The flimsy latest from pastor Jeremiah (The Great Disappearance) points to seven divine promises to help Christians live more faithfully. He devotes a chapter to each of these promises—provision, inner peace, forgiveness, eternal life, closeness to God, protection, and purpose—unpacking their scriptural foundations before outlining how readers can prepare to receive them. For example, those hoping for divine provision, whether material or spiritual, should communicate their needs to God through prayer and offer generosity to others. While such advice is sensible and Jeremiah’s biblical analyses is solid, odd anecdotes and metaphors frequently make it seem like the author’s stretching for substance. The chapter on protection, for example, includes a short history of Charles Ponzi’s rise and fall in a roundabout illustration of why earthly promises of monetary “security” pale in comparison to God’s eternal protection. (Jeremiah also cautions readers to be wary of a culture that “tries to sell us the spiritual Ponzi scheme of good works, claiming that we can feel confident in eternity so long as we do more good things than bad things.”) Jeremiah’s devotees won’t find anything new here. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

This recently discovered treatise from late feminist theologian Daly (Beyond God the Father) offers a bold if abstract take on the Catholic church’s mid-20th-century crisis of perceived irrelevance. The author, who died in 2010, abandoned the unfinished manuscript shortly after leaving the church in the late 1960s. In it, she argues that the institution was being weakened by the clash between its “uncritical assent to propositions proposed by ecclesiastical authority” and rising tides of individualism, rationalism, skepticism, and social mobility. As a corrective, she called for an integration of Catholicism’s “external, heteronomous authority” and Protestantism’s rationalist doubt; this, she suggested, might create a robust faith that balanced reason with belief and individuality with community. But religion, she argued, also means extending beyond the bounds of literalism to embrace an element of divine mystery that links believers to the “infinite power of being” and could attract young people repelled by institutional convention and hungry for spiritual meaning. Despite her academic and often abstract prose, Daly’s analysis is clear-sighted, perceptive, and bolstered by rich theological, philosophical, and historical context. Six essays from contemporary scholars helpfully situate the work within the history of Christianity and Daly’s career. It’s a worthy revisiting of an important American Catholic thinker. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

For believers, “heaven is not just a future date with destiny but.... a present state of mind,” according to this energetic account from pastor De Courcy (Take Cover). The bulk of the book unpacks how “our heavenly destiny” can inspire readers to prioritize God in daily life and refrain from being swept up by earthly obsessions with money and power. Christians can also keep their “future physical resurrection” in mind with small, intentional acts of faith, like harnessing the “indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit” to inspire a “daily resurrection of hope and resolve.” Throughout, the author encourages Christians to use the promise of “eventual victory” to buoy them through hardships, as “when you know you’re destined to prevail, it is much easier to put your shoulder to the work and your hand to the plow.” While some readers might yearn for more robust scriptural analysis rather than the pages of colorful paraphrasing on which De Courcy relies, his message is unflinchingly positive and his descriptions vivid and enthusiastic (“The worship of God is the background music to Revelation, the soundtrack of heaven. Even though Revelation reverberates to the sound of warring armies... the predominant sound is that of saints singing and angels worshipping before the throne of God”). Christians seeking hope for the beyond will be uplifted. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

These stimulating essays and interviews from the first 50 years of Sojourners magazine, collected by poetry editor Berger (Who Killed Donte Manning?), seek “sabbath rest, contemplation, solitude, simplicity, and communal resilience” in today’s world. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr meditates on silence as a conduit to a truer, fuller spirituality that embraces contradictions, “not knowing,” and mystery. Unpacking the complexities of scripture and prayer, Margaret Atwood considers the “paradoxical” implications of the beatitude about the meek inheriting the earth to question biblical ideas of power, control, and social status. Less famous writers also pull their weight; pastor Mihee Kim-Kort movingly discusses how learning to live “fully and authentically” in her queerness allowed her to embrace being a part of God’s creation, while virtue ethicist Christopher Carter interrogates such challenges as the structural racism woven into the food distribution system. Taken together, the pieces offer a wide-ranging and imaginative exploration of how religion’s eternal truths raise questions in unexpected arenas of modern life. The result is a thought-provoking interrogation of what Christian spirituality means today. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Carter-Chand (coeditor of Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars), a director of programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers a fine-grained study of how the Salvation Army compromised its ostensible values while operating in 20th-century Germany. Founded in 1865 London by William and Catherine Booth to give aid to the “unsaved” (both spiritually and charitably), the Salvation Army arrived in Germany in 1886. The Heilsarmee, as it was called, began as a marginal organization severed from national “centers of power and influence,” but became “more demographically and culturally German” as leaders worked to frame it as a “patriotic German organization with an internationalist mission.” That strategy took a darker turn, according to the author, during WWI and under Hitler, with the organization engaging in “proactive public relations efforts,” forging Nazi alliances, and failing to offer organized aid to Jews. Dismantling narratives of the organization’s wartime virtue, Carter-Chand argues that it benefited from its simultaneous “national and international identities”—it could adopt German values while retaining a benevolent, internationalist image—and points to the organization’s postwar failure to reckon with its own complicity. It’s a rigorous and sobering reminder of how faith organizations can serve alternately as agents of compassion and instruments of accommodation. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Douglass (Cultivating Teen Faith) and Tausen, professors of theology and psychology, respectively, at Seattle Pacific University, team up for an energetic, research-based guide to “lov[ing] one another as Jesus loved us.” Unpacking what psychology reveals about human interaction, they explain how readers can harness the “proximity effect”—i.e., the idea that people are likelier to befriend those physically close to them—to bond with others by spending more time in public spaces, or taking public transit to work instead of driving (according to scripture, one’s neighbor is “anyone you cross paths with”). Elsewhere, they discuss how to fight dehumanization, a phenomenon wherein the failure to see others as possessing “the same value” as oneself makes it harder to appreciate their complexity. That, too, can be mitigated by personal interactions, especially those that happen on equal footing, since even benevolent acts like serving food at a homeless shelter, the authors note, cement a power imbalance that makes it harder to recognize the other’s full humanity. Fluidly translating psychological insights into accessible prose, the authors illuminate the challenges to human connection and offer well-grounded—if not especially surprising—strategies for surmounting them. It’s a refreshing primer on how to apply a religious dictum that’s easy to remember but hard to practice. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Horror serves as an unlikely but helpful lens through which to examine scripture, in this enlightening analysis from Grafius (Reading the Bible with Horror), a biblical studies professor at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit. According to the author, horror engages with deep anxieties that lie at the heart of faith, and links between horror films and biblical stories illuminate key scriptural concerns anew. For example, he compares the apostle Paul’s struggle between spirit and flesh in Romans to the good versus evil battle between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, underscoring how the “self... contains the monstrous” and the challenges of living in inherently inconvenient, impure bodies. Horror can also reckon with societal concerns; for instance, exorcism movies illustrate how evil warps individuals as well as their families and communities, and highlights “how important the work of healing those breaches can be.” Grafius’s comparisons are revealing and creative, and he makes a convincing case that horror-inflected passages in the Bible are intended not merely to terrify but to construct new realities and raise important questions. (He also tackles some of the Bible’s most troubling passages, including “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” a prayer of revenge against the Babylonian conquerors of Jerusalem.) The result is a wide-ranging exploration of the Bible’s strangest, scariest corners. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Biblical scholars Bashaw (Scapegoats) and Higashi (1 & 2 Samuel for Normal People) team up for a lucid guide to reading scripture. Using cooking as a guiding metaphor, they detail the complexities of interpretation, describing it as a process wherein different “chefs” with unique sociocultural backgrounds use the same basic ingredients to produce vastly different results. Among the book’s most useful elements are its tips on handling the Bible’s various “ingredients,” from its prose (don’t pay much attention to headings and verses, many of which were added millennia after the Bible’s composition) to the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelations (keep historical context firmly in mind when encountering “violent images and disturbing warnings,” which were used to jolt “empire-compromised readers into repentance” or assure first-century Christians their nonbelieving oppressors would get their comeuppance). While the cooking metaphor wears thin in a few places, it provides an accessible entry point into the sometimes-opaque world of biblical scholarship, and the authors’ colorful personal anecdotes enliven the proceedings. Church study groups will be especially edified. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

Conservationist Rosolie (Mother of God) shares an energizing account of a lifetime spent protecting more than 100,000 acres of wilderness in Peru. A lover of nature since boyhood, the author signed up for an expedition to the Amazonian jungle at age 18. Seeing the devastation being wrought on the rainforest, particularly the new roads cropping up around the Trans-Amazonian highway, motivated him to dedicate his life to conservation. In 2014, he founded Junglekeepers, an organization that protects the Peruvian jungle by employing rangers to protect tracts of land. Here. Rosolie catalogs the dire threats posed by loggers and drug cartels who are slashing and burning their way through the rainforest, wreaking havoc on local ecosystems and the homes of Indigenous tribes. But he’s also refreshingly optimistic about the future, rejecting “antihuman” narratives that “we are a plague on the planet... and there’s nothing that can be done” by pointing to activists who have committed themselves to saving the environment. More personally, he uses the story of finding his own “calling”—a spiritual process in which he “lost my mind to find my path”—to advocate for the importance of following one’s dreams, even when it “requires cutting away most of what constitutes a normal life, parts of you that stitches can’t fix.” Honest yet hopeful, this will provide plenty of inspiration for budding conservationists. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this eccentric guide, bestseller Choquette (Ask Your Guides) shares the advice for tapping into one’s divine nature that she claims was revealed to her in 2002 by “the Emissaries of the Third Ray,” a group of spirit teachers from the fifth dimension. These lessons, which have been updated in the wake of a “new Earth vibration” that began after the pandemic, comprise a “direct transmission” from the spirit guides, according to Choquette, who provides commentary and examples. The guidance is generally sensible, advising readers to pursue what they love and to seek out the blessings in challenging circumstances. The ultimate goal, Choquette writes, is to bypass the fear-based, ego-focused “third dimension” and move into the fourth dimension of the spirit and the fifth dimension of universal connection and unconditional love. Still, readers new to Choquette’s work may struggle to accept the origins of the lessons and have a tough time with her awkward prose and odd examples, like how her sister recovered from a divorce by becoming a trapeze artist and joining the circus. Choquette’s devoted fans may find inspiration, but others would be better served elsewhere. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 10/24/2025 | Details & Permalink