Books

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Where Do Evangelicals Stand on CEO Compensation?

In the spirit of this week’s question on how different religious groups relate to the massive financial troubles on Wall Street, I spent time this morning digging through resources on how evangelicals view the issue of CEO compensation. With the federal bailout package currently stalled in Congress ландшафтin part because of a debate over whether [...]

24Sep2008 | Andrea Useem | 5 comments | Continued
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“Surprised by God:” On Falling in Love with Religious Law

Danya Ruttenberg’s memoir, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, about how she grew from an athiest-Jewish high schooler to an observant-Jewish 30-something rabbi is really fantastic: well-written, engaging, skating that line between the personal and the universal with surprising grace. While reading it, I had to restrain myself from [...]

10Sep2008 | Andrea Useem | 1 comment | Continued
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What the Heck Is the Emerging Church? A “Velvet Elvis” Answer

I always like new ideas, and I relish nothing more than watching big, paradigm-shifting movements overturn the status quo. (This probably has something to do with my birth-order position as a “rebellious” second child, but anyways.) Emergent Christianity has tickled my interest recently because it is just that: a completely new way of doing things. [...]

16Jul2008 | Andrea Useem | 4 comments | Continued
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When God Goes Bad: Shalom Auslander’s Memoir of Rotten Religion

Here’s something I don’t like doing: Writing frankly about my own life. Here’s something I love doing: Reading other people write frankly about their lives. As a result, I love Shalom Auslander’s book, Foreskin’s Lament, in which he writes with a hilarious, tragic clarity about his life as a recovering Orthodox Jew.
Luckily, Auslander is funny [...]

9Jul2008 | Andrea Useem | 7 comments | Continued
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God and Forgiveness on the Bathroom Floor: Immaculee Ilibagiza and the Rwandan Genocide

Some books are so powerful, so disturbing, I almost hesitates to recommend them or pass along a copy to a friend. Left to Tell, a spiritual autobiography written by a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, is one such book. A friend who read it at her church lent it to me, and the book spent [...]

17Jun2008 | Andrea Useem | 5 comments | Continued
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The Most Mysterious Haggadah: Q+A with “People of the Book” author Geraldine Brooks

A sweeping narrative set in multiple locations with a myriad cast of characters, People of the Book, a novel by Pulitzer-prize winning author Geraldine Brooks, is held together by one thing – a powerful fascination with a deceptively tattered book. The maxim “don’t judge a book by its cover” couldn’t be more applicable as the [...]

24Apr2008 | Shona Crabtree | 7 comments | Continued
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American Muslims are so American they are…boring?

At last September’s Religion Newswriters Association pow-wow in San Antonio, veteran religion reporter (and bead-blogger) Kimberly Winston pulled me aside to tell me about Melody Moezzi, the young author of the Dec. 2007 book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims. “You have to meet her,” said Kimberly, who profiled Moezzi and her book [...]

24Mar2008 | Andrea Useem | 6 comments | Continued
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Extreme Sports and Religion: The Faith of Ultramarathon Man

Like most religion reporters, my mailbox is usually stuffed with the latest religion-book releases from publishers around the country; indeed, my children are often a bit resentful that I receive so many of these mysterious “presents” in the mail. New releases carpet a good section of my office floor, but in spite of their [...]

5Feb2008 | Andrea Useem | 7 comments | Continued
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A Gripping Tale of the Iranian Revolution (without the cartoons)

Don’t let the headline mislead you: I’m thrilled that Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is coming to a movie theater near me, hopefully this weekend. Indeed, I spent the last several months loaning out copies of Persepolis: it is a funny, sad, perfectly rendered child’s-eye view on what [...]

24Jan2008 | Andrea Useem | 3 comments | Continued
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The Purpose-Driven Journalist

What was your favorite New Year’s Eve? Here’s an unexpected one from Pamela Constable, a long-time foreign correspondent with the Washington Post. On Dec. 31, 1999, Constable found herself camped out in a freezing airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, reporting on a hijacked Indian jetliner, after breaking off her winter holiday in Connecticut. When the hijacked [...]

31Dec2007 | Andrea Useem | 0 comments | Continued
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