Church Politics

Before he had turned 21, Michael Wear found himself deep inside the halls of power in the Obama administration as one of the youngest-ever White House staffers. Appointed by the president in 2008 to the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and later directing faith outreach for the president's 2012 reelection campaign, Wear threw himself wholeheartedly into transforming hope into change, experiencing firsthand the highs and lows of working as a Christian in government.

Karl Marx, coauthor of the revolutionary text The Communist Manifesto, grew up in a Christian family, and his early writings showed belief in a Christian worldview. Yet in his adulthood, Marx embraced a deep personal rebellion against God and all Christian values. In Karl Marx and the Satanic Roots of Communism, Richard Wurmbrand explores the development of Marx’s antireligious perspective that led to the philosophical foundations of communism.

There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: With righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is this story simply isn’t true.

In his four decades of urban ministry, Robert D. Lupton has experienced firsthand how our good intentions can have unintended, dire consequences. We fly off on mission trips to poverty-stricken villages, hearts full of pity and suitcases bulging with giveaways - trips that one Nicaraguan leader describes as effective only in "turning my people into beggars." In Toxic Charity, Lupton urges individuals, churches, and organizations to step away from these spontaneous, often destructive acts of compassion and toward thoughtful paths to community development.

The Bible remains the best-selling book of all time, believed by nearly two billion Christians and Jews to be divinely inspired. But in this hard-hitting new book, author Robert J. Hutchinson proposes that it is actually much more than this. The ideas enshrined in the Bible, he says, triggered a revolution in human thought and established the moral and philosophical foundation for Western civilization.

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

This groundbreaking book from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America - from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election. Evangelicals have, in many ways, defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitzGerald's narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time.

In Stop the Islamization of America, the renowned activist Pamela Geller lays bare the chilling details of the Muslim Brotherhood's strategy of steady subversion and erosion of our freedoms, while offering a practical guide for how to fight back.

Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers.

Kahlil Gibran reveals his vision of the soul and understanding of the world - past, present, and future - in this rich sampling of more than 20 works. Prose tales, fables, and poems evoke the mystic East and form a world at once powerful, tender, joyous, and melancholy. This collection, penned when Gibran was still a young writer, reveals many of the themes and styles plumbed throughout his life.

The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was?

Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, D.C., address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially, it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world.

In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda.

Christian theology may not believe in Marxism, and Marxism may think that God is dead, but the two ideologies still have much to say to one another. Thomas Merton, one of the world’s greatest modern Christian intellectuals, was fascinated by the dialogue between Marxists and Christians. Now, by listening to these nine masterful talks, which Merton delivered to the novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1965 and 1966, you can join in these conversations.

A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a battle not between armies or nations, but between the forces of good and evil, a war in which God is believed to be directly engaged on behalf of one side against the other. The hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, thought they were fighting a cosmic war. According to award-winning writer and scholar of religions Reza Aslan, by infusing the United States War on Terror with the same kind of religiously polarizing rhetoric and Manichean worldview, is also fighting a cosmic war - a war that can’t be won.

Western civilization and the Christian church stand at a moment of great danger. Facing them both is a hurricane-force battle of ideas that will determine the future of Western civilization and the soul of the Christian church. The forces arrayed against the West and the church are destructive ideologies, policies, and worldviews deeply established among intellectual elites, the political class, and our schools. More menacingly, these forces have also invaded the Christian church.

“An indispensible study” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) drawing on history, public opinion surveys, and personal experience that presents a provocative examination of the unholy relationship between American Christianity and white supremacy, and issues an urgent call for White Christians to reckon with this legacy for the sake of themselves and the nation.

As working moms on opposite ends of the political spectrum and hosts of a fast-growing politics podcast, Holland and Silvers have learned how to practice engaging conversation while disagreeing. In this audiobook, they share principles on how to give grace and be vulnerable when discussing issues that affect families, churches, the country, and the world. They provide practical tools to move past frustration and into productive dialogue, emphasizing that faith should inform the way people engage more than it does the outcome of that engagement.

Churches are all around us. Their steeples remain landmarks in our towns, villages and cities, even as their influence and authority has waned. They contain art and architectural wonders - one huge gallery scattered, like a handful of jewels, across these isles. Award-winning writer Peter Ross sets out to tell their stories, and through them a story of Britain. Join him as he visits the unassuming Norfolk church which contains a disturbing secret, and London's mighty cathedrals with their histories of fire and love. Meet cats and bats, monks and druids, angels of oak and steel.

Fatima, Portugal, 1917: The Virgin Mary appears to three peasant children, sharing with them three secrets, two of which are soon revealed to the world. The third secret is sealed away in the Vatican, read only by popes, and not disclosed until the year 2000. When revealed, its quizzical tone and anticlimactic nature leave many faithful wondering if the church has truly unveiled all of the Virgin Mary's words or if a message far more important has been left in the shadows.