After moving to Turkey in 2007, American journalist Hansen, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, came to the startling realization that America seen from abroad is a wholly different entity from the America she knew. Hansen explores her own loss of innocence, as her belief in American grandiosity, exceptionalism, and humanitarianism is deeply shaken by the destruction wrought by the U.S. in the Middle East. The first chapters describe Hansen’s encounters with Turkish nationalism and her painful acquaintance with a new view of her country’s history. Subsequent chapters explore the ways American interventions have spread wars, propped up dictators, destroyed landscapes in the name of modernization, and spurred the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle and Near East. Lucid, reflective, probing, and poetic, Hansen’s book is also a searing critique of the ugly depths of American ignorance, made more dangerous because the declining U.S. imperial system coincides with decay at home. The book is a revelatory indictment of American policy both domestic and foreign, made gripping by Hansen’s confident—if overreaching—distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences most American audiences can’t imagine. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

In this short handbook, Pitstick, a mental health counselor and clinical psychologist, edits the responses of 11 “renowned experts on consciousness topics,” including notables such as Raymond Moody, Bernie Siegel, and P.M.H. Atwater, whom he has interviewed about the soul, the afterlife, and near-death experiences. Pitstick and the experts he interviews give a potpourri of confident, optimistic answers to basic life questions like “Who am I?” “Why is there so much suffering?” and “How can I best hear my inner self’s voice and know my highest purposes?” The book’s format allows the reader to taste many ideas in quick succession to see which ones resonate, making comparison of the contributors’ viewpoints easy. For philosophical questions such as “Why am I here?” the interviewees’ answers center on similar ideas, proposing a soul that persists beyond death, incarnated into a world in which it’s hard to see the big picture but opportunities for adventure, growth, and love abound. For more prosaic questions that ponder the structure of the connection between the mundane and spiritual world—such as “Are there ghosts and evil spirits?”—answers are significantly more diverse, and there’s a clear difference between the contributors who are sure of the structure of the afterlife and those who are still pondering it. The interviews in this short book will be great for anyone searching for a new spiritual path. (BookLife)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Debut author Spoelma believes everyone’s story is unique and should be told, and she has plenty of advice for discovering, embracing, and sharing one’s story of coming to faith and seeing God working in one’s life. Spoelma argues that readers should be upfront about their spiritual life and willing to share. The story doesn’t have to be dramatic, she writes; one just has to be able to share what God has done and is continuing to do. Obstacles to sharing sometimes include fear of offending the listener or of being vulnerable. Spoelma notes that journaling helped her find her own story. Her journey didn’t change, but her perspective did, and the journals helped her relate what God had done. She offers readers other practical tools for developing their own stories as well, such as approaching it like any other project and listing the setting, characters, plot, and theme. Studying God’s nature in Scripture, finding common ground with the listener, developing listening skills, and setting limits on what should be included will all enhance the storytelling. Questions prompting further reflection are included at the end of each chapter of this helpful debut. (BookLife)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Yadin-Israel, professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University, brings his Scripture scholarship to a study of Bruce Springsteen’s impressive musical career. The author is well acquainted with the formidable body of academic work on Springsteen’s life and songs and gets right into establishing his own perspective while constructively critiquing others. He highlights the themes of grace, sin, and redemption with references from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Yadin-Israel knows Springsteen’s work well and includes a number of unreleased songs from his early years, as well as the more popular hits, astutely illustrating how the themes that occupy the musician’s work shift throughout his career. This allows him to place Springsteen’s songs in conversation with one another, as the songwriter draws at various times from multiple sources of religious imagery, including overtly Catholic concepts, the prophets in the Jewish scriptures, and other biblical figures—including a particularly illuminating section comparing the apocalyptic imagery in both the Book of Revelation and Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. This is a fresh addition to the burgeoning body of scholarship on one of America’s most famous musicians, who’s little known for his spiritual interests. (BookLife)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Malessa (What Is There to Celebrate?!) punctures the seriousness surrounding Martin Luther with a lighthearted glimpse of the famed priest and theologian in this book timed for the 500th anniversary of the dawn of Protestantism. In a series of chapters that can function as standalone vignettes, Malessa corrects popular misconceptions that have sprouted up around Luther. For instance, he was not a “jolly monk knocking back steins of home brew,” but a man who condemned drunkenness. Neither did his wife travel to him in a fish barrel, though she brought herring with her to her wedding. Luther, however, truly was not fond of the Church’s mercenary trade of providing favors to donors—and, sadly, really was an anti-Semite. Malessa’s cheerful approach makes this a refreshing alternative to overly reverent Luther biographies, but the book’s humor suffers from the translation into English: Luther is a particularly German hero, and the debunking loses some of its impact when the folklore is unfamiliar. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining, and Malessa tucks solid information into an easy-to-read format. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

In this compelling look at Isaac Newton, Iliffe (Newton: A Very Short Introduction), professor of history at the University of Oxford, draws deeply on newly available papers to explore Newton’s lifelong fascination with theological matters. Iliffe skillfully chronicles Newton’s life from his childhood and his college years at Trinity College, Cambridge, to his later experiments in physics and the writings that gained him notoriety (especially the Principia Mathematica) at a time when religious and political controversies were swirling around England. Iliffe adroitly illustrates that, from the beginning, Newton displayed deep interests in scriptural interpretation, the history of the early Church, and the idea of prophecy, notably as it relates to the book of Revelation. He points out that in the “General Scholium,” an appendix to the Principia, Newton challenges the notion that Jesus is simply God in human form by stressing that the divine mode of being in our world is completely unknown to us. Iliffe’s fascinating study provides an absorbing glimpse into Newton’s work and early modern culture. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Lawrence, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus humanities professor emeritus of religion at Duke University and one of the preeminent scholars of Islamic studies in America, adds to Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series with this comprehensive look at English translations of the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book. (Lawrence chooses to use the transliteration “Koran” to signify the English version, which also allows him to functionally resolve the debate among some Muslims about whether the Qur’an can be translated from Arabic at all.) It was not until the 20th century that English translations began to proliferate, Lawrence writes, thanks to the pioneering work of South Asian Muslims who knew English well as a by-product of British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. Lawrence helpfully identifies sectarian differences and political influences, explaining the outsize role of Saudi propagation of religiously conservative editions. He also devotes excessive attention to the creative rendering of the Qur’an done in 2015 by visual artist Sandow Birk; his fine-grained examination of Birk’s translation choices would make more sense if Birk’s text were at hand. On the whole, however, Lawrence has done pathbreaking work for English-speaking students of the Qur’an. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Bryant (The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali), professor of Indian religions at Rutgers University, explores the Bhagavata Purana (“The Beautiful Legend of God”), probably finalized between the fourth to sixth centuries C.E., which focuses on “devotional surrender” to Krishna as Isvara or Bhagavan (God). Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of bhakti spiritual paths, Bryant investigates this one tradition in depth, drawing primarily on 16th-century commentaries. In Bryant’s extensive introduction, which occupies the first third of the book, he explores with precision and assurance such topics as the definitions of bhakti, the nine bhakti practices, and the relationship of bhakti to other types of yoga, along with many religious and philosophical aspects of this tradition. His analysis serves as an invaluable preface to the subsequent texts, primarily stories, that he translates, in which readers will encounter bhaktas (bhakti devotees) attaining bliss by contemplating God, Krishna’s mischievous boyhood, philosophical discourses, warnings against the dangers of worldly attachments, and lush descriptions of bejeweled deities. The extensive use of Sanskrit terminology and the complexity of key concepts in Hinduism may offer an initial challenge for nonspecialists, but Bryant is an accomplished, helpful, and humble guide to this intriguing tradition, which is still largely unexplored in the West. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Schilling, former professor of early modern history at Humboldt University in Berlin, makes an essential entry into the field of titles to come out in honor of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary. Beautifully translated by Johnston Gordon, this massive biography roughly follows the arc of Luther’s life, but it eschews many personal details to focus on theology and politics. Schilling sets Luther and his actions in a broader framework than Lyndal Roper’s equally magisterial biography, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Reviews, Jan. 6), which is a more personal biography. Schilling instead focuses on Luther’s writings and interactions with those around him, including Charles V, who tried to call Luther to account at Worms; the rulers of Electoral Saxony, who protected Luther; Philip of Hesse, who demanded Luther sanction a bigamous marriage; and coworkers in the Reformation such as Philipp Melanchthon. Schilling allows himself wide range to comment on the perturbations caused by Luther’s determination to reform church practice (as well as on the reformer himself). Schilling’s most impressive accomplishment in this detailed biography is his portrait of how Luther placed the personal, and even the psychological, into the Christian religion in a completely new way. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink

Akins (The Pastor’s Wife Wears Biker Boots) tells the riveting story of her experience as an adoptive mother to two autistic boys. Akins was a foster mother before adopting, and she recalls the heartrending pain she and her husband felt when they had to give up their foster son to another family. But she knew she wanted to bring her love to a new child and adopted again, this time welcoming her twin boys. She remembers being asked by people whether she and her pastor husband had gone against God’s will by adopting the boys. Incredulous and irate that anyone could believe she would ever give up her sons, Akins forged forward to understand exactly what the autism diagnosis would mean to her family. Akins candidly shares the boys’ incessant screaming, biting, and feces-smearing that accompanied her strained attempts to communicate with the twins in their early years. This testimonial also works as a primer for parents in similar circumstances. The book outlines the Akinses’ day-to-day life as parents and includes practical educational recommendations for developing the best school and tutoring environments for autistic children. Akins, a special education teacher, includes a hefty amount of resources, reading lists, and lifestyle ideas for creating a flexible, happy home. Christian readers will discover hope, help, and a sense of community on every page of Akins’s excellent explanation of her experiences parenting autistic children. (July)

Reviewed on 05/05/2017 | Details & Permalink