PositiveThe Washington PostIt’s a fascinating exploration of the paradoxes of humanity’s religious instincts—and the power of followers to deify flawed mortals against their will ... Subin is a gifted storyteller, especially when she dives into lesser-known tales of Indian colonial subjects plying the shrines of dead British officers with brandy and cigars, or a Japanese prophetess haunted by visions of Gen. Douglas MacArthur ... Subin deftly exposes the human urge to worship something, anything—especially forces we can’t understand. Underneath this rich narrative, however, lies a familiar formula and a long-standing debate about what religion really is ... There is no doubt that examining racism and political power is fundamental to understanding the history of religion. But sometimes these frameworks become reductionist ... Accidental Gods depicts a dazzling range of human religious experience, by turns moving and horrifying, familiar and gloriously weird. Subin does not wholly answer the questions she raises but invites a broader investigation of the ways humans make meaning and order out of suffering and chaos.
Adam Morris
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"... Adam Morris offers up some truly strange historical characters ... gripping ... Morris shows that these oddball spiritual liberators are not just historical footnotes. They reveal society’s fundamental themes and contradictions.\
Ross Douthat
MixedThe Washington PostHe weaves a gripping account of Vatican politics into a broader history of Catholic intellectual life to explain the civil war within the church. This is not just a conflict between the pope’s liberal fans and conservatives who pine for Benedict XVI, but a contest between two different visions of the church’s relationship to modernity ... He is hardly the first critic to accuse the pope and other progressives of ancient heresies, but his accounts of complex episodes in long-ago church history are by turns exasperating and intriguing ... Historical comparisons that leap centuries, cultures and continents are always full of problems, but they are also deeply interesting. Douthat manages in a slim volume what most doorstop-size, more academic church histories fail to achieve ... He helps us see that Christians have wrestled repeatedly with the same questions over the past two millennia ... But in his tale of the perils to orthodoxy, he ignores the way in which the church’s compromises with secular democracy and multiculturalism have — at least partly — helped Catholics domesticate the chauvinistic impulses that tend to corrupt all religious ideals.
