Books

Brantley Gasaway contends that the progressive evangelical movement "stands as strong as ever." Which is to say, not very strong at all.

Austen Ivereigh's book on Francis has caused some controversy. It's also the most important biography of Jorge Mario Bergoglio yet published.

It’s easy to imagine health-care reform that does more than the ACA. It's almost impossible to see it getting enacted, as Steven Brill's book reminds us.

Why do scientists turn to questions traditionally reserved for the humanities? Tom McLeish argues for a deep kinship between the two spheres.

Secularists from Voltaire to Richard Dawkins have attacked religion for its connection to violence. Karen Armstrong flatly rejects the idea.

Samuel Adams's book is important on two counts: he focuses on the once-neglected period of the Second Temple, and he asks economic questions rather than theological-spiritual ones.

More religious people support torture under Obama than they did under Bush. In this context, Rebecca Gordon's book is required reading.

Brian Steensland and Philip Goff's valuable anthology addresses a topic that usually flies under the media's radar: "new" evangelicals' progressive social engagement.

Histories of U.S. Pentecostalism have long focused on two narratives: black and white. Gastón Espinosa looks instead at Latino Pentecostals.

For there to be a heresy about the cross, there would have to be an orthodoxy about it. Michael Gorman argues that contentions over how Jesus saves lead to an inadequate grasp of what the Passion means and does.

Reading Amy-Jill Levine's Short Stories by Jesus, I kept wishing she had published it earlier. It would have saved me some mistakes in the pulpit.

George Steiner said that "the translator invades, extracts, and brings home." In this remarkable volume, Everett Fox does all of this.

Matthew McCullough argues that the Spanish-American War signaled a crucial turning point in American self-understanding and self-justification.

At the hospital where I work, families may form relationships with pastoral care staff—but they come for our clinical competence in medicine. Gary Ferngren points out how new and odd this is.

Kyle Minor's second collection of short stories follows the success of his first, In the Devil's Territory, with acclaim. It is a beautiful work—and one that I believe promises more than it delivers.