Books

Two new books on immigration complement each other well. And where Todd Miller’s falls short, Deirdre Cornell’s shines most brightly.

Publishers see SBNRs as a key market, while preachers either court them or put them down. As for Nancy Ammerman, she isn’t sure SBNRs exist.

Paul Elie has lamented the absence of serious engagement with Christianity in contemporary fiction. He should read Stacia Brown.

Many people will remember Borg as the person who made space for them to return to—or remain in—the Christian faith. It's a wonderful irony.

For Elizabeth Kolbert, the human story reads like a Greek tragedy. Near the end, we realize too late that we brought about our own demise.

Stephen Schloesser considers Olivier Messiaen and his music through the lens of a broad-based cultural history. This is fitting and welcome.

Edward Baptist so powerfully captures the pain and tragedy of plantation slavery that I had to force myself to turn each page.

Kevin Vanhoozer demonstrates that Christian thought is a more engaging, embodied affair than much that passes for thinking these days.

Walter Kasper contends that mercy is one of those words that we use without really grasping its profundity.

When it comes to conversations about government spending, two subjects tend to get conflated. The first is an ideological debate about whether or not the government is in general any good at doing things. The second regards the actual effectiveness of specific things the government does. And the second conversation is far more concrete, productive, and important, which is why it drives me crazy when the first one prevents people from engaging the second. Ron Haskins's new book is pretty wonky, but the articles he's written to promote it are quite readable.

In this anecdotal study of public apology, Edwin Battistella shows that our anxieties and confusions about confession are rooted in a deeper ambiguity: the tension between the culpable self and the apologetic self.

Here are the Century book reviews that got read the most online this year.

Gerard Russell’s account of disappearing Middle Eastern religions has an elegiac quality. It’s heartrending and often infuriating.

Other states have a history of violence, suspicion of government, and more Baptists than people. What makes Texas different? Robert Wuthnow says it’s oil.

In Ian Leslie’s telling, curiosity is far from a valued quality. Augustine, he notes, equated curiosity with temptation.

For Ben Quash, scripture and tradition are givens. Our task is to discover and reinterpret what we have been given.