Four Reviews Coming in Publishers Weekly on Monday, April 23

-- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2007

Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
Noah Levine. Harper San Francisco, $13.95 paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-06-073664-4

Levine's first book, Dharma Punx, was the autobiography of a young hell-raiser. Having escaped juvenile hall and drug addiction through the slow discipline of Buddhist practices, the son of Buddhist author Stephen Levine is now himself a spiritual teacher. In this book he presents what he has learned about and through Buddhism. The compelling personal narrative may be gone, but the disarming, frank tone that made the first book persuasive remains. He writes about the challenge of celibacy, for example, a different kind of difficulty than that posed by intimate relationships. Levine has taken the Buddha's teachings to heart—he would call it "heart-mind"—and clearly returns to such central ideas as impermanence and suffering, giving his thinking simplicity and consistency. Considering there's a lot of Buddhism here, the book is free of a lot of Buddhist-speak. An appendix includes to-the-point instructions for a variety of meditations that relate to essential Buddhist qualities and ideas. Levine's no-frills approach makes this a short book that will be accessible for young adults with little or no experience of Buddhism. Whether the book is about a revolutionary way of life is arguable, but it is an honest book—what Buddhists would call right speech—driven by right intention. (July)

Bad Faith: The Danger of Religious Extremism
Neil J. Kressel. Prometheus, $26 (264p) ISBN 978-1-59102-503-0

Are some religions, doctrines and practices more apt to inspire hatred and extremism than others? Are people who commit evil acts in the name of their faith carrying out or corrupting the "true" message of their religion? What sorts of people are most prone to extremism? Psychologist Kressel, of William Paterson University, attempts to answer these and other questions in a facile study of the perils of religious extremism. Drawing on examples of extremism from the history of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, he defines religious extremists as "persons who—for reasons they themselves deem religious—commit, promote, or support purposely hurtful, violent, or destructive acts toward those who don't practice their faith." Although much of the book centers on Islamic religious extremism, Kressel investigates the cases of Christians responsible for bombing abortion clinics in the name of their religion. He concludes that militant faith may help some believers, among other things, establish a stronger self-esteem, give life meaning and eradicate a sense of their shortcomings, or sin. Kressel urges toleration for the array of destructive religious beliefs, even as he condemns the destructive conduct that sometimes grows out of such beliefs. Regrettably, Kressel offers no startlingly new insights into the nature of religious extremism. (July 31)

A City Upon a Hill: How the Sermon Changed the Course of American History
Larry Witham. Harper San Francisco, $24.95 paper (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-085427-0

It takes a non-specialist to write this sort of history nowadays. Journalist Witham has most recently been writing popular studies of science, Darwinism and creationism in the U.S. Here he narrates the history of preaching in America, taking as his title John Winthrop's famous sermonic description to his fellow Puritans on their way to New England. Except, as Witham points out, no Puritan thought it remarkable to describe the desired commonwealth in biblical terms at the time. Witham knows when to pick up the narrative pace and when to slow down for delicious detail: for example, evangelist George Whitefield was the colonies' first celebrity, and the last few decades have been marked by "activist" preaching across the ideological spectrum. Historians and theologians will find points with which to quibble. Yet Witham succeeds in lifting up Roman Catholic, female, evangelical and black preachers alongside the mainstay white males. He also resists the temptation to sermonize himself until the last few pages, where he asks whether American preachers' longstanding comfort with assigning "good" to our motives and "evil" to others' is more dualistic and Manichaean than Christian. But by then he's done the good historical work necessary for the one hard question to linger with the reader. (Aug.)

Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches
Scott Thumma and Dave Travis. Jossey-Bass, $23.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-7879-9467-9

This data-driven description of American megachurches is aimed at leaders and members of smaller congregations who may harbor apprehensions about this growing phenomenon. Chapter by chapter, the authors tackle common misconceptions of churches with more than 2,000 attendees and suggest that they are simply Christian neighbors with a different-looking storefront who are here to stay a while and who have much to offer smaller churches willing to learn. However, the collaboration of the two writers (one an academic and the other a consultant for church leadership) is disjointed, with the "applying what you have read" sections at the end of each chapter feeling tacked on to the richer content of the main text. One of the strongest chapters confronts the "myth" that megachurches are akin to Wal-Mart in that they grow at the expense of existing congregations. The authors argue that megachurches feed a constant cycle of "birth, growth, maturity and decline" needed to "help keep churches and religion in America strong and vital." Readers are reminded that true-blue Christianity comes in many different packages and that the market for religion can and should be tapped in a variety of ways. (Aug.)

A Starred Review Coming in PW on Monday, April 23:

Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Kate Braestrup. Little, Brown, $23.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-316-06630-3

It may take ingenuity to interest browsers in a memoir by a middle-aged mother who, 11 years ago, was suddenly widowed, then became a Unitarian-Universalist minister, and now works as chaplain to game wardens in Maine. But good memoir writing does not depend on celebrity or adventure—who'd have thought that a self-confessed recovering neurotic like Anne Lamott or a monastically inclined poet like Kathleen Norris would make it big?—and Braestrup's insightful essays are extraordinarily well written, mingling elements of police procedural and touching love story with trenchant observations about life and death. Alert to comic detail even in grisly circumstances (bears, for example, like to play ball with human skulls), she tells stories of lost children, a suicide, drunken accidents and a murder, always with compassion and a concern for the big questions inescapably provoked by tragic events. "Why did Dad die?" her children ask, and her response describes not only her theology but also her reason for being a chaplain: "Nowhere in scripture does it say 'God is car accident' or 'God is death.' God is justice and kindness, mercy, and always—always—love. So if you want to know where God is in this or in anything, look for love." (Aug.)