Burton, director of global supplier diversity and inclusion at McDonald’s, aims in her empowering debut guide to help Black women thrive in a discriminatory business world. She calls on readers to dismantle limiting beliefs that constrain their success, like the advice once delivered to Black women not to wear red lipstick to avoid exaggerating the “size of their lips” (an admonition, the author writes, to minimize themselves in the business world and beyond). Once readers have dismantled such beliefs, they can harness their strengths to improve their work performance, including using faith and prayer to make values-led decisions, prioritizing self-care to boost productivity, and fostering “grace and toughness” to more confidently lead. Drawing from her own experience, the author is frank about the ways racism impacts the corporate world but remains refreshingly optimistic about how readers can utilize their unique skills and experience to succeed within an unequal system. As antagonism toward workplace diversity initiatives climbs, this serves as an especially valuable resource for Black Christian entrepreneurs and professionals looking to get ahead. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

Haines-Eitzen (The Gendered Palimpsest), a professor of religion at Cornell, traces in this robust account the complex “afterlives” of the gospel of John. As she notes, the gospel became a site of debate for early religious groups and philosophers, with the Gnostics and such theologians as Augustine of Hippo seeking “hidden meanings” in its stories and Protestant Reformation–era thinkers using its vivid depictions of the eucharist to quibble over the literality, utility, and significance of the practice. Later, its language informed the American evangelical movement, where the term “born again,” which was drawn from the gospel of John, was used to support the idea that one must embrace Jesus to receive eternal life. On a darker note, the gospel’s anti-Jewish rhetoric (“the Jews” are referenced some 70 times in the text, generally as hostile antagonists calling for Jesus’s crucifixion) was harnessed throughout history to bolster antisemitic sentiment, including legitimizing Nazi propaganda and justifying violence against “heretics” during the Crusades. The author comprehensively catalogs the gospel’s role in Christian history and reveals how religious texts serve as vital sites for thinkers and movements to negotiate their theories and differences. The result is a robust study of a foundational Christian text. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

Butler University religion professor McGrath (John of History, Baptist of Faith) outlines in this pensive guide how former Christian evangelicals can refashion their faith. Characterizing evangelical Christianity as a narrow religious framework that harnesses “bits of the Bible” to support rigid principles often concerned with “tear[ing] down the beliefs of others,” he offers advice for shaping a more flexible, individualized faith. Suggestions include practicing “compassion and empathy” toward friends and enemies alike, developing an appreciation for the divine by seeking beauty in music and nature, and starting open-ended, nonjudgmental conversations about faith with members of one’s community. He also wisely encourages readers to release their “illusion of certainty” and approach faith as a lifelong search for “the truth about God,” which might involve elements of their past faith practices (readers should take the time to “go through the rubble, brick by brick, because there is a lot in there that was actually good and which would be a shame to walk away from”). Curious exvangelicals will get a lot of mileage out of this. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

This simplistic program for spiritual growth from novelist VanLiere (The Christmas Shoes) aims to help believers “knock on God’s door and know His real love in an unreal world.” Each chapter explores an aspect of God’s character, including his role as a father—rather than a king—who provides “tender love and care” to his flawed children; his sympathy for believers’ earthly suffering; and the direct expression of his wisdom in the Bible, which believers must accept as the word of God to deepen their faith and recognize the gospel’s “good news” in the world. VanLiere’s reassurances may hearten believers seeking a quick hit of religious encouragement, but its benefits are outweighed by repetition, faulty logic, and simplistic comparisons, including reductive efforts to prove Christ’s inherent superiority to gods of other faiths. Only VanLiere’s most devoted fans need apply. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

Nye (Grace Can Lead Us Home), an advocate for ending homelessness, reimagines in this optimistic treatise how faith communities can better meet “the interconnected physical and spiritual needs of unhoused people.” He critiques the historically entrenched “gospel rescue mission system,” which often requires an initial conversion to Christianity and continued attendance of religious services to maintain access to social programs. Such a system, he writes, is ineffective and wrongly frames homelessness as a “spiritual failure” to be repaired with religion. In its place, Nye advocates for an approach where housing serves as a foundation from which people can rebuild their lives. He shares examples of churches and nonprofits that have used this principle to help unhoused people; Calvary Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, for example, converted their entire property to affordable housing and leases back the chapel for their weekly services. Several churches in the Los Angeles area offer guarded parking spaces for those who live in their vehicles, while churches elsewhere organize social events to establish long-term relationships with local unhoused communities. Nye wisely promotes solutions that center the unique needs of individual unhoused communities instead of the well-meaning but often misguided priorities of spiritual communities looking to help. The result is an uplifting faith-based plan for tackling a pressing social problem. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Columbia literature professor Hochberg (Becoming Palestine) pieces together a fragmentary, introspective account of her late father’s complicated life. By the time he died in 2013, Yosef Hochberg had transformed from a highly productive statistician and professor to a bipolar, physically ill man convinced he was the Jewish messiah. Mining her own memories and papers found in his second wife’s apartment in 2013, Hochberg traces her fraught relationship with her father in nonchronological snippets, mixing grim recollections of his last days in the hospital with idyllic vignettes of their summers together after her parents divorced, excerpts from the many letters he wrote her, and writings in which he discussed his feelings of sexual inadequacy and growing sense that all Jews must reject “Christian” thought, including Western medicine. She also interviews former colleagues and family members, documenting the impact of his scholarly work on the field of biostatistics, which involves the application of statistical methods to biology and medicine. While her father remains a somewhat elusive figure, this serves as a powerful account of watching a loved one descend into mental illness and the messy, emotional process of retroactively trying to come to grips with a parent’s life and legacy. It’s an insightful portrait of one woman grappling with the weight of personal history. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalist McCracken (The Longing Lab) provides a candid examination of limerence, or an obsessive, unreciprocated infatuation with a romantic interest whom one has “illogically placed on a pedestal.” Tracing her own experience with romantic infatuation, McCracken recounts how she sought solace from early attachment issues by falling for emotionally unavailable men whose unattainability fueled obsession but precluded real-life intimacy. Limerence, she writes, was partly a way of insulating herself from having to make real-life romantic decisions. More broadly, it was also a result of Hollywood-influenced expectations of romantic perfection and a purity culture that disempowers women from listening to their bodies and promotes passive longing. The author, who began to recover from her romantic obsessions at age 40, explains how readers can do the same by learning to tolerate imperfection and genuine intimacy; creating more realistic narratives about past heartbreaks; and engaging in mindfulness and body-based therapy practices. McCracken draws from psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality to illuminate how longing can function as both self-protection and self-sabotage, but it’s her refreshing vulnerability that lends the narrative its openhearted relatability and insight. Readers of Glennon Doyle will especially appreciate this. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this smart guide, Lardner (Breaking Free from Binge Eating) draws from personal dieting disasters and her experience as a nutrition coach to unpack how faith can free believers from an obsession with their weight. She begins with a mindset shift, explaining how readers can repair the damage to their self-esteem caused by failed diets by viewing their bodies as gifts from God and writing a list of things for which they’re thankful at the end of each day. Small habits, like taking a 10-minute walk after dinner, can help readers build a sense of self-control to fuel other healthy habits. More generally, Lardner advises readers to swap out rigid, all-or-nothing thinking for a flexible framework of eating in a way that “empowers you to serve others and honor God.” A few awkward suggestions aside (“Pray a short prayer every time you open the fridge”), Lardner succeeds in showing how faith can spur a healthier lifestyle by providing the inner fulfillment that emotional eating often stands in for. Christian women will be nourished in body and spirit. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

This smart, pragmatic guide from bestseller Eggerichs (Speak Your Mind) unpacks a dozen insights that can “reshape the way we see and do marriage.” Some are explicitly faith-based, including the idea that one’s self-worth must come from God rather than approval from one’s spouse. According to Eggerichs, this keeps marital expectations in check and makes it easier to love one’s partner without relying on their affirmation. Other lessons expand on more general premises, including that small sources of irritation shouldn’t overtake the good parts of a marriage, and that most of the time two people can both be right (healthy differences can coexist, Eggerichs writes, without solidifying into moral absolutes or becoming proxies for battles over “identity and value”). The author buttresses these familiar insights with practical tools and aptly distilled truths—noting, for example, that “many spouses confuse deferring with losing. But in matters of conscience, deference is often the highest form of love and respect.” It adds up to a worthy resource for Christian couples looking to build healthier and holier marriages. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

The “simplest church on earth” is “the space between you and the next person you encounter,” according to this uneven outing from Good Guys coauthor Mattson, founder of interfaith organization Between. He argues that connecting with others can bolster spiritual growth, because even when conversations don’t directly center faith, they can teach participants important moral lessons and help them practice caring for others as Jesus cares for them. Such “small but mighty” moments of connection also help create a community from which people can best carry out God’s work and alleviate the “division, rage, loneliness and fear” tearing society apart. The account is light on practical ideas for facilitating connection—suggestions include practicing vulnerability and asking others careful questions about their pasts—and focuses instead on entreating readers to expend the effort to reach out to others and embrace productive discomfort. Such a message is timely, and many of the author’s stories are affecting, but they’re more often than not buried in digressive anecdotes. The result is an uplifting but incomplete invitation to love one’s neighbor. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink