In this stimulating meditation, Pierce (Hell Without Fires), dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, draws on “the subversive nature of the gospel” to examine the “historical wounds” of Black people in America. Exploring how shame is wielded by the powerful against the vulnerable, she links the story of how the prophetess Miriam was shunned for having leprosy to a viral 2015 video of an encounter in which a Black girl in a bathing suit was forcibly restrained by the police. In Pierce’s telling, the Bible story and the video both evoke how humiliation is internalized by Black women and girls who have historically been denied agency over their bodies. Elsewhere, she looks at how Black women in the rural South used knowledge passed down through generations to heal others with plants and roots for salves and painkillers, caring for the sick despite being wounded and endangered themselves. According to Pierce, the contemporary scientific validation of those ancestral healing methods disproves another “dominant story: that the traditions of rural southern folk were ignorant, unscientific, and based on superstition.” Such insights are thought-provoking, though the author’s tendency to rove rapidly between biblical, personal, and historical anecdotes can prevent them from cohering into a unified argument. Still, this is a resonant, richly detailed study of the complex relationship between race and faith in America. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

The recent decline of Christianity poses a crisis for the religion and for American democracy, according to this stimulating if uneven treatise. Rauch (The Constitution of Knowledge), a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, contends that a mass “dechurching” over the past 25 years has left a “God-shaped hole” in American society that secularism has been unable to fill. At the same time, the remaining segment of Christianity has sharpened into “a divisive, fearful, partisan” movement that prizes “un-Christian” values like aggression and strength. (That shift has been driven in part by society’s increased secularization, Rauch suggests, as Christians are influenced by politicians and evangelical media personalities, resulting in a faith that’s radicalized and less spiritually fulfilling.) Rauch calls for a “positive realignment” between faith and liberalism, proposing that pastors preach an attitude “of care and stewardship for civic institutions” and that secular activists take more seriously concerns about religious freedoms. Unfortunately, there are gaps in Rauch’s argument for a supportive relationship between faith and liberalism—most notably, how other religions, especially non–Judeo-Christian ones, might fit into this supposedly pluralistic system. The result is an intriguing if incomplete analysis of faith’s complicated role in an increasingly secular society. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

With this upbeat guide, McReynolds (Make Room), a Grammy-winning gospel singer, invites burned-out believers to seek comfort in their “true, core identity as a son or daughter of God.” After a hectic year touring the country and producing an album left him feeling like he was “choking alone in the high altitude,” he realized the professional success he’d achieved had come at the expense of relationships with friends, family, and God. He contrasts this achievement-obsessed “mountain mindset” with a “less glamorous but sustaining” valley mindset, in which one finds the “restoration” and “perspective-keeping” needed to live a full life. Tips for accessing the valley mindset include cultivating gratitude, serving others, and connecting with God via prayer, Bible study, or fasting. Despite hammering home his central metaphor a bit too hard in somewhat stilted prose (“Don’t do the climb without doing the time!”), McReynolds’s model of how to balance faith and professional aspirations gains credibility thanks to his candid personal anecdotes and refreshing sense of self-awareness. Christians who want to chase their dreams without forsaking their faith should take note. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/13/2024 | Details & Permalink

Journalist Shenon (The Commission) delivers a dense history of the modern Catholic church. Covering the past 75 years, he depicts an institution caught between the competing ideals of authority versus tolerance, or what Pope John XXIII referred to as the “medicine of mercy.” During WWII, Shenon notes, Pope Pius XII promulgated “dire warnings about sinful practices” and ignored “irrefutable intelligence” about the deaths of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Later, he centralized power in the Vatican with a 1949 decree that reinforced strict divisions between Catholics and Protestants. In the 1960s, John XXIII permitted worship in Latin to be replaced with vernacular language and pursued reconciliation efforts with the Jewish people. Subsequent popes were drawn into debates over birth control, sexuality, and relations with the world’s religions. Shenon digs most deeply into the church’s child sexual abuse scandals, arguing that John Paul III and Benedict XVI helped to cover them up by sitting on reams of evidence and failing to investigate accused clergy members. Drawing on prodigious research, the author paints a richly detailed portrait of a complex, hierarchical, and secretive institution as it grappled with a modernizing world. Unfortunately, the profusion of detail sometimes precludes broader meditations on the long-term implications of the crises described. Still, devoted Catholics and scholars of Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Foster care advocate Petersen (Fostered) aims in this compassionate guide to help Christians dismantle the false beliefs that undergird their destructive thought patterns. Arguing that feelings of “brokenness” can nurture a closeness to God, she assures readers struggling with self-hatred that loving themselves isn’t conceited (embracing “who God created you to be” is a holy act); with restlessness that “chasing unpromised potential” instead of appreciating what one has precludes satisfaction (“God may be trying to bring you healing with what you have, right where you are”); and with a lack of purposele that one’s “calling” lies not in professional aspirations but in serving as a “witness to God’s love” by loving others. Petersen makes clear throughout that the emotional healing process is often nonlinear and should facilitate self-acceptance rather than the prevention of pain, which can be an impetus for connecting with others and trying to understand Christ’s suffering. Blending Petersen’s vulnerable disclosures from a volatile childhood spent in and out of the foster care system with her concrete tips for healing (including daily mantras to reinforce one’s faith), this is a valuable starting point for believers looking to turn over a new leaf. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wagner (Godwired), a professor of religious studies at Ithaca College, explores in this scrupulous study the uniquely American myth of the self-­proclaimed “vigilante messiah” who “performs radical salvation with a gun.” Drawing from Christian apocalypticism and the American frontier myth, the narrative of the vigilante messiah took shape in the country’s earliest days, according to Wagner, and transformed “flesh-and-blood” cowboys who violently subdued Indigenous peoples into “strapping heroes” carrying out the “symbolically important” feat of conquering the West. In prevailing over a dehumanized enemy, the hero ushers in a “purified” society “where faith in God is replaced with faith in oneself,” rejecting communal systems and the modern anxieties they bring, like immigration and resource depletion. Wagner explores how the myth evolved in popular culture and art, from John Wayne westerns to such apocalyptic films as Armageddon, and draws intriguing and disturbing links to American mass shootings and the January 6 Capitol insurrection (whose gun-toting participants, Wagner argues, envisioned themselves as “pious judges trying to bring about a new world”). Ambitious and wide-ranging, this is a thought-provoking dissection of one of America’s founding stories and its lingering effects. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this quippy guide, Motherly contributor Johnston (coauthor of I’ll Be There (but I’ll Be Wearing Sweatpants)) calls on women to cast aside unrealistic social expectations and embrace their God-given “flaws and gifts.” Recalling her adolescent struggles with an eating disorder, the author describes how she transformed “from a girl who hated her flaws and was at war with her body to one who thinks her flaws are some of the greatest things about her.” She did so by dismantling false notions that lead to personal dissatisfaction—among them that rejection is akin to social death, that one must “be all things to all people,” and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Solid suggestions, like recognizing that what brings “peace and purpose” is important even if it seems ordinary—“I don’t always feel excited about the day-to-day mundane (sometimes I lose myself down a rabbit hole of Instagram escapism), but I know deep down it’s where I’m supposed to be”—are enlivened by Johnston’s refreshingly self-aware humor (“Hi, I’m Jess and I’m a people pleaser. I also dabble in codependency just for fun”). Christian women should take note of this down-to-earth invitation to seek self-acceptance. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Economic exploitation is “the root from which racism springs” and can be eradicated through adherence to Christian values, according to this impassioned debut. Pastor Foley explains how the “pursuit of profit” has fueled racism in America, with slavery ensuring American economic dominance through the violent extraction of labor, and public lynchings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wielded as “the post-slavery whip” to retain “political and economic power” over Black people. Foley also details how racist greed has been utilized by religious communities—including proslavery pastors who affirmed “out of one side of their mouth... that Africans were created in the image of God and then, out of the other side, spoke of how ‘emancipat[ing] our negroes’ would be tantamount to acting against God’s providence”—then calls for Christians to fight “racial capitalism” through initiatives like sharing one’s time or money with the needy. Debunking claims that racism is rooted solely in individuals (and thus see solutions mostly in relationship building), Foley persuasively argues that such “surface-level” fixes leave intact racism’s essential purpose: “to establish systems of wealth” that beneficiaries “perpetuate without being trampled on by those same systems.” The result is both a forceful call to recognize the roots of American inequality and a solid starting point for Christians who want to help fix them. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitude than a tightly woven “communal web” where silence is not a means of retreating into the self but shedding it to better live in the world. As a result of his visits, Iyer comes to see the ways in which the sacred shows up again and again in the mundane. For example, the tiny Tokyo apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her small children becomes a self-contained paradise (“Now I can see luxury is defined by all you don’t have to long for”), while the wildfires that regularly break out in the hills of California—and over the years claim his mother’s house and endanger the monastery itself—serve as a reminder that “the sacred is not a sanctuary... its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled.” The author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, “it’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.” This is stunning. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Yale theology professor Leppin (Martin Luther) paints a granular portrait of a saint who remains a remarkably resonant symbol for Christians. Peeling back the “interpretative layers” of medieval hagiography, he reveals Francis to be both strikingly contemporary and firmly of his time. On the one hand, he was a “restless” young man driven by feelings of “dislocation” to abandon an affluent upbringing to minister to the poor, and whose closeness to nature have led some to characterize him as an early “representative of the ecological movement.” On the other, he believed in the mysterious power of relics and may have practiced self-flagellation to drive the devil from his flesh. Placing his subject within the context of church history, Leppin makes illuminating points about how Francis’s “idiosyncratic path” was not entirely “a reflexive function of his own personal experience,” but instead fit within the church’s aims of spreading Christianity to Muslims (Francis preached to Muslims and possibly aimed to convert the Sultan of Egypt to Christianity during the Fifth Crusade). Scholars of Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/22/2024 | Details & Permalink