The Dude Abides
The great American clergyman and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher described summer as “a temperate zone in the mind…just between laziness and labor.” It was to this season, Beecher said, that “summer reading belongs.”
With the arrival of Memorial Day and the approaching June solstice, days grow longe, the normal rhythm of the work year begins to slow, a few extra hours for certain indulgences, such as stretching out on a porch chair and climbing into a good book.
This summer brings a rich collection of new spiritually themed titles that promise to captivate both the soul and the imagination as they reveal secrets and explore dark corners of the world of faith.
Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church
By Jason Berry
Doubleday Religious
For more than 25 years, pioneering investigative reporter Jason Berry has been at the forefront of exposing sexual abuses by Catholic clergy. His 1992 book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children was the first major work on the issue and he followed in 2004 with Vows of Silence, an examination of the sexual abuses (and subsequent cover-up thereof) by Marcel Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ. Now Berry turns his attention to a different kind of ecclesial corruption in this investigation of the financial secrets (and alleged deceptions) of the Catholic church. What happens after checks or cash are dropped into the collection basket each Sunday in parishes around the world? Where does the money go when a diocese sells property for tens of millions of dollars? In light of the more than $2 billion paid out in recent years to the victims of clergy sexual abuse in the United States alone, Berry “follows the money,” from U.S. parishes to the Vatican, exposing what he believes are practices that fly in the face of Catholic moral teaching and values.
Secrets and Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy
Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press
British journalist Sanjiv Bhattacharya expands on his 2006 U.K. television documentary, “The Man with 80 Wives,” about polygamist Warren Jeffs, leader of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in this breezy investigation of the broader culture of polygamy in modern-day Mormon America. Bhattacharya gained impressive access inside the polygamist compounds, weaving a fascinating and entertaining tale that is as much about his attempts to understand these fringe dwellers and their ideology as it is about their ideologies themselves. The author becomes a character in the book himself and, as he turns his journalistic lens inward and examines his own spiritual and cultural ideology with the same unblinking candor and disarming humor.
Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir…of Sorts
By Ian Morgan Cron
Thomas Nelson
An Episcopal priest in Greenwich, Conn., and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale, returns with this surprisingly tender, brutally honest and blessedly humorous account of his journey “through the harrowing straights of memory,” as he comes to terms with the wounds left by his father, an enigma of a man who was an agent for the CIA and battled both chronic alcoholism and depression throughout the author’s childhood. More than simply a personal story of one man’s journey to forgiveness and healing, Cron, who overcame alcoholism himself as an adult, weaves a much more universal story about the messiness of life and the startlingly beautiful tapestry God makes from its seemingly disparate parts. “This is neither a simple memoir of hurt endured, nor a tidy story of reconciliation and resolution,” the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says of Cron’s memoir. “It is…a testimony to the unfinished business of grace.”
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
By Deborah Baker
Greywolf Press
After discovering a cache of letters and personal papers belonging to Margaret Marcus in the New York Public Library, acclaimed biographer Deborah Parker (a Pulitzer finalist in 1994 for her biography of the poet Laura Riding) went digging for answers to the puzzle that was Marcus’ life. What would compel this woman, a post-World War II secular Jew raised in a suburb of New York City to convert to Islam, change her name to Maryam Jameelah and move to Pakistan in 1962, where she became one of the world’s preeminent voices for conservative (some would say radical) Islam. Jameelah, who resides in Lahore, Pakistan with her husband, Muhammad Yusuf Khan, leader of Pakistan’s oldest religious political party (Jamaat-e-Islami) and their five children, became an outspoken critic of Western culture, particularly American foreign policy. In her fascinating recounting of her subject’s confounding spiritual journey, Baker also contemplates what effect Jameelah’s writings may have had on extremist groups such as Al Quaida and the Taliban and the ongoing global jihad.
The Ambition
By Lee Strobel
Zondervan
After years of phenomenal success as the author of Christian nonfiction bestsellers including The Case for Christ, former journalist and pastor at both Willow Creek and Saddleback megachurches, Lee Strobel has penned his first novel — a darkly gripping, intricately plotted thriller about a mob trial, a corrupt judge, a power-hungry pastor, a cynical reporter and a gambling addict. Set in the halls of a flourishing suburban megachurch, the newsroom of a struggling big-city newspaper and the shadowlands of political kingmakers, in this page-turner Strobel proves that he has as much flare for secular intrigue as he does for theological discourse.
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