by Diarmaid MacCulloch
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The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
by Philip Pullman
(Canongate, $24)
A lack of a sense of fun is what dooms Philip Pullman’s provocative new fable, said David Plotz in Slate.com. Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has imagined that Mary, the mother of Jesus, actually gave birth to twins. One grows up to be a preacher of love; the other wrecks things by trying to build a religion. The book’s “loveliest parts are when Pullman retells the most famous Christian parables” in vernacular language. But the story isn’t playful enough, and villainizing the Christian Church is nothing new.
Absence of Mind
by Marilynne Robinson
(Yale, $24)
This slim new book of essays from the novelist Marilynne Robinson is “one of the most thought-stirring inquiries into fundamental questions that has appeared in many years,” said John Gray in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Robinson falls short in her main ambition, “which is to put the human mind back at the center of things” by tearing down science’s reductionist view of consciousness. But Absence of Mind “is a gush of fresh air” in the current debate pitting science against religion. Anyone engaged in the battle “has a duty” to read it.
God Is Not One
by Stephen Prothero
(Harper One, $27)
Stephen Prothero’s “terribly flawed” new book sometimes seems to be fighting itself, said Alec Solomita in The Boston Globe. Prothero, a religion professor, says we need to abandon the sentimental notion that the world’s major religions are all the same at heart. But after neatly comparing and contrasting Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, he turns to Western faiths and goes soft. Because he actually tries to avoid finding differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, his logic gets so knotted it feels like “he’s playing the game Twister.”