Books
Is Jamie Quatro’s novel really about marital infidelity?
Maybe Fire Sermon is more fundamentally a parable about religion.
Zadie Smith leaves no cultural stone unturned
Smith's collection of essays considers the self as an improvised response to language and the world.
How Christian was Meister Eckhart?
The eccentric preacher's ideas hover between God's absolute otherness and God's self-revelation in Christ.
Marxism and the New Testament
As Roland Boer and Christina Petterson see it, the Gospels contradict the witness of Jesus about slavery and property.
Take & read: New books in Old Testament
Does biblical scholarship still matter for the life of faith?
Tracy K. Smith’s lovely, unflinching poems
Smith is acutely aware of injustice and violence—and remarkably hopeful about the possibility of reconciliation.
Tribalism is natural. It's also destroying us.
Amy Chua considers why we cling to people who look and act like us.
Take & read: New books in theology
Theology lives in the space between apocalypticism and Christian Platonism.
Why human rights and global ethics are inadequate concepts
In a globalized world, Michael Ignatieff argues, grand moral values have failed. What's left is virtue.
Take & read: New books in ethics
What does hope look like in the face of racism?
Radical orthodoxy steps into the pulpit
The movement's plucky proponents have been known for their philosophy more than their preaching. Until now.
A life worth living, but for how long?
In their new novels, Dara Horn and Chloe Benjamin play with themes of mortality and free will.
In praise of (imperfect) images
Depictions of Jesus reveal God—but never adequately.
Marilynne Robinson's beautiful, cranky nonfiction
Robinson's essays are sometimes tedious. Yet they provide glimpses of the capacious faith undergirding her novels.
Essential reading: Fiction
We asked some of our favorite novelists and poets to tell us about three recent works of fiction that speak to them in a deep way.
Christian Wiman and the poetry of joy
In this anthology of poems selected by Wiman, joy comes in modest and unlikely guise.
Miguel De La Torre’s ethic of hopelessness
De La Torre has little use for hope in a God who only seems to show up for Christians, never for their victims.
An American childhood in Haiti
Apricot Irving writes with love—and hurt—about her father's misplaced desire to be a savior to others.
The black social gospel and the civil rights movement
Gary Dorrien chronicles the influential—but often forgotten—work of Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, and Howard Thurman.
James Comey read a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr. Did he learn anything?
For a Niebuhrian, the former FBI director doesn't seem to have much self-doubt.