Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt
It takes a certain level of self-deception to be a lukewarm evangelical. Intense piety is in the tradition’s DNA....
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
A fresh telling of the earliest encounters between the Islamic world and Christian Europe hardly needs justification....
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Late in Denis Johnson’s novel, one of his many defeated, aimless characters, Bill Houston, surveys what Johnson elsewhere calls “the cancelled life”:...
God's Harvard
In my personal evangelical heyday back in the Reagan 1980s, one measure of zeal for my college crowd was our willi...
American Fascists
Your fundamentalist grandmother is unwittingly abetting a tyrannical conspiracy....
Close encounters
To counter the pervasive influence of religion in our mountain hometown, my father once loane...
Wandering pilgrim
Literature is a greater rival to religion than science is because both religion and literature seek the same kind of good....
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
As the defining crisis in American history gathered momentum and became civil war, ministers in both the North and the South spoke with authority, even defiance, about the overriding purposes of God. The impact was sobering. Precisely at a time when Protestant influence on national values had no real rivals, America collapsed into a war over the decisive moral issue of the day.
She Got Up Off the Couch
Five years after A Girl Named Zippy, Haven Kimmel returns to her life story with She Got Up off ...