Spiritual book roundup

“Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved” by Kate Bowler, Random House, 208 pages, $26

Only in the steadiest of hands could the chronicle of a young mother’s stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis and its harrowing aftermath find you chuckling one sentenceand wiping away tears the next. It’s with good reason that Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens for a Reason” has grabbed national attention.

Bowler is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School who happens to have robust and vivid expertise in the American prosperity gospel, that televangelist-style creed preached in megachurches across the land. It is, she writes, “a branch of Christianity that promises a cure for tragedy,” one where you pray to God “like He was a candy dispenser.”

She’s 35 and has an infant son when doctors figure out why she’s lost 30 pounds and has been doubling over with abdominal pains. Bowler has just published her first book, “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” And so she came to the cruel diagnosis steeped in a worldview that sees fortune as God’s blessing and misfortune as a sign of failure, moral or otherwise — “a mark of God’s disapproval.” It’s this tension between her scholarship and her personal journey that animates the narrative and drives its most vexing questions.

“Paul: A Biography” by N.T. Wright, HarperOne, 480 pages, $29.99

Plainly declared in the title and subtitle, esteemed biblical scholar and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright’s “Paul: A Biography,” is every bit of what it promises. It’s a toothsome telling of the life of one of the pillars of first-century Christianity, Paul, the peripatetic, letter-writing evangelist, who from birth till beheading was a Jew in every sense. On the road to Damascus, when Saul — the prodigy from Tarsus who had long memorized the Torah and was known for his zeal in preaching Jewish law — fell from his donkey, after seeing a vision of the risen Jesus, whom he believed was the promised Messiah, he took on a whole new mission, but, according to Wright, never gave up his original, essential Jewish identity or mindset.

It’s that revelatory presentation — understanding Paul as first and always a Jew — that makes Wright’s work so imperative in this age of interfaith dialogue and bridge-building. (For too long, scholars have pulled Paul from his Jewish roots, pitting him against his own people.) What makes Wright’s work a joy is that he so brilliantly holds his ground as a scholar, yet writes with a storyteller’s narrative mastery, employing modern-day vernacular and fine-grained detail. Wright illuminates all angles of Paul’s humanity.

“I Am Loved” By Nikki Giovanni, illustrations by Ashley Bryan, Atheneum, 32 pages, $17.99

You needn’t be a child to love “I Am Loved.” You needn’t be a child to turn back its cover and be mesmerized by its jump-offthe-page swoops of bold color, to sink into the cradle hold of its poetry. You needn’t be a child to want to keep it always in reach. But if you are a child, by heart or by age, all the more blessed you are.

Great poems by Nikki Giovanni combine here with the jubilant paintings of Newbery Medal-winner Ashley Bryan to offer joy upon joy. This is a celebration of love, winding up with a mirror on the last page so whoever is reading can stare into her own face, alongside Giovanni’s words: “I reflect the strengths/ Of my people/ And for that alone/ I am loved.”

Bryan, a 94-year-old painter who says he “grew up to the sound of (his) mother singing from morning to night” and “has shared the song of joy with children ever since,” chose the dozen poems in this collection, declaring, “nothing is more important to a child than to feel loved.” He brings each poem brilliantly to life.

A child might make this the book she tucks under her pillow. Or, she might make it into a prayer.