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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right
Dan Brown reimagined Christianity in The Da Vinci Code. In his new novel, America’s most influential pop philosopher takes on Freemasonry, having fun with the bizarre legends surrounding the movement, and exposing the layer of mystical thinking that underlies modern rationalism.
Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World: An Excerpt
Finally, something Christians, Jews, and Muslims can agree on: Apocalypse. But as the theological end-time visions of the three Abrahamic faiths converge, it is not the wrath of heaven that threatens life on Earth, but all-too-human fundamentalism and fearmongering.
A Jew in Church? No Big Deal
In My Jesus Year a young “metrodox” Jew spends a year church-hopping in order to get perspective on his own faith. Sounds daring, but turns out to be a fairly relaxed exercise. Our reviewer proposes a much tougher challenge...
The Revolution Will Be Whispered: An Excerpt From Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine
In this lyrical excerpt, author Kim Chernin envisions a new solution that rises up from the Sinai desert nurtured by two little girls.
Not that Kind of Fundamentalist Memoir
Carlene Bauer lost her faith, but it wasn’t because she was raised on the far-right fringe of fundamentalist religion—it was more that she thought God deserved better than the clichés of modern evangelicalism.
The Arab, the Feds and the Flood: Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun Rescues America
A Muslim everyman paddles his canoe to the rescue of a drowned New Orleans, and gets, for his pains, locked up in a local version of Guantanamo. This novel—a chronicle of faith and romance, of crisis and conversion—demands not just reading, but recommending.
Sex Comes For the Archbishop: Rembert Weakland’s Unflinching Memoir
Rembert Weakland is a Catholic progressive, a Benedictine monk, and a former Archbishop. His new memoir tells the story of a career marked by good work, pastoral advocacy, and the public scandal of a gay love life.
Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?
While the rioting over the Danish cartoons seems to be well behind us, Yale University Press recently removed the images from a new scholarly work on the topic. Do Muslim extremists need a scholarly book as pretext with two wars being fought in Muslim nations and an ongoing crisis in Gaza? The problem isn’t with these images, but with the ubiquitous Islamophobia in the United States.
Revisiting Hagar, The Woman Who Named God
An interview with the author of a new book that takes a critical look at the biblical tale of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and sons, claiming that this story at the core of anxiety between religions isn’t exactly as it seems.
Rarefied Islamophobia: When Americans Duplicate the European Cultural Talk
By presenting itself as a disinterested collection of “facts” and “data,” an alarmist new book about the Muslim threat to Europe has been taken more seriously than your standard Islamophobic pamphlet.
Oh My God(dess)! Feminist Spirituality in the Third Wave
Feminists hate religion, right? Not necessarily. From Christian feminists participating in Wiccan rituals to Goddess worshipers honoring Jesus, the landscape of feminist spirituality is is not what it was in the ’60s and ’70s.
Prison Religion: Rehabilitation or Forced Conversion?
Prison and evangelical religion have been linked throughout US history; but when a faith-based rehabilitation program compels prisoners to memorize Bible verses, boundaries get blurred.
New Book Stokes Fear of a Muslim Europe
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe tells of a tide of Muslim immigration ravaging European culture, and threatening the future of Western civilization. Its author, Christopher Caldwell, makes Samuel "clash of civilizations" Huntington look like a benign minor prophet.
The Most Religious Race: Islam in Europe
Christopher Caldwell’s new book on Islam and the West is fraught with inconsistency, selective history, and outright error. But, for all that, it is a must-read.
Women of Opus Dei Explain “True Feminism”
In response, most likely, to the (fictional) account of the lesser status of women in Catholicism’s most notorious semi-secret society in The Da Vinci Code, a group of women has come together to explain what feminism looks like, Opus Dei-style.
Why David Sometimes Wins: What We Must Learn From Cesar Chavez
A new book by veteran organizer Marshall Ganz tells the sometimes triumphant, sometimes cautionary tale of the rise and fall of Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. While the story of the movement’s successes is well known, the reasons for its decline are more mysterious—until now.
Christianity Without the Cross
A new book investigates the history of the crucifix in early Christianity and develops a political theology of this-worldly salvation.
God Grows Up: Robert Wright’s Evolution of God
In his newest book Robert Wright charts a path between atheism and belief, busting religion myths as he goes: Jesus did not preach universal love; Jews didn't start out as monotheists; and the origin of religion had nothing to do with morality.
The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel
In this 1908 retelling of the gospels, Jesus travels to India, Persia, and Greece, preaching of a “cord of love” that binds all humanity. What does The Aquarian Gospel have to teach us about Christianity, New Age religion, and the birth of the culture wars?
Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield
From thermodynamic war, to cybernetic battle, to the emergence of the “chaoplexic,” a new book by Antoine Bousquet explains what war means in the modern era.