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The Anxiety Cure
You Can Find Emotional Tranquility and Wholeness
by Archibald D. Hart
Word, 264 pp., $17.99

Professor Hart (dean of the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Seminary) continues to integrate psychiatry, psychology, and the Christian faith better than anyone else—doing so in a way that remains accessible to popular audience. Here Hart sensibly distinguishes between anxiety with spiritual roots (which should be addressed by biblical teaching) and anxiety with biological roots, while giving readers concrete advice on how to diagnose and deal with their own anxieties.

The Safest Place on Earth
Where People Connect and Are Forever Changed
by Larry Crabb
Word, 240 pp., $19.99

Psychologist Crabb's latest offering is a nice combination of complaint ("Churches are rarely communities"), instruction ("A spiritual community consists of people who have the integrity to come clean"), iconoclasm ("In my view, spiritual counseling [or spiritual direction] does everything we now assume can only be done in psychotherapy"), healthy self-doubt ("Am I tilting at windmills, in a crusade that has no point?"), and hope ("God has given us everything we need to develop substantial spiritual community").

The Way of Repentance
by Irma Zaleski
Continuum, 70 pp., $9.95, paper

Zeleski wins the-most-insight-in-the-least-number-of-pages award. She discusses guilt, self-esteem, forgiving oneself, and other therapeutic concerns in the rich context of the Eastern Orthodox spiritual tradition. While acknowledging the rightful place of modern psychology (and suggesting its limitation), she insists, "Repentance is a uniquely Christian path of liberation from self."

Rise Above
God Can Set You Free From Your Weight Problems Forever
by Gwen Shamblin
Thomas Nelson, 336 pp., $24.99

As in her best-selling Weigh-Down Diet, Shamblin's kernel idea is sound, having its roots in the fourth-century desert fathers: overeating (among other compulsive behaviors) is at heart about greed, idolatry, and spiritual longings.Contra Shamblin, however: some eating disorders (bulimia and anorexia) have a significant psychological base, and others involve chemical/biological issues; misdiagnosis can lead to death. Thus Shamblim's advice becomes dangerous when she suggests all eating disorders can be solved with "Jesus plus nothing, thank you!"

Earlier New and Noteworthy Books features include:Church History (Dec. 20, 1999) Theology (Nov. 29, 1999) Christianity & Culture (Sept. 6, 1999) Biography (July 12, 1999)

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January 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1