Olasky Books: Material and spiritual homelessness

Thanksgiving week is the best time of year for homeless persons looking for food handouts—but why are they homeless? Addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness are leading causes, but Michael Ullman’s Household Deformation: The Rise and Permanence of Modern Homelessness (National Homeless Information Project, 2025) also shows the impact of family non-formation and deformation. Divorce and loneliness contribute to an increase in unstable single adult households and a shortage of low-income apartments, exacerbated by federal low-income housing policy.

Ullman asks why some fight homelessness by providing apartments that need to have at least 500 square feet for one person: The new are often “cost-prohibitive to build in large numbers because they must meet the norms and expectations of the wealthy…. Having better amenities and more privacy is a different issue than not having a regular place to sleep at night.” I’ve also wondered why a city that has, say, $1 million to spend on fighting homelessness, finds it better to house two people at $500,000 each rather than 40 people at $25,000 each.

James Whitford applauds reliance on God and self in The Crisis of Dependency (Credo House Publishers, 2024). As part of my reporting I lived four days at the Watered Gardens shelter he runs in Joplin, Missouri, so I saw close-up how his program helps people rise out of addiction, alcoholism, and hopelessness, and gain job skills and job-ready attitudes. His book, which combines personal stories and solid research, is a good alternative for those not ready for such firsthand experience.

Spiritual homelessness is also a problem. In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton University Press, 2025), Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe show the sad impact of godless homes and schools for children like Jonathan: “It scares me because when you die there will just be like trillions of years keeping going on without you in it.”

Ian Harber’s Walking Through Deconstruction (IVP, 2025) is an important read for parents and others who feel devastated as their children or friends give up on God or at least Christianity. With clear prose and analysis, Harber looks at the role of social media and shows the importance of community-building churches with trustworthy leaders.

The Reason for Church by Brad Edwards (Zondervan, 2025) lucidly melds the vertical and horizontal reasons for going to church: There individuals learn about God (who already knows each name) and our neighbors who often do not, nor do we know theirs. Edwards shows how, amid urban anonymity and suburban individualism, churches are the indispensable small towns centered on a steeple.

Amid an outpouring of short and sometimes superficial books, Robert S. Smith’s The Body God Gives (Lexham Academic, 2025) is a comprehensive response to transgender theory. It’s two books in one, so scholars who scoff at biblical claims will be impressed by Robert Smith’s careful grounding in secular studies, and those who pay no attention to mainstream research will see from his careful Scriptural analysis that church and state should come to the same conclusion: Be satisfied with the body God gives. 

Jews are the world’s all-time leaders in homelessness, having been kicked out of their homeland by Rome two millennia ago and many other countries since then. Israel finally became a country again in 1948, only to spend most of its existence surrounded by enemies not above torturing and raping anyone within grabbing distance. Rafael Medoff’s The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews (Jewish Publication Society, 2025) lays out the long tragedy.

Briefly noted

Eric H. Cline’s Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton, 2025) shows that the mail some pharaohs received from 1360 to 1334 B.C. was not all that different from social media exchanges today. Roger Luckhurst’s Graveyards: A History of Living With the Dead (Princeton, 2025) includes descriptive prose and macabre photos.

Jaap De Roode’s Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves (Princeton, 2025) shows how animals eat certain otherwise toxic substances when they are ill or plagued by parasites, and shun them when they are well. He has an evolutionary perspective, but others could point to design.

I would like to praise the last novel of Martin Cruz Smith, author of ten previous novels about Moscow detective Arkady Renko, but the second half of Hotel Ukraine (Simon & Schuster, 2025) falls apart. That was depressing, but Stephen Grant’s Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home (Simon & Schuster, 2025) reports with humor and compassion his time as a rural letter carrier.