Books

Most moral arguments against suicide are built on premises of faith. But Jennifer Hecht, a poet and first-rate historian of ideas, is intent on providing secular reasons for refraining from it.

Peter Leithart’s book can be seen as one long act of ingratitude. Sometimes, he seems to be saying it is more blessed to reject than to receive.

In our gridlocked civic life, the secular ideals of the Enlightenment and the unbending stance of the religious right are both the blame, George Marsden argues.

Virginia Woolf’s novel details the ordinary illuminations our lives offer, “matches struck in the dark.”

Church leadership is about leadership—and that includes organizational and financial skills.

Linda A. Mercadante’s study counters those who suggest that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated is tantamount to secularization.

Eggers’s novel is about a mega social network corporation that takes over the world—seemingly benevolently. Its characters have no depth or soul; their personhood is defined by electronic connectedness. 

Most spirituality books provide advice for cultivating the familiar set of spiritual disciplines. This book is different.

Elizabeth Johnson shows how biblically informed faith comes alive when we look at the world through the lens of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

To Eugene Peterson, a church is not a demarcated zone of idealized community. The potential for misdirection and distraction abounds.

Pope Gregory the Great’s famous treatise, written at the end of the sixth century, presents challenges to and must be adapted for contemporary Protestant clergy. It is a provocative countercultural voice filled with wisdom for a young pastor. 

Reinhold Niebuhr was 23 years old when he began this journal of his experience as the pastor of a blue-collar church in Detroit. Pastors will be reassured to read how even the great Niebuhr struggles with the pastoral role. 

At the heart of evangelicals’ conflicted identity, Molly Worthen argues, is the “struggle to reconcile reason with revelation, heart with head, and private piety with the public square.”

The Harriet Beecher Stowe of Nancy Koester’s new biography is not the one with which most readers are familiar—the “little woman who made this big war,” as Abraham Lincoln reportedly said about the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

I return to this book more than almost any other because it reminds me why I’m a priest, what the church is, and how God is at work in places before I ever show up. Donovan shows me that what has become the ritual of worship is really a pattern of practices that are needed to remake community and shape society. 

I tried to talk myself out of selecting a young adult book published in 2012. How could John Green possibly be shelved alongside Tillich in the pastor’s study?

For Sharon Baker, theological consistency is essential, because “our perception of God influences how we behave.”

Mary Boys offers concrete proposals for how the story of Jesus’ crucifixion can be told faithfully in the presence of Jewish conversation partners.

In a recent issue of the Century, I interview Kent Haruf, whose novel Benediction has garnered a nomination for the newly minted Folio Prize in the United Kingdom and recent reviews in The Guardian (by Ursula Le Guin) and the Telegraph. Haruf has made a life out of fine and careful reading, as well as writing. I asked him for recommendations on five books that have helped him become more fully human.

Brian Blount mounts a sweeping plea for bold preaching about the God who invades and routes death. Resurrection, he argues, transforms all of us “living dead” into witnesses.