Two centuries after Adam Smith illuminated the workings of the marketplace, a new movement among economists and social scientists is expanding his insights into a groundbreaking “economics of religion.” Using cutting edge ideas from the behavioral sciences, and a deep knowledge of religious history, this new approach is making sense not only of past beliefs, but of religion today. In Marketplace of the Gods, award-winning journalist Larry Witham tells the inside story of this expa...

More than thirty years after a famed Boston art collection is stolen, Washington learns that it has turned up in the People’s Republic of China—just as Sino-American relations are at a tipping point. To retrieve the artifacts, a covert mission is handed to retired military sleuths Julian Peale and Chinese-American Grace Ho, both art specialists. From Washington to China’s great western desert, and from Boston’s lofty art museums to modernist Shanghai, the search is on. Beijing has meanwhil...

The death of Sam Mason, a young painter, shakes a small New England town. Police say suicide. But his sister can’t believe he would do such a thing. She enlists the help of Castelli and Associates, which specializes in art crime, and Julian Peale is on the case. With Sam gone, his paintings—seemingly lost, hidden, or even a mirage—now stir a race to find out what happened, if not to cash in on his legacy. Art dealers see Sam as a “late, great artist” in the making. They’re all after whatev...

This book recounts the quintessential conflict between an American theologian and the Vatican. The Curran case framed an era, from 1965 to 1990, and left behind unresolved questions about authority and freedom in the Catholic Church today.Larry Witham uses the fast-paced narrative of a journalist to recreate this era, weaving biography, history, and theology together with courtroom drama. This book covers the life and times of Charles Curran, moral theology, Catholic highe...

"Witham's highly readable history of the American sermon strongly bolsters the contention that words change minds and alter the course of events." — BooklistPivotal moments in U.S. history are indelibly marked by the sermons of the nation's greatest orators . From colonial times to the present, the sermon has motivated Americans to fight wars as well as fight for peace. Sermons have provoked the mob mentality of witch hunts and blacklists, but they...

In the tradition of The Swerve and Galileo's Daughter, Piero's Light reveals how art, religion and science came together at the dawn of the modern world in the paintings of one remarkable artist.An innovative painter in the early generation of Renaissance artists, Piero dell Francesca was also an expert on religious topics and a mathematician who wanted to use perspective and geometry to make painting a “true science.” Although only sixteen of Piero’s works survive...

The God Biographers presents a sweeping narrative of the Western image of God since antiquity, following the theme of how the "old" biography of God has been challenged by a "new" biography in the twenty-first century. The new biography has made its case in free will theism, process thought, evolutionary doctrines, relational theology, and "open theism"-a story of people, ideas, and events that is brought up to the present in this engaging narrative.Readers will meet the G...

In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a “sensation of sensations” that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, t...

In his forties, Julian Peale is getting a fresh start. Formerly in Navy intelligence, he's cast his lot in the New York art world. He's landed a job with the venerable Medici Studios, which also contracts with the NYPD and FBI. On a winter morning, they've run a sting operation to track Russian art smugglers. The caper goes awry, but an odd bit of evidence remains: four art catalogs with graffiti markings.So begins Gallery Pieces, a story that will keep readers guessing until the e...

In his forties, Julian Peale is getting a fresh start. Formerly in Navy intelligence, hes cast his lot in the New York art world. Hes landed a job with the venerable Medici Studios, which also contracts with the NYPD and FBI. On a winter morning, theyve run a sting operation to track Russian art smugglers. The caper goes awry, but an odd bit of evidence remains: four art catalogs with graffiti markings.So begins Gallery Pieces, a story that will keep readers guessing until...

The clergy today faces mounting challenges in an increasingly secular world, where declining prestige makes it more difficult to attract the best and the brightest young Americans to the ministry. As Christian churches dramatically adapt to modern changes, some are asking whether there is a clergy crisis as well. Whatever the future of the clergy, the fate of millions of churchgoers also will be at stake. In Who Shall Lead Them?, prizewinning journalist Larry Witham takes the puls...

The conflict between creationists and evolutionists has raged ever since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. And yet, even as generations of Americans have fought and re-fought the same battles, the contours of the debate have in recent years shifted dramatically. Tracking the dizzying rhetorical heights and opportunistic political lows of this controversy, Larry Witham travels to America's churches, schools, universities, museums, and government agencies to prese...