Mennonite in a Midlife Crisis (of Faith)
Poet and writer Rhoda Janzen rebounded from a series of overlapping crises by going home to her Mennonite family—and lived to tell the (surprisingly funny) tale.
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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.
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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.
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Republican Gomorrah Documents the Christian Right Takeover of the GOP
Despite resorting to demonization and dated paradigms, Max Blumenthal’s muckraking first book traces the fascinating history of the religious right and its web of gothic and aggressive conspiracy theories—making a convincing case that the Republican Party has been “shattered” by a right-wing religious movement.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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