I am deep in a reading groove on a couple of topics and I can’t wait to tell you soon; there are a couple of really captivating and important works I will be recommending soon enough.

For now, though, I’m very eager to promote a couple of titles that will be among the best of 2026. What a stellar early Spring we’re looking at, at least among the sorts of authors you expect us to highlight. There are others and I hate to exclude fine books, but I want to list the very best.

Here are 8 titles that you can pre-order from us now.

Use the order tab below.

I could have listed more good ones soon afoot but these are sort of the cream of the crop for our readers. Truly, you can’t go wrong with any of these. I’ve read several advanced manuscripts, and even among those we haven’t seen (some publishers are more helpful for their authors and bookstores than others) in most cases I know the authors and their unfolding work well enough that I can promise you that these are worth having.

If you are ordering more than one (as surely you should) please tell us if you want us to send one now and the others later or if you want us to hold off and consolidate them. Note the release dates shown.

ALL BOOKS MENTIONED ARE 20% OFF.  PRE-ORDER TODAY.

The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry Matthew Erickson (Eerdmans) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59  – RELEASE DATE MARCH 24, 2026

I say this sometimes and I really, really mean it. I’m not a pastor (not even close) and yet I adored this book, thrilled by its wonderful insights and its glowing prose. I knew it would be extraordinary a few paragraphs into the wonderful foreword by Winn Collier of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Seminary in Hope, Michigan I almost want to say that Winn’s exquisite, solid, insightful, knowing words are themselves worth the price of admission. He sets us up with high expectations for The Pastor as Gardener and Erickson delivers.

Yet, this rhetoric of expectations and delivering isn’t even quite right as part of the thesis of this marvelous book is that pastoring and church work is not a matter of delivering the goods, let alone positioning for a career in which one can be measured with the typical American metrics of success. Gardeners mess in the dirt with hopeful patience. That’s my own cheesy illustration but you get the idea: Erickson draws the metaphor of gardener out in profound and wise way, inviting pastors — and those who they serve, maybe specially those who hire and oversee them — to see themselves as gardeners. Not that different than another agrarian rabbi in the first century who describe this work as shepherding.

Matthew Erickson, curiously —Wendell Berry fan that he is — pastors an urban church in Milwaukee. I believe the book will appeal to any pastor rural or urban or suburban, small or larger. Frankly, it’s a blast whether you like gardening or not.

Pastor and pastoral writer Mandy Smith (author of The Vulnerable Pastor) says The Pastor as Gardener, laden with the same kind of plant-life imagery Jesus used to explain his Kingdom, “helps us grow our capacity for embracing those kingdom ways and remembering how to partner with miraculous things.”

This is profound stuff, a counter-veiling voice against many of the expectations of pastoral service these days, inviting us all to slow down, to deepen our concerns about pastoral integrity and formation. It offers keen insights about how to nurture a “pastor-gardener.” Erickson says:

“We kneel with our hands in the soil of pastoral ministry, finding connection with those who have done this work before us and those who will do it after we are gone. We learn from Jesus, who is simultaneously the seed, the vine, and the gardener.”

To be clear, The Pastor as Gardener is not a simplistic read or quaint devotional. There is substance here, Biblical, theological, spiritual, and cultural. Think of some of the best work of Eugene Peterson — he’s in that mode, and it is rare for me to suggest as much. It is clear from his amazingly good recommended reading appendix that he has spent time with some of the best writers of our time (and plenty ancients as well.) His appendix has a dozen books or so under several categories from agrarianism to pastoral care to church life to ecotheology. It’s really wonderful.

He says that hope is the defining virtue of the pastor-gardener. Again, this is so good that if you are a pastor you need this book. If you are involved in church life, care about pastors, know anybody in ministry, you should buy this for them.  If you happen to be in a collegial pastors group, this would be a great book to read together.

The Pastor as Gardener is a lovely thing. We all know that a pastor is a shepherd, but the image of the Christian life as a garden–a garden that thrives with careful tending–is also embedded in Scripture and in Christian tradition, as Matthew Erickson shows us in this quietly, deeply, sweetly meditative book. His account is capable of bringing great refreshment to anyone called to ministry, but it is also illuminating for lay Christians, in or out of the pews. — Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path Unknowing James K. A. Smith (Yale University Press) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40 – RELEASE DATE MARCH 24, 2026

Sometimes when I’m telling about an author that I’m terribly enamored with or think is important for all of us I explain his or her earlier works, why they were formative for me, why you should know them. I say something about where they worked, what caused them to write what they did and how it all matters. You can put Jamie Smith’s name into the search engine at our BookNotes archives at our website and discover several such missives. I’ve appreciated his books for decades and have read all his popular ones and a couple of his technical philosophic ones. (He is a professional philosopher and some his books are quite scholarly.) I say often that his You Are What You Love is a must-read for all of us.

Smith teaches philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids and he has done generative philosophical work, largely on the postmodern school of thought known broadly as phenomenology. And, importantly he had done popular level, collections of essays about cultural engagement, books on worship, on political life, on time.

One of his themes in recent years has been how our embodied life of habits and practices — he calls them “cultural liturgies” — informs how we life, shaping the story of which we think we are apart. As these cultural liturgies shape our vision, our imagination, the direction we have as we seek a good life (even the meaning of a good life) we move from a worldview of dogma and ideas to being propelled by a deeper sort of “under the hood” desire. We are not primarily what we think, but what we love.

Which, if you follow with even a little bit of philosophical awareness, leads to a question (some might frame it as a crisis) of knowing. What do we really know? Where does certainty come from? If truth (Biblically speaking) is less a set of ideas to intellectually assent to but a Person, if we know (as Proverbs 23 put it) with our hearts, doesn’t that sort of deconstruct the very foundations of much of Western philosophy? Does it leads us to embrace mysticism? Or at least an imagination shaped by the arts?

Exactly. Who would have thunk it, but this professional philosopher and expert reader of all manner of scholarly texts, came to a crisis —his description his depression is chilling and vulnerable — and he embraced books like The Cloud Unknowing and, of course, Saint John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila and The Interior Castle of Julian of Norwich.

Smith’s project in this book — I’m on my second time through — is to invite us to explore “how radical uncertainty can be liberating, opening us to another way of being.” In Make Your Home… he draws deeply on films, novels, poetry, and art pieces and his description of these is exceptional, informed and deeply felt. (Maybe you recall these sorts of moving deep dives from when he was the editor of the arts journal, Image.)

As the back cover of the advanced reader’s copy puts it, “Smith speaks to the fundamental. Yearnings that persist in late modernity, including the philosophical quest for knowledge and certainty.” But, brilliantly, I think, he shows that the gifts of the contemplative tradition (not to mention the allure of artists and their insightful, allusive work) can “embody a liberating spirituality that recovers the fullness of being human.”

Jamie opens the book with a vivid telling of his Pentecostal years as a very young itinerant preacher. He apologizes for some of his harsh sermonizing, in a way nodding to the damages many of felt in the past generation of combative evangelicalism. He may be alluding, too, what one of his mentors, Calvin Seerveld, discusses in a chapter called “The Hurts of Worldview” in a book called After Worldview. In any case, he is grieved that he once was that guy, and even has his reputation as a Christian postmodern scholar rose, he knew something was missing.  This is the journey of his discovery, reading medieval mystics (and moderns like Thomas Merton) in the twenty-first century.

I loved this book, even though it stretched me intellectually. You see, once he has given himself over to this contemplative spiritual posture, this being at peace with not knowing (at least not knowing in the modernist propositional sense) and knowing more deeply by way of allusion and mysticism, then his question is (if I might paraphrase) what does it mean for my vocation of being a philosopher? And how do I teach philosophy in light of what I now realize about this mystical epistemology?

So, again, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is not primarily an introduction to the contemplative tradition. We have books by and about the medieval mystics and lots of accessible books about the contemplative way — think of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster or Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton or the deep trilogy by Martin Laird (Into the Silent Land, ) — but is more his grappling with the worldviewish implications of all of this, As such he explores the likes of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Derrida, Heidegger. In the excellent introduction he cites the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.”

Despite these scholarly discussion, the book is lively and lovely. Early on he learns from the fiction Reverend John Ames, of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. And there is a spectacle transcript of a speech given by Leo McGarry in a memorable scene from The West Wing. And you’ll be fascinated as he tells of the “wild ride” of the opening sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Andrei Rublev. I’d say this whole book is a wild ride.

Do you know what famous mystic counseled to “make your home in this darkness.. stay there as long as you can” from which Smith drew his title? Buy this book and you will. And maybe, just maybe, you will want to take him up on the advice. Hang on.

Beauty + Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage Haejin Fujimura & Makoto Fujimura (Brazos Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99 – RELEASE DATE APRIL 7, 2026

This is a book I’ve been eager to tell you about. I was so, so glad when Beth and I were with Haejin & Mako (at a conference for lawyers — that’s her gig and he just was along for fun) and they told us about this book they were doing together. She has long been a respected acquaintance, doing good work in the legal profession (and engaging in anti-trafficking efforts.) She understands deeply the call to serve God in one’s career and vocations and has been a leader in calling professionals to a Christ-like cost of discipleship in public life.

Mako, of course, is world-renowned as a visionary abstract painter and has written widely about faith and the arts; his last two, on Yale University Press, are Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (with a foreword by N.T. Wright) and Art Is…A Journey into the Light.

One of his first published pieces is an excellent chapter in a collection edited by Ned Bustard entitled It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God; I read it years ago and I was immediately drawn to it.

After the horrors of 9-11 happened in his neighborhood in lower Manhattan, Mako, already busy as a painter, started writing about art and peacemaking, how art offers an allusive, creative gift for those in grief, even in the rubble of the destruction. Those “refractions” as he called his post-9-11 essays we published beautifully by Navpress; they have recently been reissued in an anniversary hardback, still entitled Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture. Ever since those early pieces I knew Mako was an artist who cared deeply not only about aesthetics and his craft but also about what we might rather prosaically called the social responsibilities of the artist. Or, as Calvin Seerveld’s fine anthology puts it, how might we offer Redemptive Art in Society? Can art (again to site a title by Seerveld) “bear fresh olive leaves”, like the dove from Noah’s ark, indicating signs of life?

In 2016 Fujimura released Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering which is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. It tells of his own conversion to faith, in part, while in Nagasaki, Japan (we know the horrors of the bombing there on August 9th 1945) and, more, encountering the place where Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo wrote Silence, which was later made into a movie by Martin Scorsese. Again, this shows his passion and wisdom about relating faith to the questions of creativity and the arts in the context of the harsh and broken world in which we live. Can faith be born of great suffering and can that faith offer something akin to beauty?

Perhaps even shalom?

To see a justice worker and an artist — who love each other deeply and work together wonderfully — combine to reflect together on the relationship of justice and beauty (with stories from all over the world) is so exciting and so needed. We praise God in heaven for this amazing couple and this extraordinary book.

(Interestingly, they note in the introduction that their marriage is cross-cultural. Mako was born in Boston from Japanese parents and Haejin was born in South Korea and moved to the states only as a teen. As they put it, “Japan and Korea have had an acrimonious relationship throughout their history; as such, our marriage represents beauty born out of the fractures of sister nations.” Nothing is as easy as it looks, eh? And yet even hard things can become signals of transcendence, point the way into God’s coming Kingdom.)

I suspect you may know this, but I’ll say it for the record: there is no other accesible book like this written from a deeply Christian orientation. They draw on the important, brief (and heady) book On Beauty and Being Just by Dr. Elaine Scarry (published in 1999 by Princeton University Press) but there is no title which does what this book does. There is no book that I know of that even comes close of Beauty + Justice.

When a global justice activist like Gary Haugen (founder and CEO of International Justice Mission) says Haejin and Mako “bring invigorating new insights that I hope will encourage many toward renewed partnership with God in his mission to end violence and make all things new” you know you have a very important book. Haugen travels the world fighting some of the worst evil that exists and he reads deeply and is a man of great prayerfulness. When he says that the reflections in Beauty and Justice have brought deep refreshment to my soul” that is really saying something!

I love the one-word titles of many of the chapters — they are attention grabbing but sometimes gentle, allusive and artful, even. After early chapters on experiencing and creating beauty and on experiencing and seeking justice, there are chapter titles like Estuary, Grit, and Generosity. There is a fascinating chapter largely about “creating beauty out of ashes” called “Generational Stewardship” and their bit on “New Wineskins” is not to be missed.

Can we trust God’s abundance? Can we foster “the courage to do the slow work of justice”? I wonder: is there a connection between the slow art of Mako’s Nihonga style and the patience needed for those who work for proximate justice?  Mako wrote the lovely, deep forward to Steve Garber’s much discussed Hints of Hope and that seems to inform some of Haejin’s insights about law and justice as well.

Her insights into the need for healthy, God-evoking rhythms in her law practice are exceptional and wise for any of us in hectic workplaces. She writes about her generative environment (including daily time for prayer) and her own “Emmaus Road experiences.” I so enjoyed hearing of her own call to the practice of law and her maturity in learning about mishaps and tsedaquah, Hebrew words rooted in the laws of God.

Their mutual reflections on paintings— especially the work of George Rouault — is nothing short of inspiring. I don’t get out much to museums and rarely see live art. But, oh, their telling of it was a gift.

They speak of the glories of the extraordinary and the mundane. They work for shalom, for the realization of God’s new creation. Beauty, in fact, can bring healing and hope and if you never fully understood that, this book will be a great joy and bring you confidence. Beauty + Justice is a great book, serious but not needlessly academic, and not too long. (It is under 150 pages.) You should pre-order it now and consider using it in an adult class, book club, or study group.

Joyful, Anyway: Finding Delight in Impossible Times Kate Bowler (Dial Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00 – RELEASE DATE APRIL 7, 2026

Okay, if Smith is a bit heavy — philosophically, spiritually, living deeply in a world of a different kind of knowing —  and Haejin & Mako’s is, while lovely, very much about the brokenness of the world and what repair might look like as we work for shalom — then this book will supplement the gravitas of those with a different sort of heaviness. Kate Bowler, as I assume we all know, is dying. Aren’t we all?

She was given a terminal diagnoses several books ago and she wrote wonderfully (wonderfully) about the experience of being a young, upbeat theology professor (at Duke Divinity School, no less) while struggling with family, children, and a life-saving chance at demanding flights out of town to a cancer treatment place. The first book was Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and if the cliche of the title strikes you as Christian common sense, you need this book. If you do appreciate that it is a dumb lie, then you’ll love it. She is biting and funny and sentimental and faithful. The sequel, another memoir, this one written when her life was miraculously extended, was equally blunt and funny and serious, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear.) I sometimes say that she writes somewhat like Anne Lamott, but without the frizzy hair and playful whining about aging. Or like Nadia Bolz-Weber without the tats and cussing. One respected writer says her prose is “razor-sharp and tender” as she gives us “luminous clarity and unsentimental grace.”

She wrote two popular devotional books, one called Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection and an oversized “book of blessings for imperfect days” called The Lives We Actually Have. She did two scholarly books — one on women in the evangelical subculture and another called Blessed: A History the American Prosperity Gospel. She got to know some of these “name it and claim it” Pentecostals when she was researching that work and it was a small part in Everything Happens when they wanted to pray for her healing. She didn’t theologically agree with their thinking, but she sure appreciated their prayers. Ha.

Now, in this forthcoming one, she is back to doing memoir-like reflections on her life and times, living with this dangerous condition. As noted above it is called Joyful, Anyway: Finding Delight in Impossible Times. If almost anybody else tried to suggest that it is healthy or Godly to be cheery when going through hellish circumstances, I’d roll by eyes (at best.) But I trust Kate Bowler. She seems to have a Christ-centered joy that never minimizes our broken world and the hard stuff that happens. Jerry Seinfeld says she suffers no fools, “especially the toxic optimists.” But, yet, if she can charmingly remind us to be “joyful, anyway” I think I’ll give it a try.

You, too?

Paul and John in Harmony: A Theological and Historical Exploration Michael J. Gorman (Eerdmans) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39 – RELEASE DATE APRIL 14, 2026

I can’t say too much about this forthcoming book but I will say three quick things. First, Mike Gorman is one of the finest Biblical scholars working today; he is prolific (especially on work on Paul; his major volume on I Corinthians last year was fabulous) and he is a great, beloved teacher at Saint Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore, MD. He has hosted men and women scholars from around the world, from Fleming Rutledge to N.T. Wright.

Secondly, not only is he a preeminent scholar, he’s a Sunday school teacher (in a United Methodist congregation) and sees his work, brainy as it is sometimes, as part of a calling to serve the church. He is ecumenical, global, cross-cultural, and has a servant’s heart. Not every scholar has such a gift for speaking with less academic folk, and he’s got a foot in the world of higher education and the Biblical studies guild and yet he loves God’s people in the churches.

Thirdly, even when his work is sometimes a bit technical, he has an obvious desire for it to translate into personal and corporate transformation. To see he has an eye for application is one way to put it. He knows that serious theology that funds serious Biblical research simply must change lives. I like his tone and even in his more scholarly works, how it always has a trajectory towards usefulness in the church and in our lives.

To wit, we’re going to have this. And, wow, I’m eager to see it.

I have not seen this yet but I know it is a signifcant hardcover making the case that Paul knew of John’s testimony. (Does this necessitate an early dating of John? I imagine so.) Gorman’s close reading of Paul shows four common aspects of his “locative language” and offers a good vision of where Paul got some of his ideas about participation with Christ. A major chapter will be “Paul, John, and Jesus: Christology and Its Implications for Discipleship.”

If there is a “spirituality of Paul”, Gorman seems to be saying, it comes, in part, from his familiarity with John. Marianne Meye Thompson, the important (Emerita) New Testament prof from  Fuller Theological Seminary (and author of The New Testament Library’s John: A Commentary) calls it “stimulating and provocative.” Cornelis Bennema (one of the world’s leading John scholars) calls it “a scholarly masterpiece” and “groundbreaking.”

Scholars have long studied John and Paul as though they inhabited mutually exclusive theological worlds. But recent work on both writers is now raising afresh the possibility that they are in fact closely related, even mutually dependent. Gorman is one of the wisest and most seasoned guides in these areas, and this book will open the eyes of a new generation of scholars and preachers to exciting and fruitful study and proclamation. — N. T. Wright, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, God’s Homecoming

Gorman has produced another scholarly masterpiece. The importance of this groundbreaking book cannot be overstated. While Gorman’s explanation of the commonalities in the theologies of John and Paul is pioneering, it is his innovative explanation of this phenomenon — namely, that John influenced Paul — that is truly revolutionary. This magisterial book is poised to challenge several long-standing scholarly consensuses. — Cornelis Bennema, London School of Theology, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John

Galahad and the Grail Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts (Rabbit Room Press) $34.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99 – RELEASE DATE April 20, 2026

One of the heralded literary releases of this year is by the world-renowned poet, Anglican priest, writer, rock star, and hero to many and will soon release. It is the first part in his Merlin’s Isle series (called, “An Arthurian.”) Trinity Forum in Washington DC will be hosting a major, early reading of this on March 23rd, by the way, and we will be there with the first batch of books, for early sale that evening. The incredible illustrator Steve Crotts will be there as well. If you’re in the area, you should get tickets — come and say hello and, more importantly, hear this legendary poet re-tell the first part of this legendary story of Sir Galahad and the other knights of the quest (they set out from Camelot, you’ll remember )as they search for the holy grail.

This story (including the hope of healing the wounded Fisher King) offers renewal for the land and culture and hearing it afresh in poem style — the first time this has been done in over a century — offers a creative glimpse not only into the Arthurian lore but the worldview of 13th century people faith. (Wasn’t it Tennyson who popularized it in the 1800s?) This is huge.

Rabbit Room will be doing an excellent job of this grand story and we cannot wait to see it. (They already did one creatively fictional volume with a padded leather cover with various authors offering (new) chapters, including one by Malcolm Guite, alongside Jennifer Trafton, Jonathan Rogers, Andrew Peterson, Annie Nardone, Doug McKelvey, illustrated by Ned Bustard under the title The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, which itself is an incredible volume.) Pre-order this groundbreaking epic poetic rendition of Galahad and the Grail now from us and we might be able to get you an autographed copy from our gala with Trinity Forum.

(By the way, the second forthcoming volume, The Coming of Arthur, will be out in November of 2026. You heard it here first. Pre-order that now, too, if you’d like.)

To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times Alan Noble (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99 – RELEASE DATE APRIL 28, 2026

This is another one that I have not seen but can assure you that it will be fabulous, a great read, important and helpful and interesting. One impressive advanced reviewer has declared it one of the year’s best!

I know Alan Noble a bit having met him at conferences and heard him lecture. We follow each other on Facebook and that is revealing as well — he shares good stuff. He’s a fabulously nitrating guy, having started (before he became a book author) a very impressive blog and website back in the day called “God and Pop Culture.” I met just the other day a writer for them and was blown away by this guys credentials, scholarship, and passion for his sub-genre (of horror fiction.) Anyway, I’ve followed Alan for a long while and am nothing but impressed.

He is a literature profession at Oklahoma Baptist University and is not only sharp in his obvious field but has written about other more general topics. His first book was spectacular and I highly recommend it, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age about how to talk about talking about faith in an age of screens and digital distractions. It works on many levels and covers a lot. His very popular next book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World was a nearly luminous, mature, lovely reflection on that line from the famous Heidelberg Catechism (reflecting on 1 Corinthians 6: 19-20 that I learned to love from a mi James Ward song.) Following up on Disruptive.. Noble again does astute cultural analysis, helping us grapple with what it means to resist the idols of individualism and autonomy. Yet, it’s hard to feel that assurance of God’s good rule in our lives (and the life-giving human flourishing it forms) in this secularized age when true human flourishing isn’t deeply understood or even valued. The two books were my kinds of reads — cultural analysis and person Christian growth, theology made read in our dubious times.

Next Alan did a book that surprised some, a small hardback that was about (for lack of a better phrase) depression. It was called On Getting Out of Bed and he both offered solace and understanding and bit of prodding for some to put one foot in front of another and carry on. It assured each and every reader that they matter, that they’ve got not only a personal life to live, but a culture to contribute to. Believe it or not, you are needed! You can do this! I have recommend On Getting Out of Bed often and have benefitted from it myself.

With this forthcoming one — I hope we get it early — Alan looks to be about his classic thing: observations about the chaotic times and wholesome (if substantive) advice on how to carry one. I wonder if this one is sort of a culmination of the previous three: this, this is what is has always been about — living well. Living well, practically, in this messed up world.

I do know this, too: To Live Well will be about the classic virtues. Here’s how the publisher tells it:

Contemporary life is confusing. We are overwhelmed with choices and given conflicting messages on how to live. This book uses seven traditional virtues as ways of reorienting our lives toward God: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love. Cultivating these virtues enables us to address practical issues that face us daily.

After a hefty introduction there is a sure-to-be great forward by the wise and upbeat Justin Whitmel Earley; here’s the table of contents. It’s going to be a very wise and compelling book.

1.  Choosing Decisively
2.  Acting Justly
3.  Suffering Steadfastly
4.  Living Moderately
5.  Believing Soundly
6.  Hoping Resolutely
7.  Loving Rightly

What a book! Each chapter brims with wisdom–drawn from Scripture, steeped in deep reading, and refined through life experience. I found myself not only nourished personally but also earmarking pages to send to family and friends wrestling with major decisions or simply trying to make faithful daily choices. Truly one of the year’s best. — Trevin Wax, The Gospel Way Catechism and The Thrill of Orthodoxy

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience Tish Harrison Warren (Convergent) $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80 – RELEASE DATE MAY 12, 2026

This has a strict street date on May 12th so I wasn’t sure if I should highlight this, yet, but it is one of the books I’m most eagerly anticipating. I’ve read the early version I got a while ago (I know, I know, a perk of the job) and I’m grateful for my helpers at Random House / Convergent Books. And I’m grateful to be in touch with Tish on occasion. I know how she worked hard to get this book into shape. It is spectacular.

I sure hope I don’t have to convince you of the value of her wonderful previous hardbacks, the lovely and wise (and for some game-changing) Liturgy of the Ordinary or her deeply moving and reassuring Prayer in the Night. These are among my favorite books in the years we’ve been book lovers. I wonder if, over time, What Grows in Weary Lands will also be among this upper shelf of important books for many of us. Some say it is her best yet.

The heart of this book is about resilience. It is evident to me that it is deeper (although not scholarly or arcane) than many fine pop psychology books, even Christian ones, on this hope for resilience. We all have issues; these are hard time; who doesn’t wish for greater stamina and grace in living into the hope we are suppose to have? As her last book put it, we are in the dark a lot of the time; we need that evening prayer for those who work or watch or weep.

Tish is a fabulous writer, a clear storyteller and I was captivated by her story — that ended up as a nice, instructive parable — on the first few pages. Describing weariness, burnout, emptiness it is grueling, yet she throws in a clever line. She’s trying to build a fire and remembers how much being “on fire” for God played into her church youth group and early formation. She says, “There was enough fire imagery in my early Christian formation to alarm a park ranger.’ Ha.

Columnists offer think pieces and article and podcasts about this, so ubiquitous is this languishing in late modernity. Maybe it’s capitalism, maybe the forces of our secularizing culture, maybe screens, even, but important as the big picture analysis is, it doesn’t help you get through your dreary days.

Sure, we need spiritual renewal. And certain practices help facility that — keep sabbath, love your dear ones, go to church. Whether one has severe writers block or a lack of creativity or have felt a listlessness in a prayer life, this anxiety about the doldrums is real and painful. We are all so tired.

She indicates early on that the book is mostly about perseverance of a certain sort. We hear a lot about conversions, as well we should. And these days, de-conversions. The drama surrounding a worldview change and a new sense of things is, well, dramatic. And we need stories of elders, sages, older mystics. But what about the middle; mid-life, mid-faith? Old timers used to call it fortitude. The “unsung virtues” that sustain this are, she says, “the most vital quality in a lifetime of discipleship.” She believes that “grit is an essential ingredient of grace, that resilience is indispensable if we are to become who we are made to be.”

If you are wondering about the medieval word acedia (about which the great Kathleen Norris wrote in Acedia and Me) you are right. That is part of what is going on when we feel so depleted.

Tish is incredibly vulnerable in her description of her desert season. She is not whining, not making things out to be worse than they are. She is, as I said, a good and careful writer, colorful but not excessive. Her explorations of these themes are mature, even sophisticated, and wise and I will cherish this book as I study it more carefully in the months to come.

I am not naturally drawn to the desert fathers and mothers, but a quick glance at her great footnotes — amid essays from The Atlantic and quotes from interesting theologians, citations of Ezra Klein podcasts and Taylor Swift lyrics — there is an abundance of names like Syncleica and Chryssavgis and Cassian and Evagrius of Pontus. Don’t let the ancient names throw you. This is rich, good stuff and she is introducing classic writers that have strengthen the backbone of many a saint over the years. Yes, she looks at John of the Cross (if only she’d had Jamie Smith’s manuscript described above) and the stuff about “desolation” in the Ignatian tradition. But she reads the memoirist and poet Mary Karr and the ecological wonders of Refugia Faith (by Debra Rienstra.)

She wrote this alongside three fascinating (and funny) growing children — one calls her new bit of gray hair her “tinsel” — a great husband with whom she squabbles a bit and a mom increasingly living in the fog of Alzheimer’s. Who wouldn’t long for a more felt faith, a bit of fire?

What Grows in Weary Lands is coming out in early May. You will read it quickly, I bet — it’s hard to put down — and then you will want to read it again over the summer. Pre-order it now; you won’t regret it, I promise.

This book is like a friend who reminds you who you are and who God is when you’re too weary to remember. It’s a theology of staying-put — a gospel for those of us in the long middle of faith who are tired not because we’ve lost our faith, but because we’ve kept it. —Jon Guerra, singer-songwriter

 

What Grows in Weary Lands is poised to become a modern spiritual classic and another must-read offering from one of the brightest spiritual writers of our day. — Rev. Claude Atcho, pastor of Church of the Resurrection (Charlottesville, VA), author of Rhythms of Faith and Reading Black Books

 

Honest, wise and persistent in imagination, this is a book to refresh the seasoned spiritual traveler. A beautifully crafted weave of both resilience and wonder. — Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the Wild

 

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