Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin This is an absorbing book that takes readers through the financial meltdown from inside the banking institutions. It reads like a novel because Sorkin has pieced together private conversations from meetings and telephone calls as executives scrambled to save their businesses and government leaders struggled to find a soft landing for the U.S. economy. Much like in  Conspiracy of Fools (about the Enron debacle by Kurt Eichenwald), Sorkin shows the actors caught in a vice of greed [...]

Islam: The Straight Path by Kurt Esposito and The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe by Jytte  Klausen Americans are quick to judge, and too often swing the finger of blame across an entire group of people. Such, I believe, is the case with Muslims. There are more than 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and 1.6 million live in the United States.  Only a small fraction of these people can honestly be labeled as terrorists. They are, rather, faithful adherents to the [...]

Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 by Andrew Murphy In this book, Murphy examines the way in which the America jeremiad ( a term meaning a long lamentation, taken from the lamentations of Jeremiah) has influenced national identity. He combines historical themes with scholarly research to help us understand the power of religious yearning in shaping both liberal and conservative thought. He focuses on three periods: the Puritan era, the jeremiads at the time of the Civil War, and [...]

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch This book is a 1161-page tome, delightfully written in  engaging language by an Oxford scholar of church history. I am reading “in” the book, moving from subject to subject rather than starting at page one and slogging through. MacCulloc describes himself as “a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way [...]

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Relin There is one person I would suggest that President Obama spend some time with before making a final decision on Afghanistan: Greg Mortenson. Mortenson is a man whose greatest successes were prompted by a nearly-catastrophic failure. He was forced to stop short of the summit of the world’s second tallest mountain, he lost his way down and ended up in a small, isolated rural village where he found his life’s work. Mortenson’s story is recounted [...]