During this holy season, the choice of new books about religion is as varied as it is deep. Added to the usual crop of examinations of evangelicals and politics are memoirs about spiritual journeys and a thin (but very funny) treatise against consumerism.
"Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion" by Sara Miles (Ballantine Books, 280 pps., $24.95) is not your average conversion story.
Miles was raised an atheist, but one day, at 46, she wandered into a church.
"I walked into my neighborhood church, ate a piece of bread, had a sip of wine. A routine Sunday-morning activity for tens of millions of Americans " except that up until that moment I had led a thoroughly secular life. This was my first communion. It changed everything for me," she writes.
Revealing, matter-of-fact and poignant, this is a story of an active faith " that's the "radical" part of the book's title. Miles is not content to sit in the pews. She learns to walk through housing projects, unload a .375 magnum, wipe the nose of a psychotic man and explore the ugly politics of hunger among "thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, and bishops, all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people."
A memoir of a completely different stripe is "Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness" by Daja Wangchuk Meston (Free Press, 255 pps., $25).
Perhaps you remember Meston from the late 1990s, when he attempted suicide to escape Chinese interrogation after he was charged with spying for bogus reasons. A benefit concert and worldwide support helped pay for his release, and Meston became known throughout the Tibetan-rights community.
But that's not the whole story. He was abandoned as a child by his dysfunctional American parents and at 6 was sent to Nepal to study to be a Buddhist monk. If the details of his life are radically different from any you've known, the themes " family forgiveness, finding a place to belong " are universal.
"The Quran: A Biography" by Bruce Lawrence (Atlantic Monthly Press, 216 pps., $20.95), a part of Atlantic Monthly's Books That Changed the World series, is a standout.
The Duke University Islamic-studies professor presents what for some will be a new topic in the most readable manner. And, in this examination of the book's influence on the world, he stresses the peace-loving aspects of Islam often missed by the mainstream media. For Muslims who seek to deepen their faith and for non-Muslims who seek to understand that faith, "The Quran" is a valuable resource.
"Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics From the Great War to the War on Terror" (HarperCollins, 483 pps., $27.95) is by Michael Burleigh, whose "Earthly Powers" last year created quite a stir. The author, a London journalist and historian, continues examining the intersection of religion and politics in this heavy, richly detailed tome.
Religion changed in the last century, he writes, and secular despots such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini borrowed their infrastructures from the hierarchy of the church. Read Chapter 5, "Resistance, Christian Democracy, and the Cold War," in which Burleigh shows the importance of this "dangerous form of doing the decent thing."
If you find the news from the Middle East a constant source of concern, "Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence" by Zachary Karabell (Knopf, 301 pps., $26.95) is worth your attention.
Lest we fear peace hasn't a chance among the factions of the so-called "people of the book," Karabell, a historian and essayist, reminds us that Muslims, Christians and Jews share far more than enmity. The commonalities range from farms they worked together long ago to the shared pursuit of knowledge. Focusing strictly on the differences is a distortion, he says in this timely and well-written book.
And now for a different view: "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine" by Harold Bloom (Penguin, 238 pps., $15). In this paperback reprint of his 2005 book, the Yale University's Sterling professor of humanities maintains there are too many incompatibilities between Judaism and Christianity, and people of those faiths shouldn't take their historic shared inheritance for granted.
For example, the love of Yahweh, by Bloom's telling, is conditional and revocable. Few Christians would be willing to say their God's love is changeable. Why such a stance?
"It is not a contribution to the life of the spirit or the intellect to tell lies to one another or to oneself in order to bring about more affection or cooperation between Christians and Jews," he writes.
"Shalom in the Home: Smart Advice for a Peaceful Life" is by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (Meredith Books, 288 pps., $14.95), the radio and TV personality.
Boteach has a way of cutting through the nonsense that seems to trip up other modern-day advice-givers. Maybe it's his base in Scriptures, but this Orthodox rabbi " who examines 10 cases from the first season of his popular show of the same name on The Learning Channel " boils his advice down in a way that is understandable to people of any faith, or no faith at all.
Here's one of his adages: "Putting another person before your spouse " even if that other person is your own flesh and blood " is the cardinal sin of marriage."
"The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War" is by Dan Gilgoff (St. Martin's Press, 366 pps., $25.95).
Fans of Dobson won't love this book, but Gilgoff, senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, presents ample evidence that Christians who sit to the right of the pew are quite good at directing political discussions these days.
He calls Colorado Springs " since 1992 the home of Focus on the Family " "Vatican West." He looks mostly at Dobson's prodigious talents in the political arena. Dobson perhaps isn't as well-known as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, but he's far more powerful, writes Gilgoff.
And there's "What Would Jesus Buy? Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse" by the Rev. Billy (PublicAffairs, 214 pps., $13.95). In this slim volume, New York street performer Bill Talen, or "Reverend Billy," puts forth his manifesto.
Talen travels the country to fight big-box chain stores. He holds protests. He leads raucous revivals at his rolling Church of Stop Shopping. It's all in good fun, yet it's deadly serious.
"The first job of a church is to save souls," he writes. "And pulling out of the advertising-debt-waste cycle of Consumerism is our idea of deliverance."
Bless you, Reverend.