Books

Drawing on Harry S. Stout, Stanley Hauerwas argues that the Civil War became a total, unlimited war because the demand to participate assumed a sacral status.

Slogans are necessary, Jenson says, both for practical reasons (we need shortcuts in arguments) and rhetorical ones (we need vivid ways of summing up a position). But problems arise when slogans become "untethered from the complex of ideas and practices which they once evoked."

In the long struggle for freedom in South Africa, parts of the church played a major role, even as other parts colluded with the apartheid regime. Few actions in that struggle were more important than the Belhar Confession.

These seven books offer help in thinking about the structure and content of clergy peer groups.

Paul Farmer has a keen sense of the tendency to portray Haitians as helpless victims. This is well evident in his poignant chronicle of the year that began with the January 2010 earthquake.

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer for Britain's Open University, a service originated by the BBC to provide education via television to adults who had not gone on to higher education. A Little History of Philosophy is focused on that audience and on anyone else who knows little about philosophy except that it is, as Warburton says, "impenetrable and obscure."

Though some of his admirers may find it difficult to believe now, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not widely known in the years immediately following World War II, save perhaps as one of a band of courageous pastors and theologians in Germany who resisted the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

Karl Marlantes's new book is not fiction, but it develops the idea of his novel Matterhorn: that war provides a sense of transcendence that can be found nowhere else.

It's time for the talk, says Sandra Steingraber: the talk about the pollutants that are infiltrating our lives and threatening the health of all of us, especially our children.

Amy Waldman's debut novel asks us to take a long look at our post-9/11 selves and be disappointed.

The older and more tattered my Bible becomes, the more it becomes part of me.

The architecture of Naked Spirituality is a bit complicated. But if you can bear with it, you'll find that Brian McLaren offers countless insights.

With his imagination in overdrive, Bruce Fisk has created a fictional character to guide readers through the Holy Land and the thickets of New Testament scholarship.

A special Christmas review of noteworthy books, video and music. Categories include theology and spirituality, creative nonfiction, fiction, history and current events, children's literature, TV on DVD, choral Christmas music and popular music.