Foster care advocate Petersen (Fostered) aims in this compassionate guide to help Christians dismantle the false beliefs that undergird their destructive thought patterns. Arguing that feelings of “brokenness” can nurture a closeness to God, she assures readers struggling with self-hatred that loving themselves isn’t conceited (embracing “who God created you to be” is a holy act); with restlessness that “chasing unpromised potential” instead of appreciating what one has precludes satisfaction (“God may be trying to bring you healing with what you have, right where you are”); and with a lack of purposele that one’s “calling” lies not in professional aspirations but in serving as a “witness to God’s love” by loving others. Petersen makes clear throughout that the emotional healing process is often nonlinear and should facilitate self-acceptance rather than the prevention of pain, which can be an impetus for connecting with others and trying to understand Christ’s suffering. Blending Petersen’s vulnerable disclosures from a volatile childhood spent in and out of the foster care system with her concrete tips for healing (including daily mantras to reinforce one’s faith), this is a valuable starting point for believers looking to turn over a new leaf. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/06/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wagner (Godwired), a professor of religious studies at Ithaca College, explores in this scrupulous study the uniquely American myth of the self-­proclaimed “vigilante messiah” who “performs radical salvation with a gun.” Drawing from Christian apocalypticism and the American frontier myth, the narrative of the vigilante messiah took shape in the country’s earliest days, according to Wagner, and transformed “flesh-and-blood” cowboys who violently subdued Indigenous peoples into “strapping heroes” carrying out the “symbolically important” feat of conquering the West. In prevailing over a dehumanized enemy, the hero ushers in a “purified” society “where faith in God is replaced with faith in oneself,” rejecting communal systems and the modern anxieties they bring, like immigration and resource depletion. Wagner explores how the myth evolved in popular culture and art, from John Wayne westerns to such apocalyptic films as Armageddon, and draws intriguing and disturbing links to American mass shootings and the January 6 Capitol insurrection (whose gun-toting participants, Wagner argues, envisioned themselves as “pious judges trying to bring about a new world”). Ambitious and wide-ranging, this is a thought-provoking dissection of one of America’s founding stories and its lingering effects. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this quippy guide, Motherly contributor Johnston (coauthor of I’ll Be There (but I’ll Be Wearing Sweatpants)) calls on women to cast aside unrealistic social expectations and embrace their God-given “flaws and gifts.” Recalling her adolescent struggles with an eating disorder, the author describes how she transformed “from a girl who hated her flaws and was at war with her body to one who thinks her flaws are some of the greatest things about her.” She did so by dismantling false notions that lead to personal dissatisfaction—among them that rejection is akin to social death, that one must “be all things to all people,” and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Solid suggestions, like recognizing that what brings “peace and purpose” is important even if it seems ordinary—“I don’t always feel excited about the day-to-day mundane (sometimes I lose myself down a rabbit hole of Instagram escapism), but I know deep down it’s where I’m supposed to be”—are enlivened by Johnston’s refreshingly self-aware humor (“Hi, I’m Jess and I’m a people pleaser. I also dabble in codependency just for fun”). Christian women should take note of this down-to-earth invitation to seek self-acceptance. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Economic exploitation is “the root from which racism springs” and can be eradicated through adherence to Christian values, according to this impassioned debut. Pastor Foley explains how the “pursuit of profit” has fueled racism in America, with slavery ensuring American economic dominance through the violent extraction of labor, and public lynchings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wielded as “the post-slavery whip” to retain “political and economic power” over Black people. Foley also details how racist greed has been utilized by religious communities—including proslavery pastors who affirmed “out of one side of their mouth... that Africans were created in the image of God and then, out of the other side, spoke of how ‘emancipat[ing] our negroes’ would be tantamount to acting against God’s providence”—then calls for Christians to fight “racial capitalism” through initiatives like sharing one’s time or money with the needy. Debunking claims that racism is rooted solely in individuals (and thus see solutions mostly in relationship building), Foley persuasively argues that such “surface-level” fixes leave intact racism’s essential purpose: “to establish systems of wealth” that beneficiaries “perpetuate without being trampled on by those same systems.” The result is both a forceful call to recognize the roots of American inequality and a solid starting point for Christians who want to help fix them. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitude than a tightly woven “communal web” where silence is not a means of retreating into the self but shedding it to better live in the world. As a result of his visits, Iyer comes to see the ways in which the sacred shows up again and again in the mundane. For example, the tiny Tokyo apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her small children becomes a self-contained paradise (“Now I can see luxury is defined by all you don’t have to long for”), while the wildfires that regularly break out in the hills of California—and over the years claim his mother’s house and endanger the monastery itself—serve as a reminder that “the sacred is not a sanctuary... its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled.” The author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, “it’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.” This is stunning. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Yale theology professor Leppin (Martin Luther) paints a granular portrait of a saint who remains a remarkably resonant symbol for Christians. Peeling back the “interpretative layers” of medieval hagiography, he reveals Francis to be both strikingly contemporary and firmly of his time. On the one hand, he was a “restless” young man driven by feelings of “dislocation” to abandon an affluent upbringing to minister to the poor, and whose closeness to nature have led some to characterize him as an early “representative of the ecological movement.” On the other, he believed in the mysterious power of relics and may have practiced self-flagellation to drive the devil from his flesh. Placing his subject within the context of church history, Leppin makes illuminating points about how Francis’s “idiosyncratic path” was not entirely “a reflexive function of his own personal experience,” but instead fit within the church’s aims of spreading Christianity to Muslims (Francis preached to Muslims and possibly aimed to convert the Sultan of Egypt to Christianity during the Fifth Crusade). Scholars of Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/22/2024 | Details & Permalink

Beinart (The Crisis of Zionism), editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, issues an impassioned critique of the American Jewish community’s reaction to the war in Gaza. According to the author, “even Jews who are genuinely pained by Gaza’s agony” have convinced themselves that Israel’s outsize military response is necessary “to keep us safe,” hijacking historical narratives that frame Jews as a perennially victimized people as a justification for Israel to wield “life and death power over millions of Palestinians who lack even a passport.” To rebut such narratives, he draws from Israeli government records that attribute most of the Palestinian Arab departures from their homes and lands during the late 1940s to “Zionist attacks,” pointing to a deliberate strategy of expulsion to create a Jewish-majority state. In denying legal equality to most of the country’s Palestinian residents, Israel is “not merely offering Jews the right to determine their own lives” but “dominance over another people,” Beinart writes. He draws especially intriguing links between the “moral evasion” of what’s happening in Gaza by some diasporic Jews and increasing Jewish secularization, which, he argues, is replacing a more overtly moralistic “rabbinic tradition” that demands Jews “look inward and reckon with their sins.” Urgent and thought-provoking, this is sure to spark debate. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

Artist Nadeau debuts with a vulnerable if sometimes overwrought account of overcoming addiction. A high-powered banker with a leadership position at his church, the author spent years struggling with an emptiness that neither drinking nor an increasingly hollow faith could fill. After hitting rock bottom, he left banking and took a string of odd jobs as he set about repairing his life. Therapy helped him realize he’d been wanting a closer connection with God, which he nurtured through an “embodied life” of serving others, decentering the self, and finding goodness in the everyday (ordinary routines like going to work, he writes, imbue “that which is finite and temporal” with virtue). Most evocative are the author’s meditations on the emotionally numbing experience of addiction, which he describes as akin to “being unable to participate in the Fullness of the world around me.” Unfortunately, his insights become fuzzier the further he strays from his own lived experience, as when he suggests that readers facing their own crises should “listen to the Hidden Music” and “have courage enough to follow it wherever it may lead.” The result is an intermittently insightful testament to the life-saving power of faith. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

University of Chicago law professor Julius (T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form) argues in this provocative if ultimately unconvincing account that the Jewish patriarch is emblematic of a key dichotomy at the heart of Jewish life. Splitting Abraham’s life into two periods, he characterizes “Abraham 1” as an idol-smashing “public intellectual” in a polytheistic society who was nearly killed before he was exiled from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. He then became “Abraham 2,” “a man of faith” who “subordinate[d] himself to God in all His exacting demands” and encouraged others to do the same—a shift that explains why he was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at God’s command. According to the author, the two Abrahams symbolize competing impulses—the desire to critically question God versus faithfully submit to his will—that comprise the dichotomy at the center of Jewish life. Though this theory intrigues, the author’s heavy reliance on midrashic sources to fill in the scriptural blanks (the Torah makes no mention of Abraham’s Ur period) comes across as cherry-picking, and his argument is further weakened by analyses that can be circuitous and challenging to follow. This fails to achieve its lofty ambitions. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Slob Comes Clean blogger White (Decluttering at the Speed of Life) assures readers in this cheerful guide that God loves them precisely for the messes they make. Admitting that her own disorganized house “was once my deepest, darkest secret,” White recalls anxiously canceling her kids’ playdates and having out-of-towners stay at hotels before she started the blog that finally helped her get organized. Yet even as the clutter receded, she wasn’t cured of messiness; instead, she came to better understand “who Jesus is and how he designed me”—including, for instance, giving her the ability “to hyper focus on one thing,” even if that means letting household chores slide. Aiming to untangle the false links between cleanliness, morality, and spirituality, White notes that cleanliness is not among the characteristics of a godly woman listed in Proverbs 31, and contends that a messy house is not a sign of laziness. Such discussions, which touch on prevailing notions of domesticity, Christianity, and female perfection, are often perceptive, though White sometimes stretches her thesis too far, as when she writes that a feeling of “grossed-out-edness” while cleaning should remind one “of the difference between the world you currently live in and the promise of eternity.” Still, this makes an organized house seem within reach. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/29/2024 | Details & Permalink