This week concludes the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's annual list of books recommended for religion-themed gift giving.
A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt
John F. Woolverton with James D. Bratt
(Eerdmans, $32)
"A Christian and a Democrat" was how the nation's 32nd president once responded during a news conference when asked where he derived his "political philosophy."
A lifelong Episcopalian, Roosevelt's faith was a constant in his life and is the focus of Woolverton and Bratt's biography of the leader commonly known for establishing the programs that would become the New Deal during the 1930s in response to the Great Depression, and heading the nation during World War II.
Lesser known, though, is the strong influence of the Episcopal faith on Roosevelt's life.
An entire chapter is devoted to Endicott Peabody, the headmaster of the Massachusetts-based Groton School, whom a young Roosevelt revered as a "spiritual father." According to Woolverton and Bratt, the Social Gospel he learned at the Episocpal prep school and beyond were just one aspect of what shaped his political decisions and ultimately helped explain how the boy who lived his first 14 years of life in wealth and privilege in Hyde Park, N.Y., became a champion of social justice.
The book came to fruition after Bratt, a professor emeritus of Calvin College, picked up the work left behind by Woolverton, an Episcopal priest, who passed away in 2014.
Former FBI director James Comey, who had a lifelong friendship with Woolverton, wrote the foreword.
The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions Into Devotion
Sonja Livingston
(University of Nebraska Press, $17.95)
A literal search for a statue of the Virgin Mary threads its way through many of the 15 essays that comprise Livingston's third collection of such works. The search is a tangible parallel to the faith journey she embarks on in returning to the Catholic Church, an institution steeped in tradition and weathered by abuses and dwindling numbers in the pews.
Livingston, an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, re-examines her life and her perspective on Catholicism through such avenues as a visit to a mobile confessional in Louisiana, with inmates at a Mass at a correctional facility and through the eyes of the many adherents, and those she crosses paths with along the way.
The book also explains many aspects of the Catholic faith, but the exploration involved in her personal "expedition into devotion" is one that can resound with faith adherents and seekers across religions.
The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs
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.
NAN Religion on 12/21/2019