Run Home and Take a Bow :
Stories of Life, Faith, and a Season with the Kansas City Royals Ethan D. Bryan (Samizdat Publishing Group)
$14.99  SALE PRICE $11.99 Click on order form below.

It is World Series season
and, well, that is kinda like being in the run-off for the Nobel Prize.  True baseball fans might even say that
getting the Nobel Prize is almost like
winning the World Series.  Even those who
don’t follow baseball regularly tune in and pay attention: there is something,
for Americans, at least, about baseball. And a great body of literature has developed about the sport and, like the World Series, a lot of folks who may not be passionate baseball fans, or sports fans at all, really, love the genre.

My friend Ethan Bryan’s
wonderful, wonderful new book is about baseball – and a whole lot more.  And it is like
that: baseball fan or not, you are going to want to pay attention.

Due to what might in sports lingo be  called
a “delay of game” the book came out near the end of the 2012 baseball season just a few weeks back; I held off
posting this review until now, just to make this timely point  This is a World Series caliber book,
exciting and lovely and somehow important.  Other famous writers of baseball books (such as George Will and Robert Benson, two
guys any coach would put on their all-star writing team, by the way) agree,
noting in letters to Ethan how very well done it is.  As we sometimes say, Mr. Bryan “knocked it out of
the park” on this one.  (And how ’bout
that hand-drawn cover, almost like a vintage baseball card?  Love it!)

Ethan loved baseball as a
kid, and his well-written introduction (the warm up? the bull-pen? Okay, I’ll
quit with the baseball analogues) tells his story, loving the game, wanting to
play catch with his dad, being on a Little League type team, going to a big
league game.   He played well in high school, oddly gave up his dream of
going pro, and took up golf.  He did well
enough in that, but drifted from that sport, too, for which we can be grateful, as
I’d hate to have to review a book about putting and birdies.

Ten years after quitting baseball, after
graduating from George Truett Seminary (at Baylor University) and, hoping to
land a job as youth pastor and worship leader, Bryan is taken to a KC Royals game, a game in their new stadium,  seeing the
team he adored as a youth, as part of a job interview for a position at an area church.  He says that “the church was an answer to
prayer” and wryly adds “The Royals won in the thirteenth inning on a Mike
Sweeney home run. I took it as a sign from above.”

And then, this important
line, which leads, years later, to the writing of the book: “My passion for the
game and the boys in blue returned almost immediately.”

Ethan, through an odd bit
of luck or providence got a chance to play catch with a retired Royal, a
boyhood hero.  He wrote up the
experience, and Mike King published his account of it all — beautifully
rendered, with some good insight drawn from the thrilling episode — in an
on-line youth ministry magazine, Immerse. 
Also, against great odds, he entered a contest to come up with an
original song, an anthem, for the Royals, and his song won.  Luckily, he didn’t have to preform it at the
stadium as he says he’d have been so nervous he’d have thrown up.  He did win some big league swag and a bit of
fame as an up and coming very serious fan.

Well, a serious fan he
is.  And, as Run Home and Take a Bow explains, he sees
God’s hand in it all.  He is not the
first to note that we can “practice the presence of God” in all things, and
find God’s goodness in all manner of human experience, including the seemingly
secular.  Authors like Abraham Kuyper or
Richard Mouw call it “common grace.” 
Here is how Bryan writes about it:

It took me a long while
to realize that baseball in and of itself is one of the ways God speaks to
me.  Watching the Royals play this season
led me on a journey of faith and reflection, one that softened by heart to hear
God share His story through this marvelous game.

As the subtitle, “Stories of Life, Faith, and a Season with the Kansas City Royals” suggests,
this is one of those memoirs that narrates not a whole life, like an autobiography,
but a small slice of life, a season, an
experience.  Like A. J. Jacobs trying to
follow every verse of the Bible or Rachel Held Evans doing the same, taking a
year to follow the commandments for women (we just got her A Year of Biblical
Womanhood) or Jana Reiss flunking sainthood as she tries to read a year’s worth
of spiritual classics, Ethan Bryan goes to twenty Kansas City Royals home games
one summer, writing about each one.  In a
sense, you could read them in nearly any order, one a day, even, like some mature
sportsmanlike Chicken Soup for the Soul, but, yet, it does seem to hold
together with a bit of an unfolding plot. 
Game by game, month by month Ethan (and his companions, often his children) learn and
come to appreciate more and more, about
the sport, the players, the experience of taking in the game, about other fans,
about God and God’s redemptive work in the world.  Clearly, his faith colors how he experiences
the games (even one that he missed, stuck in bad traffic!) and his own life as a follower of Jesus is shaped somewhat by this
summer following the boys of summer.

So this is a baseball
book, but it is set in one interesting summer. 
Bryan tells you about his life, his work, his passion for helping church
youth learn about social justice and become better servants in their
community.  As you might imagine, there
are family issues, spiritual questions, ups and downs, and a bit of his
colorful life shines through, between the innings and between the games.

Some of the lessons
learned along the way are quite instructive. 
One very cold day early in the season the weather was so bad, few fans
filled the ballpark’s seats.  He and his
pal jumped around, sitting where they were not supposed to (who would care?)
and checking out the better seats.  It is
a truism that we learn to appreciate other’s viewpoints by trying to see things
as they do, that our very worldview is shaped in part by where we sit as we
look out on life.  He develops this vital
lesson as he sees the game, literally, from new vantage points.  It is a great chapter, and a fun bit of
writing (they do get in a bit of trouble; even in the nearly empty stadium,
rules are rules.)  And the worldviewish
lesson is brought home with fresh clarity.

Others stories are quite
poignant.  Once, leaving the stadium, his young daughter
noticed an older woman, clearly struggling to walk with her canes, a person
afflicted with cerebral palsy.  Kaylea,
by the way, sometimes reminded me of Coach Boone’s daughter in Remember the
Titans; she knows her baseball, and loves her Royals.  Innocent, though, still, in many ways, she
thought the disabled woman reminded her of one of the KC Royal
cheerleaders.  In a move I can only
imagine Bob Goff making, Ethan took his daughter’s observation seriously, and
approached the woman, explaining that Kaylea thought maybe she looked like one
of the cheerleaders, and asked for the woman’s autograph.  Without any condescension to the child’s
mistake, or to the woman who was surely not a cheerleader, they made her day,
reminding us all that beauty need not be culturally bound, and that there is
wonderful worth in every human face and body. 
And that we should dare to bless others in ways that may seem a bit
crazy. I wiped tears from my eyes as I closed that chapter. There were some
wild foul balls or stike-outs or double-plays, too, I think, maybe an argument with the ump, but who remembers those kinds of things
after an ending like that?

Another wonderful feature
of Run Home… is how easily Bryan weaves a small bit of another narrative
throughout the book.  He quotes (as an
epigram before each chapter) a man I bet you have never heard of: Buck O’Neil.  Buck O’Neil was a vital and important African
American sports announcer, whose pithy wisdom was apparently renowned.  Perhaps not as nutty as Yogi Berra,  he, too, was a real character, and in the last few
years of his life he was a tireless ambassador for the Negro Baseball Leagues.
It seems as if Bryan had come to know him, although he died in 2006.  Near the end of Ethan’s summer of writing
about Kansas City baseball there was a special tribute to O’Neil at the
stadium, and that chapter is very well done, informative and moving. (Ethan
says that one of his own all-time favorite baseball books, by the way, is Joe
Posnanski’s tribute to Buck O’Neil, entitled The Soul of Baseball.)

There is a lot of good baseball history,
trivia, and storytelling in this chapter, and there is a bit of family drama,
too, as Ethan explains some turmoil in their lives that particular week.  There is a bit about O’Neil’s work against
racial discrimination, and his low-key kindness to one and all.  And then Ethan brings the whole chapter around
(as he does in expert, literary ways in most chapters) by writing these two simple
final paragraphs:

As the dad of a couple of
girls, and as someone who is familiar with the rampant sexism within the
evangelical Christian culture, I wanted to teach my girls that they are free,
they are equal, in Christ.  Their job is
to love and to see the good in all people.

Major League baseball
ultimately listened to Buck O’Neil, and members of the Negro Leagues were
admitted to the National Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The church could learn a
thing or two by listening to Buck as well.

So, there is plenty here
about personal growth, human foibles, raising kids, marriage matters, social ethics, the ups and downs of
daily life and implications of Christian discipleship. Some of it is fun, very
pleasurable reading, as any memoir of an experiment like this would be, and as
the best contemporary long-form journalism often is. I think those that like
reading human interest stories, with some inspiring meditations woven through
the tales, will really love this.  It is one of my favorite books of the year.

But, let us be clear: Run Home and Take a Bow is a baseball book. 
Ethan knows the players and their stats like only the truest
devotees.  In fact, he has been chosen by
the  Kansas City Royals organization to
be a blogger for them, and his work has been published alongside some other
pretty fanatical sports voices.  He’s no
newbie to the game and no light-weight fan merely using the game as a foil for
doing spiritual reflections.  Nope, there
is plenty of solid baseball talk here, lots to keep the true fan turning the
pages. But like most of the best baseball fans (I don’t know if this is true of
other sports fans) there is this propensity to ask bigger questions, to ponder,
through the graceful rhythms of the game, life’s deeper matters.  And so if feels natural, mostly, when he
moves from a story of a good game to a story of growing faith, or when he tells
of something learned from another spectator or when he reports something he
realized by ruminating on something that happened.  Yes, there are upbeat, Christian
conclusions.  But it is first and
foremost a lovely story of a lovely summer, when a dear, lively, loving
Christian renewed his love for his team, and shares his memories of it all with
us.  As his pal Mike King notes, it is
“as life-giving as Opening Day, as sensory as pounding your glove and smelling
the leather.”

There is a website for
the book, here, and there are some great endorsements there (including a beautifully
written one by Mark Yaconelli, who rather wonderfully calls Ethan “a baseball
contemplative.”) Here is what I wrote, which is shown there, a blurb I was truly honored to
write after having read the manuscript. 
I hope you enjoy it as it tries to convince folks to buy the book. I should mention, I guess, that I’m briefly mentioned in it, but of course that isn’t at all why I’m promoting it.  I’m unashamed about by enthusiasm for this indie book on an indie press — I hope it
becomes a quiet little underground classic. 
It would make a great end of the season gift, or, of course, a great
Christmas gift for any baseball fans.

I’m not a big sports fan,
and care little about the K.C. Royals, and I loved this book!  You will
too, I’m sure.  Just a few pages in, you just know that Ethan Bryan is a
truly good man, a caring dad, a fine writer, and a great storyteller.  His
childlike joy in his beloved game is a delight to behold and along the way you
will meet some true athletic heroes, from Hall of Fame stars to historic sports
writers and some memorably diehard fans.  And there is a cast of
characters unrelated to the game, from Mike the Theologian and Chick-fil-A Jake
to Bryan’s sweet baseball-loving daughters, not to mention bunches of Bible
guys, drawn vividly from the pages of Holy Scripture as they are set alongside
the boys of summer. This is light reading that pitches some serious life
lessons, is as entertaining as peanuts during the 7th inning stretch and, like
a last-ditch homer in the bottom of the 9th, has you on your feet, leaving you truly
inspired.  Take a bow, Ethan, author and writer.

Read an excerpt of Run
Home and Take a Bow: Stories of Life, Faith, and a Season with the Kansas City Royals featured at the Burnside Writers Collective. Then come back here and pitch us an order.  We’ll send it back quick like a fast ball.  Sorry.

BookNotes

                   Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333
                                                      read@heartsandmindsbooks.com 

There are so many kinds
of novels, with such different qualities and styles of writing that it hard for
me, without a lot qualifications and hedging of bets, to heartily recommend
many.  There are many we love, lots that
are obviously worthy, and we love reading the many reviews that are available of the
latest and best.  For instance, we, like
many, are waiting eagerly for the soon to be published next novel of Tom
Wolfe, Back To Blood (Little, Brown; $30.00), his first since the much-discussed I Am Charlotte Simmons over a decade
ago. 

Some novels are written for the
sheer art of it, and we read them for the play of words, the interesting
characters, the intricate plot; insight might be gleaned along the way, but that is certainly not front and center.  For
serious art, of course, a message ought not be didactic; Calvin Seerveld, in
books such as his quirky but seminal A Christian Critique of Art and
Literature (Dordt College Press; $15.00), insists that the norm for art in God’s world is allusiveness. That
is, the best artists allude, they suggest, they evoke.  “Tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson said.  Yes, yes. 
Religious painters, musicians, script-writers and novelists have too
often taken the easy way out, preaching in their stories, with predictable
trajectories, sentimental conversions, and happy endings. These have not endured or been taken
seriously, unless they are particularly unique, like say, the hugely popular
parable about suffering, The Shack.  Not
incredibly well written, and a bit overly allegorical, it still worked for
many, and did what a good story can do. 
We look forward to William Young’s next novel, due in November, to be called Cross Roads (Hachette Publishing; $24.99.) So, there are more literary novels which are suggestive, at best, and there are some that are more didactic, knowingly.  They tell a story but they are created to bring home a point.

A very good friend of mine, Mr.
Richard L. Cleary, a retired Dallastown high school teacher (the head of the
science department) who currently teaches introduction to philosophy classes
in three different colleges,  recently wrote a novel and it stands between the genres; I
doubt if he would mind me saying it isn’t great, high art; and I suspect he’d admit
readily that he wrote it as somewhat of a parable.  A born teacher, he loves to explain and
teach, to invite conversation and challenge others to consider new views.  He blogs (often about the limits of
naturalism as a worldview and how the latest in scientific research erodes the
old-school Darwinian orthodoxies that the universe evolved from nothing, by
sheer chance.)  And so, when
Cleary decided to do a novel—his second, actually—he picked up the pen not
just to entertain with a curious plot and engaging characters, but as a tool to
teach.  His story was a device.  And I think it works well-it’s a great idea which forms a good story
which illustrates and explores important questions, questions of the utmost
importance for us all.

If the title When God is Absent (Xulon Press; $24.95) sounds a bit like some
heavy philosophical study, it is because this novel is, at its heart, an
extended riff on a few very basic philosophical assumptions.  That authors like Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky
are cited by the characters, that the college professors and students that inhabit this
story read Dawkins and C.S. Lewis, should, therefore, come as no surprise.  This is an intellectual novel, a book about
worldviews and ways of life. Some of the dialogue—over coffee, in the
classroom, between friends and among enemies—are quite deep.  The characters are trying to figure out what
they believe (well, some of the characters are, at least) and how to explain their
convictions, their doubts and concerns, to others.  In the course of the novel there are
realistic conversations among college professors and students about the truth
claims that they hold, offered in snippets at parties, in college dorms or in professors offices.  Some of these feel natural, complete with private jokes and teasing, the way friends do.  Occasionally, one or another of the characters may be a bit long-winded (as some college professors are prone to be, after all.)  Through it all, or at least through most of it, readers are
drawn to the characters and their development and their lives.  We are pulled right along,
listening in, and learning a lot, along with the characters themselves.

So, no, this isn’t a quick bit of mindless
entertainment, but – happily — it is quite entertaining.  There are colorful characters, true-to-life
plot lines, drama, romance, sports (Cleary was a football coach, too, so the
athletic scenes of locker-rooms and game films and bus-rides to away games and
inter-racial comaraderie and tensions on the teams are realistic and
believable.)  And there is violence.  Did I mention this is a tensely wrought, suspenseful
crime story?  I don’t think Dick was
being intentionally commercial (he just isn’t that kind of a schemer and has
too much stubborn integrity to allow anything to alter his vision) but as a
bookseller, I can say that, as popular novels go, this truly has something for everyone.

In the Absence of God travels some of the same territory—the search for meaning and values on the modern college campus—as the aforementioned Tom Wolfe. (I know Dick
was a serious fan of Charlotte Simmons for how it so artfully exposed the
emptiness of the secularizing milieu of the Ivy League campus) But In the Absence… includes more
intellectual repartee and includes more crime scenes that did the genteel
Wolfe.  At one point, I called it Karamazov
meets CSI Special Victims Unit.  Yes, there
is some mayhem and  dramatic action, but there are mostly episodes of of pondering, characters involved in sincere philosophic searching; the heavier scenes from
Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors come to mind — if it were set among
earnest football players and professors prone to honest ruminations, on a  small East Coast liberal arts college.

The plot of In the Absence of God
is fairly simple to tell, but the long conversations and the numerous sub-plots
are many, so I don’t want to summarize it too briefly.  In a nutshell, the plot revolves around
several college professors and their generally friendly intellectual debates
and a handful of students that are struggling to determine which basic
philosophical starting points are true. 
Cleary’s thesis, comes up posed as a question over and over: can we truly
say anything is actually wrong/immoral if there is no God?  At a garden party near the end of the book,
some free thinkers take exception to what they’ve heard of Dr. Peterson’s view,
and attack him rudely for daring to believe that atheists cannot be moral.  Of course, Peterson has never said
this—even in a novel, that would be outrageously dumb. Peterson’s position is not that atheists cannot be good, since they obviously can be, but that there is
no intellectual basis for saying something is good, no coherent foundation for ethics or morals, no way to really say that something is
right or wrong.  That is, there cannot be, if there is no universal right or wrong that transcends
personal taste or social convention, which there cannot be if there is no God.  In
a recent talk, Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias reported that in a
conversation where a cultural relativist was saying that there really isn’t any real
truth, that every culture has its own truth, Ravi, retorted that, indeed,
he knows of people who esteem and welcome strangers, and knows people who kill
and eat them. “Do you have a
preference?” he inquired of his incredulous relativist. Of course, none of us prefer to be eaten.  But whose to say what is wrong?  Is there a God who is there and has this God somehow spoken?

That Ravi story could have appeared in this book.  It is the kind of debate that the characters in In
the Absence of God  just naturally take up. The book recounts these kinds of discussions, page and pages worth.  If you like books about apologetics, or like
to listen in to feisty debates, this book will thrill you.  Cleary has himself entertained many a
dialogue like this – the ones in the novel that are interesting and cordial,
and the ones in the novel that are rude and unsatisfying. There is a sense that
these discussions in the novel are offered firstly to move the plot
along—-you can see one character slowly unpacking his own baggage as
his father dies, and as he struggles with the logic of a student who insists
that if he does not believe in God then there is no basis for saying much about
meaning or truth or ethics.  The kind and
thoughtful professor surely doesn’t want to descend to the nihilism of his
brutish student, but he realizes that there is weight to the logic of this
view.  Does he have any basis for the
claims he makes, the life he lives?  How does he live out in his own life the philosophically viewpoints he professes in the classroom?  Should one be expected to actually live by the worldview one claims to believe?   

However, this novel is more than a bunch of
arguments, retorts back and forth. (Think of the way Brian McLaren’s first novel of his “New Kind of Christian” trilogy
devolved into a set of email exchanges back and forth between the protagonists; they were certainly interesting enough, but the plot sort of petered out as they two characters just wrote missives back and forth.  The dialogue became more connected to the
characters and the plot in the second two of that series, by the way, which are well worth reading as novels that raise certain theological questions.) Cleary has given us plenty of dialogue, but also characters, plot, and well-described settings.

In the Absence of God contains
episodes that are quite believable for anyone who has worked in higher
education: the Christian prof, a
biologist that is generally liked in his department, comes to blows with his
department chair.  There is a debate
sponsored by the political science department about U.S. foreign policy and the
left-wing perspective gets much more voice in an imbalanced panel – what a show
that was, and what a good conversation some of them had afterwards.  There is a sub-plot about interracial dating,
a sub-plot about middle-aged professors caring for their aging parents (which I
found very, very moving.) And there are
some exciting football games, described without too much detail, but offering
enough sports coverage to qualify as a bit of a novel for sports fans.  One might say that it is something like Friday Night Lights  where the action on the field is interesting
but not central.  The funny chatter between
the team-mates and the goofy theory of communal bio-rhythms of the coach give
this part of the book color and interest even if it isn’t central.

I am not a fan of books about
true crime and I rarely read detective fiction.
I love J. Mark Bertrand for his mature writing and gritty approach in his Roland March trilogy (Baker; $14.99 each) which may be the best crime fiction published by any Christian publishing house. 
I know Bertrand has thought deeply about a coherent worldview — he wrote the excellent (Re)Thinking Worldview: Learning to Live,Think, and Speak in This World (Crossway; $16.95.)  His Roland March trilogy is a must-read if you like crime
fiction, if you watch shows like The Wire or read hard-boiled detective
stories.

Dick Cleary’s In the Absence of
God isn’t primarily a who-dunnit nor is it gratuitous in describing the
violence of rape or murder.  It could be
said he was too demur, that his own concerns about the coarsening of pop
culture kept him from being too tough. 
But there is mayhem, and it is a very important part of the story.  It had my heart racing when I read an early
draft of the manuscript a while back and it kept me turning pages quickly as I
read it again in book form.  It is an
important part of the story and makes certain chapters of the book truly
page-turners, and, as you might guess, becomes a vital foil for the fundamental
project of the book: on what basis can we say that human cruelty is wrong, and
how does the worldview of secular naturalism give account for the human feeling
that certain vile deeds are truly and without qualification wrong? And, get
this (as it is crucially important, and I believe will become even more important
in the decades to come): what happens when a culture becomes unmoored from
Judeo-Christian truths, and we are left to live out the implications of a
relativistic worldview? How do we determine what is right or wrong? On what
basis can we denounce anything, from adults having sex with children to
governments using torture, from abortion to cheating, from personal dishonesty to industrial polluting — how do we
persuade anyone that anything is or isn’t wrong (let alone is or isn’t true?)  Is Dostoevsky right that without God,
everything is permissible?

Allow me to warn devotees of
literary fiction that this book is both thought-provoking and yet may be just
provoking at times.  In the thick of a
several page dialogue you may want to jump in—but what about this?  Why doesn’t he ask about that?  How can the conversation partners not move
the conversation in this direction, or move towards that questions? 
Listening in on or overhearing a debate is just or like that, of course, so it isn’t surprising that in the book not every
discourse—good friends chatting over coffee, teachers leading a conversation
in a classroom, a controversial symposium in the college lecture hall, lovers
whispering big questions about their future–will  be completely satisfying for every reader.  Or at least they were not for me.  There were certain debates or exchanges that
seemed to me to driven by Cleary’s desire to make the point, so may not have sounded fully
natural. Would college professors really
talk like that to one another, so very astute about every detail of this or
that philosophical position? Was some of the dialogue a bit wooden?  Sure. But there were
plenty of times when the conversation partners said dumb stuff, when they
joked, when they tripped up their words, and those have the better ring of
truth.  Whether I fully appreciated the language and philosophical reasoning of each debate, I kept reading, soon smiling as I realized — oh yeah, I’ve had conversations just like
this. In fact, I’ve had them with Dick
himself!  If you like to argue with
friends about theology or politics or art or philosophy, well, you’ve been
there.  You’ll get a kick of this for
sure.

It may be that the voice of the
narrator of the book is a bit stiff.  I
don’t know if any college students have “retired” to their rooms in the last
fifty years.  I am not sure if there are
many college professors who have described their office suite as “copious.”  Cleary has this thing for good vocabulary,
and I have chided him in conversations and in email exchanges: who talks like
this?  Well, he does. And he ain’t gonna
change his ways to pander to the limited vocabulary of his readers. That doesn’t mean the book is unaccessible. It
just makes it occasionally quirky.  I
think that is part of the fun, actually, that a few of these characters are,
well, quite interesting.  It makes for a good
story, and makes it unique.  The tone
isn’t hip or ironic or bawdy or funny. 
It is dignified and earnest, serious, even when the characters are fooling
around. I am not sure of an author’s voice I can compare it to, but it isn’t Jonathan Franzen, let
alone Dave Eggers or Steve Almond, if you get my drift. 
If they make it into a movie, there won’t be any goofy “existential
detectives” running around.  It is an enjoyable story, and the characters are realistic, with boyfriend/girlfriend issues, fears and hopes and the stuff college students and teachers face.  It is straightforward, earnest, written to make a point.

In the Absence of God is an
enjoyable way into one of the biggest issues in the life of any person: is
there a God and how then shall we live? 
Does theism offer a basis for lasting values and meaning, and what
happens if we abandon those values for Western style atheism or secular materialism?  You will learn a bit about Darwin, Marx,
Freud, and Dawkins and you will feel the weight of the arguments of Nietzsche
and Camus.  You will learn how to follow
interesting discussions and you will smile at the behind the scenes stuff of
typical college campuses—the wonderful teachers, and the petty ones, the
idealistic youth, and the distressed ones, the office politics and the office
romances.  You will cringe as you hear
what some people think and you will feel like you’ve been punched in the gut
when you hear what some people actually say and what some actually do.  You might think the book is too didactic,
but, again, that is the genre it is.  You
may not have the good fortune of studying with a clear-headed, though-minded
conservative theist like Professor Cleary in the real world, but you can learn
much from his years of pondering and writing by taking up this story.  Reading In The Absence of God is an
interesting and profitable way into an essential core of the many debates in philosophy:
is there a God and does it matter?  If
you work through this book you will be better prepared to think about that, and
much, much more.

On a personal note, it is a true delight to have one of our most regular and faithful customers (for three decades!) publish a novel.  I have had more long and rewarding and vexxing conversations with Dick Cleary than I have with maybe any person alive. That he puts up with my questions, emails, and poking little debates is to his credit, as he is gracious and thoughtful with me. We here at the bookstore have appreciated and admired him for years.  We think you may like this novel, and we think you should grapple with the questions facing the characters in the book.  We happily recommend it.  Congrats to Cleary; thanks for putting these philosophical questions into the form of a story.   May the book cause many to think more deeply, to ponder the biggest questions of life, and learn how to engage in meaningful conversations with others.  

BookNotes

                   Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333
                                                      read@heartsandmindsbooks.com 

There are days when I am
just so eager to tell readers and friends about books that I simply can’t help
myself.  Each one of these deserve
thorough and thoughtful reviews, but I can’t wait for that – you can’t wait for
that.  These are remarkable books,
the sorts of things that are interesting and good, helpful and beautiful and I want to be sure you know we have them.  Agree or not with all the details,
these are books we want to tell about, albeit quickly.  Our apologies to these
authors for being so brief – each of you deserve much better.  But, hey, we wanna sell these babies, so come on.  Allow your interests to be piqued and
click on our order form (at the bottom of the page.) They are all on sale — we will discount them from the regular prices shown.  You won’t
be disappointed — they will make you think and deepen your own convictions. 

Three cheers for 10 great new books.   And a goofy bonus book at the end.

Thanks for supporting our family-owned, eclectic, indie, bookstore. 

Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry  Paul David Tripp (Crossway) $22.99  You may know Tripp, a conservative, Reformed scholar and Biblical counselor who has written wisely about pastoral care, about personal issues, about the radical power of the gospel, about new life found in Christ alone, as we appropriate His grace. This is hard hitting stuff as he, after years of traveling and listening well during thousands of conversations, is greatly concerned about the spiritual life of pastors and leaders, but also of those who train, support, and are led by them.  That is, nearly all of us, at any and every level of church life! We should all care about playing a part in protecting the pastorate.  As it says on the flyleaf, this book “reveals the truth that the culture surrounding our pastors is spiritually unhealthy — an environment that actively undermines the well-being and efficacy of our church leaders, and thus our entire church body.”  Joshua Harris observes that, for pastors, “this book is ‘good’ in the same way that heart surgery is good…and it just might save your life.”  Seminarians, congregational leaders, and pastors — as one reviewer put it “whether you’ve been in ministry 20 minutes or 20 years” you need this book. 

Neighbors and Wise Men:
Sacred Encounters in a Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places  Tony Kriz (Nelson) $15.99  You may know this author as Tony the
Beat Poet from the best-selling Blue Like Jazz.  (The film version, by the way, was just released in
DVD and we’ve got it!)  Tony was a missionary in
Albania among communists and Muslims, people he grew to respect and love, and he nearly lost his faith there.  His mission agency returned him to a remedial sort of seminary
study assignment, which didn’t help much. He did his studies while hanging out at a Portland bar, found atheists and seekers there who were supportive of his journey. God used these skeptics, it seems, who told him to stay faithful to his discipleship.  Kirz ends up over at Reed College and the now-famous meet-up
with one Donald Miller.  The last
portion of this moving memoir is about living locally, pastoring and making a difference in an
edgy house church outreach in his
bohemian neighborhood.  In each leg of the journey, outsiders and religious
skeptics speak truth and grace to him. 
What a book! What a story!  Highly
recommended.

A Grace Revealed: How God
Redeems the Story of Your Life Jerry Sittser (Zondervan) $19.99  In the category of basic Christian
growth, this may be the book of the year.  That’s right, you heard it here first. 
It certainly is one of the most long-awaited and eagerly
anticipated releases.  It is the sequel to the stunning A Grace
Disguised, perhaps the best book on grief, bereavement and suffering that I
have ever read.  Twenty years after the tragic accident that took his mother, his wife, and his young daughter, Sittser has grown much, seen much, continued to write and serve as an esteemed leader at Whitworth College. He has remarried and the plot-lines of his life continue to unfold to God’s glory.  This is amazingly honest, written with what I can only call a light gravity.  It is
eloquent, profoundly poignant, and hopeful, exploring how God’s
story of the rescue of His world effects our own stories.  Or, more accurately, how our own
stories, such as they are, are redeemed and gathered up in God’s redeeming story.  Sittser says in the beginning that since this is a book about
story, he felt compelled to tell stories, and, well, his own is the one he knows
best.  Form meets function
perfectly as the style of memoir and autobiography is ideal for his profound
ruminations on the gospel. 
Wonderful!  I apologize for not saying more, or saying it better, but trust me on this: this is a man who has much to teach us and this is a truly wonderful, edifying book.  Thanks be to God!

Does This Church Make Me
Look Fat? A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, and Solves Her Lady Problems
 Rhoda Janzen (Grand Central)
$24.99  Okay, I’m going to just say
it.  This may be my favorite book
of the year.  Sassy, fun,
profoundly touching, heavy stuff told with a very light touch, this follow-up
to the fabulous, fabulous Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, tells how this high-brow, liberal
literary prof comes to her senses, finds herself oddly in a Pentecostal church, and
tells the tale with glorious wit and nearly breathtaking generosity.  Her Lady Problems, by the way, include everything from decorating a house that is ugly as sin, her notable sex drive for her no-nonsense, righteous fiance, and a deadly serious case of deadly serious breast cancer.  She brings all this to us in a style which Barbara Brown Taylor says is written
“with such spot-on honesty, spiritual humility, and disarming humor that I would
follow her anywhere.” You surely don’t need to be formerly (but gratefully) Mennonite or newly (but  ambiguously) Pentecostal to love this.  You will cry. 
You will laugh out loud. 
I’m not kidding.  This, you have to see for yourself.  And Rhoda, if you are reading, sorry about the comma splices and misplaced modifiers. I can’t help myself.  Still, you rock.

A Spirituality of
Homecoming  Henri J. M. Nouwen
(Upper Room) $12.00  This is the
fourth in the lovely series of small books, handsomely produced, of
posthumously transcribed talks of the late priest, mystic and author.  Hardly
any religious writer of the last 50 years has been so appropriately popular,
even as he gently resisted the stardom of the limelight.  This really is a sweet and wise meditation,
quintessential, in many ways, of Nouwen’s great insights about the shifts from
fear to freedom, of how following Jesus returns us to our true selves and is a
sort of homecoming.  Very nicely
done.

Jesus: A Theography  Leonard Sweet & Frank Viola
(Nelson) $19.99  This 400+ page
hardback with a title which is obviously a play on “theology” and “biography” is a bargain at this price as it will provide you with months of study, written well for
average, interested readers but (with the copious footnotes and solid content) useful for scholars, as
well.  This biography by way of Biblical theology shows how the Bible, Older and Newer Testaments,
finds all of its meaning in Christ, pointing to Jesus, a signpost to Him and
His work, reflecting back on Him.  These authors are
obviously well-grounded in the breadth of the Christian tradition, drawing on
all manner of sources as they open up every portion of the Bible, carefully
making their case that Jesus is at the heart of the grand narrative of Scripture.  You may know that we are fond of Sweet
and appreciate his clever writing style, united with scrupulous research and
solid Bible teaching.  You may be surprised to see them quote everybody from Berkouwer to Wendell Berry, Ratzinger to N.T. Wright.  The appendix includes pages of great quotes on the theme from Justin Martyr and Tertullian in the first century on through to the likes of Graeme Goldsworthy, G.K. Beale and Richard Hays in the 21st. Wow.

The Mystery of God: Theology for
Knowing the Unknowable  Steven D.
Boyer & Christopher Hall (Baker Academic) $19.99  Boyer is a respected scholar (with a PhD from BU) and Hall
is beloved as a teacher, administrator and leader at both Eastern University (where
he is chancellor) and Palmer Theological Seminary, where he is dean.  You may know of the good work Hall has
done in editing the Ancient Christian Commentaries on Scripture and a few books
he has done on the patristics, and why they are helpful for our study and
worship today.  This book will
become a classic, I hope—an evangelical study of mystery, studious but written
with a sense of wonder and awe. 
Kelly Kapic of Covenant College assures us that “in these pages there is real
wisdom.”  Edwards scholar Gerald McDermott notes
that it is “a refreshing challenge to evangelicals to reject rationalistic
approaches to faith while at the same time learn humbly from the Great
Tradition.”  Not only is this beautiful theology, I believe it is very important
in these times, a solid study of the dimensions of mystery, moving our angle of vision just a bit, yet preventing an overly subjective mysticsm.  This book deserves a wide, diverse audience.  An endorsement on the back from a scholar at the University of Chicago Divinity School seems to agree. Right on. 

This Ordinary Adventure: Settling
Down without Settling  Christine
& Adam Jeske (IVP/Likewise) $15.00 
We have stocked every single book released by this edgy, upbeat imprint,
and none have disappointed.  This
is just what that line is known for: youthful, outside-the-box thinking,
well-grounded in a broad, socially-engaged evangelicalism, written with spunk
and relevance.  I know a lot of
younger adult Christian folks and these are the
stories they dream of, these are the questions they ask, and, I am positive, this is a book they will love. The Jeskes have worked in global
relief, microfinancing, and have traveled to nearly every continent doing mission, building bridges, engaging even in risky service. They do
Kingdom travel and show Christian care, living as nomads, embracing Christ’s call to serve. But they want to settle down. Christine is working on a PhD on cultural anthropology.  They want roots and community.  Can one “settle down” without
“settling”?  What is the
relationship between the American Dream and Christ’s Kingdom?  Is “normal” bad?   No matter what your life stage,
you will be inspired to live well, finding energy and courage to be bold. It will remind you not to forget the
amazing things God has and can do. 
Joyful, witty, and pretty darn challenging. Three big cheers!  I want to meet these guys!  I bet you know somebody who would love this book.

Rob Bell and a New American
Christianity  James K. Wellman,
Jr. (Abingdon) $17.99  I’ve been waiting for something like this,
a solid study of Rob Bell’s work and ministry, placing him within the broader
conversations about the nature of Protestant faith in 21^st century North
American culture.  Bell has been a very
important figure and his life itself has been fascinating, perhaps illustrative – being in a rock band
during his Wheaton College days, his study at Fuller, his work on staff of Ed
Dodson’s (post Moral Majority) church, the founding of the Grand Rapids Mars Hill congregation and
its extraordinary growth, his Nooma videos and speaking tours and increasing national fame.  After the Love Wins book became an
international sensation, his popularity and notoriety revved into hyper-drive,
and he was found to be either helpfully innovative or crassly heretical; a self-indulgent
fraud or a good pioneer of a culturally-relevant form of witness, parallel to,
but not exactly the same as the much-discussed emergent movement or missional
church perspective.  Wellman
studies all this, fairly, if with a favorable bias, including a bit of attention to how mainline churches have seen and reacted to this squabble within the evangelical community. 
Historian of evangelicalism Randall Balmer, after noting how significant
(and controversial) Bell has become, tells us that “James Wellman’s
prodigious research and astute analysis helps us understand why.”  Not the final word, but an important study
continuing to ponder the shifts within evangelicalism.

Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha,
and Mohammed Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a Multi-faith World  Brian D. McLaren (HarperOne) $24.99  McLaren, even more than Rob Bell, has
been a pioneer and lightning rod, writing books and using media, organizing
conferences and building networks, trying to find, as he put it in a
controversial book “a new kind of Christianity.”  It should be clear that Brian isn’t exactly an evangelical
any more, but that also isn’t quite the point: he wants to be faithful to
Jesus, handle the Bible well, and forge a reasonable sort of way of being
Christian in the world as it is, akin to, but not exactly the same as the liberal wing of mainline ecumenism. Agree with his conclusions or not, he is an important thinker and a good man.
In this case, he is asking million-dollar questions—how do we have a
clear sense of our own religious identity without having that identity fuel religious
antagonism and violence? (The symbolism of its release date, 9-11, is not accidental.) Can we
have profound inter-faith conversations without pretending that we all agree, which,
obviously, we do not?  Forging a
third way beyond fundamentalisms and liberalism, McLaren here carefully develops a
plausible way of approaching this painfully awkward matter.  He doesn’t back away from controversy
and yet he writes in a way that seems to me to be so utterly sincere and devoid of
gall that it cries out to be read and kindly discussed.  Highly recommended for discussion and
discernment.

AND AN ADDED BONUS, JUST FOR FUN:

Josiah for President: A Novel  Martha Bolton (Zondervan) $14.99   Maybe you are like me and
need a really light read sometimes, something fun and easy, but not utterly
vacuous.  And, maybe the dishonest
and harsh noise from both sides of the partisan divide in this election cycle
is nearly driving you to drink.  Well, maybe this will be a way to take the edge off – or make you long more
clearly for something good and different in our public lives.  Yes, this is outrageous, but, in this
upbeat novel, the story is plausible.  When former Congressperson Mark Stedman throws in the towel on his presidential bid, he meets Josiah Stoltzfus, a Lancaster County Amishman, who ends up being drafted to run for President. Did
you like the old movie Dave?  Or
even Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?  Well, this isn’t as good as either of those.  But still, ya gotta love a story where corn gets planted in the Rose Garden.

BookNotes

                 Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333

The Exact Place: A Memoir by Margie L. Haack (Kalos Press) $16.95

BookNotes discount: 20% off, $13.56
Use order link below.

A SENSE OF PLACE
You most surely know, and appreciate, the recent trend, nearly a part of the proverbial zeitgeist now, which could be described as a renewed attention to place.  Wendell Berry’s astute and elegant essays and novels (there is a new collection of Port Williams membership short stories coming later this month) have helped many of us, and has illustrated this trend.  The “buy local” movement–saying no to big box sameness and the idol of efficiency at the cost of care and relationship (can anybody say amazon?) or, say, the foodie movement, reminding us of the importance of knowing from where our poultry or fruit comes—are all indications of our desire for real groundedness. I do not use the term rhetorically. 

As soon as it was released a few years ago, I raved about Beyond Homelessness:
Christian Faithfulness in an Culture of Displacement by Brian Walsh & Steven Bouma-Prediger (Eerdmans; $27.00) which is one of the most insightful studies of home and place I’ve ever seen.  I celebrated far and wide last year when Craig Bartholomew published Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Baker Academic; $29.99), a major work that examines the role of place in the Bible, in the history of Western philosophy and theology, and how such a category of thinking can affect our daily discipleship.
 
The recent interest, also in religious circles, of the new urbanist movement (think of the popularity of James Howard Kunstler, and his anti-suburbia books Geography of Nowhere and Return from Nowhere) is just another example of this trend.  The Space Between: The Christian Engagement with the Built Environment by Eric O. Jacobsen (Baker; $22.99) is extraordinary as a uniquely Christian contribution to thinking about, as his earlier book put it, “sidewalks of the kingdom.”
 
Foundational to all of this is the assumption that in God’s world, our places matter—built and natural, both—and inevitably shape how we live.  The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton explores this wonderfully, and its popularity (even being mentioned in a hip Hollywood movie) again points us towards this trend, and the good truths we are ironically discovering in this virtual postmodern world.  When religious folk talk about going “home” these days, they may not mean being heaven-bound in the afterlife, but may more likely be talking about some longing for belonging, a true place, a place where stories cohere and life makes sense. Home.

We are, doubtlessly, for better or for worse, shaped by where we come from, so we’d be wise to attend to our roots and our places and homes.
 
Novelists and screen writers know this, of course, and they struggle to find the voices of their characters. (Just yesterday I heard on NPR an interview with an actress who told how she demanded to know more about her fictional character: “Where is she from?” she demanded of the director.)  

I think that memoirists know this best, as it seems inherent in the genre: lives unfold, from somewhere, bouncing around like pin-balls, hit hard by others, or just grazing them, shifting here or there.  A good memoirist tells her story, layer by layer, not just listing biographical facts; she struggles to discover and allow her readers to discern, some pattern, some thread, some making of meaning, from episode to episode, year by year.

THE EXACT PLACE
I start this short review with this long intro for two big reasons: Margie Haack’s lovely, interesting, inspiring new memoir, The Exact Place, is yet another example of a contemporary Christian leader reminding us of the importance of place. I wanted to put her story alongside heavier non-fiction studies in order to suggest this.  Indeed, in her beautiful, potent introduction Ms Haack cites Kathleen Norris’ evocative phrase “a spiritual geography” as she tells how her own rugged Northern Minnesotan upbringing shaped her personal landscape. 

Margie writes…

There was a stark, even frightening beauty to the land just north of the Plains where I grew up; it was a constant reminder of the paradox of human strength and its inherent limits. These are stories about place and family, and are firmly rooted in the stark beauty of the northern Minnesota landscape. The people, the animals, and the physical nature of the land shaped my personal landscape. No matter how far I move from them, I cannot shed them. Nor do I want to. They are powerful reminders of both the strengths and the limits of human love, they have become part of the history of my spiritual geography.

Ms Haack is certainly not trendy, and she did not long to share her childhood story to make some grandiose statement about place–that is my framing of it, the teacher/bookseller in me wanting to observe one important reason all of us should read these kinds of books, indeed, this book.  Whether she likes me saying it or not, The Exact Place: A Memoir is important for this very reason, and is therefore instructional; useful, even.  As with any good novel or biography, it raises good questions, allusively.  It certainly doesn’t preach but intentional readers may be led to ponder many big questions.  How might you think about your own sense of place?  Do you live your life well-grounded, caring about real life in God’s real world? Do you know your place, your exact place? Do you want to shed your past?  How would you describe your “spiritual geography” and personal landscape? This collection of almost old-fashioned storytelling will help you and those you give it to, I am sure.

By the way, I am not alone in this pragmatic consideration. Listen to Leslie Bustard, of Square Halo Books: 

Every time I have read her writings, I have fallen more in love with
God, my husband, my children, my home, and the story God is writing in
our lives. Notes from Toad Hall and now this lovely book, The Exact Place, makes ordinary life just what it is — redeemed, beautiful, and full of grace.



Secondly, I start my celebration of Margie Haack’s book by citing other important books, highlighting the renewal of the local and the celebration of local narratives, because, despite being shaped by our place – the land, the animals, the seasons, the mores, the schools, the relationships, the values, the stories–it becomes clear (for those who have ears to hear, at least) that there is, as the old Puritans might have said it, superintendence.  God is sovereign, we confess, and God is active, but few are the people who can say with much certainty what God has precisely done in their lives, which parts of our lives are truly right, known as God’s gift, and which aspects are derived from some seepage of sin, from our own dumb choices, or the fallout and fruit of decades of inhabiting a very broken world.  We are not pin-balls randomly bouncing, but we sure do feel that way sometimes, don’t we? 

You see, the very title of this charming little book is itself quietly profound, the sign of a prophetic imagination: God allowed her to be in the exact place she needed to be, for things to “come ’round right” as the old Quaker song puts it. What an amazing grace to be able to, with quiet integrity, say that about one’s life.

The last paragraph of the book says this so very beautifully.  Do not fret my spoiling it here, though, as it will again hit you like a ton of bricks when you finish the book in your own good time, anyway.  This wonderful excerpt will show you the culmination of the story (not to mention her superlative writing, eloquent and casual, insightful without being highbrow.)  Listen to this.  It is as direct as she gets in this telling of her tale and these are words to savor.

Wendell Berry, the essayist and poet-farmer, asks the question: Is life a miracle? He answers, saying, “I believe that everything that exists is a divine gift, which places us in a position of extreme danger, solvable only by love for everything that exists, including our enemies.”  I have recognized and loved many divine gifts in my landscape. It was easy to accept Norway pine, browsing deer, and falling snow.  Poverty and a stepfather who liked me about as well as a broken trailer hitch were more difficult to receive, and yet I sense the danger that awaits one who refuses such gifts. So it was here, in the midst of glory and brokenness, where I found a miracle — or at least, pretty near to one: it was the thread of redemption that ran through my childhood, even through the dark hours after midnight. If I had been fat with well-being and contentment I believe I would have missed the love of God that still tracks through the wilderness heading me toward Home. I am, I was, in the exact place I need to be.

And so you can see why The Exact Place: A Memoir is one of the best books I’ve read this year.   It suggestively, by way of a good story, gets at place, and God, sorrow and redemption. It isn’t hard to read, it is entertaining, but, as I’ve implied, it carries, below the surface and between the lines, a great and very relevant significance, made evident in those heart-breaking, hopeful last lines. Beth and I were quite privileged to get an early manuscript (Margie is a friend) and I literally raced through it, eager to read chapter by chapter, story by story, the pieces of her life remembered and retold.  It  is a very good book.  And she is a really great writer—if you subscribe to her Notes from Toad Hall you know her witty and honest style, and who know what I mean.  You can read a short excerpt from the book here, a portion called “The Yellow Lady Slipper.”

ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE YOU
Margie and her husband, Denis Haack, run one of the most wonderful ministries of which we know (with one of  most fabulously interesting websites, too, which you must visit.)  They call themselves Ransom Fellowship and they publish (for free, although a donation would be proper) the very wise and useful and sometimes a bit provocative Critique magazine, inviting people of faith into better conversations about complex things, nurturing cultural discernment, seeking (as their mentors Francis and Edith Schaeffer used to say) “honest answers for honest questions.”  They often write (beautifully) about music and film and the questions of ordinary Christian life, coping with stress, cooking good food, trying to honor God in the mundane, learning to witness well in a pluralistic world. They have a good array of folks writing for them, and we respect them immensely.   Their home—delightfully called Toad Hall—is almost like an Upper Midwestern L’Abri and their ministry of hospitality and speaking and writing and hosting concerts and reviewing movies have made them low-key rock stars among some younger evangelicals who still can’t seem to find a safe place to be mentored into wise and fruitful cultural engagement. 

Margie is a sassier writer than Denis and her candid look into the hectic craziness of their lives is told colorfully in another newsletter, which she does, nicely called Notes from Toad Hall. You can browse great archives of some of the stuff Margie writes at the Ransom webpage, here.  You can click on her blog, or even listen to her read a few essays (click on the “audio” icon and spend a few minutes enjoying her fine writing and wonderful insights) and see some of her famous recipes.  You will love Margie and Denis and will revisit their website often.  

Those who subscribe to her Toad Hall know that Margie has the gift—a way with words, such an honest voice—and we are glad for both Margie and Denis’ good writing.  Together they’ve served and cared and guided many of us for decades and we are glad to call them friends. (We are grateful that they have been supportive of our bookish work.)  Anybody who has heard a bit of her story has told her that she has to write a book.  

Haack was raised in very (very) Northern, and very (very) rural Minnesota, growing up in the harsh and lovely terrain of animals, subsistence farming, outhouses, hard weather, poverty, and country neighbors, the kind that, I gather, good fences should make better.  Although I adore the rural earnestness of Michael Perry (his Visiting Tom: A Man, A Highway and the Road to Roughneck Grace is just out and Beth assures me is it great) and the Lake Wobegone stories of humorist Garrison Keillor, nobody has looked at the rougher underside of a “little house in the big woods” like Haack.  

PATHOS, HILARITY, GRACE
Yes, there is some sadness here.  She writes fairly about a difficult father.  There is serious poverty. (The shack on the cover of the book, by the way, is a recent photograph of the home in which she was raised, which she now says is “haunting.”  But there is glory, here, too, luminous insights, conjured by a young girl, and retold now through the lens of her candid bu
t winsome memory. And oh, dear, how she can tell us.

One reviewer (Andi Ashworth) says, “There are sentences in this book so wonderfully crafted, breathtaking, and insightful, that I had to read then over again and again to let the words seep into my soul.  Margie is a storyteller of the highest order.”   Another reviewer says it is “artful, unpretentious, humorously self-disclosing.  The Exact Place tells of life in rural Minnesota with perception and insight that recall Leif Enger or Patricia Hampl.”



Pathos and hilarity, introspection and adventure. And there are shenanigans. (She brought her horse into her house and fed him pickles?!) There are fights. There are guns.  There are country recipes. There is a glimpse into a world few of us have experienced – when she went off to elementary school she reports that it was the largest building she had ever seen.  She loved the school bathroom, since at that point her home only had an outhouse, and no indoor plumbing.

And yet, there is something universal afoot, recalling childhood pleasures, coping with kid fears, with the anxiety of knowing that some things aren’t right (the overwhelming smell of kidney beans in their shotgun shack being only one such thing), and, too, the joy of discovery (learning to read!) and growing into adolescence, the search for a clearer sense of purpose, of finding a relationship with the God who was there.

The Exact Place by Margie Haack is one of our favorite books this year and we are eager to sell this rural memoir.  We are confident it will be one you will truly enjoy. We are quite glad it has been published by folks we respect, a classy, indie press called Kalos Press.

Maybe you should buy several, take it to book groups, talk it up, and wonder how, as Ms Haack so honestly does, God works to bring us to “the exact place” we need to be.  I mentioned that Quaker hymn, Tis a Gift to Be Simple, that assures us in turning, turning, we come round right?  This quiet, simple set of interesting farm-girl stories testifies that it is true, profoundly true. In many ways, this is one of the most urgent lessons to be learned in life, and it is a story of Providence and Grace.  In telling her own remarkable story Margie speaks honestly about all of us, our foibles, fears, and brokenness.  And yet she realizes that it comes round right.

BookNotes

Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333