Books

An annotated list by the author of Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction.

It has become fashionable to narrate the lives of books. Paul Gutjahr offers a brief and readable account of the Book of Mormon's history.

Can Protestants believe in purgatory? Should they? Might this enhance ecumenical relations with Catholics? Jerry Walls's answer to each question is yes.

Joel Salatin's new book offers a full banquet of opinions, prescriptions and rants. How does the man find time to farm?

Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott's remarkable book will undoubtedly become the standard scholarly introduction to Jonathan Edwards's theology.

The spate of books on John Henry Newman shows that there is little hope of settling arguments about him—or about Benedict's understanding of him.

Jill Gill has produced a remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and the NCC in the 1960s and 70s.

Ten years ago, I studied readers of the then popular Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels. If I conducted that study today, I would potentially have access to far more objective data about readers than I did. How quickly do they read? Where do they stop reading? What passages do they mark? Do they write notes in the margins? E-books are providing companies with the opportunity for all of this information and more about people who use e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.

Amanda Porterfield details the degree of rationalist skepticism in 1790s America—and its demise in the face of a Protestant counterattack.

Last spring I visited the Paris exhibition Cranach in His Time, where I was introduced to a sampling of Lucas Cranach Sr.’s diverse and sometimes puzzling range of work. Cranach (1472–1553) produced more than 1,500 paintings, not to mention engravings, decorative work and altarpieces. I began my tour with his portrait of the powerful and shrewd Frederick the Wise, who was Saxon’s ruling elector, Cranach’s patron and Luther’s protector. A little further on I studied a portrait of Luther, Cranach’s friend and partner, painted as a nonthreatening monk—an effort to persuade his critics that he was not dangerous.

Diana Butler Bass's new book is warm and winsome. But it lacks the particularizing power of her earlier work's grounding in stories about specific communities and people.

In the decade since 9/11, it seems as though every trade publisher and university press has brought forth a guide to the Qur’an for the perplexed. Carl Ernst eschews the usual method for books of this sort.

Faith, as Marcelo learns in Franciso X. Stork's young-adult novel, is following the music when we don't hear it.

A man stumbled into church drunk and bleeding from his hand. "I have hepatitis C," he said. I remembered this as I read Richard Beck's book Unclean.