Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials
As many perhaps have already noticed by now, America has a bouyant love affiar with all things irrational. This is certainly nothing new - it's been going on since last century at least. Some may find this to be quaint but unimportant to how society functions - but Wendy Kaminer does a fantastic job of arguing that wide spread irrtionalism and uncritical acceptance of things like angels, aliens, gurus, etc. has serious repercussions for everyone. Read More...

How Brains Think
What is intelligence and what's it good for? According to William H. Calvin, real intelligence is what you bring to play when you stand in front of the refrigerator contemplating the leftovers of the past weeks and figuring out what you could do with them. As Jean Piaget used to exclaim, intelligence is what you do when you don't already know what to do. Read More...

Created Equal
Should heterosexual Americans even care about the rights of gays? Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff argue well that the movement for gay rights is of fundamental importance to the continuing maintenance and growth of individual liberties of all Americans. This is a small, handy, and rather comprehensive book which ably presents the arguments in favor of equal rights for homosexuals. Read More...

Minimalists vs. Maximalists
This isn't actually a book, but a magazine. Normally very conservative in its presentations, the recent edition of Biblical Archeology Review (March/April) presents two sides in an interesting and important debeate about biblical history. On the one side are the maximalists, researchers who argue that the bible is an accurate and informative guide to the history and culture of ancient Israel. On the other side are the minimalists, recent scholars who argue that the bible is actually a record of what later generations mythologized about their history. Read More...

God's Funeral
Why had most intellectuals and writers in Europe abandoned tradtional Christianity by the end of the nineteenth century? Was it a result of industrial and scientific progress? Was it Charles Darwin and his insightful writing on evolution? As A.N. Wilson writes, the sources of this skepticism and disbelief were many and varied. Synthesizing biography and intellectual history, Wilson traces the lives and ideas of people like Hume, Mill, Hegel, Gibbon and more to demonstrate that the seeds of the destruction of tradtional religious belief had been sown long before Darwin. This is a great book on philosophy and intellectual history for people who don't usually read - or can't usually understand - such books.

The Battle for God
Karen Armstrong is one of the more interesting and enlightening of recent writers on religion. A former nun, she is the author of A History of God which presents 4000 years of monotheistic history of Jews, Christians and Muslims and also of Gospel According to Woman, about the role of women in the Roman Catholic Church and how they have been preceived. Now she has just published a new book discussing Protestant, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism - why the groups have come into existence and what they hope to accomplish.

Close Encounters with the Religious Right
Brand new from Americans United for the Separtion of Church and State and Robert Boston, author of the exceptionally useful Why the Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State (I keep referring back to it regularly) is a very informative book about the Religious Right in America. Here you will find detailed descriptions of not just major organizations like the Christian Coalition and people like Jerry Falwell, but also lesser-known personalities like William Murray (so of Madalyn Murray O'Hair) and groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. And since it is a brand new book, the information if very up-to-date.

Seven Theories of Religion
Many people who study religion and religious history don't also spend enough time reading about the theories of religion - why religion exists, how it developed, what needs it serves, etc. Most of what people know about Freud's or Marx's ideas seem to stem from crass popularizations and this leads to errors. Daniel L. Pals, in this recent book, does an excellent job of not only presenting the theories of many important scholars, but also the basic objections which have been raised. This fair and even-handed approach makes his book an excellent addition to a class reading list and an important part of the library of anyone interested in studying religion. This is definitely a book I will be using regularly.

A Necessary Evil
Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of books on religion, politics and culture. In this new book, Wills tackles an important underlying theme of American history: distrust and even outright contempt for government. This book carefully examines not just the history of anti-government attitudes, but also how people today have mythologized anti-government attitudes in the past. This mythologization of our past - militiamen, the Civil War, etc. - has become important in the justification of contemporary anti-government arguments and is worth the price of the book alone.

Daughters of Light
The activity of women - particularly Quaker women - in American society just prior to the Revolution is a little read-about topic. Rebecca Larson does a good job in opening up this topic and describing how Quaker women engaged in a very public role by preaching in public and private spaces to audiences of men and women, Quakers and other Christian faiths, free whites and slaves. This measure of authority was unprecedented and, unfortunately, unimitated in later eras. The intermingling of mysticism and pragmatism, male and female roles, and religion and politics is an important story of early America.

The First Messiah
About 100 years before the probable lifetime of Jesus, a man came to Jerusalem who eventually came to be called "The Teacher of Righteousness." Called Judah by author Michael O. Wise, this all-but-forgotten preacher and prophet prefigured the stories surrounding Jesus in a startling number of ways. Equally messianic figures, they both were were arrested and condemned by authorities due to their religious claims. Combinations of personal charisma and apocalyptic prophecies lead to the establishment of institutions which carried their messages long after they died. But unlike Jesus, Judah actually left behind personal writings explaining his perspective. Just how much did Jesus and his following cult owe to Judah?