Books
Narrative Wounds and Livable Fictions
Bearing witness and fixing blame in Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter. By Matthew Potts
Paying Attention to Pain
Leslie Jamison’s The Empahy Exams: Essays. By Sejal H. Patel
Girls and Sarah Coakley, Through a Theological Lens of Desire
Examining the relationship between desire and transformation in two disparate works: Girls and Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” By Peter Boumgarden
The Prophetic Vocation(s) of Julia Budenz
Reflecting on Julia Budenz’s life and life’s work, a single 2,200-page poem, The Gardens of Flora Baum. By Marion Torchia
Religion in the Age of Kant and Bacteria
Two books on the Axial Age: Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas. By Suzanne Smith
Poetry and Opacity
Adrie Kusserow’s latest volume of poetry, Refuge. By Michael Jackson
What Is “Health”?
Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor’s The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less. By Tamara Mann
Writing Africa into Islamic Studies
An Interview with Ousmane Oumar Kane. By Lisanne Norman
Pilgrims: Progress and Regress in Three African Memoirs
Reflecting on the trope of pilgrimage in recent memoirs by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Lamin Sanneh. By Devaka Premawardhana
Right-Brain Religion, Left-Brain Science
A review of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. By Daniel Goodman
