Books

The Six-Day War, as Caitlin Carenen argues, represented a turning point in American Protestant views of Israel.

People tend to remember John Woolman as a heroic individual, both a reformer and a saint. Geoffrey Plank takes a broader view.

Robert Lustig argues that blame is the last thing overweight people need.

Wrigley Field and Fourth Presbyterian Church both opened in 1914. It's the perfect image of my lifelong connection to God and baseball.

How can churches and other religious institutions speak effectively to let the world know that something is happening with church people that they might want to be a part of?

It has become cliché to note that we live in a world of information overload. Being cliché, of course, does not make it any less true. We professors are well aware of our inability to keep up with the fantastic production of new knowledge in our own specialties, yet the torrent of words overwhelms not only scholars but all readers. Who can possibly read all the books, magazines, journals, newspapers, blogs, tweets and posts worth reading? And what is worth reading, anyway?  This deluge is often ascribed to the digital revolution, and indeed the internet and pervasive connectivity have greatly expanded our reading options. Nevertheless, the historically minded will recognize in our current situation merely the ongoing ripples of earlier information revolutions.

In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence. I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention.

Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith render things – a graveyard walk, a dream about an elevator, a Neil Young song – into something else entirely.

Forty-two percent of U.S. marriages are interfaith. Naomi Schaefer-Riley convinced me that this is one of the biggest stories in religious life.