Religion

churched is a collection of stories that detail an American boy's experiences growing up in a culture where men weren't allowed let their hair grow to touch their ears ("an abomination!"), women wouldn't have been caught dead in a pair of pants (unless swimming), and the pastor couldn't preach a sermon without a healthy dose of hellfire and brimstone. Matthew grapples with the absurdity of a Sunday School Barbie burning, the passionate annual boxing match between the pastor and Satan, and the holiness of being baptized a fifth time-while growing into a young man who, amidst the chaotic mess of religion, falls in love with Jesus.

Tom Bandy has come to be known as one of today's most insightful interpreters of congregational life and the cultural changes that are affecting it. In previous books he has addressed issues such as the addictive behaviors congregations exhibit, the cultural situation that makes this a "pre-Christian" era, and the organizational changes that must occur if bold new congregational systems are truly to work.

By evaluating the responses to all of these concerns, the author has heard a recurring set of questions: How do I help people overcome the fear of change? How do I persuade them to accept the cost? Why is there a sense that change is inherently unfaithful? When I go to my church next Sunday and drink coffee with that little group of people God has gathered in our place, how in the world do I convince them to take such risks?

Drawing on the penetrating analysis of contemporary cultural shifts that has come to be his trademark, Bandy offers detailed and pragmatic suggestions for how one can invite established church members into the mission of transforming their congregation into a place that calls and equips people to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

"Carroll, whose love for the Catholic Church . . . is not only matched by a lovingly critical eye. . . but an urgent plea that Rome set another course." -- Boston Globe

In this bold and moving book sure to spark heated debate, novelist, cultural critic, and National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.

The Church's failure to protest the Holocaust -- the infamous "silence" of Pius XII -- is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are the culmination of a long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus on the cross, to Constantine's transformation of the cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church's conflict not only with Judaism but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this narrative, he implicitly affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only then can Christians, Jews, and all who carry the burden of this history begin to forge a new future.

Drawing on his well-known talents as a storyteller and memoirist, and weaving historical research through an intensely personal examination of conscience, Carroll has created a work of singular power and urgency. Constantine's Sword is a brave and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader.