April 30, 2014

Our spring books issue's reviews include Amy Frykholm on Toni Morrison, Jason Byassee on Richard Hays, Katherine Willis Pershey on Lauren Winner, and more.

This is a picture of ministry shorn of all romanticism, polite piety, and social support, of ministry sustained only by Christ.

Most moral arguments against suicide are built on premises of faith. But Jennifer Hecht, a poet and first-rate historian of ideas, is intent on providing secular reasons for refraining from it.

Dostoevsky shows us the aches of the human heart, the deceptions we create, often unknowingly, and the hopes we have to be better people.

Nestled among corrupt church officials and worldly pilgrims is this small-church pastor who is always motivated by Christ-centered love.

After describing encounters with the oppressed in South Africa and Honduras, Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a carefully honed analysis of justice within a Christian framework.

Virginia Woolf’s novel details the ordinary illuminations our lives offer, “matches struck in the dark.”

Church leadership is about leadership—and that includes organizational and financial skills.

Linda A. Mercadante’s study counters those who suggest that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated is tantamount to secularization.

Peter Leithart’s book can be seen as one long act of ingratitude. Sometimes, he seems to be saying it is more blessed to reject than to receive.

In our gridlocked civic life, the secular ideals of the Enlightenment and the unbending stance of the religious right are both the blame, George Marsden argues.

Eggers’s novel is about a mega social network corporation that takes over the world—seemingly benevolently. Its characters have no depth or soul; their personhood is defined by electronic connectedness. 

Most spirituality books provide advice for cultivating the familiar set of spiritual disciplines. This book is different.

Elizabeth Johnson shows how biblically informed faith comes alive when we look at the world through the lens of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

To Eugene Peterson, a church is not a demarcated zone of idealized community. The potential for misdirection and distraction abounds.

Reinhold Niebuhr was 23 years old when he began this journal of his experience as the pastor of a blue-collar church in Detroit. Pastors will be reassured to read how even the great Niebuhr struggles with the pastoral role. 

At the heart of evangelicals’ conflicted identity, Molly Worthen argues, is the “struggle to reconcile reason with revelation, heart with head, and private piety with the public square.”

The Harriet Beecher Stowe of Nancy Koester’s new biography is not the one with which most readers are familiar—the “little woman who made this big war,” as Abraham Lincoln reportedly said about the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Pope Gregory the Great’s famous treatise, written at the end of the sixth century, presents challenges to and must be adapted for contemporary Protestant clergy. It is a provocative countercultural voice filled with wisdom for a young pastor. 

For Sharon Baker, theological consistency is essential, because “our perception of God influences how we behave.”

Mary Boys offers concrete proposals for how the story of Jesus’ crucifixion can be told faithfully in the presence of Jewish conversation partners.

I return to this book more than almost any other because it reminds me why I’m a priest, what the church is, and how God is at work in places before I ever show up. Donovan shows me that what has become the ritual of worship is really a pattern of practices that are needed to remake community and shape society. 

I tried to talk myself out of selecting a young adult book published in 2012. How could John Green possibly be shelved alongside Tillich in the pastor’s study?