Newsweek:
For years, America’s mainline Protestant churches were in serious decline, with plummeting membership and a voice that seemed irrelevant in national politics. All the energy seemed to have drained out of them, flowing inexorably toward evangelical and Pentecostal denominations, with their burgeoning megachurches and media empires. But a new book finds hope for the mainline. In “Christianity for the Rest of Us” (HarperSanFrancisco), independent scholar Diana Butler Bass contends that a spiritual renewal is underway, and to prove it, she marshals the examples of 50 mainline churches that are anything but dead.

From the God's Politics blog:
Last Sunday’s New York Times reminded me that fundamentalism is, indeed, dangerous. What story underscored this point? Something about religion in the upcoming elections? Religious violence in the Middle East? 
No, what caught my attention was the New York Times Book Review. 

Today was a big day at the Bass household--I received the first copy of my new book, "Christianity for the Rest of Us," in the mail and my daughter started her first day of third grade.  The connection between the two events seemed spiritually palpable to me.  In my experience, writing is like parenting and parenting is like writing.

Holding the new book, I felt all the pride of new parenthood and the relief of the birthing part FINALLY being over.  "It exists!  It is real!," I squeal on the phone to my husband. "And it looks so good."  I spend hours looking it over--just like a mother counting the toes of her newborn--checking for any little mistakes or defects.  "It is perfect," I announce proudly to a friend.  I often hear other authors describe writing as a birthing process.  My new book was no exception: conceived in joy, it grows quietly and privately for a long time, and then, eventually, through editing and re-editing and designing, the whole bloody (in the literal and not the British sense of the word) thing is pushed out into the world.

And then, just like the little blond girl going to third grade, you send it out on its own.  You hope and pray that others will love what you've produced, cherishing it as you do, and not do violence to it. For a book, like a child, is a gift to the world--a gift that has to be shared with others, to which others will respond as they choose.  You can't control who will appreciate and love the gift, nor can you control the ambivalent, the ignorant, or the schoolyard bully.