Books

Angela O'Donnell's sassy poems are born of her deeply Catholic imagination. She builds a house of saints, canonized or not.

Elaine Pagels's book repeats a winning formula: contrast the canon's controversial parts with more appealing Gnostic selections.

Steven Pinker says human beings are becoming less violent. But his larger point seems to be that everyone should think like he does.

The term world Christianity has been widely used since the publication of Philip Jenkins’s 2002 best seller The Next Christendom, but in popular usage it has tended to refer only to Christianity in the Global South. Though courses on world Christianity have proliferated, no one until Douglas Jacobsen has taken the care to delineate the contours of the entire global movement.

Some two decades before Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote the seminal 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which improved the public conversation about religion and society in the United States, Bellah penned a provocative essay called “Religious Evolution.” He has finally returned to that ambitious theme.

Michael Moore's work is that of a repentant sinner called to bring the news—not all of it good—to folks who would rather do without it.

Alain de Botton is offiicially enthusiastic, but his book is wistful. Atheists who pick it up may find themselves undergoing a crisis of faithlessness.

Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for a Christian Sexual Ethics is at #16 on the current Amazon sales list. When is the last time a sane, scholarly, carefully argued and theologically rich book of sexual ethics ranked that high? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it was recent. (Four out of the top five on the Amazon list are versions of Fifty Shades of Gray. If only those readers would open up Farley!) To make matters even stranger, the book is six years old and used mostly in seminaries and at religious institutions. The flurry of interest was provoked by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The title of Nathaniel Philbrick’s slim new meditation foregrounds the questions at the heart of every assignment made by every English teacher: Why read this book? Or that book? For that matter, why do we assign reading in the first place?

The Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. I have learned to comfort myself with Christian verities such as steadfastness and hope.

To those who fear that Christian cultural engagement is in a state of intellectual poverty, Marilynne Robinson's work offers reason to hope.

In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv sounded an alarm over the loss of outdoor experiences for children. Not only children, however, need to be outdoors.

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer of stunning power. She is also a writer who spends pages mistaking journal entries for literature.

Julia Scheeres’s unsettling book reminds us that Peoples Temple could have appealed to anyone concerned about racism, sexism and poverty.

While Christian scholars have long questioned body-soul dualism, it remains common in church circles. This may finally be changing.

Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt focus on the first half of Thurman’s life, finding there not only the deep and complex roots of his mature works, but also a far-reaching influence on historical events and actors.