“It is not a contribution to the life of the spirit or the intellect to tell lies to one another or to oneself in order to bring about more affection or cooperation between Christians and Jews,” he writes. Few Christians would be willing to say their God’s love is changeable. For example, the love of Yahweh, by Bloom’s telling, is conditional and revocable.

In this paperback reprint of his 2005 book, the Yale University’s Sterling professor of humanities maintains there are too many incompatibilities between Judaism and Christianity, and people of those faiths shouldn’t take their historic shared inheritance for granted.

Focusing strictly on the differences is a distortion, he says in this timely and well-written book.Īnd now for a different view: “Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine” by Harold Bloom (Penguin, 238 pp., $15). The commonalities range from farms they worked together long ago to the shared pursuit of knowledge. Lest we fear peace hasn’t a chance among the factions of the so-called “people of the book,” Karabell, a historian and essayist, reminds us that Muslims, Christians and Jews share far more than enmity. If you find the news from the Middle East a constant source of concern, “Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence” by Zachary Karabell (Knopf, 301 pp.,$26.95) is worth your attention. Read chapter 5, “Resistance, Christian Democracy, and the Cold War,” in which Burleigh shows the importance of this “dangerous form of doing the decent thing.” Religion changed in the last century, he writes, and secular despots such as Hitler and Mussolini borrowed their infrastructures from the hierarchy of the church. 375 magnum, wipe the nose of a psychotic man and explore the ugly politics of hunger among “thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, and bishops, all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people.”

She learns to walk through housing projects, unload a. Revealing, matter-of-fact and poignant, this is a story of an active faith - that’s the “radical” part of the book’s title. A routine Sunday-morning activity for tens of millions of Americans - except that up until that moment I had led a thoroughly secular life. “I walked into my neighborhood church, ate a piece of bread, had a sip of wine.

Sara Miles was raised an atheist, but one day, at age 46, she wandered into a church with no particular plan: “Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion” by Sara Miles (Ballantine Books, 280 pp., $24.95) is not your average conversion story. Added to the usual crop of examinations of evangelicals and politics are memoirs about spiritual journeys and a thin (but very funny) treatise against consumerism. During this holy season, the choice of new books about religion is as varied as it is deep.

Take This Bread by Sara Miles