Why We Need Religion by Stephen T. Asma
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A Darwinian view of whether religion is meaningful and beneficial to society.
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Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World by Clay Routledge
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Is a belief in the supernatural because of an evolutionarily-ingrained need to create meaning?
Read MoreChristian: The Politics of a Word in America by Matthew Bowman
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This book delves into the ongoing struggle over the word “Christian” and its centrality to American politics.
Read MoreBelief by James E. Alcock
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An examination of our thoughts and feelings about the world as we believe it to be.
Read MoreAbsolute Power by Paul Collins
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This lively narrative of religious and political history attempts to chronicle the improbable success story of the last 220 years of the papacy.
Read MorePantheon: A New History of Roman Religion by Jörg Rüpke
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The author closely follows the literary and archeological trail through the long history of the Republic.
Read MoreWonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani
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This translation of Ungläubiges Staunen: Über das Christentum is a collection of Kermani's vivid encounters with various works of Christianity-inspired artwork.
Read MoreHasidism: A New History
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An amazing story shot through with persecution and revelation, played out against the governmental and ideological convulsions that gave rise to the modern world.
Read MoreConfessions by Saint Augustine
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Readers who recall the big, marvelous WW Norton edition of the complete works of Isaac Babel from over a decade ago will remember the vivid, otherworldly experience of reading it, and of course a large part of that experience was the handiwork of translator Peter Constantine, who has now, intriguingly, turned his hand to translating one of the strangest and most fundamental works of the Western canon, the Confessions of Saint Augustine.
Read MoreThe Divine Mind by Michael Gellert
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Jungian analyst Michael Gellert, in his new book The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God's Inner Journey, sifts through the Old Testament, the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Hadith in order to trace the mental and moral growth of the central character, the God of the three Abrahamic religions. The goal of The Divine Mind is to make some sense out of the figure Richard Dawkins refers to as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”; in these pages, Gellert is asking the same question Scriptural scholars have asked all the way back to Saint Augustine and that believers have been asking in one phrasing or another since Adam and Eve were bustled out of the Garden of Eden: “What is it with this Guy?”
Read MoreBook Review: Christopher Hitchens - The Last Interview
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The thriving “Last Interview” series from Melville House features slim volumes collecting the final public comments made by a wide variety of public figures – geniuses, charlatans, comedians, artists, successful frauds, and the occasional transcendent intellectuals. Here we get reflections in winter (whether they knew it or not) from such people as David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Hannah Arendt, Philip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut, and this month the series takes in the late Christopher Hitchens, political commentator, outspoken atheist, and author of the bestselling God is Not Great.
Read MoreMarilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy
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Marilynne Robinson began her novel Housekeeping while completing a dissertation on Shakespeare as a graduate student. Initially she wrote what now form the book’s preliminary scenes as exercises in extended metaphors. Evoking her childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho, a lake town in the panhandle of the state (in the book she renames it Fingerbone) and remotely drawing off her ancestors, Robinson simply wanted to see if she could still write something other than scholastic essays. Also, she has said, she wanted to impress her friends.
Read MoreJames Wood and The Fall of Man
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At one point in James Wood’s novel The Book Against God, the spiritually tortured narrator Thomas Bunting is transported to a painful recollection of adolescence. Thomas is the son of a kind and intelligent Anglican priest. His childhood was filled with love and attention. Then one day when he was 14, he says, he walked into his school’s assembly hall and, as though stepping through some kind of portal, entered into a state of self-consciousness:
Read MoreA Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith by John Rawls
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John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice, was perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. As an undergraduate at Princeton in 1942, he submitted A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community as his senior thesis. Decades later, Professor Eric Gregory of the Princeton religion department found this thesis in the Princeton Library, and now New York University Law professor Thomas Nagel has edited it into a book.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: It wasn't what he wanted
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As Charles Homer Haskins pointed out in his humbly durable masterpiece The Renaissance of the 12th Century, the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all. Fiercely cold most of the time (due to a bout of climate change), but not dark in the sense of shuttered. Beknighted, but not benighted.
The great scholar John Addington Symonds (whose absence from bookstore shelves bloody well qualifies him for honoring here in Absent Friends, somewhere down the line) put it very prettily when he observed that any age without Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael must necessarily seem dark. The ostentatious showboating of the Italian Renaissance is the problem in a nutshell when it comes to thinking about the innocent ages that come before.
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