Books

Theo Hobson’s ambitious book traces the historical emergence and fate of liberal theology in the modern period. He defends the “liberal state” and the way good liberal Christianity is allied with it.

Karen Hering believes that writing is a way to tune into your inner voice and discover the relationship you have with whom or what you believe in.

Julian Barnes’s attempt to console himself with “It’s just the universe doing its stuff” recalls C.S. Lewis’s recoil from the “goodness” of God.

U.S. society has shorn food production of its spiritual dimension. Fred Bahnson and Ragan Sutterfield explore this issue from different directions.

Yang Jisheng argues that totalitarian states tend to develop policies in a vacuum and find it difficult to change course. Thomas Keneally would agree.

James MacGregor Burns has authored an eminently readable history of that elusive historical movement we call the Enlightenment.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. contends that to be fully prepared to share a word from God with a congregation, a preacher should attend to storytellers, biographers, poets and journalists.

Power is a gift, a means of peacemaking, a God-sanctioned key to human flourishing. This is the striking claim advanced in Andy Crouch's engaging new book.

There are few heroes in Sheri Fink's harrowing narrative of overwhelmed health-care workers during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Christians in the United States who are committed to accompanying the churches of the Middle East are looking for help in understanding the shifting dynamics of the region after the Arab Spring. Paul Danahar’s lengthy study would seem to promise such help.

Novelist Kent Haruf has often drawn on his upbringing on the sparse eastern plains of Colorado. But in his latest novel, Benediction, Haruf inches closer to his roots than he ever has. One of his central characters is a minister in a small town church that’s much like the ones that Haruf grew up in as the son of a Methodist minister. 

The genius of Doug Ottati’s work is that he illuminates ways that theology is a source for rather than an obstacle to piety and practical living. 

The aging-parent memoir is a crowded genre. Still, I was eager to read Jeanne Murray Walker’s account of her mother’s last years. I wasn’t disappointed.

The power of Amina Gautier’s stories is in the way they portray the undertow of danger that pulls at African American youth in a Brooklyn housing project.