Excerpts:
Our reading list this year, like the rest of our lives, was colored by the triple whammy of 2020: the pandemic, the racial justice protests and the presidential election. But given the unpredictability of these 12 jam-packed, crisis-filled months, how did the thinkers, researchers, preachers and their publishers of the books we clung to know to furnish us with such timely analyses? As several of the authors of the most interesting books have noted, the answer is all too grim: In many cases, we only reaped in 2020 what we had long sown.
But among our favorite histories, travelogues and memoirs below, there are as many solutions as there are jeremiads, and books as fun as they are enlightening.
The Calvin College historian argues evangelicals’ seduction by Donald Trump has been decades in the making. As Du Mez connects the dots of militant patriarchy and what she calls “family values evangelicalism,” she tells the story of the religious right’s beginnings as a partisan political force in the 1970s as they fought the rise of feminism and mourned the loss of the Vietnam War.
Religion News Service Staff. “The Most Intriguing Books on Religion we Read this Year.” Religion News Service. December 23, 2020. https://religionnews.com/2020/12/23/the-most-intriguing-books-on-religion-we-read-this-year/