How about that last BookNotes — some fabulous brand new books and some important ones to consider pre-ordering. You can pre-order anything, of course —- just visit our inquiry page or our secure order page at the website — but we wanted to let you know about a few especially good ones coming in the next few weeks. Most we’ll have a bit early, I’m sure. We were proud of that mix of suggested titles, so if you missed that, check it out, HERE.

And at least one or two customers are still talking about the special Labor Day BookNotes, not only with books about work and a Christian view of our labors, but a handful of fabulously-written memoirs or creative nonfiction that explore various work settings. Fun, huh? Check that one out HERE.

The last two podcasts were fun, too — one listed three sorts of books about work (that was a Labor Day feature) and then in the next one I told about three good books about reading the Scriptures. Another “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast (describing three books about prayer) is about to drop today (you can find it at our Facebook page, eventually; you can watch us on Youtube or just listen on Apple or Spotify.) They release every other week.

And, yes, the 20% off discounts are all still good. Hooray for that.

We’re looking forward into the fall when there’s a new commentary on Acts coming from N.T. Wright (see below), an important collection of pieces on preaching coming from Baylor University Press by our friend Fleming Rutledge, and the previously mentioned Reading the Bible Latinamente edited by Ruth Padilla Deborst & Danny Carroll, R is coming in early from IVP. In early November will have the next Norman Wirzba book (Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis on Yale University Press) which I know I need, and the new one by Catholic priest and gang-land activist, Gregory Boyle (Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times.) In what will surely be seen as one of the great publishing events of the year, a long-waiting new volume (with the curious title The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World) by the exquisite author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer will be available in mid-November. It’s only $20.00 in hardcover and with our BookNotes discount, you’ve got to get it.

It’s going to be a good season (and I’ve only named a few of the best nonfiction highlights) and we’ve got some great and rather practical ones here, now. Thanks be to God, right?

Here, then, with no further ado, are eight brand new ones that we have here at the Dallastown shop and four excellent forthcoming ones you really ought to pre-order now.

Longing for Joy: An Invitation into the Goodness and Beauty of Life Alastair Sterne (IVP) $18.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

What can I say briefly about Alastair Sterne and this extraordinary book? Please know it is very, very highly recommended. I know a number of customers loved the excellent book we pushed a year ago, The Invitation to Joy: The Divine Journey to Human Flourishing by Daniel Denk (which was released by Eerdmans) and I wasn’t sure we needed yet another book on joy; to be honest, many such titles seem less than serious, glib almost. But Sterne is an amazing person (who has worked closely with more than one of our favorite friends and customers) so we realize how good he is, as a thinker and writer and, well, as a person. You may recall his excellent previous book (that came out maybe four years ago) called Rhythms for Life: Spiritual Practices for Who God Made You to Be which was a down-to-Earth reflection on spirituality with a solid vision for vocation and our real-world callings. That book should be better known among us, I’d say.

Longing for Joy is now his brand new one and his thesis is both lovely and profound. True joy (not cheap happiness) is connected to goodness and beauty. We long for this — is being haunted too strong a word? — and he invites us into this desire, even if we struggle with what might be generally called mental health issues. It is hard to describe how moving this nicely construed and excellently rendered work is. I’m only part way through and concluded I had to lead off with it in this BookNotes. As a reader, you are going to appreciate it, I’m sure.

There is something here for all sorts of readers, by the way. The gorgeous first chapters are about our longings, including profound meditations on presence and absence, joylessness and cultivation of virtues. The second portion includes “the story of joy” which is Trinitarian, which chapters on the Father, Son, a pair entitled simply Crucified and Resurrection, and one on the Spirit. The large third section are pieces about the possibilities of joy in all manner of settings and contexts. It’s all so good.

And I’m not alone in thinking this. Karen Stiller (we reviewed her excellent book on holiness — Holiness Here — a month or so ago) says that “Like a master craftsman, Sterne weaves story, Scripture, and meaning into the most convincing case for joy I’ve read yet.”

I was delighted to see an author who has not released anything new in quite a while who is a writer I esteem immensely, Mike Mason (The Mystery of Marriage, The Mystery of Children, Champagne for the Soul) had a solid endorsement on the back. Mason writes,

Through rich storytelling and wise teaching, Alastair Sterne is an excellent guide to those cozy rooms, fireside parlors, and old summertime porches in that beautiful place you may have forgotten–the House of Joy.

Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Area of Being Human Carlos Whittaker (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 / OUr SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is another book that I can only mention briefly as too long of a review would be unfair. This unfolds as part memoir, part report from the front-lines of a rather unique set of experiences, and a guidebook to practical ways to live more faithfully and fruitfully amidst the noise and blessings of the internet. I don’t want to spoil the fun.

One need not, in fact very few could, do what this creative writer did. He takes nearly two months off to live in a fresh place and context (two fresh places, actually) to see what he could learn about our lives with screens. I love the cover, crossing out “Dis” and replacing it with “Re” since that is sort of the end game, here, disconnecting for a while to find ways tog et reconnected, rightly.

(By the way, even though he doesn’t mention it, this reminds me a bit of the older book by my good friend Sam Van Eman who wrote The Disruptive Discipleship: The Power of Breaking Routine to Kickstart Your Faith which is about how we might change up our lifestyle for a bit, trying some odd experiment or fresh change to learn some new patterns of faithful discipleship. This Whittaker book doesn’t work the theory the way outdoor educator Van Eman does, but he shows it — this is one heckuva disruption and one heckuva kickstart to some new patterns. It really is a fascinating project and you’re going to want to listen in, reading along for fun, and for good ideas to take home into your own life.

Simply put, as you might get from the title, Carlos Whittaker goes to a monastery to hang out with monks and then he goes to an Amish farm and joins their household for a time.

As it says on the back cover, most of us “have gotten so used to notification and alerts, pings and rings, that even if we don’t want to be on our phone so much, we don’t know what to do about it.” I can relate, can’t you?

(Aside: there are a lot of good books on what to do; I’d recommend at the very least the splendid The Life We Always Wanted by the astute thinker and wonderful writer, Andy Crouch.)

If you like chatty conversational books with a lot of storytelling, this work of creative nonfiction covers what Whittaker learned in his several weeks with the monks at Saint Andrews. His very first encounter with Father Patrick (who he likens to a brother of Patrick Swayze and Gandalf) will make you smile, and from there on out your in with him in this rather intense Benedictine way of life, which, of course, at first, he hates. This is not the famous Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, which I have a sneaking suspicion he’s never heard of. For their part, the monks didn’t know or care that he is a popular evangelical writer. (And he was surprised that, uh, monks these days have phones. So there’s that.)

The second section is written of his time with the Miller family (in what he calls the Amish School.) In this section he’s in Ohio, working on a farm with a fascinatingly simple Anabaptist family. Although at least they talk (a lot) there is an awkwardness here for this black, very modern gent, not unlike what he first experienced with the monks. It’s a different experience for sure — no silent meal partners here — and he learns quite a lot. It’s a breezy, fun account, and we’re sure it will off some “tools and motivation” for living a bit less encumbered. It’s fun and a bit funny and — with his brain scan with his hero Dr. Amen (I tempt you, but no spoilers in this review!), Carlos’s last era (at his own home) shows just how to finder deeper relationships in a tech-saturated world.

Living With Grief Nicholas Wolterstorff (Cascade) $18.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

This is a book that is short and simply stunning. I’ll admit I was so taken in part because I hadn’t heard it was coming, although many have wished for it for decades. It is short and seriously profound and my hands shook when I turned the first pages. Let me explain.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is arguably one of the world’s most renowned philosophers, having done major, heady works on Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Oxford, etc. He is a theologian, as well (at least in the sense of doing philosophical theology) and has serious books about the nature of God, the experience of knowing God, the importance of liturgy, and has written widely about the relationship of worship and work, prayer and politics. His passion for Christian thinking about what we might call political philosophy (what is justice?) is equal to his knowledge of aesthetics and his interest in the arts. His wonderful autobiographical book ,In This World of Wonders, tells his own story as a Calvin College graduate and his journey into the wider world of intellectual renewal within evangelicalism, his role in the scholarly community, and his efforts for public justice. He even contributed a wonderful graduation speech to my own edited book, Serious Dreams: Big Ideas for the Rest of Your Life and we admire him greatly.

A key moment in his life, in 1983, however, was and remains horrible. His adult son died suddenly in a hiking accident, and, as any father would be, he was overcome with grief. A personal journal he kept in the aftermath — passionate, powerful, poignant — called Lament for a Son is a near classic among those who read about the topic of grief. Nick notes often that it was not written to be published or read widely but friends convinced him it would give others a model of honest, raw, Christian grieving. He published it reluctantly in the late 1980s, and we have had it regularly in our big grief section at the shop ever since.

This, then, a half a lifetime later, is one in which he offers some systematic and serious ruminations on how to cope with life’s sorrows. It’s been a long time coming.

There are just a few dense, short chapters. He explores “What is Grief?” and “What to Say.” He has a major chapter called “Owning and Disowning Loss and Grief” followed by “Owning Loss and Grief Redemptively.” The final chapter — succinct but wise — is “Where Is God in Loss and Grief?”

If Lament for a Son was a cry of grief, a cry of the heart, Living with Grief is “descriptive, reflective.” If the first was called passionate and poetic, he says this one is “dry, literal, prosaic.”

This extraordinary and I’d say nearly historic book has its genesis in some lectures Wolterstorff gave at Fuller decades ago; he had even lost the manuscripts in the subsequent years. A friend of his who had used those lecture notes in a class at a local prison (that also reads together Lament for a Son) had Nick joined that class a time or two to speak. It was at these prisoners urging that he revisited (and revised) those long lost Fuller lectures and now offers them here, finally, now. It is not for everyone (and neither is Lament for a Son.) But it is one many of our readers should read and some will cherish.

Ignite Your Soul: What Exhaustion, Isolations, and Burnout Light a Path to Flourishing Mindy Caliguire (with Shawn Smucker) $18.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Many of us who have followed the many books that have come out in the last twenty-five years or so about spiritual formation, soul care, and spiritual direction might know Mindy Caliguire’s name. She did a small, quiet book about spiritual friendship and another that I thought was brilliant called STIR: Spiritual Transformation in Relationship which explored the stages of growth and how intentional relationships allow us to explore our faith formation together. (You’ll see some of her influences in the important work of Ruth Haley Barton at the Transforming Center, if that helps place her a bit for you.) So if she does a new book, it is going to be upbeat and delightful but also very well considered and helpful.

A second feature of this, besides the significance of the author and her solid reputation and experience in this space — she works with folks in churches and marketplace settings and offers guidance in a superb, online community named the Soul Care Collective — is that it is co-authored with a dear friend, central Pennsylvania’s Shawn Smucker. Sean is an amazing person, a novelist, co-writer, blogger, podcaster, and (get this!) a fairly recent bookseller having opened, with his wife, a lovely little shop in Lancaster, PA. Sean has an eager passel of followers and they will be delighted to know he has come alongside Mindy and helped her with this nice, new book.

To be clear, this book carries weight; a sort of hopeful seriousness, I’d say, but it shares pain and seems to really understands the complex moods and conditions of many modern readers. Are you burned out?  Might you say you are in a “bone-dry existence” or in a season where you miss (or don’t even miss) a once fiery (or at least glowing) experience of faith? She, too, has walked through this valley of the shadow. She gets it.

She writes, with exquisite honesty,

“The destruction that tore through my parched soul was not the end of the story. Nor does it have to be the end of yours.”

 

Our Church Speaks: An Illustrated Devotional of Saints from Every Area and Place Ben Lansings and D. J. Marotta (IVP) $24.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’ve been waiting for this book for months (having chatted with the author last winter) and it just came in —nearly a month early!  Hooray. We’re very excited by this handsome, illustrated guide to various sorts of saints, done on heavier stock paper, making this a grand volume, if slim, with some true heft. D.J. Marotta is a savvy, young, Anglican priest in Richmond (who has a great vision to reach college students, by the way and works with the CCO for that purpose.) Marotta wrote a wonderful previous book that we highlighted here at BookNotes a while back, called Liturgy in the Wilderness: How the Lord’s Prayer Shapes the Imagination of the Church in a Secular Age. Readable but astute, informed by the best thinkers, with some prophetic oomph to it, that little volume is a delightful gem.

But this one is perhaps even more delightful as it is a co-authored project with an artist who is involved in Redeemer Anglican there in Richmond. He has been doing these string “modern icons” on social media for quite some time. It is fabulous to have pastor/writer D.J add his thoughtful devotional essays. The sense that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses is nearly palpable.

This sort of book (a saint-a-day, so to speak) is time-honored and so very useful. Those who use them love them! From the important devotionals of Orbis editor Robert Ellsberg like All Saints or Blessed Among Us to the soon-to-be released artfully designed work of Kreg Yingst, Everything Could Be a Prayer: One Hundred Portraits of Saints and Mystic ( I hope you saw our invitation to pre-order it) this brand new one can stand comfortably, wisely, even, with them. And the art — wow. It’s a full color illustrative graphic style (very different than the wild work of Yingst) and drawn to hint at the stylings of icons.

I like how there are some short essays in here — how to pray over these pictures, an overview of church history, a bit about why such diverse, global folks are portrayed and held up as those who bear witness and speak to us today. It shows their feast day (if they are formal saints in the Catholic or Orthodox churches) and helpful stuff about them all. There are favorites here and, I suspect, some you do not know much about, if at all. Marotta’s insights and Lansing’s art are a great combo. This book is a blessing.

Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spirituality Hungry Brad East (Eerdmans) $24.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’m not going to lie: this cover doesn’t grab me. I’m not sure who it is for. But you know what? It’s a thrill nonetheless, a fabulous resource, a great guide to Christian faith and growth. It’s not goofy or dumbed down, but its epistolary style makes it warm and gracious. East is a professor of theology at Abilene Christian University (and has a rather academic work on the church and another on reading the Bible in the church.) Here he is inviting God’s people to think about the task of saint-making. I’m part way through and it is inviting, warm, personal.

Is it for young people? I think so, I guess, but not just teens or young adults. It is written not by the good Professor as a scholar, but as a fellow pilgrim, perhaps something like a mentor, or even a confirmation sponsor. If you’ve ever hoped to disciple another, you need this fabulous guide to the spiritual life in Christ.

Yet, even if it is for “future saints” (we are all currently saints, if yet sinners, so I’m not pleased with the title) it is, clearly, of great value (and enjoyment) for those of any age or stage. This is one of the best guides to the habits and practices and convictions and insights we need as saints moving into deeper friendship in the church of Christ.

Since these are letters there are no shown footnotes or citations. But the back is jam-packed with endnotes, by sentence, citing, more often than not, Scripture and church Fathers, ancient theologians and a few more recent, from Lewis to Barth to Bonhoeffer. It ends with a small, black and white icon. Kudos.

Blurbs and rave reviews on the back of this are impressive. Wow — Rowan Williams, Alan Jacobs, Tish Harrison Warren, Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew Levering, Miroslav Volf, all top-class leaders, writers, thinkers. They all affirm East’s serious invitation to those who may be familiar with the faith, having been raised in the orbit of the church, but who are restless, bored, distracted, and mostly untutored. Letters to a Future Saint is a rare and vital work.

The Practicing the Way Course Companion Book: An Eight-Session Primer on Spiritual Formation John Mark Comer (Waterbrook) $24.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

I am not always a fan or workbooks and supplemental resources that go with primary texts. I know some enjoy the questions and blank spaces for journalling or reflection, but sometimes it just feels like an add-on, as if the publisher needs yet another item. But not always.

This is one of the best study guides I have ever come across and I can’t say enough about it. (Except to say that it is also available for free for download at John Mark Comer’s “Practicing the Way” online ministry, and, despite that, I still want to commend this oversized, thorough companion guide.)

If you’ve been around me lately you may know we have a huge stack of Practicing the Way here at the shop and have been talking about how much I appreciated not only the book but the fabulously made, really solid, really interesting free streaming classes based on the book. When our Presbyterian adult ed class went through it this summer we all agreed it was so good. We downloaded the free discussion questions and wished for more time to explore the extra content offered in the handouts.

That free extra content is designed to be used with the free online class, and I very highly recommend that visual content. But it parallels the book, so even if your not interested or able to stream the course, The Practicing the Way Course Companion Books is tremendous to own, to use, to share. Good, good stuff.

The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World Christine Rosen (W.W. Norton) $29.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

This is named, by the prestigious publisher, as “social science” and I suppose I cannot argue. It is also profoundly theological, deeply philosophical, and, so far, a heck of a great read. I’ve appreciated Ms Rosen since her serious memoir, ahead of its time, I think, My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, and have appreciated her scholarly presence with books on, for instance, the history of the eugenics movement. She has been affiliated with Hunter’s Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture at UVA and works currently as a Senior Fellow at the the important, conservative American Enterprise Institute in DC.

I love the title (the subtitle, though, is odd since we clearly are not in a disembodied world, even if there are online tendencies and some odd ideologies that suggest as much.) Still, we get her drift, don’t we? And for anyone cares about this anti-Gnostic concern, the question of how to experience real life in an increasingly technologically mediated world, Rosen has thought hard about it all.

She is no Luddite, as far as I can tell, but she does want to know “what kind of a person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world?” Well, wow. What do we gain and what do we lost when, as she suggests, we “no longer talk about the ‘Human Condition’ but the “User Experience’?

Yep, if you worry at all about all this talk of AI and the metaverse and venmo and TikTok challenges and (yes) online conspiracy culture, this book could provide insight and solace.\

Just listen to this, which ain’t no algorithy, but my own selection to share with you, for real; I’ve met Alan Jacobs and I’ve read Alan Jacobs; you can trust this:

Christine Rosen has written a wonderful book. It is not merely a warning against algorithmic control of our lives, but, more essentially, an encouraging guidebook to the recovery of personal experience in all its manifold forms. The Extinction of Experience reconnects us with our own lives in marvelous ways.–Alan Jacobs, author of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

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When PRE-ORDERING more than one forthcoming book please let us know if we should send them as soon as they release or if we should hold one and consolidate it with another, sending them together. Whatever you prefer…

Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway Stephanie Duncan Smith (Convergent) $26.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80  – ON SALE DATE = October 15, 2024

I’ve had an advanced copy of this for a while and have been itching to tell you about it. The opening epigraph is a line from a Madeleine L’Engle poem and early on she tells about a YA novel by the great Gary Schmidt, so I knew I was going to love it.

Even After Everything is, in my view, one of the best books I’ve read all year; it will, without a doubt, be in our annual Best Books of the Year list. It’s very well written, very raw and yet beautiful. I respect this good writer and her remarkable gifts of crafted fine sentences, fine paragraphs, fine pages. This is a great read, a very good book.

It is so well written and captivating I suspect that for some of us who value glorious spiritual autobiography and memoir will not even care (at first) what it is about. Her subtitle makes it sound a bit like a standard-fare guide to Christian growth, and insofar as she offers insights and hard-learned wisdom, it does give readers fresh perspectives and solid ideas that can help them along the way on their journey. It reminds us that we are not alone and in her story one can take away much.

But, wise as she is, I don’t want to invite you to this only because you will learn or grow or be aided in your spiritual practices. Rather, this is one of those texts that, as Lewis reminds us in Experiments in Criticism, we should first “behold.” That is, enter in, with eyes wide open.

Not only is Duncan Smith’s prose surprising and vivid, this is a rare memoir in that it chronicles her own deep grief and pain (she experienced two miscarriages) and arranges the narrative alongside the church calendar. I suspect a book of sorrow though he liturgical year has been done before, but I can’t think of such a work.

This is more than a clever device; it is central, substantive, important, amazing. In her telling the tale this way, something odd happens. There is an interaction (I think of Crowder’s song “Beautiful Collision”) of disorientation and reorientation.

She lost her first pregnancy on the winter solstice’s longest night (“just as the world readied to celebrate its most historic birth on Christmas”) and, oddly, gave birth (after an unexpected and rather uncertain pregnancy) to a daughter nearly one year to the day of her loss. This marked — tears stream down my face as I even write this — “the peak of pandemic death in their city.” As my advanced galley copy puts it, “This clash prompted a desperate search for steadiness, in which the liturgical year became an anchoring force.”

An anchoring force. What a phrase.

This is the best (and I’ve read a few) books on the liturgical year I have ever read, even though it isn’t a book that we will put in the nonfiction section of our church room it is a memoir, a story, a book of marriage and sexuality, of progeny and death, of loss and birth and sadness and joy

She writes, in Even After Everything, alongside personal episodes, reflections like this:

Shauna Niequist writes of a friend who was in a session with his spiritual director. He was chronicling the great disappointments of his life when, “all at once the usually reserved priest book in and yelled his name. “These are the terms! Now what’s the invitation?”

These are the terms: Every one of us is loosed into a world where anything can happen, nothing is secure, and anxiety has a hell of an imagination. We are haunted by the whole kingdoms of hypotheticals — ghost futures spiraling out in every direction. And when the contractions come calling and the what-ifs start wilding, our vital systems begin to clench.

It’s enough to make anyone forget how to breathe.

I read that newborns learn to breathe from their mothers, by synching the rhythms of their heart rate, their inhale and exhale, to hers. In the closeness of chest to chest, they learn the most vital sign. Heart to heart, they learn how to live.

So maybe that’s the invitation: Stay close to the beating heart of love…. Let love be the tempo, trust its steadiness, lean in close.

Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age Rod Dreher (Zondervan) $29.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99  – ON SALE DATE = October 22, 2024

If the above mentioned memoir is beautifully written and raw and enlightening, so, too, this one, in a different style, is captivating, very well-written, smart and inspiring. I cannot do justice to the many remarkable stories and the great, substantive chapter. Dreher is a great memoirist, a potent cultural critic (I did not like his last two books much) and here, has given us a splendid bit of perusal storytelling — his own deepening of faith in a season of very hard times — shaped by his sharp social studies. If you know the names of the amazing Iaian McGuilchrist, say, or (of course) Charles Taylor, you will be pleased to know their serious work has informed some of his teaching about the secularizing forces of the post-Enlightenment West.

I, for one, need tiring of reading yet another take on how we got into our modern mess. In this excellent telling, we significantly lost a sense of a social imagination that supposed what some might call the “supernatural.” We are a people who scoff at miracles (even as we deeply long for them.)

We have more than a dozen great books that explore the shift in the cultural milieu given the rise of the secular age; in various ways and with various strengths, many help us place ourselves historically, know what time it is, so to speak. Knowing why our friends and family think as they do, dream as they do. They help us discern at a deep level what went wrong and why even for those of us with lively faith, it is hard, sometimes. Really hard.

And, we have books that share with readers a vision of the spirituality of the ordinary, affirming a sense of wonder. We have a shelf full of just such books and a few are well known — A Tree Full of Angles, Tortured Wonders, A Liturgy of the Ordinary, Eyes to See: Recognizing God’s Common Grace in an Unsettled World, and so many more. Yet this new Rod Dreher book is more than an eloquent plea to recapture wonder, to stand in awe, to enjoy the goodness of God’s world and our place in it, but it is a guide to how to do that, even when it seems complicated. This is more than sighing at the beauty of a sunset or being attentive to how glory streams all around. And it is more than a theology of the possibility of miracles, but it is both, actually. It is one of the most stimulating, thought-provoking, and excellent books I’ve read in ages.

If time permitted I’d quote fabulous paragraphs and great quips, but I’ll just note this: he starts the story with a reasonable guy who has been haunted by his experiences with UFOs. And then another who fears he has been plagued with demons. Dreher is an Orthodox Christian so he does not rule out the possibility of the demonic; indeed the sensor wonder of much of Orthodox faith sets the stage for some of his opening us to the fullness of life. Although this book isn’t about the paranormal, as such (see the fairly recent Encountering Mystery by brilliant New Testament scholar Dale Allison or the anticipated book [coming in a few weeks, also by Eerdmans] by evangelical Bible guy Alan Streett called Exploring the Paranormal: Miracles, Magic, and the Mysterious.) But I would say read Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. I am working through it and it is more than a delight, it is itself wondrous. Wow.

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us about the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive Russ Ramsey (Zondervan) $29.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99 – ON SALE DATE = October 22, 2024

I wonder if you recall that about a year or so ago Russ Ramsey — who has written well about his own near death experience, and other theologically-rich topics of practice living — did a stunning, fabulous, easy-to-read, but so informative book called Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith. Like a few other excellent and enjoyable introductions to art appreciation from a Christian orientation, Rembrandt…. was not just about Rembrandt (although that first chapter about him was spectacular) but each chapter invited us to discover some of the world’s most celebrated artists and their work. I enjoyed it a lot and said so here at BookNotes.

Earlier this year Ramsey’s people — him or the publisher I do not know — invited me, of all people, to offer an endorsement of this new one, sort of a sequel to the Rembrandt one. Wow! I’m no art critic and I at first almost demurred.  But then I wondered if they invited me to this sacred task because they wanted to have potential reader realize that ordinary folks can enjoy such a book, that is it is not primarily about aesthetics or deep art criticism or for those who already know plenty about paintings old and new, Like it’s predecessor, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart it is full of stories, the glorious stories of we humans who ache, who sin, who fear, who need to struggle to even stay alive some days. Van Gogh did have a broken heart and therein lies some of his artistic beauty. That is why we need such paintings and artwork in our lives, to “teach us about wonder and the struggle…”

This forthcoming one, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart is, I think, better than the first.

Here is what I said for my book blurb. I wonder if it will be in the real books once they come out in a few weeks; if so, probably in an edited, slimmed-down version. I do love the book and am glad for it’s energy, honesty, and how it invites us into these stories of fascinating artists.

In Russ Ramsey’s fabulous follow up to the fabulous Rembrandt Is in the Wind he offers more well-told stories of artists — some who you will know, some who you may not — which becomes a door flung wide to big questions, urgent questions, about the very things that matter most. With verve and gusto he tells us about details of the artist’s lives and helpful interpretations of their work, sharing his own journey to appreciate these paintings done by other hurting humans who, flawed as they may be, still carried the imprint of the image of God. Among the many contributions this book makes is how great creativity sometimes emerges from great sorrow and how, therefore, we who also ache can take comfort in the gestures and symbols and colors and stories of great art. Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart is a book to own and a book to share.  — Byron K. Borger / Hearts & Minds

The Challenge of the Book of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is N. T Wright (Zondervan) $26.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80  – ON SALE DATE = October 22, 2024

Okay, friends. I have no idea what to say about this, other than that Wright is the sort of author who ordinary readers can benefit from and to whom deeper scholars will want to pay attention, just to see what the prolific New Testament scholar has to say… in other words, this book should be on your list.

I love the book of Acts and although we’ve got our favorite commentaries on this grand story by Dr. Luke, I’m positive this one will be on the short list of the most often recommended. I think any of us who care about the Bible will be glad to hear Wright is doing a new one; I do not know this for sure, but I’m guessing it is somewhat analogous to but maybe more detailed than his lovely Into the Heart of Romans. The forthcoming Challenge of Acts is 176 pages

(For what it’s worth, The Bible Speaks Today: The Books of Acts by John Stott is absolutely splendid and just about the only one you’d need for most ordinary readers and Willie James Jennings Acts in the “Belief Theological Commentary” commentary series is nothing short of brilliant at times. We love the “Story of God Commentary” series and Dean Pinter did the Acts on in that fabulous series and so interesting; F. F Bruce’s NICOT is, of course, a classic.)

That Wright is asking questions about the nature and task of the church (drawn from a culturally-sensitive reading of Acts, of course) is important. In this day and age it is among our greatest needs, getting clear about the local church. I trust he’s going to be really helpful on this.

Here is the bit, swiped from the publisher website:

Acts is a substantial book. It sits right in the middle of the New Testament, looking back to the four Gospels and ahead to the mission of the early church. It provides a framework for our understanding of the letters; but it does more than that. Acts offers a sophisticated and nuanced view of what it means to think of the gospel of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, going out into the world over which Israel’s Messiah claims the status of Lord.

This Christian movement and thinking, detailed in Acts, entailed confronting the wider culture of the Greek and Roman world, as well as the culture of the Jewish world, which provides us today with an important message as we ourselves face new questions about gospel and contemporary culture.

From the renowned author of Into the Heart of Romans, N. T. Wright brings to the book of Acts his expert’s eye on theological nuance and cultural context, distilling it down into an introductory commentary, perfect for anyone looking to take their own reading a little deeper and discover the profound (and often forgotten) potential of the church and the Way of Jesus Christ.

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