For gift-giving with substance, consider religious books

Holiday shoppers in bookstores are often attracted to pretty coffee-table tomes. But for recipients who'd enjoy some substance, the best gift might well be a good religious book.

Religion's book of the year for 2003 is "The Resurrection of the Son of God" (Fortress), a blockbuster by N.T. Wright that rebuts the doubts, ancient and modern, concerning Christianity's pivotal belief that Jesus rose bodily from the grave.

Other notable titles:

Raymond Brown: "An Introduction to the Gospel of John" (Doubleday). One of America's most influential Roman Catholic Bible scholar rethinks his 1960s view of the Fourth Gospel in this posthumous work.

William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnot-Armstrong: "God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist" (Oxford University Press). Two megawatt minds reduce humanity's oldest issue to understandable essentials .

Jean Bethke Elshtain: "Just War Against Terror: The Burdens of American Power in a Violent World" (Basic Books). A neoconservative moral theologian mulls a timely topic.

Luke Timothy Johnson: "The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters" (Doubleday). A prominent Catholic scholar says Christianity's venerable creeds are vital and analyzes them phrase by phrase.

Harold Kushner: "The Lord Is My Shepherd" (Knopf). Devotions on Psalm 23, the Bible's most-memorized chapter, by America's most-read rabbi ("When Bad Things Happen to Good People").

George Marsden: "Jonathan Edwards: A Life" (Yale). This universally lauded biography portrays America's greatest theologian, 300 years after his birth.

Carl Olson: "Will Catholics Be 'Left Behind'?: A Catholic Critique of the Rapture and Today's Prophecy Preachers" (Ignatius). Explains why traditional Catholic and Protestant theologians oppose the end-times theology popularized in the ongoing series of "Left Behind" novels.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945" (Cambridge). Sobering history of how lethal liberal theology made fashionable German Protestants despise Judaism and accommodate Hitler.

Geza Vermes: "Jesus in His Jewish Context" (Fortress). Oxford University's Jewish expert on Jesus questions academic skepticism about New Testament history in a readable reassessment.

Dan Via and Robert Gagnon: "Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views" (Fortress). Bible professors argue U.S. religion's current hottest issue. Via belongs to the Episcopal Church, the epicenter of conflict. Conservative Presbyterian Gagnon wrote a major book on the issue.

Shoppers should shun these titles, despite popular appeal:

Dan Brown: "The Da Vinci Code." This church-bashing novel misleadingly implies that facts might underlie the fable about Jesus' secret marriage to Mary Magdalene.

Michael Drosnin: "Bible Code II: The Countdown." More hokum about forecasts of modern-day disasters encoded in Old Testament Hebrew.

Mark Hitchcock: "The Second Coming of Babylon." Evangelical headline-chasing; claims the Bible predicts Iraq will supplant America in global power.

Theodore Jennings: "The Man Jesus Loved." Supposes for no good reason that Jesus took a gay lover. A new low from a United Methodist scholar and United Church of Christ publisher.

Michael Jordan: "The Historical Mary." New Agers' scurrilous claims that Jesus committed unspeakable acts with his mother.

Elaine Pagels: "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas." A cut above the other discards, but the Princeton popularizer avoids analyzing facts that undermine her theory about a long-lost Gnostic text preceding the Gospel of John.