book review of religious books

Ten Theology Books to Watch For – May 2024

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N.T. Wright and Michael Bird – Jesus and the Powers [Feature Review]

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New Book Releases – Week of 13 May 2024 – Hari Kunzru, more…

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Lectionary Poetry – Pentecost Sunday ( Year B )

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Kevin W. Hector – Christianity as a Way of Life [Feature Review]

Living our Theology A Feature Review of Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology Kevin W. Hector Hardcover: […]

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Ebook Deal of the Day! Walter Brueggemann and Brevard Childs- Old Testament Theology – $2.79

Our Kindle Ebook Deal of the Day… Old Testament Theology: Canon or Testimony Walter Brueggemann and Brevard Childs *** $2.79 […]

5 Essential Ebook Deals for Church Leaders – 16 May 2024

Here are 5 essential May 2024 ebook deals that are worth checking out: Brene Brown, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Neil Gaiman, more… […]

Ebook Deal of the Day! Brene Brown – Atlas of the Heart – $3.99

Our Kindle Ebook Deal of the Day… Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience […]

Courtney Ellis – Looking Up [Essay]

What Birds Taught Me About Grief   An Essay by Courtney Ellis, author of Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to […]

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You Are His Masterpiece

by Aleena Ortiz

"You Are His Masterpiece" is a healing self-help book with recommendations for trusting in God’s process. Judith Lacy Hewes’s hope-filled religious self-help book "You Are His Masterpiece" is a guide for those dealing with... Read More

Walking Closer

"Walking Closer" is an earnest monthlong devotional for Christians that focuses on trust and faith over fear. Jonathan Temple’s Christian devotional "Walking Closer" suggests a daily practice that reflects one’s faith in God.... Read More

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The Gospel According to Alex Jones

by Eileen Gonzalez

Calling its ideal audience of one to task for deviating from his earlier Christian principles, "The Gospel According to Alex Jones" is a caustic and esoteric text. Jay L. Hall makes a case against Alex Jones in his political science book... Read More

I Am That I Am

by Xenia Dunford

Celebrating deep relationships with God, "I Am That I Am" is a curious and provocative collection of spiritual meditations. Henry Martens’s appealing spiritual book "I Am That I Am" discusses the benefits of spirituality in an... Read More

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Higher Power

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Interfaith chaplain Cedar Monroe’s "Trash" is a case study in the US’s rampant poverty problem. Discussing poverty with particular emphasis on poor white Americans, Monroe’s book is focused on the homeless and housing-insecure... Read More

The Afternoon of Christianity

Analytical and prescient, Tomáš Halík’s stunning theology book "The Afternoon of Christianity" makes projections about the future of Christian faith in light of the sweeping demographic and cultural changes it faces. Clear and... Read More

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About faith, family, and an informal investigation into carcinogenic toxins, Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn’s memoir "Loose of Earth" is wrenching. Blackburn grew up in Texas surrounded by cotton fields. Her family was religious; their... Read More

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Book review: Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times by Elizabeth Oldfield

Rachel mann reviews a christian reflection for troubling times.

IT IS hardly news to say that active Christian faith is a minority pursuit in the UK. Ours is a society in which belief in God is readily parodied as weird, naïve, or absurd; and that’s the polite version. Yet, as Elizabeth Oldfield reminds us, such assessments sit alongside pervasive longings for meaning, sense, and hope. These are anxious times. It is hard to shake off the sense that the world is coming to an end.

Foreclosure signs have been erected on the future. Despite this, Oldfield suggests, there is value in building up what she calls our spiritual core strength. Indeed, with humour and self-deprecation, she argues for the goodness of Christianity’s near-discarded wisdom. In a world falling apart, maybe . . . just maybe . . . there is good news in the stories of God.

Oldfield’s book is part spiritual memoir and part self-help manual, and it takes its title and impetus from that famous line of St Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Where it finds its nuance and weight is in how tenderly it handles that claim. This is no pious manifesto. She describes the book as “my search for a deep life, for a place to steady myself amid the waves”. Indeed, the excellence of Fully Alive lies in its thoughtful consideration of the trip-hazards placed in the path of human flourishing in this era of chastened faith.

The book uses a simple framing device: each chapter presents a modern take on the classic seven deadly sins. Each sin is translated into contemporary categories, and Oldfield offers intelligent ways to negotiate those sins seriously sans the stench of piety. Wrath, for example, is read as the human gift for self-righteousness, a tendency that leads to polarisation and othering. Oldfield plausibly suggests that our best balm for this abiding modern sin is in intentional peace-building. If anyone wants to witness how she models that in real time, listen to her podcast, Sacred , in which Oldfield invites guests from a range of positions to engage in the deep conversation that helps us move from judgment to understanding. Fully Alive reveals the scaffolding that holds that excellent podcast in place.

Equally, accidie is read, powerfully and helpfully, through the prism of distraction. Quoting Patricia Lockwood, the author reminds us that our phones and iPads are “portals” that promise us connection and significance, and yet often only feed fractures in our souls. Hope, Oldfield suggests, can be found in steadfastness and rhythm — in finding sabbath and community (she is a member of a small intentional community) — as well as in giving holy attention to precious texts, from scripture to poetry and fiction.

Oldfield is not interested in playing a spiritual master or holy woman for the TikTok age, dispensing woo-woo self-help advice. Rather, she sifts the wreckage for signs of promise. This is done with wit, unexpected vulnerability, and moments of laugh-out-loud honesty. Oldfield was a high-flyer: a former BBC journalist and the head of the think tank Theos for ten years. Like many during the pandemic, she reassessed her situation and decided to walk away before she burned out. This is a woman who studied theology at university and knows the force of Charismatic Evangelical conversion, but equally has learned how life forces reappraisals on us. Hers is a faith tempered by reality. She is a trustworthy companion for the mess that we have got ourselves into.

I can offer no higher praise than to say that this is a book for those who found oxygen and hope in Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic ; that is, for those who can’t quite give up on the Song of Love despite all the evidence to the contrary. Oldfield is fully aware that God — or “the G-Bomb” as she calls him — is a turn-off for so many. Perhaps, Fully Alive might just be a way for many at the edge of faith and beyond it to dwell in the beauty and challenge of our Christian inheritance.

The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, and a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University. Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times Elizabeth Oldfield Hodder & Stoughton £18.99 (978-1-3998-1076-0) Church Times Bookshop £15.19

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Being Nick Kristof

In “Chasing Hope,” the veteran Times journalist remembers the highs and lows of his storied career.

Nicholas D. Kristof covering an Arab Spring protest in Bahrain in 2011. Credit... via Nicholas Kristof

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• May 14, 2024
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CHASING HOPE: A Reporter’s Life, by Nicholas D. Kristof

There aren’t many journalists who can claim to have had more of an impact on the world than Nicholas D. Kristof. In 1997, one of his dispatches for The New York Times, about routine ailments killing children in India and elsewhere, inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health; billions of dollars later, that article hangs in the lobby of the Gates Foundation. In the 2000s, according to the former head of the International Rescue Committee, Kristof’s coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

And then, of course, there is the editorial Kristof wrote for The Carlton-Yamhill Review while in grade school, successfully challenging a rule against girls’ wearing bluejeans. His goals, he explains in his memoir, “Chasing Hope,” were to “impress girls” and to “overthrow the patriarchy.”

Stories like these, and many more, fill up Kristof’s book, which charts a charmed and committed journalistic life. Kristof has spent four decades at The Times, and won two Pulitzer Prizes — he shared the first with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1990 — but his career began all the way back when he was a boy in rural Oregon battling the powers that be and dreaming of becoming a foreign correspondent. It didn’t take him long to get there.

“I was the youngest national correspondent at the paper,” Kristof writes after describing his arrival at The Times in 1984; he was 25 years old and promoted quickly. A few pages later, he’s off to Hong Kong “to become the youngest foreign correspondent” at the paper. (A trigger warning for other journalists: His annual expenses in 1980s Hong Kong came out to more than $500,000 in today’s dollars.)

“Chasing Hope” is devoted in large part to stories about how Kristof got the story and to documenting his swift rise through the journalistic ranks at The Times. But it begins on a descent, in 1997, with Kristof aboard a small airplane that is crash-landing in the Congolese jungle amid a civil war. Before the crash, he begs a soldier to sign a handmade receipt for a $100 bribe, which Kristof had paid him so the plane could refuel.

From there, we follow Kristof to Cairo in the ’80s, where he deals with the fact that “Nick,” in Arabic, translates to a word not to be published here. Then, it’s on to Cambodia, where he reports on the country’s sex trade and does not immediately disabuse a brothel owner of the idea that he might be a customer. “If I purchased a girl from her brothel and freed her, was I breaking any American law?” Kristof later wonders.

In Indonesia in the late ’90s, he sees a group of men on motorcycles driving by with a head on a pike. “I have a routine for approaching people who may kill me,” Kristof writes. “My theory is that it’s harder to murder someone you’ve just shaken hands with.”

“Chasing Hope” suggests that Kristof has shaken hands with plenty of killers, and should by now have a pretty grim worldview. After reading Thomas Hobbes in college, Kristof at first dismissed the philosopher’s bleak assessment of human existence. “Then I became a reporter,” Kristof writes. At one point in the book, he describes a young woman who had been enslaved and raped by janjaweed fighters in Darfur talking to an American aid worker who wants to help. “There’s nothing you can do for us,” the woman says. “We just want to die.”

And yet Kristof says he remains “a perpetual optimist,” with a belief from the very beginning of his career — see the bluejeans campaign — that journalism is a means to better the world. (Kristof credits his do-goodism to his mother and father, the only parents in his conservative hometown to let the school principal know that they didn’t want their child to be paddled.)

There’s also a surprising cheeriness to much of the book — Kristof loves an exclamation point — and he makes the case that there’s plenty to be hopeful about, from positive trends in global health to all the hard-working bighearted types Kristof has met along the way. But I often wanted to know more about some of the people in dire circumstance whom Kristof mentions only briefly before moving on to continue his story. I wondered if they shared his sense of optimism.

“ Chasing Hope” will satisfy Kristof superfans eager to know more about every era of his life — there are back-to-back chapters titled “I Become an Editor” and “I Begin My Column” — but the book suffers for its insistence on being completist. Kristof has traveled to 170 countries, and, by my count, this book manages to mention his visits to about half of them. One thorny border crossing eventually blurs into the next.

Like most journalists, Kristof has also always been more illuminating about others than about himself. Several chapters devoted to his failed run for governor of Oregon in 2022 offered a chance for introspection and a bit of digging into what went wrong — the State Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Kristof didn’t meet the residency requirement — but we don’t learn much beyond a few stray details like his strategic decision to connect with the common Oregonian by not carrying around his shoulder bag from Davos.

Still, there is reason for hope here, too. The life Kristof has lived really is a testament to the power of telling other people’s stories. Now that he has shared his own, he can get back to doing just that.

CHASING HOPE : A Reporter’s Life | By Nicholas D. Kristof | Knopf | 460 pp. | $32

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Lithium is key to green technology. Where will the US source it?

“The War Below” examines the global competition for metals like lithium and nickel, which are needed for electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines.   

• By Terry W. Hartle Contributor

May 9, 2024

As America moves from fossil fuels to renewable energy, it must increase its supplies of lithium, copper, nickel, rare earths, and cobalt. These minerals are key components in electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, and other green technologies. Because there are few domestic suppliers of these metals, the United States is forced to rely on a number of countries that are hostile or politically unstable, or that use child labor. But building new mines in the U.S. is controversial and unpopular. 

This conundrum is examined in “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle To Power Our Lives” by Ernest Scheyder. In clear and nuanced prose, he analyzes the search for these building blocks of renewable energy and the barriers to getting them.

Scheyder, who has covered the energy beat for Reuters, begins by discussing the kinds of new metals that will be needed, why they are important, and where we might find them. Most important, he convincingly demonstrates that by offshoring these minerals, the U.S. places itself and its industries in a vulnerable position. 

For example, China is the world’s largest producer of lithium. Even when the metal is mined in other countries such as Australia, most of the processing is done in China. The country is also the world’s largest consumer of copper and buys aggressively from Chile. By contrast, copper production in the U.S. is falling. 

Indonesia has large supplies of nickel – which allows electric vehicles to drive farther on a single charge – but it blocks exports of this metal so it can build its own electric vehicles. Meanwhile, the only U.S. nickel mine will be depleted in 2025. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo holds the world’s largest supply of cobalt, but the country is riven by violence, and child labor is often used to extract the minerals.      

America has substantial known reserves of both lithium and copper. But nothing generates intense political opposition like a proposal for what the author calls a “loud, dangerous and disruptive” open-pit mine. As it happens, noise and disruption are only two factors that play into the complex web of opposition for mining projects.  

As Scheyder notes, “Despite the role such proposed U.S. projects would play in abrogating climate change and even lessening the cost of green energy products, each one faces strong, legitimate opposition from environmentalists, neighbors, Native American groups, or others, underscoring the dilemma facing the country as it tries to go green.” In short, it’s not just one problem; it’s a whole set of challenges.  

Consider lithium. A very light metal, it is “enormously good at retaining an electric charge, making it the perfect anchor for a lithium-ion battery.” There are large reserves of lithium located in Rhyolite Ridge, Nevada. But the locale is also the home of a small, extremely rare plant known as Tiehm’s buckwheat that flourishes in lithium-rich soil. One federal regulatory agency declared Tiehm’s buckwheat an endangered species – which could have killed any possible project – while another agency gave a mining company $700 million to build a mine. Scheyder calls this an example of the government’s left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing. 

This may be the most dispiriting theme of the book – the inability of the federal government to develop a clear, comprehensive approach to obtain the precious metals needed to support green  energy initiatives. Policies put in place by one administration are quickly overturned by the next. Federal agencies act in ways that simultaneously advance the efforts to acquire these metals while at the same time undermining them.  

Scheyder is fair and evenhanded. He considers each project on its own merits and gives a careful summary of all the views expressed. As he emphasizes, “Energy security used to be about crude oil and natural gas. Now it’s also about lithium, copper and other [electric vehicle] materials.”

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Ozempic is the ‘it’ drug. A new book tries to explain what it means.

Johann Hari’s “Magic Pill” chronicles his experience taking semaglutide while simultaneously studying its pros and cons.

It’s hard to overstate how quickly Ozempic and similar drugs have gone mainstream. When I started taking semaglutide in January , I knew only two people who had tried it. Four months later, it feels almost ubiquitous.

Well-timed for this mania, Johann Hari’s “ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs ” aims to help readers clarify whether they should take the plunge. His central contention, that “Ozempic and its successors look set to become one of the iconic and defining drugs of our time, on a par with the contra­ceptive pill and Prozac,” seems almost unarguable . But his conclusion on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is mixed: “If you want a book uncritically championing these drugs, or alternatively a book damning them, I am afraid I can’t give it to you.”

What he does give is an easy-to-read summary of just what the subtitle suggests — benefits and risks — though there are a couple of points about which I think he’s wrong. And the amount of digressive fluff — an account of his nightmarish stint at an Austrian weight-loss spa, a smarmy chapter on Japanese food culture — implies this could have easily been a long magazine article rather than a short book.

Scottish-born journalist Hari, now based in London, used to be a fat guy. He opens his story by confessing, “Some people say the main reason they survived the pandemic was the vaccine; for me, it was Uber Eats.” He assumed he wasn’t alone, but then he went to a post-quarantine Hollywood party where everyone was not just slim but gaunt. What was going on here? He quickly found his answer. From there, Hari chronicles his snap decision to start Ozempic while simultaneously studying the pros and cons of semaglutide.

Before continuing with a summary of Hari’s admittedly entertaining anecdotes, it feels important to mention that, while he may not be especially well-known on this side of the pond, in 2011 he was suspended from his columnist job at the Independent after admitting to plagiarism and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of other journalists. You would think this history would make him meticulous in his research, but he has already come under fire for claiming in the book that food critic Jay Rayner lost pleasure in food after taking Ozempic . When Rayner responded on social media that he had never taken the drug, Hari apologized, saying that he had “confused an article by Jay Rayner in the Guardian with an article by Leila Latif in the same paper.”

Hari’s reputation, as well as his sloppiness, casts a shadow over even the most poignant portions of the book, such as the grief he experienced after his friend Hannah, his favorite partner for epic pigouts and crude banter, died at 46 after she choked while eating and went into cardiac arrest.

Hari, 5-foot-8, 203 pounds, deeply addicted to fried chicken — he was given a Christmas card by the employees of his neighborhood KFC addressed “to our best customer” (and it wasn’t even the chicken outlet he patronized most often!) — decided the time had come to take his shot.

In his telling, things went well for him; though he experienced nausea and lightheadedness, the product worked as advertised. After three months, his neighbor’s “hot gardener” asked for his phone number. At which point he went into a bit of soul-searching about whether he was taking these drugs because he cared about his health — or was it really because he was worried about how he looked?

All I can say to that is: duh. As he reports a few chapters later, when Esquire magazine polled 1,000 women, asking if they would rather gain 150 pounds or get hit by a truck, more than half said they would prefer the truck.

This was not the first or the last of the “duh” moments. Though the book is pleasant and informative, it consistently makes aha moments out of familiar concepts. “Satiety, or the feeling of no longer wanting more, is not a word we use much in everyday life, but I kept hearing it in two contexts. The first was the science of factory-assembled food — because this food, it turns out, is designed to undermine satiety. The second was in the sci­ence of the new weight-loss drugs — because they are designed to boost satiety. I only slowly began to trace the connections be­tween them.”

Some of us will be ahead of him there.

Meanwhile, Hari flatly states that “for the medication to work, you have to take it forever.” Like hypertension or diabetes, he explains, obesity is a condition that requires permanent medical management. And most people who go off the drugs regain much of the weight they lost within a year.

However, some doctors believe that if you can maintain your goal weight for six months, your body will lower its “set point” by about 10 percent, and you can wean yourself off the drug without fearing that all your losses will be reversed. In my case, I weighed 142 when I started, and I hit my goal of 126 after about three months. Since then, I’ve been on a low-maintenance dose, and I’m hoping that staying on it for another three months will give me a set point of 128. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I do think the jury is still out here.

Hari also is critical of the off-brand semaglutide compounds available online and at med spas, labeling them “ Breaking Bad Ozempic” and suggesting that they could be fatal. But the book doesn’t lay out enough evidence to warrant such a baldly negative conclusion.

Which leads us to one last thing. I was tickled to read his claim that “there’s already been a decline in the value of the stocks of the doughnut company Krispy Kreme, which analysts directly attributed to the growing popularity of Ozempic.” So I looked that up in the endnotes and found nothing more.

I’m all for a good comeback, but perhaps Hari still has a little way to go.

Marion Winik has been detailing her Ozempic journey in a series at BaltimoreFishbowl.com .

The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs

By Johann Hari

Crown. 320 pp. $30

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