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And thanks to those who supported our evening with Jeff Chu last week. What a delight he is —I wished we had been able to record it. You view on the web some of the other interviews he’s done about Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand in this tireless book tour he has undertaken. We have a few autographed copies left, too, if anyone is interested, read our previous review and send us an order. They are 20% off. It’s a great summer read.

10 NEW BOOKS — ALL 20% OFF (scroll to the bottom to order.)

Here are ten new books that look really good. I’ve finished a few already — Bear Witness was stunning! — and started a few others in earnest. You know what they say: it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it. I am very confident that these are each well worth your time and hard-earned greenbacks.

Click on the order link below. All books mentioned are 20% OFF.

Dim Sum and Faith: How Our Stories Form Our Souls Jenn Suen Chen (IVP formatio) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This book came in a few hours before our big event with Jeff Chu and as I pondered how to introduce him — an Asian American storyteller, a memoirist who vulnerably invites us into his life, reading over his shoulder, who writes about cooking and food — I started this, Oh my, oh my, it’s so good. Dim sum (which I had been researching as we were thinking about Chinese food for our reception) is splendid, we’re told, in Hong Kong, especially, and Jenn Suen Chen’s parents are, like Chu’s, from there. A lovely and esteemed culinary tradition in China, dim sum literally means “to touch the heart.” And that is what stories do.

On the back cover of Dim Sum and Faith: How Our Stories Form Our Souls… this brand new exploration of the value of reflecting upon and knowing how to tell our stories, Chen’s publishing team writes:

You are invited to the dim sum table — a lively gathering for family to share stories and enjoy sweet and savory dishes together. Our stories — our memories of love and grief, our ancestors’s experiences that affect our personal history, all our hurts and joys — require attention and reflection. Together we can discover how these stories have shaped us.

Great, eh? Sim Sum and Faith, while rooted in Chen’s Asian-American experience with lots of her own well-told stories, is an invitation to explore our own “culturally embedded stories with God.”

As a spiritual director she knows how to offer wise spiritual practices and thought-provoking, lovely meditations (on Psalms 139, actually — hooray!) Can we look at our stories and integrate them more fully into our lives? Might we look on our memories as God actually does — with love and hope? Can we be becoming?

DJ Chuang (author of MultiAsian.Church and cohost of the Erasing Shame podcast) notes that this book reminds us that it is helpful to see how God cares about our family history, cultural background, and big emotions — “and loves us through it all.” He says to Jenn Chen, “Thanks for showing us how God takes every aspect of our lives to handcraft us into the likeness of Jesus Christ”

Jenn Chen is co-director of Summit Clear, a mentoring organization for those in cross-cultural work. We’re excited to have this and hope you’d give it your consideration.

Experiencing Scriptures as a Disciple of Jesus: Reading the Bible like Dallas Willard Dave Ripper (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

I know that not all of our customers and BookNotes readers know who the late Dallas Willard was but please know he was truly one of the influential and esteemed evangelical writers of the last 50 years. He got Richard Foster to write the very important Celebration of Discipline and was an older, wiser (although not fully approving) voice of a decade of conferencing and writing in what became known as the emergent church conversation and clearly and movingly wrote about how the Christian faith is to be embodied where our interior lives — our walk with Christ as we are transformed into the likeness of Christ — spills out to shape our very lifestyle. We are apprentices, walking the way of Jesus. You see his influences in the writings of John Ortberg and John Mark Comer and Ruth Haley Barton; he was friends with Eugene Peterson. Willard wrote substantive books about apologetics and whole-life discipleship (and in his day job he was a philosophy professor and published in that field as well, about the authority of moral insight and epistemology.) Anyway, from prayerful books of spirituality (Spirit of the Disciplines or Hearing God, for instance) to reflections on how spiritual transformation actually works (see the excellent Renovation of the Heart) to his important, hefty works on the Kingdom of God (Divine Conspiracy volumes one and two) he was a prolific writer and important leader, bearing witness to a sort of evangelical faith that was lovely and good.

This is a study that can be read profitably without knowing a thing about Willard, but it is sort of an exploration of how Willard handled the Bible. The author is the lead pastor of a big Christian Church in New Hampshire; he has studied at a variety of good places including the Dallas Willard Research Center at Westmont College. It is a wonderfully written book, which offers, in the phrase of Lacy Finn Borgo, “story and scholarship.” In a nutshell it is how to read the Bible to meet God, the spirituality of reading Scripture, how to encounter the God of the Bible.

The title of this book, Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple, really says it well. It is for anyone who loves the Bible or anybody who wishes they did. It is not the final or only book about Scripture we should read but it really is refreshing, thoughtful, and will bear fruit in your life as you take up the task of reading in such a way that you can come to know the Author. And then follow that same holy Author. 

It might be too simple to say this is a book about contemplative engagement with the text since Ripper explains how this living encounter with God through the text is transformational. And as we are transformed into Christ-likeness we live out His ways in the world. Some people use to run a program called “Bible and Life.” That’s sort of it, too.

Hint: Ripper explores what he calls the “Ignatius-Willard” connection. Just think of the great NavPress book by South African Methodist Trevor Hudson, Seeking God: Finding Another Kind of Life with St. Ignatius and Dallas Willard which Ripper obviously cites.

I found fascinating a section for leaders which inspired a blurb by E. Trey Clark, the dean of the chapel at Fuller Theological Seminary, who wrote:

Includes a must-read chapter for ministry leaders interested in a way of preaching and teaching that deepens their own and others’ spiritual formation.

Somebody said that Willard read the Bible “with the reverence of a Southern Baptist, the intellect of a philosopher, and the heart of a mystic.” Nice eh?

The Core of the Christian Faith: Living the Gospel for the Sake of the World Michael W. Goheen (Brazos Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

My goodness, what can I say about this fantastic book?

You might be surprised from the title that it is not about systematic theology or core doctrines; it is not obviously arranged about the things you are supposed to believe.  Goheen, you should know, was shaped by his extraordinary work on the missional thinking of Leslie Newbigin; he wrote a chapter for the second edition of the influential little book on worldview, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview; he joined with Craig Bartholomew to write The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story and its wise follow up, Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. On and on he has worked, writing along the way these books that show the embodied, communal, missional vision of people of faith living into and out of the narrative arc of the Biblical story. Shades of N.T Wright, perhaps — I say that as a marker for those who might connect some dots by linking Goheen to Wright — much of this came together in what is one of my favorite books about the contours of Christian discipleship, The Symphony of Mission: Playing Your Part in God’s Work in the World, co-written by the extraordinary pastor/leader of Redeemer Tempe, Jim Mullins. So taken was Mullins with this metaphor of finding  your place in the symphony to play God’s music and the Newbegin-esque / Al Wolter’s worldviewish, Biblically-astute Goheen that he got him to leave his native Canada and move to Arizona where they started the Missional Training Center in Phoenix. This book — The Core of the Christian Faith — is the core of the teaching done to equip pastors in the “Redemption” network, what one church planter calls “a rare and essential work.”

Goheen’s sweet pastoral heart, his deep cultural awareness, his radical missional insights all combine to create this brilliant book about God’s redemptive mission in the world, the whole story God making “all things new.” I still especially love and recommend the somewhat more practical The Symphony of Mission, the one Goheen and Mullins did together. But this backs it up and provides a solid and compelling framework for the vision, the wholistic vision of why the Christian faith should be construed, taught, and lived in this particular sort of way.

Goheen starts with a lament about the cultural captivity of so much of the church. Written mostly to eager evangelicals, but certainly applicable for anyone, it is true that many are nearly mimicking secularized visions of public life that come from either the far left or far right. We’ve had a “massive catechesis failure” in that we’ve allowed Fox News or other ideological platforms to shape our attitudes and behaviors. Only a deeply storied, Biblical worldview with a missional dynamic can counter this and Goheen is clear: it must begin with Jesus’ own favorite teaching: the inauguration of the Kingdom of God.

And to understand at least the beginnings of the vas implications of the Kingdom, we have to back ups and get a bigger picture of the whole unfolding drama of Scripture. We must become missional people captured by the trajectory of the Biblical story.  And that, my friends, leads to what he calls a “missional encounter with culture.”

This is the core way to think about faith — not mere systematic theology — and “the kind of instruction or process of formation, in what it means to be part of the new humanity of God’s calling” that is needed today.

We must return to the good news as a comprehensive and powerful message of God’s Kingdom centered in Jesus the Messiah. As he put it in another book (by swiping a line from Newbigin’s famous encounter with a Hindu) we must learn to see the Scriptures as “the true story of the whole world.”  And that true truth shapes our imaginations not only to understand the Kingdom of God and the coherent Biblical narrative, but helps become a missional people ready for a wise cultural encounter. Goheen ends the books with some great chapters about what that looks like as we caringly come to understand and critique the story of the modern West, the shift towards postmodernity, the ever-present spirit of economic progress and consumerism.

What a closing appeal this is, to “take every thought captive” and live out, together, the core story of our faith. What an approach! This book is very highly recommended and I hope churches and campus ministries and small groups and Bible classes and social reform movements all over use it well.

First Nations Version – Psalms and Proverbs: An Indigenous Bible Translation Terry Wildman and the First Nations Translation Council (IVP) $18.99 (paperback) OR $24.99 (hardcover) // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19 (paperback) OR $19.99 (hardcover)

Here is the eagerly awaited latest release in this Indigenous Bible translation; the New Testament came out a few years ago to much acclaim and they have just released the Psalms and Proverbs. Slated to be released later in the summer, we are delighted to have it here, now. I’ve dipped in already, taking in the fresh translation and new cadences!

It really is unique, not just a mild tweaking of a couple of words, but a large-scale culturally-astute, dynamic equivalence translation using words like Father Sky and the One Above Us All. These sacred songs and wise sayings of the Hebrew Scriptures “speak to us anew through the vivid, poetic imagery of the First Nation Version, informed by the structures of Native American storytelling.

Our friends at IVP put it this way:

Whether you’re seeking solace, strength, or spiritual insight, the First Nations Version Psalms and Proverbs will guide you with its profound expressions of praise and trust in the Creator. Step into the harmonious blend of ancient wisdom and indigenous tradition to discover a spiritual experience that speaks directly to your heart.

Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land Ross Halperin (Liveright Publishing) $31.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.59

I believe in the power of books. I believe the “pen is mightier than the sword.” I believe some authors are used by God to transform our lives, change our beliefs and behaviors in ways that can have lasting endurance. I am not being sentimental or sloganeering when I say I believe books can change the world.

And so, every now and then I am overcome by the heavy joy, the privilege, the obligation, even, to play a role in helping a book make its mark on the world. I think of our little role in promoting the stunning expose (and David vs Goliath legal battle) against industrial hog farms and how they had Carolina legislatures in their pockets, described so vividly in the page-turner that even John Grisham said he wished he’d have written — Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corban Addison. We played only a tiny part but we were one of the early and hopefully significant voices supporting another book that is one of these nearly once-in-a-lifetime reads, the now widely admired Just Mercy: A True Story of Justice and Redemption, by a true hero of our times, Bryan Stevenson. For what it’s worth, this new book, Bear Witness, seems to me to be just such an important title, one that will inspire many (people of faith, surely, and others.) My hands shook as I opened the pages. I literally had to stop and whisper a prayer of gratitude that we get to be some sort of conduit for such an important story.

If Bryan Stevenson became a mainstream publishing phenomenon from his evangelical roots at an institution of Christian higher education (at Eastern College where he was noticed by Tony Campolo) so the main figure in this book, Kurt Ver Beek, came from another Christian college, Calvin College in Grand Rapids; the NGO he and his wife started in Honduras eventually had Calvin students coming to do some fairly dramatic service learning and Reformed leaders like the Calvin alum, political philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, joined his board. Indeed, Kurt Ver Beek’s own Call for Justice: From Practice to Theory and Back, is a book we’ve touted here before, a fabulous back-and-forth set of letters between the on-the-ground reformer Ver Beek and the Grand Rapids philosopher Wolterstorff.

Kurt is not the only key character in Halperin’s telling of the Bear Witness story, but he and his wife, Jo Ann Van Engen, are the founders of the multi-faceted Christian charity, the Association for a More Just Society (AJS) which the book covers as it grew and faced unbelievable challenges. The Ver Beeks live with their children and work in one of the most dangerous barrios in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Certainly, if anybody cares about Central America at all — if your entry point is evangelical missionary work that you support or attention you’ve paid to the US-backed murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero or maybe you’ve watched the exceptionally violent “Narcos” series on Netflix, or maybe you care about immigrants pouring in to the US from their settings in Guatemala or El Salvador or Honduras — you will find this to be a must-read. If you aren’t particularly interested in the lives of the poor and oppressed in these hard places, but care more generally about how people of faith can enter the arenas of public policy and make incremental differences in reforming institutions (of criminal justice and the police or the judiciary, or transforming schools and school systems, of taking on unjust corporations and the like) this story will show how it can happen. It’s about hard, long efforts towards social change. I can hardly say enough about it.

I first heard of Jo Anne and Kurt decades ago — like nearly 50 years ago, maybe — when they published an article about the less than helpful and sometimes inappropriate role of short term missionary teams. Spending so much money to bring kids to a third world country to build a simple building for a health center, say, is not only costly and largely inefficient, but that, then, puts local builders out of business and creates social strain among the hosts. It’s complicated in a dozen ways, but they were cutting edge missionaries thinking well for years before the deepened their efforts to bring healing to various sectors of society. That simple article showed that they were thinking well and speaking out about the long-haul of true social renewal in poor neighborhoods.

As they did their Godly, charitable work through ASJ including some small development projects, helping victims of domestic violence, obtaining legal land rights to illiterate campesinos, they realized that the Biblical call and the facts on the ground demanded more systemic reform and the implementation of public justice. They needed better laws and better enforcement of laws to keep local folks from being terrorized by gangs and drug runners, pimps and bullies. Some cops were on the take — this becomes a major, blood-curdling matter in the middle of the book — and some judges are fearful of reprisals if they rule against punk murderers or narcos. These stories kept me turning the pages late into the night,  on the edge of my seat, yet ashamed that I hadn’t known more of this friend of some good friends!  Honduras, we learn, in those years had literally one of the highest murder rates in the world; the bravery of Kurt and his team and their deep persistence offering proposals for reform of broken, corrupt institutions, literally changed those numbers dramatically. His work is known and honored all over the world.

It is hard enough even in a land of justice and good order to adjudicate crimes when judges don’t have printer ink (or even toilet paper.) In a sense, the Ver Beeks realized they needed to reform not only the judicial culture and police corruption, but the very worldview of the culture, their views of crime and justice; in a word, they needed to take on a culture of impunity. One of Kurt’s best allies is Carlos Hernández, a deeply spiritual servant of the people, a gospel-changed school teacher and co-conspirator with the Ver Beeks. Carlos, ever Kurts friend and neighbor, became increasingly involved and eventually went to work for ASJ. And, as you’ll discover, he soon needed security guards to protect him (as did the Ver Beeks) due to the death squads and sicarios who were out to assassinate him.

In this shift to reformational engagement with the powers that be and the Christianly conceived work for public justice they were in a parallel manner, doing what the wonderful (and popular) anti-trafficking and anti-slavery group, IJM (the International Justice Mission) was doing. Indeed, out of IJM’s thinking came a very important book about the need for good laws and law enforcement if we are ever going to see social justice talk hold in unjust places. (See, for instance, the Oxford University Press study, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence by Gary Haugen & Victor Boutros.) With IJM’s help they started a branch of their AJS ministry (at first it was nearly clandestine) called Peace and Justice  Their small but growing team of spunky investigators and lawyers and activists and reporters learned about the law and procedural stuff like the Articles of the Penal Procedure Code. They developed baselines reports — some well over 200 pages — on improvements needed in the Honduran Public Services Ministry.

As this Christian NGO increasingly became involved resisting “the locust effect” (in Haugen’s phrase) by helping fight bad guys, and trying to persuade the police toward social righteousness, they hired investigators. This is stunning to think about, like something from a TV show. They hired guys who became pals with the police — sometimes charismatic locals who nearly crossed (okay, they did cross) lines of decorum and maybe ethics working undercover to expose misdeeds. Their team of activists trailed narco-traffickers and studied gang culture and tried to get rapists and kidnappers jailed, even as they insisted on due process and protested police brutality against the very dangerous criminals they (behind the scenes) helped capture and adjudicate. What bravery (and bravado) they needed to stand against extrajudicial executions in a culture of impunity! Which, soon enough, tragically turns on their them as beloved employees are gunned down, one by one.

They had hoped early on to find a Christian lawyer but couldn’t find anyone willing to face down these terrifying criminals so they hired a flamboyant leftist known for bravely investigating human rights abuses. Now he is trying to help (some of) the trusted police and government forces, even as they facilitated a huge purging of corrupt police. It’s a messy situation, the ways of the barrios complex, the impunity culture deeply rooted. They needed to form cooperation relations with truly corrupt politicians and some accused them of being part of the corruption. The held exceptional, Biblically-informed principles which informed their practices, day by day, but they had little time or energy to be punctilious. We learn all this in the first few high-octane chapters and the Niebuhrian complexity of dealing with an immoral system only gets deeper and more trying.

We learn all kinds of other interesting stuff, too — the United Nations recommends, for instance, that an adequate justice system would have 1 judge for every 4000 citizens. In Honduras they’ve got maybe 1 for every 55 thousand. Most human rights organizations do not approve of shrouding witnesses to prevent unfair guilty verdicts, but balaclavas are used in some cases in Honduras since bearing witness against a criminal makes you an immediate target. (This is in contrast to our “jury of your peers” principle of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.) So some witnesses were cloaked and camouflaged.

There is danger and complexity and compromise to their work as they strive for what Steve Garber (in the often-mentioned chapter in his Visions of Vocation) called proximate justice. They are not idealists who want to accomplish everything. There will be, we can tell, collateral damage. But they won’t give up just because some things are really messy. One rave reviewer noted the “nauseating moral quandaries they faced…”  Nicholas Wolterstorff calls this gut-wrenching tale “a story of undaunted patience…”

I do not want to share spoilers. But what a page-turner it is. Bear Witness will appeal to those who like true crime investigations, who like muck-racking reporting about great injustices, who like David vs Goliath type stories of those righting wrongs. As with any book about poverty and injustice in Central America there are some ugly portions; some even gruesome. There’s anger and fear and doubt; mistakes are made and friendships (and budgets) strained. It might work for those who like missionary stories. (The faith and Reformed worldview of the Peace and Justice team are described by this seemingly secular author and it is fascinating to see books like Richard Mouw’s lovely Calvinism at the Los Vegas Airport and Gary Haugen’s Good News About Injustice mentioned. He describes their faith often with apparent wonderment. Although the leaders of ASJ and Peace and Justice are obviously Christian, this is a book written about them on a major, secular publisher without an overtly religious intent.) It has been called “poignant and chilling” and a compelling example of the best of “gripping, investigative journalism.”

The New York Times review said author Ross Halperin has an “immersive narrative voice reminiscent of Tracy Kidder.” It isn’t exactly tedious, but, man, he puts you right in the investigative details, with stats about poverty and health care and education reforms and this judge and that ruling, the formation of commissions and the follow through of political hardball as hard-won victories are undone and fought for again.

You will read about their tough decisions about facing down armed assassins and worry if certain plans will play out. You learn about the plight of mistreated workers and the lengths corrupt business leaders or paramilitary enforcers will go to stop their exposes and reforms. You will learn where they went when they needed to escape — once to Costa Rica and occasionally finding safe haven in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What an unfolding drama this book is and how much we have to learn by this organization that over decades of persistent  endurance, has made lasting change. It is a book for our times.

A compelling tale and the perfect doorway into the complex inner workings of the poorest country in Latin America, where people struggle for power and the rule of law is weak. Halperin’s reporting is prodigious; Nueva Suyapa and its residents appear on the book’s pages not as some faceless mass but mothers and fathers and sons and assassins and students and extortionists and sometimes several of those things all at the same time, always just trying to get by. — Carl Hoffman, Liar’s Circus

Kurt Ver Beek and Carlos Hernández are possibly the bravest people in the world and  among the few who truly understand how homicide works. Ross Halperin… has gone deep and found the insights that matter. Bear Witness will be required reading. — Jill Levy, Ghettoside

Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives Mitali Perkins (Broadleaf Books) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

This easy-to-read and deeply engaging book from award-winning YA author Matali Perkins offers such a lovely, good thesis, and has such great stories from her own life (as an immigration from India and professional creative writer) that I want to recommend it to everyone. This is a great little book!

Certainly everyone who follows BookNotes desires good writing, and, most likely, more beauty in the world as well. Some of us — most of us in one way or the other — are makers, creating stuff daily, even if we don’t see ourselves as artists, as such. So we’re all called to express our creativity whether it is through cooking or gardening, gift wrapping birthday presents or arranging knick-knacks or curios in the living room, cropping a picture on Facebook or dabbling in your own creative writing in a private journal.  And — again — who among us doesn’t care about the world at large; who doesn’t cry out through tears these hard, dark days?

And so, this book is for almost everyone; for you and for me.

Just Making asks a fairly specialized question, a question that we’ve been hoping to see covered in a book-length treatment, but it’s focus should appeal to us all. A few others hav written about the relationship between justice and art but few have been so charming and practical about it. This is more specifically about, as the title puts it in language that is so spot on: justice and making. This really is a guide for “compassionate creatives.” What a phrase!

The first grand portion is a rumination on “Creativity and the Just Life” and Perkins asks about justice for the maker, for the receiver, and for the community.  Nice!

In Part Two she asks why some stop making things. She explores the “brutal, excessive market” and wonders about “destructive interior forces.” Anyone who contributes to the broader culture will ind these words very helpful, I am sure.

Part Three Perkins is comprised of five good chapters which offer guidance on how to keep on keeping on, being creative, making things, doing good work. From “restoring agency in the vocation” to finding mentors (“in the margins” she suggests) and within third places (which might be virtual) she is often specific and wise. In some nice but heavier challenges she calls us to not only “lean into ancient practices” (you might be surprised by this chapter even as it is generative food for thought for any artist) and to — as the final chapter puts it — “Cross Borders and Liberate the Work.”

In each chapter she has, set apart in italics, testimonials of others. This is a great asset to the project. Mitali invited various artists, craftspeople, designers, writers, and others to reflect on the question of the chapter, or describe how justice-work informs their creative output. From an expressionistic modern painter to a textile artist, from an opera singer to a needlework stitcher, each share what sort of just principles, values, or concerns deep into their work. One brave graphic designer and printmaker pushed back a little bit, wondering if expecting art-making to have any particular societal outcome might be reductionistic and limiting. Even though he has done overt justice-themed projects he wonders if just making art that is good and which adds beauty to the world is enough. “And in doing so,” he continues, “making something that can be morally good and useful. And hopefully,… even just.”

There is at the end of Just Making, a thorough study guide for book clubs or discussion groups as well. Well done, Mitali Perkins, well done.

You Were Never Meant to Do It All: A 40-Day Devotional on the Goodness of Being Human Kelly M. Kapic (Brazos Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Perhaps you recall us exclaiming about the excellent and useful themes in the hefty, but really readable, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News by Covenant College prof, Kelly Kapic — just now out in paperback, btw. Or, maybe you will remember that we celebrated the good sales of the book after Kelly spoke at the CCO Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh last February. (That is our biggest off-site gig all year and we always write about it after the event — go back to the end of February in our BookNotes archives and see the big piece I wrote about the many authors and books we promoted there.) Anyway, we are fans of the many books Kelly Kapic has done — on Jonathan Edwards, on suffering, on hope.

You’re Only Human is very good in a rare way. He honors our creatureliness and invites us to embody wholistic faith without shame or fear because, after all, God made us this way: being dependent on God is, as they say, a feature not a flaw. That big book and this new spin-off from it shares gospel-based stuff by a grace-based theologian. It is rooted in the revelation of God in Genesis 1 and 2 about the world and humankind — It. Is. Good. In fact, It. Is. Very. Good.

Flawed as we are, we still must recall that our Maker made us as finite humans and that this is a great, great gift of the Christian worldview. The upshot: you don’t have to do it all.

This devotional, You Were Never Meant to Do It All, is fabulous with 3 or four devotional readings to go along with each of the 10 chapters in You’re Only Human. He does, of course, encourage people to go back and read those fuller chapters for deeper exploration, but you wouldn’t have to. You Were Never Meant… does stand alone nicely as a set of seriously Biblical and spiritual reflections on “the goodness of being human” but it also stands alone as a fine daily study.

By the way, Kapic has offset in a pull quote box for each devotional, a quote from somebody and these sidebar quotes alone are nearly worth the price of the book. A few may be from authors you know; I bet there are some quotes worth pondering from writers, thinkers, mystics, even, that you don’t. From the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony to writer and contemplative Kathleen Norris, from Christian counselor Chuck DeGroat to the eloquent Lutheran Dorothy Bass (from her lovely book Receiving the Day) this book is a great resource to have and I’m sure an edifying devotional classic to prayerfully go through, alone or with someone. There are really interesting discussion questions, too, to help you process the content that much more intentionally. Have fun!

Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path Through Doubt, Disillusionment, and Dead ends Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague (IVP) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I have really, really liked the writing of Catherine McNiel — her year-long memoir called All Shall Be Well: Awakening to God’s Presence in His Messy, Abundant World was so very well written and so clear about God’s presence in our good but weary world. Fearing Bravely was a bit more feisty, insisting that we learn to love others, “neighbors, strangers, and enemies” even at great risk to ourselves.  The blurbs are stunning with high recommendations from women and men from across the cultural and theological spectrum. Her first book won a number of awards, a very well written reflection on her life as a new mother, Long Days of Small Things.

And yet, attentive to the brokenness of the church and sad about so much restrictive and harsh theology, she wonders. From the start of her spiritual journey “full of earnest faith and hope” she now realizes that without some awareness that some of us go through what some (drawing on James Fowler, perhaps) call “stages of faith”, one can really be set on a tale-spin when one experiences a crisis faith or new senses of things evolve. When some religious leaders or movements have turned us off, when some have even hurt us, when we grow lackluster or confused, maybe, when God even seems to have vanished, what are we to do?

This is not a book merely celebrating deconstruction, or even documenting the journey away from faith, even though Catherine and her co-author, Jason Hague, have lots of stories to tell of painful doubts and struggles  (Hague, by the way, also is an accomplished writer and the author of Aching Joy: Following God Through the Land of Unanswered Prayers which is excellent.) Mid-Faith Crisis is an assurance that you are not alone in this experience and offers insight about how faith goes through stages of development and reconsideration. I’ve got a few intellectual bones to pick with the seminal James Fowler but he documented that decades ago. They obviously cite the very important underground classic, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith by Janet O. Hagberg, which we have stocked for years. Yes!

The opening bit explains their thesis by mentioning a popular on-line meme called “How It Started vs How It’s Going.” Both, then, cleverly, tell of their young faith lives (and both are wonderfully told — Jason was on the 700 Club as an 8-year old) and then how it’s working out for them now. Hague has had unimaginable sorrow in his life, Catherine saw some  serious unpleasantness early on as a pastor’s daughter. Both could work that meme and it’s helpful, I think, to see how very earnest and even dynamic faith blooms, changes, adapts, and, well, there’s that honest matter, now: how it’s going.

Whether your ambivalence to your previous faith is from heroes falling or toxic systems uncovered, whether you’ve got intellectual questions about the coherence of faith or new feelings about the world’s suffering and sorrow, whether you’ve been wounded by the church or just are facing a mid-life crisis, this book shows that the disillusionment that goes with these sorts of questions and doubts, is not the end of the story.  It’s broken up into different sorts of “how it’s going” realities — those who have doubts, lives where suffering overwhelms, those hurting from unanswered prayers, etc. This is honest and wise and helpful.

There’s some hard stuff in this book but great beauty, too. The ending epilogue by Jason will, I guarantee you, have you in tears of wonder and joy. It’s very moving and good.

The great writer Aubrey Sampson says these authors have “unromanticized vulnerability” while another says they are “refreshingly honest.” At the end of each chapter they suggest something to read and something (musical) to listen to. Big kudos.

Instrument of Peace: Meditations on the Prayer of Saint Francis Alan Paton (Whitaker House) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Alan Patan was a mid-20th century international literary rock star, having published his debut novel, Cry the Beloved Country in 1948. (And, yes, we still stock it.) Even then, it nuancefully and artfully told a story exposing the horrors of South African apartheid. He was a playwright and novelist, a poet and churchman.  He was among the founders of an alternative political party in South Africa to counter apartheid.

And here, now, newly re-printed from more than half a century ago, is his mature and refreshing take on the classic “Prayer of Saint Francis.”  He notes that he drew on the power of this lovely prayer as his wife of many years lay dying of emphysema. Paton’s take is about prayer and trust, about God’s presence and about social service, God’s grace spilling out in to the world.

Paton wrote that he has an “unrepeatable debt to Francis of Assisi, for when I pray his prayer, or even remember it, my melancholy is dispelled, my self-pity comes to an end, my faith is restored.” He writes about this “majestic conception” of what the work of a disciple of Jesus must be.

We are grateful for Whitaker House for getting this book in circulation once more.

The re-publication of these meditations on the prayer attributed to St. Francis could not have come at a more apt time in the world. As well as being a world-famous author, Alan Paton was a respected member of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa who represented us at important meetings of the Anglican Communion and the World Council of Churches. This collection reflects both the eloquence of a great writer and the deep spirituality of a committed Christian whose faith led him to reject apartheid unequivocally. I recommend it highly for those seeking spiritual depth in their quest to become bridge-builders in our polarized world. — The Most Reverend Thabo Makgoba, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town

They can make a difference as God’s instruments of peace and be given the wisdom to do so–just what this book does.— Bishop Todd Hunter, Founder, Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others, author of What Jesus Intended: Finding True Faith in the Rubble of Bad Religion

Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood Angela Denker (Broadleaf Books) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

I have mentioned this recent release about a month ago but I felt like I should highlight it again.

After the assassination of an elected official in Minnesota last week (and the shooting of another couple, and a targeted list of others — all Democrats) by a person steeped in the teachings of a certain sort of MAGA Christianity, we who are church people stand with our mouths agape. What sort of faith even hints that their parishioners should kill political opponents? What weird worldview leads to killing in the name of God? This faith-based blood lust has been seen in recent years among other religions but there is the dark undercurrent in some corners of the evangelical world that seems to create such monsters.

(To be precise, the movement that seemed to have influenced the alleged assassin is known as the “New Apostolic Reformation” and we have books that study it theologically, apart from how it has recently aligned itself to Trumpian politics, and current affairs journalists have written about its recent political manifestation. Please order from us the brilliant The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. We have it as previously announced at 20% off.)

When the stories of the murders broke last week many on the political and cultural right insisted on the misinformation that it was a “leftist” or “Marxist” who did the shooting. That some of the supposedly legit talking heads on Fox News wouldn’t retract this despicable error is part of the tragic context where even a cold-blooded murder can be politicized by MAGA ideologues. Sigh.

How have we gotten into this mess?

Well, speaking of this weighty matter in our cultural moment, even as we cry out wondering why this religious man tragically turned killer, I wanted to share some of what I previously said in an earlier BookNotes about this very, very relevant title.

Angela Denker, I explained, is a former non-denominational evangelical turned progressive Lutheran pastor, and she wrote a splendid travelogue report of visiting Trump supporters and white Christian nationalists and asked them why they felt and believed and voted as they did. It’s a great, generous read called Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves and her kindness is evident throughout. (In this regard it reminds me a bit of another travelogue of gracious reporting, Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America by the aforementioned Jeff Chu.) In any case, Denker is a good writer and astute observer of the conservative religious landscape and her new book, in a similar accessible style, is particularly about how all of this shapes the raising of boys. It is a matter she, again, knows something about. She is a religious mom of boys.

Her latest report from the hinterlands, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood deserves a bigger, more careful review but know that it is candid and direct — “unflinching” one reviewer called it. Historian and Christian critic of the religious right, Randall Balmer, notes that “readers should not be fooled by Angela Denker’s storytelling ease and graceful prose into thinking this is simply another anodyne book about child-rearing. Her arguments about the sources and the persistence of racism, misogyny, and what she calls “brutish masculinity” are powerful and, sadly, all too relevant.

Pastor Denker makes a powerful case against the toxic aspects of this fundamentalist sub-culture of religious extremism and authoritarianism. She has been called “an expert on influencers” and she is the mother of two boys. There is a radicalization happening around us and she exposes much of it as it influences many young white men, in some exceptionally conservative faith communities. As she documents these dangers (with the sharp eye of a journalist and the prophetic insight of a cultural critic) she offers real hope and the grace of a good pastor. It makes for a good and sadly, much needed resource.

For what it is worth there are lots of thoughtful books about the nature of masculinity and what is often called “toxic masculinity.” It will make you ponder much, but I did a long, mostly favorable review of Nancy Pearcey’s unique, serious book from a year ago, The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes; Pearcey is herself both a critic of shallow, pop, evangelical conventions and yet a strong critic of progressive and liberal assumptions. It would be a good book to put into conversation with Denker’s look at the rise in radicalization among young white men these days.

Jemar Tisby calls Disciples of White Jesus “essential” and Kristen Du Mez, of course, has been touting it.

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