Naptime Kitchen blogger Strickler details in her down-to-earth debut how the chronically dissatisfied can swap comparison for contentment. As a young mom, the author struggled with “knowing my life was a gift” while envying the spacious kitchens and attractive outfits she scrolled past on social media. Deciding to reframe her frustrations, she learned to transform her dreams of a bigger, cleaner kitchen (less a superficial desire than a hunger for domestic happiness, she writes) into gratitude for the messes and spills of a vibrant family life. Elsewhere, she describes turning frustrations with the routine of marriage into thankfulness for being fully known by a partner, using such mindset tweaks as giving one’s spouse the benefit of the doubt during conflicts. While the ills of social media–induced envy are hardly news, the author effectively validates the real needs for safety, belonging, and connection that underlie the apparent desire for more. In the process, she explains how readers can better fulfill such needs through straightforward practices like compiling and sharing a list of all the positive traits one appreciates about one’s partner. The result is a welcome reminder to stop and smell the roses. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

TikTokker Backstrom (Holy Hot Mess) brings her irreverent humor to this candid, freewheeling account of deconstructing her faith and slowly building it back up. Raised in a rigid Southern Baptist church, Backstrom grew into a devout adult whose beliefs wavered little until a question from her five-year-old son—would his nonreligious friend go to hell?—caused her faith to unravel like “a thread tugging loose from a carefully knit sweater I’d been wearing my whole life.” She details the chaos that ensued as she funneled her mounting anger at the church into Youtube and TikTok videos, spurring an “exodus” of her followers but attracting a new community of like-minded fans; became “the poster girl for [faith] deconstruction”; suffered through a painful divorce; attempted to find a new church; and struggled to forgive church members who’d hurt her. Eventually, she adopted a faith rooted less in the church than in Jesus’s teachings and the notion that self-love is foundational for loving others. Amid her chatty if sometimes scattered musings, perceptive points emerge about moral ambiguity, both her own and that of believers who don’t always practice what they preach (“Sometimes we’re the hero in our story, sometimes the villain, and most of the time, we’re just... people”). Christians seeking respite from strict spiritual absolutes will find comfort here. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Lambert details in his meditative debut manual how Christians can read scripture to promote “wholeness and healing” rather than hate. Explaining how the Bible gets weaponized, he contends that pastors and churches incorrectly frame the text as the inerrant word of God, giving rise to skewed interpretations that obscure its message or harm the very groups it calls on Christians to protect. Instead, readers should consider the Bible a “big, messy, and complex” collection of writings best analyzed in less literal ways. Those include a “Jesus-centered” lens that uses Christ’s love as a filter, and a contextual lens, which the author uses to convincingly debunk bans on women pastors, noting that the verse cited in support of such restrictions—extracted from a letter written by Paul to an Ephesian church—was meant only to address that specific church, rather than Christians “everywhere and for all time.” Elsewhere, Lambert outlines how a “liberation and flourishing” lens draws out biblical themes of justice for the oppressed and empowers readers to fight injustice in their lives. Intertwining teachings from a diverse slate of thinkers and theologians, including bell hooks and James Cone, with Lambert’s own experiences of deconstructing the rigid, Southern Baptist faith of his youth, this makes for a wide-ranging and cogent guide to seeing scripture in a new light. Disenchanted Christians will be energized. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

Koeth, an assistant history professor at Notre Dame, debuts with a scrupulous study of the profound changes Catholicism underwent during the midcentury suburban boom. Replacing the structure of the 19th-century “immigrant church” proved daunting, as suburbs rapidly expanded across unwieldy, unwalkable distances, stretching the church’s financial and human resources and diminishing the sense of community cultivated in urban congregations. With suburban churches overcrowded and increasingly inaccessible, the epicenter of religious life shifted to private spaces, as older parish associations that aimed to cultivate “communal spirituality” gave way to home-based “apostolates” led by laypeople. Absent the tightly knit immigrant communities that had anchored city life, suburbia also became a crucible where ethnic divisions between Catholics broke down, a development that ended up reinforcing racial barriers that were already compounded by suburban segregation. Against this backdrop, the author incisively reappraises broader shifts in U.S. Catholicism—arguing, for example, that the dissolution of the Catholic “Democratic monolith” stemmed not only from racial backlash and antiabortion sentiment but from economic pressures driven by the shift to suburban life, which spurred Catholic tax “revolts” as “inflation and tax increases... cut into the savings and income of working-class whites.” Thoroughly researched and well analyzed, this is a smart look at a volatile period in American religious history. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this dynamic treatise, theologian Watterson (Mary Magdalene Revealed) excavates the egalitarian roots of Christianity via the life of a largely forgotten saint. In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the council of Nicaea ordered the destruction of the Gospel of Mary, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and other texts that cut against notions of “an exclusively male succession of divine authority.” Drawing on these scriptures, which were saved by monks and rediscovered between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Watterson recounts the story of Thecla, who lived in the first century, refused marriage to follow the apostle Paul, dedicated her life to spreading Christ’s teachings, and baptized herself in a moment of crisis—an act that illustrated a profound self-belief rooted in God’s love. According to Watterson, Thecla’s story reflects a Christianity that existed before the fourth century less as a religion than “an ancient version of an equal rights movement.” Though some of the book’s scriptural lessons veer off-topic, Watterson perceptively analyzes the links between power, authority, and embodied faith (she contends that Christian spirituality has often ignored the “sweaty, messy, bloody reality of the... human body”). The result is a vibrant and creative reframing of traditional Christian power paradigms. (July)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

Art historian Nyord (Seeing Perfection) provides an intricate account of how Egyptian mortuary practices have been transformed in the Western imagination to fit Christian archetypes. According to the author, early European scholars selectively mined the works of classical writers such as Diodorus and Servius to explain what ancient visitors to Egypt observed, including mummified bodies, obelisks, and tombs. In the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars attempted to interpret Egyptian practices within a cross-cultural context, but continued to overidentify Judeo-Christian parallels (for example, by using terms like “body and soul” and “eternity” that carried Christian connotations). The translation of the Book of the Dead in 1842 cemented European scholars’ convictions that postmortem judgments (whereby the gods evaluated the “ethical and religious merits” of deceased souls) were central to the Egyptians, and marginalized such concepts as metempsychosis, or the migration of souls, that helped distinguish Egyptian funerary practices from Christian ones. Exploring why Western misinterpretations of ancient Egyptian death practices persist, the author points to an enduring “universal human longing for transcendent, eternal life,” as well as documentaries, film exhibits, and books that reinforce entrenched ideas about the Egyptian quest for immortality. Dense and methodical, Nyord’s history meticulously probes the challenges of cultural transmission. Serious Egyptologists will be edified. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

The “story of American charisma” is one of destructive leaders advertising apocalyptic futures, institutionalists wielding big government, and trailblazers fighting for social progress, according to this illuminating intellectual history. Worthen (Apostles of Reason), a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill, traces 400 years of charismatic American leaders, from 17th-century “prophets” who excited adherents with “the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence,” to 20th-century “agitators,” such as Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and dangerous “gurus” like Donald Trump who have garnered outsized influence in the wake of widespread losses of faith in public institutions. At the heart of this history, Worthen writes, is the paradoxical human desire for personal agency and connection to “force[s] greater than ourselves,” which became pressing after the Protestant Reformation remodeled “medieval people’s relationships to divine power,” and was supercharged in an America defined by individualism. Drawing on fine-grained historical research, Worthen makes insightful forays into how power is mediated in the public sphere and how Americans express their need for “transcendent meaning and... worship” through means that can seem anything but divine. It amounts to a revealing window into shifting currents of American social, religious, and political thought. (May)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Reading the Bible in the tradition of history’s “great mystics” can help Christians build a more expansive faith, according to this spirited guide. Inspired by such figures as early Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, spiritual retreat leader McColman (Eternal Heart) highlights the value of reading the Bible with “spiritual imagination,” or drawing personal meaning from its stories without getting bogged down in factual specifics. For example, he suggests that it’s less important whether God actually created the world in six days than that the story has resonated with generations of readers and can spark one’s own awe at God’s power. Using their spiritual imagination can help readers to see God as “infinitely loving and compassionate rather than patriarchal and authoritarian,” enriching their faith and helping them combat the Bible’s weaponization by those who literalize the text. Elsewhere, McColman emphasizes the value of noticing how themes like justice show up in biblical stories and can be applied to readers’ lives. Such advice buttresses the author’s call for readers to engage with the Bible through a flexible method that accounts for the text’s mysteries and gaps. Believers eager to see scripture through a new lens will want to pick this up. (June)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this intermittently illuminating history, medievalist Gillhammer (A Late-Medieval History of the Ancient and Biblical World) explores how Christian liturgy has evolved in Western culture. Tracing how specific rites have changed over time, she explains how Psalm 51—a song of penitence in which King David asks for God’s forgiveness—gained popularity in the Middle Ages for its engagement with sin and repentance, finding its way into church services and private devotions; later, it was set to music by such composers as Bach and Brahms. Dies Irae—a poem filled with references to the Last Judgment—became part of Roman Catholic services honoring the deceased in the late 1600s, cementing its associations with “danger, death,” and spirituality that have persisted in popular culture (the poem’s eerie plainchant melody features in 19th-century classical music and even in modern film scores). Though Gillhammer repeats some of her points about the liturgy’s emotional resonance, she effectively highlights how religious rituals allow people to connect with “community, in the present and across time” and thus remain deeply ingrained in contemporary society in sometimes surprising ways. It’s an intriguing if imperfect look at the enduring influence of religious tradition. (June)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Meyer (The Confident Woman) delivers a solid guide to overcoming life’s challenges through faith. Framing hardships as opportunities to grasp the breadth of God’s love—periods of sickness illustrate his ability to heal, sinful moments show his capacity to forgive—Meyer argues that if believers endure challenges rather than run from them, they will come out on the other side more spiritually mature. To get through the “mess,” readers should affirm their faith (by literally speaking aloud to their problems); pray; and cultivate a positive attitude by reminding themselves that the difficulty won’t last forever. If they can help it, readers should also refrain from making big life decisions in such moments. Enduring hardship helps believers better understand Jesus’s suffering on earth, according to Meyer, and build the type of “godly” character that allows one to better serve God. Meyer’s competent prose serves as an effective vehicle for her matter-of-fact instruction and frequent reassurances that tough times don’t mean God has left one behind, even if many such points are recycled from her previous books. The author’s fans will get what they came for. (July)

Reviewed on 04/25/2025 | Details & Permalink