

Amateurish historians often tell us that we must study the past to avoid repeating its mistakes. Such efforts rarely work out well. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, by contrast, offers an unusual, complex and thoughtful approach to history.

Along America's highways, wooden barns used to reign, and blue or white silos stood like sentries. Today those wooden barns and silos are decaying, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect, and slowly being replaced by low steel buildings. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.

There clearly has been a marked rise of interest in the Crusades since the start of the present war in Iraq--an interest spurred at least in part by President George W. Bush's talk of an American crusade against terror in the days following the 9/11 attacks. Up to this point, the renaissance in publications about the Crusades largely has been limited to works that fit squarely within traditional historical scholarship. Stark and Housley, on the other hand, provide Crusades volumes for an age in which information is targeted to distinct and splintered interest groups.

The problem with liberal theology, Protestant or Catholic, says Rodney A. Howsare in Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, is that Christ comes too late into the picture.

Why would anyone want to read a theologian's memoir? The answer is not immediately self-evident. One can admire a thinker or an artist and still not be drawn to the person's life story.

When I opened this bio­graphy, I was as curious about how David Remnick would pull off a biography of a sitting president—after only one year in office—as I was about Obama himself.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's book about the 2008 presidential campaign has people talking about the private lives of the politicians and all the scenes we didn't see during the campaign.