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

There’s no “one right way to experience God,” contends bestseller Wong (You Are More Than You’ve Been Told) in her openhearted latest. While believers are often conditioned to “pretend like we are close to God” by praying, worshiping, or studying the Bible in the same way others do, they should, according to Wong, use their unique qualities to connect with God in ways only they can. Instead of wasting time in large faith community settings, for example, introverts can study scripture with a few close friends, while others can use chance experiences to enjoy God’s creation rather than adhering to rigidly scheduled Bible study. Faith can also be found in the day-to-day; stressed-out parents can capitalize on quiet moments doing chores to speak to God, or use their love for their kids to appreciate God’s unconditional devotion. Readers will appreciate Wong’s gentle, permissive tone, and her examples of individual faith practices—drawn from her own life as well as from other believers—help anchor her message about how better knowing oneself opens the door to more fully loving God. The result is a compassionate reminder that faith isn’t one-size-fits-all. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

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