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Spirituality and Religion May 2024
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Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere
by Savannah Guthrie
Beginning with her Baptist upbringing, Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie reflects on the role faith has played in her life and how her relationship with religion has evolved over time. From there, she takes readers through her existing understanding of God as love and the importance of making space for imperfection in her spiritual life.
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| To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People by Noah FeldmanWell-researched, accessible, and timely, this sobering exploration of modern Judaism surveys the religion's different schools of thought, practice, and identity. Don't miss: the discussions of Israel as a concept and as a modern nation-state, which the author takes great pains to differentiate between while encouraging readers to confront issues like nationalism and the ongoing war in Palestine. |
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| Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life by Shai HeldIn this moving and persuasive look at prevailing narratives about Christianity and Judaism, author Rabbi Shai Held pushes back against the idea that the former is about belief while the latter is about action; or that Christianity is more defined by love and Judaism by law. Recommended for readers looking to deepen the spiritual experience of their Jewish practice and reconnect it with God's love. |
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Losing our religion : an altar call for evangelical America
by Russell Moore
"Former Southern Baptist pastor and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore calls for repentance and renewal in American evangelicalism American evangelical Christianity has lost its way. While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals. Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be aplace of belonging and hope. As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering, "Can American Christianity survive?" In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore calls his fellow evangelical Christians to conversion over culture wars, to truth over tribalism, to the gospel over politics, to integrity over influence, and to renewal over nostalgia. With both prophetic honesty and pastoral love, Moore offers a word of counsel for how a new generation of disillusioned and exhausted believers can find a path forward after the crisis and confusion of the last several years. Believing the gospel is too important to leave it to hucksters and grifters, he shows how a Christian can avoid both cynicism and complicity in order to imagine a different, hopeful vision for the church. The altar call of the old evangelical revivals was both a call to repentance and the offer of a new start. In the same way, this book invites unmoored and discouraged Christians to step out into an uncertain future, first by letting go of the kind of cultural, politicized, status quo Christianity that led us to this moment of reckoning. Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what'sdead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again"
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| Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne LamottReligious memoir mainstay Anne Lamott brings her well-established candor and thoughtfulness to this examination of love in its many forms, from the parental to sacred to the love of one's community. Who it's for: established fans of Lamott's work. Newer readers might want to start with her other titles like Help Thanks Wow or Traveling Mercies. |
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| The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammonNPR correspondent Sarah McCammon examines the recent, relatively sharp decline in membership in evangelical churches, drawing interviews with others who left their churches and on her own experience being raised in a strict religious environment. Don't miss: the exploration of how responding to large cultural shifts has shaped evangelical churches since the 1970s. |
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| God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible by Candida MossEngaging and richly detailed, God's Ghostwriters looks at Christianity and the crucial role that enslaved people played in spreading the faith and even compiling the the Bible to begin with, with a particular focus on the inescapable role that Roman imperial rule played in keeping people in bondage. |
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| Reading Genesis by Marilynne RobinsonJust as she does in her fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson pairs her love of literature with her interest in theology in this thought-provoking close reading of the book of Genesis. Topics include: the "show, don't tell" storytelling rule of thumb, character archetypes as applied to biblical figures, and concepts like grace and justice. |
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What grows in the dark
by Jaq Evans
When fake spiritualist Brigit returns home to investigate the disappearance of two teenagers, the case eerily echoes her own sister's death 16 years earlier. Original.
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The kingdom, the power, and the glory : American evangelicals in an age of extremism
by Tim Alberta
An award-winning journalist follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement in which he investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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