Is It God’s Will?
By Brandon Ambrosino (Morehouse Publishing, 2025)
Brandon Ambrosino, a convert to Catholicism and professor at Villanova University—Pope Leo XIV’s alma mater—is brave enough to question some of the challenging articles of faith that many of us struggle with but force ourselves to accept. This includes the long-held Christian belief that our God is all-knowing and all-powerful as well as all-loving.
After a good friend dies prematurely, Ambrosino cringes when he hears someone tell the man’s young children that it was God’s will to take their father. The typical bromides don’t hold up: The image of an omniscient, omnipotent God who is unmoved by immense suffering leaves Ambrosino cold. He has issues, too, with ideas about how God sometimes does intervene in human affairs. This book is his bold answer: A new portrait of God that draws on scripture, especially Psalm 82 and stories about Jesus’ life, from the cross to the resurrection.
Ambrosino asks: What if God was surprised by the crucifixion? Jesus’ brutal death is a crucial example of what Ambrosino calls the “world-gone-wrong,” which, in his framing, God could neither foresee nor prevent from happening. God’s response to this is love, through which God “stands in solidarity with all those the world has failed to love.” And through the resurrection, God reconfigures Jesus’ death on the cross.
This is an ambitious book, and not necessarily a book to comfort the afflicted in moments of distress. Drawing insight from contemporary theologians, including Ted Peters, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Jürgen Moltmann, Ambrosino introduces a new God-image, a new theodicy. Though he uses some jargon—theopoetics, “camp” as an aesthetic theory—his approach offers relief from traditional dead ends in God-talk.
The future, according to this framing, remains open-ended. Things can still go terribly wrong, but God is evolving with us, leading us onward through hope.
—Maryanne Hannan
From Aristotle to Christ
By Louis Markos (InterVarsity Press, 2025)
Louis Markos, a professor of English and scholar at Houston Christian University, has written several works exploring the riches of the ancient world from a Christian perspective. His latest, From Aristotle to Christ, follows his popular From Plato to Christ. Intended for undergraduate students and general readers, the book provides an overview of Aristotle’s life and work and how his theories helped shape Christian doctrine as we know it today.
Many church fathers and monastic scholars, like Thomas Aquinas, found ancient Greek thought helpful for Christian theology. Augustine and other early Christian thinkers drew on Plato’s philosophy, but following the collapse of the Roman Empire, most of Aristotle’s works were lost to the West, and were not rediscovered until the 12th century.
Markos provides a reliable introduction to Aristotle’s philosophy with chapters that cover the Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Rhetoric. Where Aristotle clashes with Christian dogma—as in his belief in the eternity of the universe or the impersonal nature of God—Markos is less willing to delve, perhaps because he is writing for a more general evangelical audience. Some readers might want more engagement with the challenge Aristotle’s works posed for the medieval church and the controversy Aquinas generated by defending Aristotle in the face of the more Augustinian medieval tradition.
These reservations aside, From Aristotle to Christ offers a worthwhile study of how one of the most famous ancient Greek philosophers influenced Christian thought.
—John Farrell
Briefly noted:
Art Is: A Journey into the Light
By Makoto Fujimura (Yale University Press)
Makoto Fujimura explores the place of art in revealing spiritual truths through this reflective journey that moves between Japanese culture and Christian theology.
The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action
By Wesley Granberg-Michaelson (Orbis Books)
Granberg-Michaelson lays out a four-movement path for becoming an activist in a book that speaks to God’s justice and our place in pursuing it.
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl
By Anna Rollins (Eerdmans Publishing)
In this debut memoir, Rollins struggles against the unhealthy pressures of diet and purity culture that continue to police Christian women’s bodies from childhood to adulthood.
This article also appears in the January 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 1, page 39). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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