A girl is playing with wooden dolls in her Bermersheim backyard when an orb floats out of the sunlight and catches her eye, yet it vanishes before she grasps it, like the butterfly escaping the killing jar. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) is five years old. And her mother is horrified; good children do not see heavenly objects, she says, but the orbs repeatedly return, hurtling by Hildegard’s head, thrumming with angelic music. God seldom spares Hildegard. The visions seldom go away. And the inventive theology as well as difficult life that proceeds out from such visions pulsates at the heart of Sharratt’s celebrated story. The winner of the 2013 Nautilus Gold Award, Illuminations spirits us into the German mystic’s troubled, twelfth-century environment and, as an example of Christian historical fiction, it invites us to take notice, not so much of the orbs but of Hildegard’s full-bodied, animated faith—the same faith that caught the eye of Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, when he named her a Doctor of the Church.

Hildegard was the tenth child born to a noble family, and tradition obliged her parents to offer Hildegard as a tithe to the church at an early age. Illuminations captures the heartbreak and loneliness that followed from this decision to render her an anchorite. Jutta von Sponheim, another religious recluse, shares a cell with Hildegard for thirty or so years, during which time Hildegard sharpens the skills that eventually set her apart as a polymath. Sharratt’s heroine is never more herself than when she is at play in the fields of botany, theology, music, poetry, pharmacology, prayer, drama, vinification, financial management, and anti-patriarchal activism. The unusual visions of luminous substances continue, with each occurrence becoming more intense than its antecedent, and Sharratt’s provocative as well as descriptive prose renders Hildegard’s ecstatic experience in ways both mysterious and terrifying, even if one senses that such revelations emphasize those dimensions of the divine character that should be brought into contemporary theological discussion.

Hildegard’s revelations of the Feminine Divine, where God is imaged as a mother, together with multiple and different visions of divine immanence in the natural world, receive considerable coverage in this novel and, in the end, they empower Sharratt to compellingly recover and then reassert the link between God, creation care, and maternal kind-heartedness for those pushed out to life’s edges. One finishes this story, then, and one senses that a future hope for women religious lies in mining the motherlode of the Christian past.

Historical fiction often serves as an educational as well as imaginative point of entry into a particular period. Luther in Love is all this and more. Written in adroit prose and moving at a rapid, appealing pace, Bond’s latest novel uses the ingenious device of a private memoir, penned by Martin Luther’s wife, Katharina von Bora, as a way to engage our theological sensibilities and push them past dates, Diets, and papal Bulls. Flesh-and-blood characterization is Bond’s specialty, and he has published at least six other novels in this genre, so it will come as no surprise that he never once flinches from a balanced or rounded portrait of the Reformation’s principal architect. A former Augustinian friar and a professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Wittenberg, Luther (1483-1546) was an obdurate yet assiduous man, at war with his emotions before finding peace, like Augustine before him, in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. Luther took from Paul the idea that salvation is free gift, not an effort, and that good works are not a requirement for redemption, but the result of loving God because God first loved humankind. Bond mines the many-layered details of Luther’s troubled inner life, and he shows how Luther’s battle cry—the demand for reform in head and number of the Roman Catholic Church—is inextricably tied to the story of how Paul’s insight into God’s saving grace reformed Luther’s own soul.

Bond highlights some of the other characters who come to blows in the wider arena of church change at the sixteenth century’s outset. Archbishop Albert of Mainz serves as Luther’s main opponent, for example, and the Elector Frederick of Saxony, with whom Bond sympathizes, protects Luther, because Frederick frowns on Italian incursion into German matters. In the end, though, it is the tale of Katharina von Bora’s marriage to Luther, set against the backdrop of continent-wide turmoil, that remains with this novel’s readers. Marriage is a school of character, for Luther, and his marriage to Katharina also appears designed to highlight a higher love—Luther’s love for Jesus. It is no small thing that Bond’s novel features a link to a downloadable study guide for church ministers to use during premarital counseling sessions. Protestant Christians gathered late last October to mark the 500^th anniversary of the year Luther made his ninety-five theses known, and this novel’s 2017 publication was a timely one, even if Bond’s novel repays close attention at any time.

Hourihan’s stimulating story exemplifies a point I often make in my literature and theology classes at Texas Christian University: Novels seldom function as neutral territory on which reasonable people stand and then agree to disagree; instead, novels frequently declare a war of the spirit on the battleground of ideas. Favorable accounts of Hourihan’s tale led to a Northern California Publishing Award for Best Spiritual Book (2004), for example, and yet, perhaps representing others, Donald Grayston’s review eviscerates the text: “This is a diatribe, a character assassination, a polemic, an angry screed, a pathetic exercise in projection, and an assault on the general consensus in the community of Merton scholars and readers about who Merton was and what he was about.”

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was one of the most celebrated Catholic Christian monks of the last century. He was a Trappist whose prolific writings on everything from racial equality to social activism, from contemplative studies to literary criticism, have had an immense influence on the lives of his readers. After visiting Asia and then stopping off in Bangkok to participate in an interfaith council, Merton was accidentally electrocuted on December 10, 1968, in his cottage at the Red Cross Conference Center, close to Thailand’s capital. Such details are crucial to the “general consensus” in the community of Merton readers, as they are in the imagination of the late Hourihan, and yet Hourihan, a onetime teacher of Indian Vedantic philosophy, offers a radical re-appraisal of Merton’s premature end. His electrocution was no accident; it was made to look like one.

Hourihan characterizes Merton as something of a Hamlet-figure, wavering between Trappist austerity and Vedantic nondualism. Journeying through Asia fosters Merton’s alienation from the Catholic Church, Hourihan’s narrator reveals, and Merton struggles to conceal his self-disgust. Indian spirituality helps, we are told, even if Hourihan’s Merton laments Vedanta’s late appearance in his soul’s formation. In this context, Bangkok becomes a crossroads moment: Should Merton return to his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani, just outside Bardstown in Kentucky, and there resume his writerly duties, or should he leave the Catholic Church behind and commit to Vedanta? Hourihan’s challenging novel insists that Merton would have been useless to himself if he had returned to the monastery, and useless to his Christian readers if he had become some kind of sadhu, so a staged suicide seemed to be the only solution to his existential problem. The Death of Thomas Merton is an ambitious historical novel, like the others mentioned in this survey, and while it amazes some folk, and vexes still more, it rarely leaves its readers unmoved.