Yerby debuts with an upbeat call for Christian women to step out of their comfort zones and into their God-given calling. Drawing from her experience founding the Christian Entrepreneur Organization, she lays out how readers can take stock of their natural gifts, then brainstorm how to use them in ways that help others and honor God. Mapping out a path to one’s purpose also entails attending to God’s “gentle,” day-to-day nudges (e.g., heeding an idea that pops into one’s mind year after year) and planting seeds for success, like speaking about a topic one is passionate about “even when you have a small audience.” With patience and faith, she writes, the “gifts and ideas that God has placed in your heart” will eventually become “tangible fruit.” The author’s tone is refreshingly reassuring and optimistic, and her advice makes up for what it lacks in novelty with exercises and useful reflection questions (“What questions have you been avoiding asking God?... Once you can identify the questions you’ve been avoiding and the reasoning behind it, you can move forward toward getting the clarity you need to pursue your purpose”). Believers stuck at professional crossroads will be especially gratified. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

This illuminating study from Shabazz (Growing up X), the daughter of Malcolm X, mines her father’s 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca for a template for spiritual transformation, or awakening to the “truth of who were are.” Shabazz breaks her father’s pilgrimage into steps, from his initial alienation from the Nation of Islam and crisis of faith, through his “surrender,” or leaving behind of “cherished arguments with reality,” to his “liberating grief” over the traumatic losses of a spiritual community and a previously “unshakable” theological framework. Later steps on the path to spiritual transformation involved recognizing that one is part of an interdependent whole, a realization that aided Malcolm X’s abandonment of the Nation’s separatist philosophy and his reimagining of the struggle for Black self-determination on a global scale. Such an understanding of oneness is key for today’s activists, Shabazz explains, because “sensing the oneness of all life on this precious earth, [and] knowing how to honor [it]... is essential to understanding which actions are—and are not—ultimately directed in the service of liberation.” Bolstered by valuable insights into her father’s philosophy, Shabazz’s account offers a refreshing counterpoint to more self-focused spiritual transformation narratives. The result is a unique reconsideration of the legacy of a key figure in Black liberation. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mehta (Beyond Chrismukkah), an associate professor of gender studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, traces in this fascinating account the convergence of contraception and the American religious left. In the 1950s, she writes, Cold War–era family values inspired a coalition of liberal Protestants and Jewish clergy to advocate for contraception, viewing it as a means of shoring up God-honoring marriages in which couples could enjoy sex and parent intentionally. As the diaphragm became a central part of the cultural conversation, some New York City clergy united with doctors to advocate for its availability in city hospitals—a measure that passed, though it was only available to married women. The 1970s saw contraception become aligned with women’s liberation, however, and after the Supreme Court ruled that single women could also be prescribed birth control, the religious left receded from the conversation and the right’s resistance soldified. The author robustly unpacks how the fight for contraception’s availability was often far from a “tale of feminist victory,” while teasing out the complex beliefs and histories motivating elements of the religious left, including those who didn’t support contraception (parts of the Black church, for example, saw it as a possible means of controlling the Black population). It’s an enlightening examination of the tangled intersection of faith, choice, and health in America. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Believers “are compromising their faith or leaving it altogether... because they’re being shaped more by secular culture than the historic Christian faith,” argues pastor Graham in his disappointing debut. He contends that secular society’s emphasis on individualism has seeped into church culture, perpetuating a faith that prioritizes personal wants and discounts the importance of worshiping God with a “surrendered heart.” Among modern society’s ills, he highlights cancel culture and the practice of “church shopping” rather than committing to one faith community, which is likely to cause “spiritual drift.” Graham finds the antidote in spiritual practices, like regularly reading the Bible and attending church, that can bring believers back to Christianity’s roots. But for all of his criticism of how believers supposedly pick and choose parts of Christianity, he fails to consider how much of the traditional church doctrine he espouses, including the opposition to gay marriage, arises from narrow readings of the Bible that often fail to account for historical context. Readers should proceed with caution. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Therapist Ramsey (The Book of Common Courage) captures in this raw, evocative account the challenges of grappling with chronic illness. Determined to live with the inflammatory spinal arthritis, primary immunodeficiency, and adrenal insufficiency that had swallowed up much of her young adulthood, the author in her early 30s embarked with a friend on a road trip across the West Coast. But their exuberant visits to California’s redwood forests and the Pacific Ocean were derailed when the author suffered a massive health crisis that left her with frequent bouts of anaphylactic shock, debilitating pain, and other mysterious symptoms. Ramsey chronicles the ensuing hospital stays, doctor visits, surgeries, and calls with her insurance company as she struggled to get to the root of her sickness and receive competent care from a medical system that often neglects female patients. Along the way, she also worked to maintain her faith and grapple with the guilt and grief of relying on her loved ones’ care. Ramsey writes with heart and honesty about chronic pain, framing it as a deeply isolating experience but also a conduit to surprising moments of connection with, for example, a doctor who prayed for her, as well as her family and husband. Readers enduring their own health crises will be especially moved and inspired. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Ridgely (When I Was a Child), a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, chronicles in this meticulous account the growth of an interracial Catholic community in Newton Grove, N.C., from the 1870s through the segregation era and beyond. Contrary to Gone with the Wind–style lore, Ridgely writes, plantation life fostered interracial association in Southern households (though “unequal status” permeated “nearly every interaction”), and it was traces of this former coexistence that the post-Reconstruction push for segregation sought to erase. In this context, in the 1870s, white Southerner John Carr Monk founded the Newton Grove parish after converting to Catholicism, whose doctrine of a “singular Body of Christ” he saw as validating his idea for an interracial church community where he could worship alongside his mixed-race half brother, Solomon Monk. Carr founded the parish as “interracial, albeit internally segregated,” with seating arrangements separating the races. A brief period of outright segregation began in 1939 and desegregation occurred in 1953. Ridgely makes clear throughout that Monk was no radical (his Southern upbringing and later medical studies in the North had imbued him with the racism of his day), and that the parish he founded was no “utopia” but a community that sought unity without equality as it struggled to maintain itself within the demands of the South’s white supremacist framework. Historians of American Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this compassionate guide, Anglican priest Warren (Liturgy of the Ordinary) shares practices to deepen one’s faith during periods of “spiritual desolation.” Warren recounts feeling trapped in a state of “silent crisis” as her faith and satisfaction in her work waned. She sought answers in the writings of monks and early Christian converts whose “spiritually difficult and ascetic lives” occasioned many “intense seasons of languishing, weariness, and a sense of God’s distance,” coming away from these texts with a “slow, quiet,” but consistent approach toward “persevering in the long apprenticeship to Jesus.” This can involve consistently practicing rituals—like prayer, fasting, and community worship—that act as spiritual anchors; trading “panic and perfectionism” for grace toward oneself; and generally leaving room for God’s mysteries. The author excels at energizing familiar wisdom (“If salvation is to meet us at all, it must meet us in the slog”) as she effectively reassures believers that the disorientation of “spiritual drought” is as old as faith itself. Despairing Christians will be rejuvenated. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bessenecker (The New Friars), director of global engagement for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an interdenominational campus ministry, considers in this stimulating treatise what it means to reckon with disappointments in God, other believers, and the “historical sins of the church.” He notes how personal challenges can help Christians build a deeper faith as they seek God’s “companionship” to endure suffering, and how grappling with the church’s flaws is essential because the faithful are meant to live and grow in community. (Believers can begin to do so by recognizing the ways they’ve contributed to harmful aspects of Christian culture, joining a healthy church community, and forgiving others for their sins.) The author also overviews the sins of the historical church to help readers avoid the same mistakes, like participating in missions that reinforce a colonial Western Christianity. While the dearth of direct guidance may frustrate some readers (Bessenecker instead offers reflection questions, like “How do you think Jesus’ words about loving enemies... apply to Christians when a nation is at war?”), this accounting of the church’s structural sins is bold, thorough, and evenhanded. Believers questioning their relationship with the church will be gratified. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Spiritual awakening may sound like an otherworldly experience but is actually a “return to a natural state of inherent wakefulness and wisdom,” contends psychotherapist and spiritual teacher Bodian (Meditation for Dummies) in this lucid guide. Drawing from his professional experience in trauma psychotherapy as well as Zen Buddhism and Advanta Vedanta, he outlines an approach to achieving nondual awareness, a “direct experiential knowing” that recognizes oneself as inseparable from “being, consciousness, God, spirit.” What obscures this awareness are rigid narratives about the self that trap practitioners in “a claustrophobic inner world”; to dismantle them and “awake” into nondual awareness readers can study the work of Buddhist teachers and sages, experience the present “without judgment or intervention,” and—once one has “awakened”—integrate this awareness into daily life by living in alignment with “the deeper truth of your being.” He also includes helpful guidance for establishing a healthy teacher-student relationship, and takes care to remind readers that awakening is not finite but an ongoing, lifelong process. Bodian distills a host of nondual wisdom traditions with uncommon fluidity, and clarifies the nitty-gritty of spiritual experiences with useful answers to frequently asked questions about each chapter’s central points. Those seeking to explore nondual practice from a nondenominational angle will find value here. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hanbury, founding editor of Common Good magazine, debuts with a hit-or-miss collection of essays loosely focused on technology’s intersection with faith. Taking a generally grim view of tech, the author traces the “conflict between humans and the stuff we make” back to biblical times, when Cain murdered Abel for receiving more favor from God for an offering of a firstborn sheep than Cain received for his offering of produce. That story, Hanbury writes, illustrates how the work “we make with our hands” can “get away from us” in damaging ways. The internet, for instance, has sapped people of their ability to concentrate, flattened individualism, and privileged harmful content, according to the author. He expands on this subject in a later entry that discusses how allotting much of one’s attention to the internet is a form of implicit “worship” that should be redirected toward God. Unfortunately, such thought-provoking meditations are overshadowed by pieces that feel tonally unrelated, like a jokey riff on the things Hanbury would rather wear on his arm than an Apple watch (“one of those preppy leather cuffs from 2003”) or familiar arguments about how personalized algorithms trap users in information bubbles. This has its moments, but doesn’t do enough to stand apart from the flood of books on the internet and its effects on society. (May)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink