Books

As a prospective monk at the Algerian Trappist monastery, Freddy Derwahl came to know the community before the 1996 abduction of seven brothers.

Margaret Bendroth and John Fea both contend that Christians need to encounter the past in all its complexity and humanity.

Stanley Hauerwas’s book is about learning how to die and training how to be human. Broadly speaking, it is a book about time and purpose—or, better said, the purpose of time.

The Good Lord Bird is a tale of the antebellum South like none you’ve heard. A young slave is liberated by John Brown, who will later try to ignite a revolution.

Joshua Dubler shows up at a maximum-security prison as a budding ethnographer. He becomes a man captured by friendships.

Theo Hobson’s ambitious book traces the historical emergence and fate of liberal theology in the modern period. He defends the “liberal state” and the way good liberal Christianity is allied with it.

Karen Hering believes that writing is a way to tune into your inner voice and discover the relationship you have with whom or what you believe in.

Julian Barnes’s attempt to console himself with “It’s just the universe doing its stuff” recalls C.S. Lewis’s recoil from the “goodness” of God.

U.S. society has shorn food production of its spiritual dimension. Fred Bahnson and Ragan Sutterfield explore this issue from different directions.

Yang Jisheng argues that totalitarian states tend to develop policies in a vacuum and find it difficult to change course. Thomas Keneally would agree.

James MacGregor Burns has authored an eminently readable history of that elusive historical movement we call the Enlightenment.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr. contends that to be fully prepared to share a word from God with a congregation, a preacher should attend to storytellers, biographers, poets and journalists.

Power is a gift, a means of peacemaking, a God-sanctioned key to human flourishing. This is the striking claim advanced in Andy Crouch's engaging new book.