Books

Randall Balmer uses Jimmy Carter's career to trace the history of progressive religious beliefs in the post-Watergate political environment.

Ministry is one of the only professions besides writing where a person has daily need for poetry. Poetry refreshes and renews language and adds insight to stories we’ve heard many times. It can be woven meaningfully into sermons, and it bolsters the human spirit. But pastors often turn to the same poets over and over again, and time to explore new territory is limited.

In Simon Blackburn's inquiry into how to get our love of self into balance, self-esteem and shame appear alongside traits such as integrity and sincerity.

Pope Francis and Simone Campbell's recent books have much in common. Yet the standoff between U.S. sisters and the Vatican continues.

Nicholas Healy's central methodological criticism of Stanley Hauerwas is that he "is concerned with the logic of coming to believe and the logic of Christian living rather more than the logic of belief."

Three things I am reading this summer, and three that I am not.

Todd Purdum's work of journalistic history on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is ultimately a story about politicians doing the right thing.

Philip Jenkins vividly synthesizes a specialized historiography: World War I as a global religious conflict.

Erika Hayasaki, having reported on a succession of traumatic events, read about a popular university class on death. She decided to enroll.

Owuor's novel wrestles with Kenya's bitter remnants of colonialism. Yet it suggests that the future can be shaped by people who are willing to incorporate the past with honesty and integrity.

Updike's religious explorations are what make his writing so interesting, and Adam Begley explores them well. But he devotes too much space to trying to link fictional settings and characters with Updike's real life.

In two pages, you go from a simple devotional habit to being sucked into the vortex of global power plays. You must be reading Brueggemann.

In this long, freewheeling conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, Eberhard Busch sometimes uses the document for leverage against distortions in the contemporary church, and sometimes challenges its assumptions.

C. L. Seow explores how the book of Job might have been understood by its original writers and audiences, and how we might look at it now.

Alistair McGrath offers an intellectual history of Emil Brunner's life and thought—and pleads for a recovery of his theology.