Books

Some classic works on the origins of modernity give pride of place to Calvinism. D. G. Hart will have none of it.

Reading Edwidge Danticat’s novel Claire of the Sea Light is like swimming through a gentle tide in a body of water known for riptides. The feeling that something invisible, fierce, and irreparable is just under the surface never quite leaves the corner of the reader’s mind.  The story traces relational ties in Ville Rose, a small coastal village town in Haiti.

Nigel Biggar thinks that Western Christians are willfully ignoring that soldiers and military action are essential to social peace and justice.

R. S. Sugirtharajah sees both sides of the mirror: Christian views of Asian faiths and the reciprocal gaze of Asian believers.

Emily Holmes endeavors, with the help of French feminist theories, to understand several of the medieval mystics who are most alien to 21st-century religious sensibilities.

In 1920, not long after the Great War, a little-known agitator gave a speech in Munich on the topic, "Why Are We Anti-Semites?" The speaker concluded that it was important to prevent Germany “from suffering a death by crucifixion." Of course this agitator became quite well known—it was Adolf Hitler—and we know what his antisemitism led to.

Flannery O’Connor never wrote just for herself, God, and an elite group of peers. She was eager for an audience with ears to hear about grace.

As a prospective monk at the Algerian Trappist monastery, Freddy Derwahl came to know the community before the 1996 abduction of seven brothers.

Margaret Bendroth and John Fea both contend that Christians need to encounter the past in all its complexity and humanity.

Stanley Hauerwas’s book is about learning how to die and training how to be human. Broadly speaking, it is a book about time and purpose—or, better said, the purpose of time.

The Good Lord Bird is a tale of the antebellum South like none you’ve heard. A young slave is liberated by John Brown, who will later try to ignite a revolution.

Joshua Dubler shows up at a maximum-security prison as a budding ethnographer. He becomes a man captured by friendships.