April 29, 2015

If vainglory is about stealing glory from God, it is unintelligible outside the house of faith. This may explain why Rebecca DeYoung's book flows against the current of attempts to reclaim narcissism and pride.

Eric Foner resurrects the history of the Underground Railroad, its powerful place in New York City, and how it helped Harriet Beecher Stowe and others bring about the war that ended slavery.

Anne Tyler's 20th novel is, like her previous 19, about a mildly dysfunctional Baltimore family of loyal yet infuriating people who love one another, but not always helpfully.

Marie Gottschalk describes an American penal system that has all but abandoned any real attempt to rehabilitate its inmates.

Our spring books issue includes scholars' recommendations of the best recently published books in Old Testament, theology, and ethics.

When Jeanne Bishop learned of her sister's murder, she found herself saying aloud, "I don't want to hate anybody."

Why was the first Gilded Age a time of sometimes violent resistance, while ours is an age of acquiescence? Steve Fraser's answer is twofold: capitalism has changed, and so has the social imaginary that enfolds it.

Just when I was feeling despondent, I was asked to review a book by Luigi Giussani. His rhetoric both bamboozled and mesmerized me.

I kept quiet about my faith for fear of embarrassment. Then I read Anne Lamott, and suddenly I wasn't so alone.

These days, we need a strong current of theological explication of Christian eschatology. Richard Middleton has stepped forward—and his book doesn't even mention zombies.

Richard Hays has said for years that he's working on something about "echoes of scripture in the Gospels." But life intervened, so he has produced this slim volume as an appetizer.

Morton Kelsey showed me that I was under a spell that needed to be broken.

I read Lauren Winner's new book with the sort of joy one feels when watching someone utterly hit their stride.

Princeton Theological Seminary can be a lonely place for an African American professor. During a difficult period, I saw Isabel Wilkerson on PBS.

I was 29, agonizing over a decision, when I came upon a little book by Robert Ochs.

Instead of sitting down to rage at a blank page again, I grabbed a copy of Don Quixote. Three days later, the ice of time had cracked.

Study of the Armenian genocide has attracted many fine scholars, but Ronald Suny's book stands out.

When I was 13, my pastor slipped me Glenn Clark's The Soul's Sincere Desire. Within three pages, I knew I had a soul.

In her 11th novel Toni Morrison returns to the foundation of most of her fiction: childhood and its traumatic effects.

Karl Ove Knausgaard forced me to cancel six months of my life in order to fixate on 30 years of his.

The appeal of Abandonment to Divine Providence is its simple, lyrical repetition of a single idea: whatever happens is the will of God.

The "Fall of Rome...is not a historical event; it's more akin to a theological idea." So proclaims Douglas Boin, sacking the understanding of early Christian identity that has prevailed since at least the second century.