Books
This is Religion News Blog's news page on Books. See our front page for more religion news.
Monday October 12, 2009
Books • Positive Thinking • Success Coaches:
Americans have long prided themselves on being “positive” and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! By the mid-’00s optimism wasn’t just a psycho-spiritual lifestyle option; it had become increasingly mandatory.
Two years into the Great Recession, it’s time to face the truth…
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Saturday October 10, 2009
Books:
How do we read R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis Illustrated“? It seems a contradiction: a sober reconstruction by a man who admits he “[does] not believe that the Bible is ‘the word of God.’ ” And yet, the further we get into this electrifying adaptation, the more it all makes sense. If you remove divinity from the equation, “Genesis” becomes a human creation — “a powerful text,” in Crumb’s words, “with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.” These stories are sacred, then, not because they were handed down by any deity but because they speak to the elemental conflicts that drive us as women and men.
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Tuesday September 29, 2009
Books • Harry Potter • Witchcraft:
A memoir by George W Bush’s former speechwriter claims that Bush administration officials objected to giving JK Rowling a presidential medal of freedom on the grounds that her Harry Potter books “encouraged witchcraft”.
Latimer, whose memoir Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor was published last week by Crown in the US, says that the “narrow thinking” of “people in the White House” led them “to actually object to giving the author JK Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft“.
See also: Harry Potter is converting Christian critics, Christian themes abound in Potter and How the boy wizard won over religious critics — and the deeper meaning theologians now see in his tale
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Tuesday September 15, 2009
Books • Freemasonry:
While the fictional story lines about conspiracy and the Catholic Church in “The Da Vinci Code” caused an uproar among some Catholics and drew censure from the Vatican, a senior representative of the Freemasons in Australia called “The Lost Symbol” the work of a “terrific novelist.”
“We are very pleased, there is nothing in this book that will offend my organization. It does give us the opportunity to open it up a bit,” said Greg Levenston, Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory for the Freemasons.
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Friday September 11, 2009
Books • Freemasonry:
With Dan Brown’s newest novel, The Lost Symbol, hitting bookstores Sept. 15 — much of it rumored to revolve around Masonic myths — the Masons are in pre-emptive damage-control mode, Religion News Service reports.
Small wonder, since The Da Vinci Code — which Brown claimed to be historically accurate — was full of errors.
» Full Story
Thursday September 10, 2009
Books:
The influential comics artist Robert Crumb, best known for such outré works as “Keep On Truckin’ ” and “Fritz the Cat,” is exploring a surprising new topic in his latest work: the Bible.
Over at Beliefnet, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield wonders whether Crumb’s work will be heavenly or heretical?
» Full Story
Wednesday September 9, 2009
Atheism • Books:
Philip Pullman, the children’s author, is set to cause controversy with a new book – called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ – denying that Jesus was the son of God. Publisher Jamie Byng said that Pullman’s book, which will be published next Easter, “strips Christianity bare and exposes the gospels to a new light”.
» Full Story
Monday December 29, 2008
Books • Islam:
Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo. The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
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Monday July 21, 2008
Bible • Books:
Most believers would say the Bible is the word of God, or at least a divinely inspired book written by divinely inspired men.
But what if the Bible had been mistranslated or censored to remove the tawdry bits about pimps, cross-dressers or, ahem, a Brazilian wax as punishment?
» Full Story
Thursday January 10, 2008
Books:
“It’s like being raised in the mob; it’s the world that you know,” Frank Schaeffer said. “Really, it’s like growing up in New Jersey and killing people seems normal. Until you get out of it and realize maybe this isn’t as normal as you thought.”
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» Full Story
Sunday January 6, 2008
Books:
Regardless of whether you’re religious, you can partake of a fair amount of manga out there with Christianity as its main basis. Granted, such books and stories are not often kind on the subject — usually taking the harder-line stance of the church and God as forces to be feared, with sins coalescing as tangible demons of hell — but then, you shouldn’t really expect to learn all that much from dramatized tales.
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» Full Story
Friday October 12, 2007
Books:
Fifty years after it was first published, Ayn Rand’s most influential book offers a vital clue to why so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests.
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» Full Story
Thursday October 11, 2007
Books:
Provocative author Christopher Hitchens has been nominated for a U.S. National Book Award for his bestselling work, God is Not Great.
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» Full Story
Monday September 24, 2007
Books • Polygamy:
How can a woman be so indoctrinated that she accepts her husband has other wives? And how can she find the courage to leave? Catherine Elsworth meets a former Mormon who, at the age of 70, has decided to speak out.
» Full Story
» Full Story
Monday September 3, 2007
Agnosticism • Books:
John Humphrys went looking for God and ended up an angry agnostic – unable to believe but enraged by the arrogance of militant atheists. It’s hard to see the purpose of the world, he says, but don’t blame its evils on religion.
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» Full Story
Tuesday August 28, 2007
Books:
This is the story Patricia Hochstetler tells in a series of three books about her childhood in an Old Order Amish splinter group ruled by a man called “The Elder.”
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» Full Story
Tuesday August 14, 2007
Books:
Struggling authors should keep the faith – literally. Sales of books that explore religion or spirituality have grown by more than 50 per cent in the past three years, according to online retailer Amazon.
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» Full Story
Thursday August 2, 2007
Books • Harry Potter:
Where are the pictures of angry, book-burning Christians? Where are the denouncements of the books as pagan incitements to the occult, drawing the nation’s children down the path of witchcraft? It has all been strangely quiet on the theological front.
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» Full Story
Monday July 30, 2007
Books • Harry Potter:
(Spoiler alert: If you want to avoid learning anything significant, finish the book before you read this column.)
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Tuesday June 5, 2007
Books:
Viviane Dyer thought she had only bought an old suitcase. But inside was an eclectic collection of religious texts, all hardcovers published in the 19th and early 20th century: the Quran; an English translation of the Tao Te Ching; essays on Zorastrianism, and several collections exploring Hindu thought and law, translated from the original Sanskrit.
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» Full Story
Thursday May 3, 2007
Books:
As Harry Potter ends, publishers compete to give fantasy enthusiasts the next big family-friendly series. Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven books, set on a preserve for magical creatures in Connecticut, are so hot that he represented Borders at this past weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation’s largest.
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» Full Story
Tuesday April 24, 2007
Books:
For HarperSanFrancisco, a publisher of religious and spiritual books, the time has come to capitalize on the market for Christian fiction revealed by the success of the “Left Behind” series of evangelical novels.
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» Full Story
Monday March 26, 2007
Books:
Jeffrey Archer launched his new book, ‘The Gospel According to Judas’, in Rome this week. But as Peter Stanford points out, Archer isn’t the first to be intrigued by the gaps in the official story.
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» Full Story
Wednesday March 21, 2007
Books • Success Coaches • The Secret:
Steve Salerno, author of SHAM — How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless: We’re so conditioned to take the pulse of our happiness from one moment to the next, and it’s self-help that’s encouraged this. And the reason it does this is to keep us convinced there’s something wrong with us, so they can sell the next book.
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» Full Story
Monday March 12, 2007
Books • Religion Trends:
Largely ignorant when it comes to knowledge about religions, how effective can Americans be as citizens confronting a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq, Bush’s term “Islamofacism,” debates on intelligent design, rulings about “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, a so-called “war on Christmas” and community arguments over Christmas displays on public property?
» Full Story
» Full Story
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