Creativity can be a powerful tool for “alleviating suffering and fighting injustice,” according to this graceful guide from children’s author Perkins (The Golden Necklace). She contends that those who make art participate in a kind of “just making” that benefits themselves (by expressing their emotions through their work); their audiences; and their communities (art can “shatter clichéd narratives that conceal the truth,” sparking activist movements). Perkins digs into reasons why creative people might refrain from making art, including a brutal commercial market that privileges those with more connections, qualifications, and social power, and self-critical inner voices. The practices she offers to overcome such obstacles include seeking mentors and developing sustainable rhythms of rest and work. The advice is backgrounded by the author’s valuable perspective as the daughter of Bengali immigrants. Throughout, she gives due to how embroidering, quilt making, and other forms of creative work practiced by women who, like her ancestors, “made beautiful things but didn’t dare to dream of art as a career,” can be a source of beauty and order amid hardship. Even those who’ve never picked up a pen or a paintbrush will be inspired. (May)

Reviewed on 03/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Singer and pastor Wells debuts with a clumsy attempt to prove that joy is rooted in divine love. Contending that people mistakenly tether their sense of fulfillment to “fleeting and fragile” sources, he argues that forming the “right” relationship with God provides a permanent feeling of “rest and security” that is rooted in unchanging divine love and precludes the need for other sources of approval. The bulk of the account considers how Christians can create such a relationship with God by taking small, everyday actions—spending more time in prayer, reading the Bible, or trying to connect with God—and communal ones, like attempting to broker peace between individuals and communities. Unfortunately, Wells’s energetic case is undercut by a tendency to veer into platitudes and awkward metaphors—including the book’s overarching comparison of pursuing a holy life to creating a bomb that explodes into “joy and strength” instead of destruction. The author’s good intentions aren’t enough to save this. (May)

Reviewed on 03/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Aiming to be better than others is morally harmful and chafes against Christian ethics, according to this intriguing meditation from Yale theology professor Volf (A Public Faith). In support of his thesis, Volf cites such thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, who posited that the “craving for distinction” amplifies anxieties about inferiority while reinforcing narrow scales of valuation that prize traits like intelligence, wealth, and beauty. Indeed, Volf writes, such comparisons do not “preoccupy Christianity at all,” because the faith centers the idea that people are loved by God simply because of their humanity. Grounding that concept in art and scripture, he analyzes John Milton’s Paradise Regained, in which Jesus resists the temptations of Satan in the wilderness by refusing to “strive for superiority” over God, and writings of the apostle Paul that frame the pursuit of “any kind of superiority—social, material, moral, or spiritual”—as “inimical to the gospel message.” Volf’s argument amounts to a robust critique of the prizing of ambition for its own sake, though he also acknowledges that such striving can lead to social progress and that it’s possible for people to improve themselves without measuring their progress against others’. Armchair philosophers will find much to ponder in this smart take on a world obsessed with forward motion. (May)

Reviewed on 03/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

University of Amsterdam religion professor Van Der Toorn (Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible) meticulously surveys the 2,000-year evolution of the Israelite religion, which preceded Judaism but differed in key respects (including that adherents initially worshiped a pantheon of gods—of which Yahweh was one—and that it was so woven into daily life that adherents wouldn’t have thought of it as a religion). Beginning in the Iron Age, Der Toorn traces how the faith evolved in tribes and clans as Yahweh slowly rose to prominence over other gods, later becoming a source of political power for rulers who styled themselves as “God’s lieutenants.” After the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel led to the Israelites’ exile, the religion absorbed Babylonian customs, and, as literacy rates rose during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, splintered into various “reading communities” with different interpretations of sacred texts. The author perceptively analyzes how the religion assumed different purposes in response to cultural and political changes, transforming from a tool for fostering civil obedience to a means of “preserv[ing] a collective identity” among an increasingly disconnected diasporic people. The result is a a valuable history of an influential yet little-understood faith. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this rigorous study, National Book Award winner Pagels (Why Religion?) digs into persistent questions about the historical Jesus. Devoting each chapter to a major sticking point, she discusses Jesus’s virgin birth, suggesting that Matthew and Luke revised the gospel of Mark to deflect harmful rumors “ridiculing Jesus as a bastard,” and gospel writers’ efforts to blame Jewish leaders for Jesus’s crucifixion and deemphasize Pontius Pilate’s role—a framing that helped believers sidestep fears of being associated with a figure crucified for anti-Roman “insurrection.” Elsewhere, she unpacks the debate over whether the resurrection was physical or spiritual (as Paul claimed). Pagels’s analysis is most captivating when she’s excavating the complex motivations of the gospel writers, who were often reacting to historical and cultural developments to formulate new ways of attracting followers. Less successful are her detours into personal anecdotes (in a chapter on the resurrection, for instance, she mentions being “shaken by” personally experiencing “the presence of people who had died” without elaborating further) and analyses of Jesus in movies and art. Still, curious believers will find much to chew on. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Harrigan (The Leopard Is Loose) provides a colorful account of the 1917 appearance of the biblical Mary to three young shepherds in the village of Fátima, Portugal. The visions—in which a beautiful, shimmering woman informed the children that WWI would soon be ending, and divulged three secrets that weren’t disclosed until later—took place against the backdrop of a country unsettled by the shockwaves of WWI (nearly 100,000 Portuguese men had been sent to fight in Africa or on the Western front). Harrigan traces how the prophecies inspired believers crushed by poverty and political upheaval, while sparking fear in the country’s anticlerical government, which believed the visions stemmed from attempts to revive Catholic sentiment among the public. In the decades afterward, Harrigan writes, the visions seeped into the Catholic imagination, ramping up apocalyptic anxieties as believers awaited the 2000 release of a letter in which one of the shepherd children disclosed Mary’s final revelation about the “fate of the world.” Harrigan uses the events of Fatima to paint a vivid portrait of Catholicism as an all-consuming faith that played on 20th-century anxieties with supernatural visions, apocalyptic imagery, and tales of eternal torment for sinners. Rendered in novelistic detail, this is a fascinating history of a mysterious event and its complicated legacy. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former presidential candidate Kasich (Courage Is Contagious) offers upbeat if somewhat underdeveloped profiles of ordinary people who made the world a better place with the aid of their faith communities. Among those highlighted are Mary Scullion, a scrappy Catholic nun who founded a charity organization that provided food and shelter to unhoused women in Philadelphia in the 1980s; Naser Hajar and Nadeem Khan, members of an informal association of Muslim doctors who created a Toledo, Ohio, medical clinic for uninsured patients; and Tracey Beal, who sought refuge from a volatile upbringing in the stability of her local church as a child, and as an adult founded Schools Connect, an initiative that provides children with social support by connecting schools with “area churches, businesses, nonprofits, and civic organizations.” Throughout, the author highlights how faith communities can tackle societal problems by uniting people through a common sense of purpose, utilizing shared resources, and generally making groups of people more than the “sum of their parts.” Unfortunately, those solid insights are marred by clichés and tone-deaf grousing about the decline in public religious affiliation that fails to seriously consider its causes. Despite its good intentions, this falls short. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Palestinian pastor Isaac (The Other Side of the Wall) offers an impassioned indictment of Western faith communities’ lackluster response to the conflict in Gaza. Delving into the region’s history, Isaac contends that the foundations of modern Israel lie in a settler-colonial project that established an apartheid state through ethnic cleansing. He frames the Israel-Hamas war less as a response to the October 7 Hamas attack than “a textbook case of genocide” fueled by long-running imperialist ideologies, including a Christian Zionism that uses the Bible to justify Israel’s designation as the Jewish homeland. Such an ideology constitutes both an attempt to “subordinate Jewish people” to Christian end-times “fantasies” and a violent “betrayal of love and justice that Jesus embodies,” according to Issac. Yet few Christian organizations have called for a ceasefire, he notes, and those that have did so in “toothless” statements that refrain from taking sides. Instead, faith communities must “speak truth to power” by demanding the cessation of aid to Israel and the investigation of war crimes. Despite a few head-scratchers (as when he compares Jim Crow laws to Israel’s right of return), Isaac’s up-close perspective undergirds his convincing case for the urgent need to apply faith principles to the pursuit of peace. The result is a thought-provoking dissection of the complicated relationship between power, politics, and identity. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Robertson (True Inclusion) aims to “wrest the Bible away from the people who use it as a weapon against queer people” in this accessible call for change. Debunking scriptural interpretations that condemn homosexuality, he notes that the concept of sexual orientation didn’t exist in biblical times, and argues that the Bible actually deplores sexual domination or exploitation. According to Robertson, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah—in which God destroys those cities after male residents threaten to have sex with visiting angels disguised as men—is an indictment of xenophobia, not homosexuality. He builds his case for a pro-queer Christianity around the “profoundly intimate same-sex relationships” between such biblical figures as Jesus and Lazarus, who serve as models for “resist[ing] their society’s expectations for how they should live regarding sex... and gender.” In addition, Robertson frames the “definition of queer as ‘resistance to norms,’ ” as an apt encapsulation of Jesus’s countercultural mission. Robertson’s enthusiastic, empowering vision for a more inclusive church inspires, and his exegesis of the six “clobber” passages—the scriptural verses most often cited by Christians to condemn homosexuality—is competent and lucid, if somewhat familiar. This is a solid resource for queer Christians and those who love them. (May)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Theologian Kearns debuts with a thoughtful and intimate exploration of modern masculinity. Drawing from the experience of shaping his identity as a trans man—which involved trying on personas ranging from gentleman to “fierce protector”—he contends that modern masculinity permits men to experience few vulnerable emotions besides anger, discourages closeness with other men, and disconnects men from their bodies and minds. Meanwhile, men learn in the evangelical church that God has granted them power over their families and religious communities, but are given mixed signals about how to wield that authority—they’re told “to be loving fathers but also righteous warriors,” for example, and to adhere to purity culture, but also that they risk “being driven mad by their sexual urges” without “God’s help.” Such insights about the contradictory nature of evangelical teachings are valuable and incisively drawn, while the healthier model of masculinity suggested by Kearns—which asks men to investigate their emotions, form closer connections with other men, and eradicate “toxic behaviors”—is smart and sensible if not groundbreaking. The result is an insightful look at the complicated nexus of gender and power in the evangelical church. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink