Serene Jones

Finding Grace Amid Trauma

Serene Jones knows how to bring a cerebral approach to Christianity. A systematic theologian, she taught at Yale University for 17 years before becoming the first woman president of Union Theological Seminary last year. For her, faith and intellect have never been far apart.

Over time, however, Jones grew concerned that she and her fellow theologians were far apart from those in society bearing the brunt of suffering. She worried her professional community wasn't offering much in the way of useful ideas for those who'd been through abuse, war, devastating accidents and other kinds of trauma.

“I kept stumbling,” Jones says, “into the arena of this question: how do theology, the Gospel and the Cross speak to people whose emotional and cognitive capacities are not at high rational function because they are oppressed?”

Jones's reflections on that question, along with poignant anecdotes, enliven her newest book, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Westminster John Knox, Oct.).

The new book marks a career turning point for Jones, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister and scholar of both John Calvin's thought and feminist theology. She previously wrote Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace (Fortress, 2000) and Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (WJK, 1995). At Union in New York City, she now oversees an institution famous for producing public intellectuals, from Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Paul Tillich and Cornel West. In this prominent position, she's making her own de facto debut as a writer with a message for the general public.

“I'm trying to write in a way that's more accessible and more oriented toward people who are not theologically trained, but are searching,” Jones says. “The book includes lots and lots of stories.” —G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Arlynda Lee Boyer

Racing to Enlightenment

How do you get to NASCAR from the television game show Jeopardy? By way of Buddhism. That's how it worked for Arlynda Lee Boyer, whose first book, Buddha on the Backstretch: The Spiritual Wisdom of Driving 200 MPH (Mercer Univ., Oct.) examines how the high-intensity sport of racecar driving illustrates the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

“I almost won a year's salary on Jeopardy, but talked myself out of the right answer to the final question,” Boyer says from her home in Staunton, Va. “And when I went home, instead of being happy that I came in second, I started thinking about this essay I had written when Dale Earnhardt died. It was about how he embodied Buddhist ideals.”

Earnhardt, who died in a crash during the final lap at the Daytona 500 in 2001, was like a Buddhist master, Boyer says. Like all good NASCAR drivers, he lived only in the moment and accepted that death could come around any bend. “Those are Buddhist ideals,” Boyer explains. “To live life to the fullest, to be in the moment and then let it go without attaching a lot of emotion to it. Drivers do that in a race. If they blow a tire, they just fix it and move on. In some ways, Dale taught me to be a better Buddhist because he lived like that.”

It's the eighth title in Mercer's Religion and Sports series; the series has 7,500 copies in print. “This book takes us beyond the traditional sports like basketball and baseball,” says Barbara Keene, Mercer's marketing director. “We have had a lot of interest in this book, especially at Book Expo. It has touched a nerve, for sure.” —Kimberly Winston

Omid Safi

Progressive Muslim Moving On

It wasn't until Muslim scholar Omid Safi showed his 16-year-old son an Islamic miniature depicting the Prophet Muhammad on his miraculous ascension to Heaven that Safi realized the power of images. The colorful depiction of the Prophet on a winged horse “just blew [him] away,” says Safi of his son's reaction. “He was hooked. He connected to the Prophet in a way that the boring medieval biographies had never done for him.”

So while most Muslims strictly adhere to a ban on images depicting Muhammad's face, Safi, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, chose to include several in his new book, Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters (HarperOne, Nov.). One image is a Persian-style portrait of Muhammad that Safi has hung in every home he has lived in—from the Iranian home of his childhood, where similar portraits could be found at most street corner shops, to his home today.

Safi simply believes that the portrait allows him to remember the spirituality and mercy of Muhammad. “We have transformed the Prophet as our situation has changed,” Safi says. Of late, the depiction of Muhammad as social engineer and Arab hero, proffered by such influential writers as Karen Armstrong, has dominated. “I have to confess I read through Karen Armstrong, but I just find it so flat,” Safi says.

Safi's yearning for “something different” had previously put him at the forefront of the Progressive Muslim movement, a term he coined in his previous book, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. As a cofounder of the Progressive Muslim Union, Safi eventually found himself embattled by both infighting among the organization's founders and board members as well as facing constant criticism over the term “Progressive Muslim” and its meaning. So he set himself anew to the task of writing Memories of Muhammad and re-chronicling the place of Muhammad's example within modern Muslim lives.

“The task of really being Muhammadi is something that's still ahead of us,” Safi says.—Asma Hasan

Carlos Eire

Snowballing Success

This is the enviable journey documented on Carlos Eire's CV: academic historian of the late medieval and early modern periods, graduate of Yale (three degrees), tenured at the University of Virginia and now back at Yale as the T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies for the past decade. So Eire must be a child of privilege grown to be a self-satisfied and stodgy bloviating intellectual. How wrong that is.

Here is the beginning of the scholar's journey. Cuban-born, Eire was just a boy when Castro took control of the island, applying a vise grip of militant ideology. Eire was one of the children spirited away from parents and home to a gritty new reality of poverty, vulnerability and promise in the United States. Not only has he not forgotten his early years in a vibrant Havana and the trauma of dislocation and resettlement but he wrote an award-winning memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), about it. (Fans will be happy to know a sequel is forthcoming.)

The most recent of Eire's books, A Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, Nov.), reflects something that he admits has fascinated him all his life. The topic has “deep, emotional roots. I don't want to die and vanish.”

Eire has been contemplating the topics of death, the afterlife and eternity for many years. While to modern Americans the notion of eternity is largely abstract, Eire's investigation revealed to him how immediate and compelling the idea has been throughout history. He observes that “eternity for us is more of a wish, so we're shocked that someone would actually go to such an extreme as the suicidal terrorists of 9/11, confident in the promise of eternity as some concrete reality.”

Consequently, besides numerous scholarly articles, academic papers and lectures, Eire also writes for people who want to read intellectually stimulating books that engage on a serious level, but don't need the technical treatments his scholarly peers require. Among his next books: a study of levitation in 17th-century Europe. With Eire as guide, expect serious scholarship along with levity. —Kristin Swenson