Episcopal priest King debuts with a bracing account of her family’s flight from violence as Palestinian Christian refugees. The history is told from the perspectives of three women: Aniiseh, King’s great-grandmother; Bahi, the author’s grandmother; and the author herself. Aniiseh grew up near Haifa (in what’s now Israel) in the 1920s, married at 15, and miscarried three times before giving birth to seven daughters and one son. Bahi’s family fled anti-Palestinian violence when Israel became a nation state in 1948, settled in Syria and then Lebanon (where the family contended with anti-Christian animosity), and—when the country erupted into civil war in 1975–left for the United States. King, who passed as white while growing up in Houston, Tex., had only an oblique understanding of her Palestinian heritage, until she set out as a teen to understand her roots and her family’s place in America (“I always experienced the world with the privilege that whiteness brings... [but] our whiteness is limited, liminal”). King pulls no punches in detailing how seemingly safe harbors for refugees can suddenly become threatening, and vividly captures how her family celebrated life’s blessings and endured tumult with the aid of their faith. The result is a powerful narrative of loss, survival, and belief. (July)

Reviewed on 04/11/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lawyer and Israeli diplomat Taub (Parasha Diplomatit) draws deeply on Jewish tradition for this impassioned defense of productive disagreement as a vital “source of renewable intellectual energy.” Mining the Talmud, Bible, and his own experiences in conflict resolution, he sketches out a philosophy that sees individuals as intrinsically capable of accessing only a “partial and incomplete” version of the truth. A fuller picture can only be found by engaging in intellectual collaboration with others, Taub contends. He explains how readers can argue better by taking stock of their cognitive biases and mentally separating the content of the argument from judgments about their opponent’s character. More broadly, Taub suggests that organizations should foster dissenting perspectives by empowering junior employees to speak up, and preserve opposing views in official records. What emerges is an intelligent, well-grounded case that productive disagreement helps to build a society resilient enough to weather and learn from its differences (community “born of agreement is fragile”; community united in debate is “real and lasting”). It’s a persuasive case for the value of agreeing to disagree. (June)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Western society is rooted in the biblical notion “that all humans bear the image of God,” according to this thought-provoking intellectual history. That assertion, contends Persico (The Jewish Meditative Tradition), a visiting professor of Jewish studies at UC Berkeley, represented a key ideological departure from contemporaneous Near Eastern religious traditions that viewed royals as the heirs to the divine, and has played a vital part in shaping modern ideas of individualism and autonomy. Ranging from biblical times to the present, he explores how the idea influenced belief in values like equality (if everyone is created in God’s image, universal rights are the logical result). Other links are more surprising—for example, Persico suggests that secularism’s rise beginning in the mid 19th century was aided by how the idea affirmed intrinsic human value, which, ironically, helped to repudiate the same divine authority that had given it purchase. Ultimately, Persico uses the notion that mankind was created in God’s image to call for people “to protect our autonomy and that of our neighbours... to struggle for the establishment of a just, egalitarian” world. Erudite and well-reasoned, it’s an illuminating and expansive look at the interplay between faith and society. (July)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chiaramonte (coauthor of Embracing Queer Family) recounts her eight-year gender “transformation” in this bruising memoir. Raised in an “uber-religious” evangelical household to believe God’s love was contingent on obedience, she learned early on to “act and behave like a man.” Much of her adulthood was spent “transitioning in the dark”—buying and throwing out women’s clothes; seeking out transgender communities on the internet. Therapy spurred her at age 34 to realize she was trans and begin the process of transitioning. Chiaramonte provides diaristic, no-holds-barred discussions of what she’s gone through since, including choosing a new name and grappling with body dysmorphia, panic attacks, and a political climate openly hostile to transgender people. She perceptively renders the visceral relief of learning to feel comfortable in her own skin alongside the realities of “ambiguous loss,” including of those who are physically close but emotionally estranged—among them her mother, who told her she was giving “God the middle finger.” Elsewhere, Chiaramonte delves into the challenges of constructing a new faith outside the constraints of organized religion. It’s a candid and unflinching window into what it means to find oneself. (July)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Almond (The Buddha), a professor emeritus of religion at Queensland University, comprehensively chronicles more than two millennia of scholarship on the biblical story of the flood. Ancient and medieval interpreters saw it as a source of literal truth and, in the case of some Christian and Muslim thinkers, as a prototype for later religious figures and events (with several Christian commentators framing Noah as a Christlike regenerator of humanity). Towards the end of the 17th century, modernity brought a wave of religious and secular thinkers who used “new science” to scrutinize the narrative anew. For example, naturalist Carl Linnaeus, while unwilling to dismiss the account wholesale, questioned the plausibility of the sudden extinction of every animal species save a lucky pair of each. Others wondered about the provenance of “the vast amounts of water” in the flood, the means of its eventual dissipation, and how an ark could have accommodated what was then an ever-increasing number of recognized species. Stretching his survey to the present, Almond concludes with a trenchant discussion of the story’s relevance in a world that risks destruction from yet another “cataclysmic climate event” wrought by “human wrongdoing,” and urges readers to take responsibility for remaking the world (as did Noah, whom Almond calls the world’s first environmentalist). Rigorous yet accessible, this is a worthy reconsideration of an ancient story. (June)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Lyonhart (MonoThreeism) takes a bumpy ride through six stages of “the Christian story” in this energetic if flawed retelling. Using each stage to anchor his theological, personal, and philosophical meditations, he covers creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, God building up the Jewish nation in preparation for the growth of Christianity, humanity’s redemption through Jesus, the founding of the current church, and the impending end of the world. He contends that cutting out any one of these parts would impede the moral completeness of Christian philosophy: losing sight of the sixth and final movement would render humans “materialists,” while de-emphasizing the creation narrative risks furthering a “body-shaming, sex-repellent, anti-environmental” ethos. Lyonhart’s at his most convincing when he discusses how understanding the story of Christianity in its entirety prevents ideological cherry-picking and enables a robust understanding of Christian morals, though this point tends to weave in and out of view. Additionally, the six “movements” can feel somewhat like an arbitrary structural container for wide-ranging theological musings, personal anecdotes, humorous asides, and sprawling philosophical analyses. The result is an ambitious yet uneven attempt to breathe fresh life into a familiar narrative. (June)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this ardent and rigorous manifesto, minister Levy-Lyons (No Other God) explores the ill effects of faith’s decline. According to the author, the 20th century saw the rise of a progressivist culture whose capitalist ethos has transformed religion from an intrinsic part of daily life into a commodified “object, separate from oneself, that can be chosen or unchosen.” Such a shift unlinks matter from spirit, she argues, setting in motion three chief disconnects: from one’s body (which transforms from a sacred vessel into a machine designed to achieve one’s ambitions), from the earth (which becomes a utilizable resource rather than God’s creation), and from other people. Meanwhile, secular values like meritocracy and self-fulfillment try to fill the gap but lack the spiritual depth to help people “fully receive the sacred gifts of life.” Despite a sometimes caustic tone and a few less convincing examples (at one point, she suggests a rise in mastectomies and even formula feeding are symptoms of the “deep-seated spiritual grief” of being severed from “our animal selves”), Levy-Lyons makes a persuasive case that an important aspect of human life gets lost when secular culture makes the notion of “surrender[ing] to something larger than ourselves” superfluous. It’s a probing critique. (June)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hamilton and Wilson (coauthors of Compassionate Conversations) draw on their experience as Zen Buddhist teachers and conflict mediators for this solid guide to fostering a “spirituality with teeth.” Citing the value of a pragmatic spiritual approach—one that builds skills to help others rather than simply healing oneself—the authors highlight such strategies as building community and forging stronger bonds with others through questioning, active listening, and reframing. Exploring how the principles behind meditation inspire communal practices, they compare seeking “oneness” with the world to finding common ground during conflicts, and describe how people can get in touch with their body and emotions to interact with others more intentionally. Throughout, the authors condense Zen teachings into a beginner-friendly overview that can feel repetitive at times, but they pepper the account with memorable bits of wisdom (“It takes time to discover the timeless”). Newbie practitioners will find the most value here. (June)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Tolan (Faces of Muhammad) traces in this vibrant and sweeping survey the 1,400-year evolution of Islam. Stressing Islam’s conceptual unity (“we are one umma”) and diverse reality, he tells its history by stitching together the stories of key figures. Among them are Um Waraqa, a woman who, at Mohammad’s request, led prayer at the second mosque in Medina; Rabia al-Adawi, an eighth-century flute player and founder of Sufism who rejected her many suitors to devote herself to writing poetry “to her one true love, God”; and early 15th-century Chinese Muslim admiral Lzheng He, who helped spread Islam to the Philippines and Indonesia while forging diplomatic and economic ties. Turning to the present day, Tolan highlights gaps between Quranic principle and Islamic societies (especially concerning the rights of women), and frames the clashes between politicized reactions to Islam—including fundamentalist terrorist organizations and an “anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extreme right”—as a continuation of contests over the faith that have “been playing out for centuries.” Tolan’s impressive geographic scope and fine-grained historical detail combine for a masterful portrait of Islam as a religion and culture. The result is the definitive history of a complex faith. (May)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Elie (Reinventing Bach), a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, probes the origins of the American culture wars in this detailed if oblique history. At the center of his account are the so-called “controverts” who used “crypto-religious” language, tropes, and images to undermine traditional religious beliefs in the 1980s. They include Andy Warhol, who expressed his complicated religious identity in silkscreen prints of apostles and Brillo boxes, the latter of which played on Catholic-inflected notions of the “ordinary as holy,” according to Elie. Also spotlighted are Madonna, who embodied a “struggle with traditional female ideals—of womanhood and motherhood, of virtue and erotic power,” and Martin Scorsese, whose long-delayed The Last Temptation of Christ cut against Christian ideas that Christ’s teachings were self-evident without historical interpretation. Elie situates this artistic ferment against the backdrop of an American Christian culture and a Catholic church that was grappling with sexual abuse within its ranks as well as the AIDS crisis. In the process, he probes how artists and popular culture understood and reacted to shifting currents of “authority and individual conscience,” devotion and desire, and institutional hypocrisy. While the implications of those questions are fascinating and the individual artist profiles are vivid, Elie struggles to slot the book’s various elements into a cohesive argument. It adds up to an intriguing yet disorganized portrait of a tumultuous decade. (May)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink