Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science
Illuminates the far-reaching harms of believing that natural means “good,” from misinformation about health choices to justifications for sexism, racism, and flawed economic policies.
The Gluten Lie and Other Myths About What You Eat
"Levinovitz has written an angry, funny and highly readable condemnation of the 'fearmongering' nutrition business — which he says is not just wrong but detrimental to public health."
—The Washington Post
"The terms we use reflect idiosyncratic dietary faiths, the religion scholar Alan Levinovitz explains in his new book The Gluten Lie, in which he examines why people tend to put moral and religious lenses on food terminology. Much of people's relationships to food can be explained by religious patterns of thought. Our words are often more philosophical than scientific. And our words inform approaches to eating, and overall well-being, in deeply consequential ways."
—The Atlantic
The Limits of Religious Tolerance
Religion’s place in American public life has never been fixed. As new communities have arrived, as old traditions have fractured and reformed, as cultural norms have been shaped by shifting economic structures and the advance of science, and as new faith traditions have expanded the range of religious confessions within America’s religious landscape, the claims posited by religious faiths—and the respect such claims may demand—have been subjects of near-constant change. In The Limits of Religious Tolerance, Alan Levinovitz pushes against the widely held (and often unexamined) notion that unbounded tolerance must and should be accorded to claims forwarded on the basis of religious belief in a society increasingly characterized by religious pluralism. Pressing at the distinction between tolerance and respect, Levinovitz seeks to offer a set of guideposts by which a democratic society could identify and observe a set of limits beyond which religiously grounded claims may legitimately be denied the expectation of unqualified non-interference.