Books

Robert Wuthnow's stories occasionally confound his data. But he lets the contradictions sit—producing a rich tapestry of small-town life.

There will never be another like Hauerwas. His piety-free personality guarantees that.

I'm delighted that Malcolm Gladwell has rediscovered his Christian faith. But I worry that David and Goliath is like the Bob Dylan album Saved.

If positive thinking leaves you cold, Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote will be just what the title promises.

The U.S. is the only Western democracy that retains the death penalty. Evan Mandery tells the story of the long legal campaign against it.

To read John Updike is to remember just how upper-middle-class and masculine his fictional universe is.

It's easy to write off David Rakoff's novel in verse as a cliché. But Rakoff was master enough of his craft that his rhymes lapse into doggerel only when he chooses.

How many gadgets are de rigueur these days? I’m considering upgrading from my “dumb phone” to a smart phone, and I’m tempted to try an e-reader. At the same time, I’m troubled by the unspoken reality: we gadget people are an elite minority, a society of first-world people who have access to a network and its benefits that others don’t have. Or do we really believe that the entire world will soon be “like us,” connected into one happy progressively social network?

How are we to reconcile the Old Testament's violence with the gospel? Jerome Creach's book is among the best of a recent stream of books on the topic.

As we unpack the same ornaments, read the same stories and entertain the same deep thoughts our ancestors did, we have every reason to be gloriously unoriginal.

Do smartphones make us smarter? Have breakthroughs in communications technology improved the quality of our lives? Media guru Douglas Rushkoff takes these questions on.

David Nirenberg has produced a highly learned intellectual history of anti-Judaism that is also lively, engaging and accessible.

As with many memoirists, Bolz-Weber's personal faults beget literary ones. Yet our regard for the narrator becomes less important than our regard for Christ.

A special Christmas review of noteworthy books, music and TV.