Krone, an associate professor of environmental science at Allegheny College, debuts with a lively ethnographic study of how faith communities across the U.S. are reshaping the ways Americans eat. Religious groups have long influenced agriculture, from Jewish immigrants establishing diasporic versions of kibbutzim to Christian farmers raising livestock in sustainable ways to honor God’s creation. Drawing on ethnographic research from across the country, Krone highlights how different faith-based food initiatives have melded religious and secular influences: Christian cattle farmer Mac Baldwin raises livestock via biblical philosophy that centers the sanctity of nature (the beef is grass-fed and antibiotic-free), but sustains his business through partnerships with a halal Muslim slaughterhouse and secular grocers, while Baltimore’s Pearlstone Center employs “ancient Jewish agricultural practices” while furthering interfaith agricultural educational programs for Jews and non-Jews. Krone calls attention to rituals such as shmita, the Judaic practice of letting the land lie fallow for one year, in her argument that religious agrarianism challenges the exploitative logic that undergirds industrial agriculture. At the same time, she acknowledges the compromises farmers must make to adhere to market realities (for example, Baldwin mutes his overtly Christian messaging for retailers). The result is an intriguing window into the complex intersections between food production and faith in America. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Psychotherapist Feliciano (This Book Won’t Make You Happy) shares good-humored guidance for making the Christmas season joyful. With four kids under the age of 10, the author and her husband found themselves too consumed with last-minute prep to enjoy Christmas morning; after nearly falling asleep while her kids unwrapped gifts, she committed to figuring out how to appreciate the holiday. According to Feliciano, doing so begins with identifying moments in which one would like to be fully present and working backward to achieve them, including by turning down unnecessary commitments and taking time to meditate. She also suggests reframing the season’s stresses by finding gratitude in so-called obligations (“I should watch holiday movies with the kids” becomes “I get to watch holiday movies with the kids”) and simplifying tradition for sanity’s sake (instead of hiring a professional photographer for Christmas card photos, the author snapped a candid shot of her family in their holiday pajamas). Feliciano’s psychological insights are well balanced by funny, down-to-earth recollections of her own holiday mishaps (she remembers dragging a massive Christmas tree into her home “like a caveman who has just killed a lion and is headed back to the cave”). This’ll go a long way toward helping readers find merriment when things feel anything but festive. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Batterson (Please, Sorry, Thanks) contends in this shopworn guide that readers of faith can change their lives and the world by thinking long-term. He advises believers to cultivate a “long vision” that looks beyond one’s own life and strives to better the world, and outlines a plan for doing so by auditing one’s regrets and learning from them, considering one’s deepest convictions, and aligning one’s goals with Jesus’s values. Readers should also practice “long obedience” by putting those goals into action in small, everyday ways. Together, long obedience and long vision shape a “long legacy” that trickles down into the lives of future generations, and which God works “behind the scenes” to help enact. Unfortunately, the author hammers home his thesis, reiterating in slightly varying ways that “our actions and reactions have second, third, and fourth generation impact,” but remains vague about practical details, giving this the feel of a well-meaning but flimsy sermon. Christian do-gooders won’t find much they don’t already know. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Kanter (Chicago Católico) details in this scrupulous survey how the Claretians, a congregation of Catholic missionaries, reshaped the contours of American Catholicism. The Claretians arrived in Texas from Spain in 1902, when Spanish-speaking Catholics were hardly recognized by the church, Kanter writes. Preaching in storefront chapels and railroad camps, the missionaries used their language skills and understanding of Latin American tradition to strengthen Latino Catholic communities and create important cultural resources, including the magazine U.S. Catholic. As they fanned out into cities, Claretian missionaries founded urban dioceses that served for new immigrants as bridges between “centralizing, Americanizing impulses and the desires of Mexican and Puerto Rican Catholics to nurture the culture of home.” With Latinos now comprising about half of the U.S. Catholic population, the Claretians are attracting an increasingly global membership (including from non-Spanish speaking countries in Asia and Africa), raising new opportunities and challenges. The author makes a solid case for the Claretians’ role in ushering in a new era of American Catholicism while remaining transparent about the movement’s problems, including its part in covering up clerical sexual abuse. The result is an insightful look at an underexplored corner of Catholic American history. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Faith is an antidote to the overwhelming sense that modern life lacks “meaning and purpose,” according to this intermittently insightful debut from pastor Serrano. At the root of modern malaise, he writes, is a “materialism” that recognizes only what “can be observed in the physical world using physical senses, tools, and methods,” denying the faith that imbues life with meaning. To reclaim a purposeful life, readers can harness seven “ancient” practices, like singing with others in church, which orients believers to their “true north” and makes faith physical (“The reality of God is resonating in your very flesh and bones”), and giving thanks to God’s “transcendent truths” that lie beneath the “ever-changing circumstances of this fallen and fickle world.” The author is successful in reading complexity into such basic behaviors as scriptural study (he frames Bible stories as “supra-myths” that let believers see “our world today as clearly as possible”) and his scriptural analyses are robust, though his relentless idealizing of the past often feels myopic and selective. Still, Christians looking to reinvigorate their faith will find value here. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Holp debuts with an upbeat compendium of wisdom drawn from his work as a spiritual medium and his own path to self-acceptance. The author recounts growing up gay in a rigidly conservative Ohio town, and how coming out in his early teens allowed him to live more authentically (“When we show up as ourselves, right where we are, exactly as we are, without trying to fix, change, or run away from ourselves, the Universe meets us where we stand”). Other chapters use client readings to draw out such key lessons as the link between grief and a sense of purpose: Holp recalls watching a client realize she should pour her love for her late son into nursing, and notes “the struggles you’ve overcome [can] become the road map that helps others find their ways.” The author’s experience as a medium lends the advice a gentle spirituality, though the book’s strength lies in its perceptive takes on human nature, as when Holp discusses what it means to surrender or advises readers not to chase after their desires, but instead become the kind of person “who naturally attracts what we desire,” after which “everything has a way of unfolding effortlessly.” This should please the author’s fans and win him some new ones. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pre-WWII Jewish culture is brought to life in this rich illustrated tour of synagogues destroyed during the war. Piecing together sparse archival material—design plans, census data, photos, and descriptions—artist Strongwater (Where We Once Gathered) depicts shuls built from the 1600s to the 1930s, alongside concise, well-researched histories of the communities that housed each one. These include Nesvizh, Belarus, where Jews first settled in the 1500s and built in the 1700s a three-story tall brick synagogue described by residents as “scary and beautiful” (its ceiling featured a “giant sea creature, a Leviathan”) that was destroyed in the 1940s along with nearly all the town’s Jews. The synagogue in Bad Buchau, a German spa town, was built in the 1830s in the style of a church and featured a bell tower, curved windows, chandeliers, and a red and gold ark; it was burned down soon after Kristallnacht. While focusing mainly on synagogues in large Jewish communities like Warsaw (whose synagogue boasted an 80-person male choir), Strongwater also highlights smaller, off the beaten path locales, like Vukovar, a port city in Croatia, and Bielefeld, a small city in Westphalia where Jews had lived since at least the 14th century. The result is a worthy tribute to an important piece of Jewish history. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/26/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former NFL quarterback Tebow (Through My Eyes) shares an inspiring invitation for readers to see themselves and others through God’s eyes. The book is grounded in the notion that one’s worth is not based on skill or ability but an inherent “value, a royal and familial identity” bestowed by God. This truth, Tebow writes, should empower readers to both value themselves and to help marginalized people in whom the same divine spark resides. He points in particular to members of the disabled community, the group to which Jesus devoted much of his life and nearly all his miracles, even though they were “written off” by much of society. Woven throughout are passages on how the author’s faith evolved in conjunction with the creation of his Guatemalan mission Tebow Down, which provides services and education to developmentally disabled children. These stories highlight how recognizing God’s image in others individually and collectively can help guard against an increasing sense of disconnection from God and community. The result is an invigorating and often tender call for believers to love their neighbors as themselves. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this illuminating debut history, Colorado Springs, Colo., serves as a microcosm for how evangelicalism has accrued cultural power over the past 70-odd years. Historian Schultz begins in the 1940s and ’50s, when evangelical leaders fused faith to Cold War–era patriotic values, birthing a militaristic evangelicalism that saw believers as “stewards and defenders of a Christian” and American heritage. The era saw small towns like Colorado Springs attract evangelicals drawn to their traditional values, growing economy, and relatively cheap prices. Colorado Springs, in particular, drew enterprising evangelicals who built campuses for ministries like Young Life, Navigators, and Focus on the Family, and helped set up institutions like the U.S. Air Force Academy, marrying piety, patriotism, and power (military leaders “loudly proclaimed that good soldiers were good Christians and vice versa”). The evangelicalism that emerged in Colorado Springs—and the conflation of “Christianity and patriotism” that distinguished it from mainline Protestantism, which had increasingly begun to “emphasize America’s religious pluralism”—helped it evolve into a social movement which, the author convincingly shows, has played a key role in fueling today’s Christian nationalism. The result is a revealing window into the roots of a movement that has reshaped American religion and politics. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Newton (Breathe Again) issues a passionate if somewhat vague call for Christians to set aside their insecurities and embrace their divine purpose. He asks believers to abandon the “lies” they’ve internalized (that their worth depends on worldly achievement; that they are defined by past traumas) and build faith through small, day-to-day behaviors, like acting with integrity and worshipping God in and out of church. Doing so allows one to better tap into the voice of the Holy Spirit, access their unique “spiritual gifts,” and find their path. Newton also shares advice on overcoming imposter syndrome and eradicating bad habits, generally by being more self-aware (“If you don’t like who you are becoming, it’s time to pay attention to what you’re putting in your soul.... What are your tendencies? What trajectory is that leading you on?”). While Newton has a lot to say about overcoming the barriers to accessing one’s gifts, he’s less concrete about what it means to actually live out one’s purpose. Still, his unfailing optimism and reassurances (“If Jesus is big enough to save you from hell, then He is certainly big enough to help you process your emotions”) will buoy readers’ spirits. It’s an enthusiastic invitation for believers to find themselves through faith. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink