Believe
Why Everyone Should Be Religious
Ross Douthat
Zondervan, 2025
When conservative columnist Ross Douthat began writing op-eds for The New York Times in 2009, most of the negative reader feedback about his religious sensibilities came from people who had been raised in a religious tradition and later rejected it. Sixteen years after, negative reader reactions came primarily from a different group: people who have been raised without any religion at all.
While the first group was hostile toward religion, Douthat writes, members of the second group are often mired in a secular worldview not totally of their choosing. This second group is Douthat’s intended audience for Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025). He makes the case that they should not only entertain the idea of religion, but they should pick a tradition to embrace, commit to and practice.
Already committed and practicing believers will appreciate Douthat’s clear argument and deft reporting, interpretation and analysis of wide-ranging cultural phenomena, from near-death experiences and UFO abductions to the New Atheism, Darwinism, AI, and the multiverse. He shifts smoothly from an intellectual perspective to a personal one, encouraging readers to find an established religious tradition that resonates with them while sharing in the last chapter how his roots in Episcopalianism and charismatic Christianity finally led him to Catholicism, and why he believes in the ultimate truth of Christianity.
The Uses of Idolatry
William Cavanaugh
xford University Press, 2024
Everybody worships, William Cavanaugh writes in his latest book (The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford University Press, 2024) and, like everybody throughout history, people mostly tend to worship badly today. In the current secular West, that means the decline of explicit worship of God but not a decline in worship itself. Cavanaugh takes readers on a long, yet brisk walk through the meaning and appearance of idolatry in our contemporary post-postmodern context, explaining at the outset that “Studies of idolatry tend to treat it as a ‘religious’ problem,” but that treatment is too narrow, because “the worship of anything, not only gods, can be idolatry.”
He considers idolatry by way of sociology, philosophy, political science, economic history and theology. And then, because idolatry is “less a matter of what people say they believe and more a matter of behavior,” he undertakes a close study of two significant idolatries of the 20th and 21st centuries: nationalism and consumerism.
After a devastating assessment of our idolatrous ways, Cavanaugh offers a glimmer of good news. “The ubiquity of worship indicates a deep longing in the human heart for the transformation of our lives,” he writes. In his final chapter, he sketches out how sacramentality and the incarnation of Jesus can serve as remedy to idolatry.