NCR Book Club

Religion News Service

FINGERPRINTS OF GOD: THE SEARCH FOR THE SCIENCE OF SPIRITUALITY
By Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Published by Riverhead Hardcover, $26.95

For more than a year, Barbara Bradley Hagerty was a sleuth on God’s trail, hunting for evidence of the divine as far afield as a Native American tepee, brain scans, and epilepsy clinics.

Authors uncover the intersections of Eastern and Western spirituality

East & West

SOLITUDE AND COMPASSION: THE PATH TO THE HEART OF THE GOSPEL
By Gus Gordon
Published by Orbis Books, $18

Exhaling, I step out the door into our backyard, trying to be mindful, which, of course, means I’m not yet effortless, and not where I want to be, but it’s a starting point. Almost all the Eastern gurus with whom I’m familiar connect proper breathing with thought, or, rather, lack of it.

MARKED: RACE, CRIME, AND FINDING WORK IN AN ERA OF MASS INCARCERATION
By Devah Pater
Published by University of Chicago Press, $16

I am still shocked as I edit the final touches to this review. A white job applicant with a criminal record has a better chance of being hired than a black applicant with no criminal record. We now know this thanks to this excellent study by Devah Pager of how a criminal record can be a barrier to employment.

AMERICAN BABYLON: NOTES OF A CHRISTIAN IN EXILE
By Richard John Neuhaus
Published by Basic Books, $16.95

In his last book, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus argues that Christian allegiance to America is provisional, not eschatological, limited yet substantial and real. For this reason, he affirms his identity as an American and derides radical critics who seek to escape time and place by claiming "citizenship of the world."

Read the full review here: Neuhaus' first and last things

THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CATHOLICISM: THE PITTSBURGH LAITY AND THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, 1950-1972
By Timothy Kelly
Published by University of Notre Dame Press, $45

The charismatic Bishop Kenneth Untener once said, “What happened at Vatican II might be compared to the great plates shifting beneath the earth.” Its effects were “monumental.” Tectonic shifts do not migrate overnight, and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin captured this temporal dimension when he wrote, “The theological and pastoral currents of the previous decades needed a catalyst to channel them in the direction of building up the church … Pope John XXIII allowed the dynamic forces that were present in the church to be unleashed with full creative and pastoral wisdom. The results were the documents of Vatican II.”

A Benedictine monk, a musician and a scholar, former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland does more than merely trace his life in the church in his just released autobiography: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop (Eerdmans, $35). He provides excellent -- if sometimes chilling insights -- into U.S. episcopal-Vatican relations, including his own frosty relationship with John Paul II and some Vatican officials. At home, many in the Milwaukee may find he too glibly glosses over his appropriating $450,000 in archdiocesan funds to pay off his sexual accuser, Paul Marcoux. In 2002, Weakland’s resignation as Milwaukee archbishop was accepted immediately following public disclosure -- on ABC’s “Good Morning America” -- of that relationship.

BE NOT AFRAID: AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE WAR ON TERROR
By Tom Cordaro
Pax Christi USA, Erie, Pa., 2009
326 pages, softcover, $16 (US)

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a strange crisis for the victorious West -- what to do with the massive apparatus of the military-industrial complex that since the end of Word War II had dominated U.S. foreign policy and consumed trillions of dollars for national defense. In Orwellian terms, a new enemy was needed to justify the costs of maintaining a well-entrenched and ideologically hard-wired national security state.

The Spiritual Landscape of Mark
By Bonnie B. Thurston
Published by Liturgical Press, $12.95

An icon of the transfigured Jesus, attributed to the 14th-century artist Theophanes the Greek, beckons the reader in and signals the importance of what is contained within its pages. The scene is of an illumined Jesus, flanked by Elijah and Moses on a mountaintop, with apostles responding in both awe and fear. Since God cannot be experienced directly, it is through indirection, in this case through the space God inhabits, that the believer can come to know this living God. Christianity is a religion anchored in time and space. Jesus lived a concrete, physical life in a particular landscape. It is in this geographic particularity in all of its ordinariness that the extraordinary happens. By examining the landscape of Jesus’ life, one can come to know him in a fresh and engaging way.

THE OTHER SIDE OF DESIRE: FOUR JOURNEYS INTO THE FAR REALMS OF LUST AND LONGING
By Daniel Bergner
Published by HarperCollins, $24.99

This is an unsettling but ultimately fascinating book.

New York Times Magazine’s Daniel Bergner wanted to discover how we come to be who we are sexually. How do we cope with the forces of desire? How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical; between the wish for love and the “anarchy of the erotic”?

RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT
By J. Kameron Carter
Published by Oxford University Press, $35

Is racism essentially religion-based? Does the theological construction underpinning the Christian worldview deem whiteness as foundational to creation? J. Kameron Carter argues yes.