Pulitzer winner Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) delivers a riveting chronicle of the fracturing of a progressive Christian church during a period of social and political turmoil. In 1996, “hippie church planters” Rod and Gwen White founded the Circle of Hope church in Philadelphia as an alternative to “hypocrisy, GOP politics, and rote Bible learning.” By the 2010s, they’d expanded into four congregations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But fissures that developed after the Whites stepped back from day-to-day operations in the 2010s deepened in 2020 as the church’s four pastors grappled with Covid lockdown policies; the disconnect between the church’s antiracism efforts and its struggles to interrogate its own biases; and questions over whether social justice efforts should be linked to political activism. Focusing on each of the four pastors in turn, Griswold artfully teases out the challenges that eventually led to the church’s closure at the end of 2023, including the gap between its utopian vision and its ability to enact it and growing tensions with the Whites, who wanted to keep the institution largely out of politics. It’s a fascinating inquest into the death of a church that doubles as a compassionate case study on the insufficiency of good intentions. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/10/2024 | Details & Permalink

Howell debuts with an erratic portrait of his father, Rasta movement founder Leonard Percival Howell (1898–1981), and the Rastafarian community he led near Kingston, Jamaica, from 1940 until it was disbanded in the late ’50s. Howell frames his childhood in the Pinnacle compound as idyllic, and the residents there as good citizens, claiming that the friction between Howell’s followers and other Jamaicans stemmed largely from harassment by colonial authorities who sought to undercut Howell’s influence. Interwoven with the story of the commune is valuable background on Rastafarianism’s origins in Marcus Garvey’s movement for African independence, from which it broke in the early 1930s when Howell designated Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as “the Living God.” Unfortunately, the author’s alternately defensive and worshipful attitude toward his father yields some questionable conclusions, as when Howell writes of his father’s many romantic relationships, “one could argue Dada loved women too much to respect them, but he was a man of his times.... He was a Victorian gentleman and a lion all in one.” This falls short. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Former marine Robichaux (Fight for Us) delivers an uneven account of his aid efforts in Ukraine. Following Russia’s 2022 invasion, Robichaux and his son Hunter headed to Ukraine with Save Our Allies, an organization that aids Americans and allies in war-torn countries. The conflict was “like nothing I’d ever experienced before,” Robichaux writes, describing how he dodged Russian attacks, procured communications supplies, and saw evidence of war crimes, “from mass graves filled with the bodies of women and children to... the use of chemical weapons on civilians.” The author’s harrowing recollections of these atrocities and how he held onto his faith in the face of them are the most resonant parts of the book (“Pain and even death are not permanent,” he writes. “Bad things do happen to good people.... But it’s not the end of the story”). Unfortunately, the impact is undercut by the author’s digressions into such political issues as America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and by his naive policy suggestions, as when he asserts that “the president of the United States does have the power and ability to swiftly end this war” by demanding a ceasefire and leading NATO humanitarian forces into Ukraine. Despite some moving moments, this misses the mark. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pastor Joyce recounts in this poignant debut memoir how his faith helped him grapple with the emotional challenges of Goldenhar syndrome, a rare congenital craniofacial disorder that caused the left side of his face to be severely underdeveloped. Joyce recaps a childhood spent undergoing countless reconstruction surgeries, getting bullied, and witnessing his parents’ distress over his condition. Meeting his future wife Anna helped him feel “freely chosen” for the first time, but it wasn’t until 2017, when he had a vision of a Jesus with a “face... just like mine,” that he fully understood “no amount of woundedness [is] too ugly for the love of God.” Joyce contends that all people suffer from emotional wounds, and that they can be healed through “the power of God’s love” and the knowledge of the crucified Jesus’s wounds (“To know that God is also broken but not ugly... heals the deepest parts of you”). The author’s at his best when he mixes personal insight and pastoral wisdom in vivid metaphors, as when he writes of the thorn in the apostle Paul’s side: “God’s love and power are made real not because he pulls the thorn out of the flesh but because we find him in the middle of the pierced flesh, which can no longer destroy us.” Sensitive and nuanced, this lingers in the mind. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

“The spirit of faith” is “in your words,” according to this emphatic sermon from pastor Osteen (Your Greatness Is Coming). Writing that “words are like seeds... every time you say them, they’re taking root and growing,” the author posits that speaking one’s goals into being, or “talking like it’s going to happen,” sharpens personal conviction and attracts God’s favor. Even when nothing appears to change and the goal seems out of reach, readers should keep “professing their faith,” Osteen writes, and take comfort in the knowledge that divine workings are sometimes invisible. His advice for rewriting self-limiting narratives is wise, and despite a tendency to oversimplify—at one point he encourages readers to tune out negative voices by “letting that all go”—his enthusiastic aphorisms will stick with readers (“Tell yourself a new story. You don’t have to figure out how it’s going to happen. All you have to do is believe”). Osteen’s fans will also appreciate the pastoral blessings woven throughout—“I declare that you are blessed with promotion, with good success, with ideas, with creativity.” It’s a rousing ode to the power of belief. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Today’s “virus of meanness” must be combated with faith and kindness, according to this impassioned outing from pastor Evans (Kingdom Politics). Reminding readers that God “calls us to love others for the glory of His name,” Evans describes how small, tangible actions like mowing someone’s lawn can cumulatively help to repair a culture dominated by a “me-first mentality.” By practicing such kindnesses on a daily basis, Christians can ultimately shape a world that centers “God’s glory and the advancement of His kingdom agenda” while also reaping divine blessings themselves. Evans brings plenty of his usual charisma to this spirited reminder to do good even when it’s inconvenient, though the profusion of strained metaphors sometimes serves to confuse more than clarify (“Far too many Christians resemble the moon. We enjoy our lit side and want to shine.... But we also have a dark side. The dark side reeks of selfishness, secrets, and scandal. To avoid showing anyone our dark side, we wear a mask”). Still, it’s a solid resource on the challenges and rewards of loving one’s neighbor. (July)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Historian Harris (Watchman on the Tower) provides a fine-grained chronicle of the deliberations and pressures that led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1978 to repeal its ban on the ordination of Black men and the presence of Black couples in Mormon temples. Focusing on the period between 1949, when the prohibition was canonized (it had been church policy since 1852) and the ban’s repeal, Harris maps out the clashes between radical church leaders who preached that Black people were the “cursed” descendents of Cain, and the ban’s opponents, including Black Mormons, civil rights activists, and LDS administrators eager to salvage the church’s public image. Secular pressures mounted in the 1960s as a federal civil rights investigation looked into Brigham Young University’s racist admissions policies, though Harris contends that such initiatives only caused LDS leaders to retrench. Ultimately, the church’s hand was forced when president Spencer Kimball pushed to open temples in racially diverse countries like Brazil, culminating in his 1978 “revelation” that the time had come to “admit Black people into [the church’s] ranks as full, functioning members.” Harris studiously dissects how the church’s legacy of racism has persisted after the ban’s repeal, noting that leaders have recently sought to “distance the church from antiblack teachings” without directly repudiating them. It’s a nuanced account of the Mormon church’s uneven progress toward social justice. (July)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

How, and why, did atheism emerge within a “peculiarly religious species,” asks evolutionary psychologist Gervais in his comprehensive debut inquiry. To answer the question, he first catalogs the cognitive adaptations (for example, the brain’s ability to embrace “minimally counterintuitive” narratives that twist an idea just enough to make it memorable without provoking disbelief) and cultural values (an emphasis on teamwork and morality) that helped religion flourish in the first place. Yet, he explains, sufficiently stable societies foster a sense of “existential security” that can ultimately render religion “motivationally impotent” and pave the way for atheism. (Such stability is often precipitated by strong nonreligious social institutions, Gervais suggests, noting that Scandinavian countries, which have good public health and welfare programs, tend to be among the world’s most secular.) Gervais distinguishes between atheists who eschew belief in God entirely and those who retain some degree of belief while forgoing church attendance and other observable indicators of religious identity. Even as religion’s “overt markers” disappear, he contends, its influence persists in the form of morals that have been instilled over thousands of years. Gervais approaches his subject with abundant intellectual curiosity and grounds his study in accessible discussions of evolutionary theory and research on present-day increases in disbelief. It amounts to a trenchant study of a noteworthy cultural phenomenon. (July)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Leadership coach Gibbons debuts with a sincere account of the challenges of growing up between cultures. Born to a Korean mother and an American father in Maryland, Gibbons worshipped American culture and was eager to “fit in,” despite looking “100% Korean.” After a fire destroyed their home when Gibbons was 10, the family moved to Arizona. There, they entered a church community of “mostly blue-collar hardcore fundamentalist believers,” sparking Gibbons’s complicated relationship with conservative Christianity, which peaked when he attended a Christian college whose prohibitions against interracial dating were “absurdly inconsistent with what I knew about God.” Souring on Christian fundamentalism, Gibbons broke with the church as an adult and in 1994 helped found Newsong Church in Irvine, Calif., as a “haven” for those who felt like “outsiders” from Christianity. While the sections on Newsong’s founding are somewhat rushed and a climactic revelation pertaining to Gibbons’s family may leave readers with a sense of whiplash, the questions about what it means to be both a Christian and part of a “third culture”—not entirely Korean and not entirely American—are salient. It’s an intriguing look at the intersections of race, identity, and faith. (July)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this pensive outing, Ford (Introduction to Koans), a Zen teacher and Unitarian Universalist minister, traces an “arc of the spiritual life” that loosely mirrors the Zen path to enlightenment. He begins by describing the feelings of unease that lead some people into a lifelong search for enlightenment that involves wading through life’s “messiness” in hopes of better understanding themselves and the cosmos (“I could see the hole in my heart,” Ford writes, describing how he felt before he began studying Buddhism in the 1960s). Drawing on his “pluralistic physiology of faith” (“My brain is Buddhist... but my heart is Christian”), Ford enriches traditional Zen teachings with philosophy, mythology, and Christian scripture, noting, for example, that Psalm 90, which meditates on the brevity of life, functions as both “an invitation into a holy place” and a reminder “of one’s own insignificance.” While the book’s mix of memoir and instruction is sometimes haphazard, patient readers will find plenty of food for thought. It’s a boon for the spiritually curious. (July)

Reviewed on 04/19/2024 | Details & Permalink