Twelve Churches , by Fergus Butler-Gallie (Avid Reader) . This collection of portraits of twelve churches offers an ambitious retelling of Christianity’s evolution. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem illustrates the paradoxical nature of a religion that twins life and death, peace and violence, prosperity and poverty; the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, illuminates Christianity’s “complicated dance with secular power”; the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama, affords a glimpse of how “time and justice are inherently linked” in Christian thought. A wide-ranging final chapter, centered on a megachurch in Nigeria, hidden churches in China, and churches that provide virtual services, explores how hope for the future, especially as articulated in the Book of Revelation, r

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