This book is well defined by its subtitle: An Appreciation of the History, Practice & Mystery of Ancient Faith. Sweeney is not a Catholic and isn't interested in becoming one. He is interested in how to adapt (not adopt) some Catholic practices into his faith life and there he finds much that he can use.

a review of Moving a Nation to Care when I bought a copy of it in Chicago last year.

I will say that when I finished it, I was entirely impressed by both the information and the presentation.  I heartily recommend it to anyone concerned about PTSD who does not already own a copy.

But this is not going to be a review as much as a small story.

Unchristian : what a new generation really thinks about Christianity– and why it matters /by David Kinnaman.

I had mixed feelings about this book – on several levels. Despite its flaws this is a powerful and even important book.

The basis of the book is research on what people think about Christians. The results opened the eyes of the author, though they probably would be less surprising to non-Christians. Christians are thought to be unChristian, not only by those who don’t share their faith, but by many Christians under 30.

The Party Faithful : How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan [book review]

Some on-line progressives (e.g. many at DailyKos) to dismiss Amy Sullivan as a concern troll, mainly those who have managed to convince themselves that Democrats can somehow regain power without reconciling themselves to the vast majority of voters who take religion more seriously than they take politics. That they are wrong does not make Sullivan right on all counts, but she is certainly a voice worth hearing.

Bumped by PD because it's his blog and you should read it.

For a split second last week, I thought I'd killed E.J. Dionne. We had the opportunity to talk about his new book, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right, and by way of introduction, I was telling him the story of the first time we met, just after the 2004 election. I'd asked him then what religious progressives should do in light of John Kerry's defeat. His answer was a definitive shrug. This, I related to him on the phone, had caused me to go home with the liberating realization that I was now as much of an expert on the religious left as he was.

This conclusion caused him to laugh, then cough, and for that instant, I thought he was a goner.

Spending half an hour or forty-five minutes on the phone with someone doesn't give you much insight into their personality, of course. You get some indication of the kind of person they are, but obviously, it's hard to gauge their authenticity.

But to the extent that you can tell such things, I got the sense that Dionne has a delightful personality. He seems like the kind of regular guy you might bump into a bar and spend a pleasant afternoon shooting the breeze with.

Unfortunately, my digital voice recorder is a piece of garbage, so I can't really prove the point. But I mention it because that personality shines through the book. Unlike many writers on the intersection of religion and politics these days, Dionne is conversant with a broad range of philosophy and theology, no doubt garnered in his time in Oxford (he holds a D.Phil from the university) and Rome, where he covered the Vatican for a few years. Dionne can respond to ideas, not just poll numbers or dreary thumbnail versions of what "people of faith" should be all about. Better yet, he can do it in prose with a light touch. Souled Out was actually a pleasure to read.

Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian with a deep grounding in religion. This is more unusual than you might think. Most academics, even if they have the background, miss out on the conviction. Wills is also very well read, which is unusual in these days when bestsellers gloss over the complexities. To be really informative, rather than just an opinion piece, an author must fully understand and respect both (or more) sides of any issue and be able to explain them. Wills does. This is not to imply that Wills lacks opinions. He is forthright in delivering them, but it does not get in the way of the history.

Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer’s first book (which promises to be the first in a series) is a slim volume, as light and approachable in tone as are his Religion-Outside-the-Box missives (which we are treated to here on Street Prophets as regular diaries from the Rabbi). You could read it cover to cover in the time it takes to sip an extra large caffe latte.  However, although it is no ponderous tome, for a reader who is seriously searching for a better relationship with the Divine, it will take days to read this powerful little book – for it contains an invitation to honest participation – with oneself and with one’s Higher Power.

The book is not a compilation of Rabbi Brian’s prior writings on the Internet.  It is not specific to Judaism – or, indeed, to the religions that came down from Abraham.  Rather, the book is a guide to help people who may or may not have any prior conscious relationship with God to find a voice and to develop a connection – in short, to learn to pray and to listen for the small, still voice within that comes from God.

A very wise man once told me that the longest journey anyone can take is the one from their head into their heart – well, consider this book as a gentle and effective guide for starting (and for those who are well along for checking progress along) that journey.

I wish I could recommend this book.  I really do, because I liked it.  I liked the writing, I liked the concept, and I liked the ideas.

But there's just no there there.

Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb have created this really novel concept in their new book The Faith Between Us , where they basically wrote a joint memoir.  But in the end, I was left wondering, "Where's the Beef?"

Jesus : a meditation on his stories and his relationships with women is a look at the parables of Jesus and the passages about his relations with women from a slightly different angle.  Greeley is a storyteller and so he analyzes them as stories. What do they say? What is the point of the story? Why was it written down and remembered when other events were not?

This is a good method to break open a story and see something fresh within it.  Many of us have read these texts as children, as young adults and as adults, have looked at them as sacred, as literature, as texts to be decoded.  Examining them as stories  takes us back to square one, where everything we have learned can still be applied. His comments about the parables (there are always three people in a parable, God, a person and a third party which is the audience/reader) are worth the price of admission by themselves.  Quirky and idiosyncratic as always, Greeley enlightens not despite that, but because of it.

Dan Wakefield
The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate
New York: Nation Books, 2006
This review refers to the paperback edition .

If you have read any of the several dozen major books on the Christian right, this book will tell a story with which you are already familiar.  Wakefield, a Protestant layman and a journalist by training, investigates some of the social, cultural and political forces that led to the ascendancy of the Christian right and the decline of the influence of mainline Protestantism.  Wakefield is not afraid to say why this trend dishonors the life and ministry of Jesus and mocks his message.  But Wakefield undertakes his investigation a bit too late, portraying as novel mainstays such as megachurches and failing to express the meaningful distinctions between various Christian right leaders and personalities.

The past two weeks or so, I've been reading Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, subtitled, "The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century."  (When he refers to "radical religion," he's not talking about Islam but protestant Christianity in the mold of the Southern Baptist Convention, and other fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches.)  The book is a very sobering indictment of American politics and culture, suggesting that a convergence of three problems that face the U.S. (and that the Republican party have embraced) may very well lead to America's "fall from grace," a fall which is largely avoidable but that Americans have set themselves up for.

The following passages came from the last chapter of the book.

I was going to do a review of Gregory Boyd's The Myth of a Christian Nation as a stand alone, but realized that I was going to compare it to Jim Wallis' God's Politics. That being the case, I decided to throw in Faithful Citizenship, which is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' official statement on the same matter. There has been a lot of discussion of the Wallis book and his blog God's Politics, but Boyd's book is less well known and the Catholic document isn't even well known among Catholics.