Books
A masterful survey of American religious history
Thomas Tweed offers a bold new benchmark for scholars, with an expansive scope across 11 millennia and far beyond Protestantism.
The minds and money behind MAGA
Books by Laura Field and Jacob Silverman expose how right-wing intellectuals and tech billionaires have joined forces to dismantle the democratic order.
Trending topics: Gaza
Four new books that shed light on the war in Gaza
Not homeless enough to count
Brian Goldstone shows how America’s housing system renders five working families in Atlanta invisible even as they teeter on the brink of collapse.
Seeing Christ’s image in Orthodox women
Ashley Marie Purpura explores the Eastern church’s androcentrism—and finds resources to counter it from within the tradition.
The Black Madonna and the church’s imagination
Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones argues that to name Mary as Black is to challenge Christianity’s complicity in colonization and to claim sacred Blackness.
What’s the connection between evangelicalism and conspiracy theories?
According to Jared Stacy, it’s fundamentally about language and story—and it goes back to Colonial America.
A 17th-century Dear Abby
Mary Beth Norton steers between the timeless and the time-lost in this all-too-slim book about the world’s first advice column.
Thumbs up
Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson zoom in on the like button as a synecdoche of digitalized life.
Marjorie Maddox’s vital disquiet
Her poems weave stories of trauma and survivorship, dancing on the frail and fraying edges of memory and perception.
Death work
Sarah Jobe puts testimonies from her fellow prison chaplains in conversation with Karl Barth’s work on reconciliation. Does resurrection matter in the face of state-sanctioned suffering?
Buried secrets
In Susan Gregg Gilmore’s new southern parable, 12-year-old Leonard buries his neighbors’ regrets alongside his own amputated leg.
A theology of self-help according to Thecla
Meggan Watterson finds in the Acts of Paul and Thecla a seven-step journey for personal growth.
The UFW march and the writing of Catholic history
On March 17, 1966, farmworkers marched to Sacramento in a procession replete with Stations of the Cross. Jeannine Hill Fletcher seeks to foreground them and others whose land, labor, and lives were effectively stolen in the name of Christ.
What criminal justice reform will require
Debbie Hines draws on her legal career in Baltimore to show what redemption looks like in practice.
Rethinking atonement with an emphasis on trust
In her third book on trust, Teresa Morgan argues that it is what empowers us to turn away from wrongdoing and suffering and toward God.
Deconstructing the Catholic imagination
Rebecca Bratten Weiss finds treasures in the ruins of Christian literary classics. But first, the idols need to be smashed.
Practicing compassionate patriotism
Recent books by Amanda Tyler and Drew Strait offer concrete, actionable advice for resisting Christian nationalism.
What a society needs to survive
Yuval Noah Harari’s history of information networks emphasizes two crucial characteristics: truth telling and self-correction.
A novel about the real mother of Jesus
In Kaethe Schwehn’s imaginative tale, the lives of Yeshua, his Greek birth mother Salome, and his adoptive parents Mari and Yosef drip with the brutal and the beautiful.