Books

Books

How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel

It is easy for us to underestimate the aura that surrounded a written text in the ancient world. As you read this review, you are performing something that once seemed like magic: converting signs on a printed page into human speech.
Cover Story

Pursuing Kerry

Complaints about John Kerry’s “religion problem” are of a piece with complaints about his personality.

Call to arms

Conventional wisdom holds that a select group of World War I poets and writers, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen among them, forever changed the way we see war.
Cover Story

Faith-based politics

Most of the Nazi leaders considered themselves not merely Christians but instruments of God’s will, proclaims Richard Steigmann-Gall, a young Canadian historian. Many people think that if the Nazis had any religion it was derived from Wagner’s operas and Teutonic mythology.