Books
Benedict options learned from actual Benedictines
Patrick Henry’s vision of monasticism is not a fleeing ark, but a marsh teeming with life.
Lauren Groff builds a proto-feminist medieval world
But the enchantment of Matrix is ultimately broken by her language.
Trauma and embodiment
Hillary McBride draws on psychology and theology to encourage us to befriend our bodies.
Anya Silver’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful last poems
Saint Agnostica is a chronicle of grief, love, and mystery.
Stephanie Spellers’s bold, practical wisdom for American Christians
Kenosis, solidarity, and discipleship
John Pavlovitz’s bottom line: Faith should be a life of love
The popular blogger speaks to the pain of Christians who are disappointed with the failures of the church.
A manifesto for middle age
Kaya Oakes seeks the wisdom of women who are young, old, crazy, barren, butch, femme, angry, other, and alone
Saumya Roy lets Mumbai’s garbage pickers speak for themselves
Castaway Mountain gives voice to families who have been impoverished by the whims of the powerful.
The historical roots of interfaith dialogue
Tal Howard offers a carefully researched history, from the Mughal Empire to Nostra aetate and beyond.
Stories of the unhoused faithful
Listening to the poorest and most dislocated, Susan J. Dunlap hears the music of faith.
A new translation of “The Dark Night of the Soul” thrills with adventure
In St. John of the Cross’s poetry, the dark night is also a night of profound, even ecstatic beauty.
How 20th-century mainline Protestants shaped immigration policy
And how that policy shaped the 21st-century mainline church
A novel about purity culture and its harm
At its core, God Spare the Girls is about a family history doomed to repeat itself.
An American teenager in Slovakia
How a year overseas unraveled and remade Sarah Hinlicky Wilson’s identity
15 London children died in a World War II attack
Francis Spufford’s novel imagines the lives they might otherwise have led.
The complicated Lindbergh
It’s hard to strike the right balance in a biography of the heroic aviator and antisemitic activist. Christopher Gehrz succeeds brilliantly.
The White Iowans and Latino and African migrants of the meatpacking industry
Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s ethnographic study complicates familiar views of the Corn Belt.
What preachers have said in times of national crisis
Melissa Matthes well understands both the political and the religious power of mourning.
Some trees are like mothers
Scientist Susanne Simard on how trees communicate and nurture each other