Features
Moving down in the world: Called to a smaller place
Acquainted with grief: The church’s way with death
Culture changers: David Hollinger on what the mainline achieved
River revival: Can the Jordan roll again?
I Wish and Moonrise Kingdom
Voices
Philip Jenkins
The clash that wasn’t
Somehow, newspapers never publish banner headlines announcing "World's Largest Muslim State Fails to Persecute Christians."
Stephanie Paulsell
The right note
Faith, as Marcelo learns in Franciso X. Stork's young-adult novel, is following the music when we don't hear it.
Books
Church as problem and solution
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.
How to Read the Qur’an, by Carl W. Ernst
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.
Unclean, by Richard Beck
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.