Why I Am Still a Christian
A friend once asked Diana Butler Bass why she was still a Christian. The answer lies in the question of spiritual memory, and of a community that exists through time.
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Christianity v. Christ: An Excerpt From A People’s History of Christianity
Most people know only the Big-C Christianity—Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America—but there is another one, linked to a biblical parable of a wounded man’s rescue by a stranger.
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Found in Translation: How a Thirteenth-Century Islamic Poet Conquered America
The best-selling poet in America today was born in Afghanistan, practiced a form of Islam that originated in Iraq, and has been dead for 800 years. How did a white man from Tennessee, who doesn’t read a lick of Persian, make Rumi accessible to mainstream America?
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Boy Gets Boy, Saves Earth: A Gay Christian Writer’s Plan to Change the World
Perry Moore, ardent Christian and author of Hero, believes that the time has come for the younger generation to supplant the older generation of bigots.
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Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem with Popularization
While the history of popularization is a history of regular folk learning about other regular revolutionizing folk and imitating them, comic book histories like The Wordy Shipmates do their part in ensuring that the next generation knows more about Beyoncé than Byzantium.
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So Deep a Wound: Home, and the novels of Marilynne Robinson
Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson’s third novel in as many decades is packed with the author’s signature themes of struggle, torment, grace, mystery and vulnerability-in other words: Christianity. Indeed, only a Christian of uncommon mettle could write a novel so untainted by the bastardized tropes of Christian culture.
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The Untold Story of The Greatest Yiddish Poet in America
Peter Manseau’s first novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, takes on themes of Jewish-Christian enmity, the trials of translation, and the idea of language as a virtual homeland.
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The Best Books Media of 2008
Forget the standard litany of the best-selling books and most popular movies… This year’s list includes comics, rock bands, Battlestar Galactica, “Hava Nagila” sung to the tune of “The Twist,” and “I Am the Walrus” translated into Aramaic.
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New Book Reveals How Faith is Like a Covert Operation for the Bush Family
A brand new investigation of the Bush family reveals a religious narrative that strays from the official story circulated to supporters and the press. How many conversions did George W. actually have and why? How did a blue-blooded Episcopalian family come to represent the evangelicals of America?
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Undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University, Finding Common Ground
Brown sophomore Kevin Roose, an Ivy-league heathen, infiltrated the nation’s holiest university and emerged a changed man—not committed to conservative Christianity, but to finding a new language for reconciliation.
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