To Be a Jew Today by Noah Feldman
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At a time when all eyes are on Gaza, a scholar considers different ways Jews consider God, religious observance, and the state of Israel.
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The Nones by Ryan Burge
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A look at the growing segment of society that has no use for organized religion.
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Cross Examined by John W. Campbell
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Everything you’ve always wondered about Christianity but were for 1800 years forbidden on pain of death to ask.
Read MoreThe Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David D. Hall
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A definitively researched explanation for a phenomena many of us still don’t understand.
Read MoreThe Twentysomething Soul by Tim Clydesdale & Kathleen Garces-Foley
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A very readable guide surveying the inner faith-lives of a generation most Americans find baffling at best.
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American Cosmic by D. W. Pasulka
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Pasulka deals with two general groups of people who “interpret, spin, produce, and market the story of UFO events to the general public.”
Read MoreChristianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History by Brian Stanley
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Stanley's arguments are based on wide-ranging research, and his prose is clear.
Read MoreWhy We Need Religion by Stephen T. Asma
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A Darwinian view of whether religion is meaningful and beneficial to society.
Read MoreSupernatural: 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 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 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 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:
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