“Love Without Limits” by Jacqueline A. Bussie, Fortress, 195 pages, $24.99

“Learning to Speak God From Scratch” by Jonathan Merritt, Convergent, 256 pages, $15.99

Here’s a subject not often found on the religion bookshelf: linguistics. As in “sacred language,” the ways we put words to what’s holy. It’s a language that’s been hijacked by politicians, blasphemed by holier-than-thou hypocritical preachers, and muted by the masses who dare not utter a word construed to be “church-y.”

A few years back, Jonathan Merritt, a religion and culture contributor to The Atlantic, left behind the Bible Belt for New York City and found himself thunderstruck by the disconnect (and discomfort) in God talk in Gotham.

He robustly constructs his argument — one rife with hard data from the sociocultural realm and rich in personal narrative. It’s one that solidly convinces that sacred words

in crisis and that any lost language leaves a gaping hole in human understanding.

He opens his case with this assessment: “The way certain groups of people use sacred words gives the rest of us the holy heebiejeebies.” From there, Merritt takes off, swashbuckling his way through ironclad analysis, poking into curious linguistic and Biblical corners, making us see in a whole new light why it matters to reimagine and reclaim sacred language.

are “The Way of Kindness,” edited by Michael Leach, James T. Keane, Doris Goodnough, Orbis, 224 pages, $18

The roster here is a greatest hits of American writers, not all of whom are regular travelers in the religious or spiritual domain. And that, perhaps, is what makes this a notch above the usual such gathering. To read Jack Kerouac: “Practice kindness all day to everybody/ and you will realize you’re already/ in heaven now.”

George Saunders implores: “err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”

Dorothy Day quotes the Carmelite nun who told her, “It is the crushed heart which is the soft heart, the tender heart.” Even Aldous Huxley chimes in, telling us, “(I)t’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with human problems all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’ ”

While this is a book for quick dips or longer dallies, the curators of this collection — three fine souls in the world of spiritual publishing — have put their collective heft into what unfolds here. Your summer’s day will be all the gentler for having spent time among these literary and spiritual masters.

Jacqueline A. Bussie, professor of religion at Minnesota’s Concordia College, sat down to pen “Love Without Limits,” a deeply personal how-toguide for no-holds-barred loving. She included chapters on her Muslim and her LGBT friendships. Then she turned in her manuscript to the Christian publishing house with whom she’d signed a contract.

The publishing house deemed the two chapters “offensive” and “theologically out of bounds” and ordered Bussie to cut them. Bussie refused, dead-set against being censored. Certainly not in a book about how people of faith — faiths — “are called to love with no exceptions, asterisks, or limits.”

Mighty fine thing that Fortress Press, a Christian publisher with a progressive bent, saw fit to snatch up Bussie’s message. In a world as balkanized as the one in which we find ourselves, Bussie’s words light the way toward practicing “a love so deep it subverts the social order, so radical it scandalizes the powerful, so vast that it excludes no one.”

all Barbara Mahany’s latest book is “The Blessings of Motherprayer.” NONFICTION

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