George Eliot: Whole Soul by Ilana M. Blumberg (OUP, £30 (£27); 978-0-19-284509-2).
“In this new account of George Eliot’s spiritual life, Ilana Blumberg reveals to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult, but devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot’s letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us company, still today, in the search for modern meaning.”
What Christ? Whose Christ? New Options for Old Theories, edited by Alan Race and Jonathan Clatworthy (Sacristy Press, £19.99 (£17.99); 978-1-78959-340-2).
“This book explores a Christian view of Jesus of Nazareth that responds to critical demands from numerous perspectives, encompassing Jesus of History research, differing cultural contexts, feminism, and post-colonialism.”
Reformations Compared: Religious transformations across Early Modern Europe, edited by Henry A. Jefferies and Richard Rex (Cambridge University Press, £25.99 (£23.39); 978-1-009-46863-3).
“Reformations Compared presents a collection of comparative studies of the Reformation as it reverberated across Europe in the sixteenth century. Each chapter is focused on two or more comparable geographical spaces, isolating the variables that help explain how and why the Reformation unfolded as it did in each separate setting.”
Selected by Frank Nugent, of the Church House Bookshop, which operates the Church Times Bookshop.