Healthy side effects

Ryan Cragun’s How to Defeat Religion in 10 Easy Steps (Pitchstone, 2015) displays a clever atheist’s game plan, but he overlooks one reason atheism fails: Christianity makes a difference in this life as well as the next.

Harold Koenig’s Spirituality & Health Research (Templeton, 2011) reports on hundreds of studies that show religious (in the United States, predominantly Christian) involvement and belief lead to greater marital stability and less alcohol and drug abuse, risky sexual activity, and delinquency/crime. One odd result: Church folks on average tend to be fatter. The bulk of Koenig’s book is a guide to future researchers: how to identify a question, select a sample, do clinical trials and statistical modeling, and get someone to pay for it all.

Koenig’s co-authored Handbook of Religion and Health (Oxford, second edition, 2012) cites studies that church-attending men are far more likely to be faithful in marriage and far less likely to abuse their partners. Also, churchgoing wives are far less likely to head toward divorce, and adolescents attending religious services or saying their religion is important to them are much more likely to abstain from sex until marriage. Other studies show positive correlations between religious involvement and numerous aspects of physical and mental health, and mortality: Everyone dies eventually, but religion has an effect similar to that of “cholesterol-lowering drugs or exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation.”

Other useful reference books include Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality edited by Raymond Paloutzian and Crystal Park (Guilford, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality (Oxford, 2014), but both—compilations of essays by a variety of authors—are less consistently useful than Koenig’s work. Benjamin Mast’s Second Forgetting: Remembering the Power of the Gospel During Alzheimer’s Disease (Zondervan, 2014) shows God’s faithfulness even when we are forgetful.

Spiritual medicine

Is 90 percent of your typical prayer asking God for things, rather than praising God for Who He is (and thanking Him for what He already has given you)? In I Will Lift My Eyes Unto the Hills: Learning from the Great Prayers of the Old Testament (Weaver, 2015), Walter Kaiser Jr. gives 11 superb examples of prayers that put first things first and urges us to go and do likewise.

Gary Burge’s A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion (IVP, 2015) brilliantly creates the backstory of the centurion Jesus praised, and in the process teaches readers about the milieu of the Gospels. Jeremy Walker’s Passing Through: Pilgrim Life in the Wilderness (Reformation Heritage, 2015) depicts well how we should think of life in this world. Dennis Johnson’s Walking with Jesus Through His Word (P&R, 2015) shows how to discover Christ in all of Scripture.

O. Palmer Robertson in The Flow of the Psalms (P&R, 2015) connects the dots, showing that the 150 psalms are not randomly ordered: Robertson teaches about theology and structure, points out poetic pillars and the redemptive-historic framework, and pairs Messianic and Torah psalms. Walter Kaiser Jr. and Dorington Little in Biblical Portraits of Creation (Weaver, 2014) oppose theistic evolution doctrines with clear teaching from Genesis, Psalms, and other books.

William VanDoodewaard’s The Quest for the Historical Adam: Genesis, Hermeneutics, and Human Origins (Reformation Heritage, 2015) is a scholarly look at how Christians have reacted over the centuries to attempts to override the Bible. John Lennox’s Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism (Monarch Books, 2015) has good insights into the Bible book and its contemporary application.

Michael Morton’s Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace (Simon & Schuster, 2014) is a well-written memoir by a man imprisoned for murdering his wife until DNA evidence showed another man committed the crime. Morton in prison came to believe in God after “a bright, blinding, golden light” burst into his cell: His ears were filled “with an incomprehensible roar” as he felt “infinite peace and joy … nothing less than God’s perfect, boundless love.” —M.O.