This week concludes the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's annual list of books recommended for religion-theme gift giving.
The remaining titles include a newly published diary written more than 70 years ago, a peek into the lives of modern-day saints and a selection from the Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Frank E. Lockwood.
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the Worldby Tom Holland (Basic Books, $32)
It's impossible to understand modern civilization without comprehending Christianity, British historian Tom Holland maintains.
His latest book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, masterfully covers 2,500 years of Christian and pre-Christian history.
Over the course of 543 pages, Holland covers everything from the Bible to The Beatles, John Calvin to Karl Marx.
The spiritual journey, for Holland, begins not in Bethlehem but in Athens and not in 4 B.C but in 479 B.C. He starts with the religious worldview of the Greeks and Persians as well as the Jews before addressing the rise of Christianity.
Rather than restating the gospel narratives, Holland races ahead to the travels of Paul and the rise of the early church, its stunning growth and its eventual embrace by the ruler in Rome.
Dominion is not a hagiography; its protagonists wear no halos.
The pages highlight plenty of church-sanctioned intolerance, torture and tyranny. But there are heroes as well, who fight for freedom of worship and conscience.
Both sides quote the scriptures. Both sides claim a divine mandate. Both trace their roots to the same spiritual homeland.
Holland is a masterful storyteller. He effectively illustrates how Christendom has shaped much of the planet.
While Christianity appears to be decline in places, its imprint remains, Holland argues.
"Even in Europe -- a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States -- the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people's morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence," he wrote. "Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion."
-- Frank E. Lockwood
The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs by Martin Mosebach (Plough, $26)
Writer Martin Mosebach views the video of the 2015 beheading of 21 Coptic Orthodox Christians, or Copts, by Islamic State terrorists on a beach in Libya -- and decides to learn more about the men who were instantly recognized as martyrs of the faith.
The 21 incorporates travel writing, history, theology and culture as Mosebach visits with families of the men, learns about their faith and along the way unspools generous amounts of Eastern Orthodoxy history. More than a dozen of the men, who were migrant workers at the time of their deaths, had been neighbors on the same lane in El-Aour, in Egypt, a country in which Islam is the official state religion.
One of the men was not a Copt at the time he died but declared his Christian faith alongside the others on the beach, and has since been embraced by the faith.
Mosebach seeks to individualize the collective killing on the Libyan beach, heading up each of the chapters with the name and photo of one of the men. He writes vividly and with clarity, as he delves into the background and spirituality of the religion in which families do not mourn and seek retribution for the killing of their loved ones, but instead consider the men to be martyrs of Jesus Christ.
Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It by David Zahl (Fortress Press, $26.99)
"Maybe we haven't abandoned confession so much as traded in one screen for another," writes Sonja Livingston in one of this year's religion-theme book selections, The Virgin of Prince Street, echoing the premise of Zahl's latest book.
The number of religiously unaffiliated in the United States now stands at 26%, according to Pew Research, but Zahl -- the founder and director of Mockingbird Ministries -- argues that the level of adherence to religion hasn't changed. Instead, people pursue replacement religions in the form of popular, secular preoccupations such as work, food, exercise and technology. We find salvation in exercise, a way to atone for calories eaten; we respond to work emails from our beds at midnight to increase our number of good works in a search for approval.
Most of the book is dedicated to examining the phenomenon of "seculosity" through the lens of nine different topics, and a slim concluding chapter contains suggestions and insights that readers of any or no faith can apply to their lives.
Renia's Diary: A Holocaust Journalby ReniaSpiegel (St. Martin's Press, $27.99)
In 1939, Renia Spiegel, a 14-year-old Jewish girl living with her sister, Ariana, and grandparents in southeastern Poland, began a diary as an outlet to talk about her day-to-day life.
Her first-person account in part details her time attending a girls' school, socializing, having a boyfriend and missing her mother (who was living in Warsaw to promote her sister, an actress). It's also a mix of teen longings, hopes, fears and joys set in the context of a Poland under Nazi occupation -- and an increasing fear, and later reality, of relocation to the ghetto in Przemysl, where Jews were segregated from the rest of the population in miserable living conditions.
The diary was brought to light only recently by Spiegel's niece, Alexandra Renata. Renata retrieved it from the safe-deposit box
Religion on 12/14/2019