It is gratifying to get orders and encouraging remarks, always, but it was especially fun hearing the comments about the last BookNotes. I listed some books on the need for a renewed imagination and how poetry can help. I introduced you to the great British poet and literary critic and pastor, Malcolm Guite, and offered autographed copies of his marvelous first volume of the four-volume set of “Merlin’s Isle” Arthurian stories told as an epic poem; an epic ballad, to be more precise. No one of note as done such a thing for over a century and Guite joins the ranks of some of our most esteemed writers in the bold project. Kudos to Rabbit Room Press for creating (with the help of linocut artist and designer Stephen Crotts) such a gorgeous, sturdy volume. As I hope you recall — please visit www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/booknotes if you missed it — that it is called Galahad and the Grail (Rabbit Room Press; $34.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99.) 

In that BookNotes, before highlighting all of Malcolm’s essays, studies, and poetry volumes, I commended Discipling Our Diseased Imagination: Spiritual Formation and the Healing of Our Heart which is a faith formation resource wonderfully written by Dordt College prof Justin Ariel Bailey (Baker Academic; $24.99 // OURS SALE PRICE = $19.99.) I am working slowly through it a second time after a quick skim and it is amazing. It is less about creativity and the arts, I’ve said, but it is profound. No narrow reductionism or cheap sentimentality, but a Biblical call to be fully human as we learn to see “with the eyes of our heart” and perhaps pray with our eyes wide open.

 

For a more mind-blowing imaginative experience I might have recommended David Dark’s new and improved (if I can swipe a phrase from old-school capitalist marketing) edition of Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World (Vanderbilt University Press; $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96.) It is widely re-done, showing is growth as a writer and cultural critic. And a dreamer!

David is one of the most imaginative guys I know and I would buy any book he writes. This one, on popular culture — a very serious re-doing of an earlier one — is awe-inspiring. I mean that.

In that last column I also wanted to work in a reference to the very new James K.A. Smith book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path to Unknowing (Yale University Press; $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40.) When I described it before I had explained how this reformational philosopher tells his story of a renewed encounter with the mysteries of mystics like Saint John of the Cross and the unknown writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. I briefly explained his insights about rejecting certainty and dogmatic confidence — sort of a natural extension of his work in You Are What You Love which argued that the center of gravity of the human person is not the cognitive mind. What I didn’t say as much about is that Make Your Home…also spends much time and glorious writing ruminating on the power of art to help us enter this space of a different kind of knowing. He’s not exactly talking about the sublime (that seems to have a somewhat different intellectual genealogy) but he offers glorious examples of how the arts (visual and written word and music, too) can be transformative. If you’re interested in exploring matters of the imagination, this book is going to make you think.

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Two years ago I had the great privilege — almost a life-time bucket list thing — to speak at the legendary Calvin University’s Festival of Faith & Writing. I was so nervous sitting on a couch with expert writers Ann Bogle and Karen Swallow Prior to be interviewed by the conference director, Jennifer Holberg, author of the wonderful Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story of Shape Our Faith (IVP Academic; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59.) Another workshop, rambling on about our work here at the store, was well-received and it was such an honor.

With Beth’s chemo treatment ongoing, we decieded we needed to stay closer to home this season so we missed the conference this weekend. We’re in awe that Calvin is able to bring in such amazing writers, authors, thinkers of various sorts for a wonderful, generative event. You should go two years from now. I hope we will!

To wit: here are a handful of books that strike me as good reads for those of us who couldn’t be in Grand Rapids last week. I bet Warren had some of these at the also legendary Eighth Day Books book display at FFW. In any case, here are fifteen suggested reads (almost all recent) in honor of the fruitful FFW, whether you were there or not. Consider this my hat-tip to them and, equally, a follow-up to last week’s BookNotes about poetry and Malcolm Guite. On we go.

FIFTEEN BOOKS ABOUT STORY, WRITING & LITERATURE

Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us Martin Shaw (Sentinel) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

This is a hard book to explain but it has been getting so much publicity you may have heard of it. He’s an amazing storyteller and fine writer inviting us to a life that matters by embracing the right myths. The right dreams. Rejecting staid stories. Malcolm Guite calls him a “harbinger, a sign of the shift in consciousness that all of us, trapped in our techno-bubbles, so desperately need.” It is magical at times, a remarkable testimony; the first pages tell of this UK wild guy who meets a Lakota medicine man named Wallace.  As we learn in the book, there is something about open-heartedness, sometimes tender and often powerful.

From our greatest living storyteller, a validation of all that is awe-inspiring and implicit in a world where we are confined by the explicit and banal. — Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary

A book that will help seekers, doubters, and believers alike appreciate faith anew, not by reinventing Christianity, but by retelling its story through the experience of a thousand other stories. Read it . . . then read it again. It will do your soul so much good. — Justin Brierley, author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences Neal Allen & Anne Lamott (Averly) $27.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

I was hooked by the first pages, as you, too, might be, if your want some wise and punchy advice from a former journalist and the always-interesting Anne Lamott. Neal Allen writes the bulk of this, sharing the rules for writing he’s developed over his career, with his wife Anne — you’ll recall she tells of falling in love and marrying late in life in Love Always — adding snarky annotations and sometimes brilliant clarifications. Neal and Annie are a great time, each offering a bit of insight with lots of examples. Their chapter on not showing off (let others be erudite; your job is to befriend your reader”) is worth the price of the book for those tempted in such ways. Their bit about “which Beatle are you” is clever; Neal says Anne is a Paul, although she wishes her style to be like John’s.

They are mostly down to earth and when they do delve into the realm of grammar or the philosophy of rhetoric it’s pretty painless. It is very practical. Neal advises we “remove the clutter of short words (pronouns, prepositions, connectors) and they both make a case for strong verbs. Wow. Buy it!

Start with a Word: On the Craft and Adventure of Writing Marilyn McEntyre (Eerdmans) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I love Anne Lamott as a writer but deeply respect Marilyn McEntyre who I’ve had the pleasure of being with on a few occasions. I’ve read her poems, her essays, her polemics. We love her book about being a medical patient and cite (almost in every talk I do) her classic Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. She’s elegant and gracious and charming and smart. I have only just started this — the first chapter is “Read Like a Writer” — and intend to savor every word soon.

The chapter titles are as interesting as they are in Caring for Words with these notions that are sometimes allusive and sometimes very clear (from “Move the Camera” and “Find Out Who’s There” to “Develop and Digress” and “Address Your Dear Reader.” Not to mention “Know When to Stop.” ) I’m eager to see what she means by writing “from the inside out” and eager to explore how to “Tell the Public Part.”

Here is how the publisher describes this project:

After decades of writing award-winning books on subjects ranging from poetry to art to liturgical seasons, celebrated author Marilyn McEntyre turns her attention to the vocation that has shaped her life. Start with a Word: On the Craft and Adventure of Writing is a literary masterclass that eschews drills and formulas in favor of close readings and refreshingly playful advice.

A veteran teacher, Marilyn understands that the best writing instruction doesn’t come from rigid rules or rote approaches to filling the blank page. Instead, she demonstrates how the writers whose works we have enjoyed can become our tutors. She calls us to move beyond asking “What does this text say?” to a more revealing question: “How does this text work?” This shift in perspective — from passive consumption to active apprenticeship — transforms how we encounter literature and how we create it.

More than a how-to manual, Start with a Word is an invitation into a way of being that honors both the precision and the mystery of words. It offers short lessons on essential elements of literary craft, close readings of passages from a range of works, writing prompts, and, above all, encouragement for authors to find their unique path into work only they can create.

Writing, Creativity, and Soul Sue Monk Kidd (Knopf) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Do you remember her older books on spiritual formation like God’s Joyful Surprise or When the Heart Waits? They are still in print and lovely and useful. Kidd became more widely known, though, after the blockbuster Secret Life of Bees, followed by a good handful of other stellar novels. She is beloved for her stories, The Mermaid Chair, the spectacular The Invention of Wings, The Book of Longings, and a memoir she wrote with her daughter Traveling with Pomegranates. Her earlier memoir Dance of the Dissident Daughter explored feminism and faith; you can see she has written widely in several genres.

Now she tells us how and why she does it. Part memoir with uplifting storytelling, part reflection on the spirituality of creativity, part masterclass in the process of writing (with some fabulous sections on reading and the reading life as well) Writing, Creativity, and Soul is a very nice book for her fans whether they want to be writers or not.

The book is pleasantly arranged in four segments, Moorings, Mystery, Method, and Meaning. I’ll admit I jumped first to the last section and read “The Curative Power of Writing” and then dipped into her piece “Hurry Slowly” in the Methods section. Yep.

Kirkus is a review source that is highly regarded and their “starred reviews” are a very good sign. Here is what they wrote about Writing, Creativity, and Soul.

Kidd is one of America’s most evocative memoirists of the spirit. Her new book looks back over a life of writing to explore the nature of human creativity and the urge we have not just to do something but to make something. Kidd digs deep into the archetypes of consciousness. . . . Memory becomes a box of precious finds. Kidd can write some of the lushest clauses in American prose. She can also write a simple declarative sentence. At such points of contact, writing thrills. But it can also heal the fractures in our lives. A gorgeous memoir of the creative life, designed to bring out the writer’s voice in all of us.

The Beauty of Souls: Aesthetic Encounters with Marilynne Robinson Mark S.M. Scott (Fortress Press) $36.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.80

Few deny that Marilynne Robinson is one of the great writers of our time. From her several novels (including Gilead, which earned the Pulitzer Prize), several collections of astute, dense essays, to her creative rendering of Genesis, she is a public top-shelf intellectual and deeply Christian thinker. In this detailed thesis, Mark Scott explores particularly her aesthetics — excavating her sense of beauty. By which he means to behold her work, making connections with her themes of “perception, contemplation, growth, loss, brokenness, wonder, and redemption” as “a literary journey into the spiritual life.”

Obviously, her fiction and most of her prose are not overtly theological but yet Scott argues that “Robinson’s writings spiritually sensitize her readers, preparing them for deeper levels of soul-discovery and soul-formation.” Can we learn more of what it means to be human and what human spirituality is like by reflecting on the magisterial Gilead saga? Can we learn to care for our own souls — and, perhaps, the souls of others — as we move beyond a literary or even theological reading of her signature works? His point becomes clear early on when he admits to the lack of action (and even conventional plot) in these slow stories that seem off-putting to some and exceptional to others. He makes a case that this, actually, is where the action is.

All Swirling and Weaving: Reflections on Reading Fiction and Growing in Faith Douglas Basler (Wipf & Stock) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $

This amazing little book — which ought to be well known among us! — would be a great book for a book club or ongoing adult reading group, doing one chapter each time. Each chapters offers a  generously Christian reading of a popular novel. If you enjoy the well-written book reviews in places like The Christian Century, say, or the detailed study of contemporary fiction in literary journals, Douglas Basler’s recent book is one you will love. Whether you’ve read the novel he explores (as a way to see how this story can enhance our faith formation and discipleship) or not, the chapters are enjoyable, informative, provocative, and inspiring.  That the great Marilyn McEntyre wrote a lovely forward makes good sense and it, too, is a great read.

McEntyre says of this book by a Presbyterian pastor (who, by the way, is very much in the spirit of Eugene Peterson, that pastor who so valued novelists and reading as essential to the vocation of pastoring) that “you who read these chapters will find yourself as you finish them ministered to, that you have experienced epiphanies and ‘shocks of recognition’ along the way…” Indeed.

The exciting introduction starts with Pastor Basler’s reading of Wendell Berry’s older classic, The Memory of Old Jack. He explains, then, that the title of this collection (All Swirling and Weaving) is a line from Brian Doyle’s Mink River, which is one of the great chapters here. It’s a great set-up for this lovely set of reviews written by a caring pastor. (He doesn’t have a chapter on Memory of Old Jack but gives us one on Berry’s Nathan Coulter.)

All Swirling and Weaving offers “reflections on reading fiction and growing in faith” from the likes of the aforementioned Berry and Doyle, but then Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness, The Bean Trees (Kingsolver), The Heaven and Earth Grocery Story (McBride) and Leif Enger’s Virgil Wander. He looks at the “playful excess” of Andrew Peterson’s The Wingfeather Saga and the “circles of sorrow” in Toni Morrison’s Sula. He studies The Brothers K (by the great David James Duncan) and Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour. And, yes, he has a chapter on Marilynne Robinson, exploring Jack. He obviously has good taste, as a book lover and as a pastor.

Language As Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon Toni Morrison (Knopf) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

Toni Morrison, by any account, is one of the most significant authors of our time. She was not only a working novelist but a critic and professor, a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner (for Beloved.) These dense but passionate reflections are essentially from a “dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University.” In these chapters, she interrogates famous works by respected authors in the American literary canon and exposes racial bias and how racial identity is created and projected.

She writes about, as the cover tells us, “the reflection of the author’s own deepest fears, insecurities and longings.” She does this with profound erudition but also with considerable wit. This is deep and serious stuff.

As the flyleaf notes:

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature Nadra Little (Fortress Press) $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I must admit I did not know much about Toni Morrison and while religious and spiritual themes are obviously present in her work (including overtly Christian language), I have never presumed to know anything about her own faith orientation.

I do not know of any other book that explores Morrison’s “spiritual vision” — her worldview and religion — as this does. It a way, it is a way to discover her work through the lens of her faith.

The question is, of course, what the contours of her faith were. She was obviously a black feminist and her spirituality was complex and inter-faith. One writer (Del Sandeen) who has written on the activism of Maya Angelou says this is the “must-have, for a deeper diver into what made the later writer’s stories so compellingly magical.”  Little has done serious research and explores the background of Black Roman Catholics that shaped Morrison. There are some excellent portions looking at African folktales that have informed the shape or tone of certain novels.

There are some good and helpful biographical insights (a white mob lynched two of her fathers older friends when he as young which “traumatized him for life.”) Her mother was an excellent storyteller.

Nick Ripatrazone, a literary critic for Image, and himself Roman Catholic, insists that this is a book we need. “For too long,” he says, “Morrison’s significant spiritual influence has been unspoken or, at best, misunderstood. No more.”

Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision is the seminal text for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of an under-appreciated yet central part of Morrison’s life and literature: her Catholic faith. –Ekemini Uwan, public theologian and co-author of Truth’s Table: Black Women’s Musings on Life, Love, and Liberation host of Truth’s Table podcast

The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation Michael D.C. Drout (Norton) $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

Of the shelf-full of books we have about Tolkien, this is a stand-out for two or three simple reasons. First, it is a memoir, mostly, a story about reading Tolkien’s mythic volumes. Yet, there is a “ribbon of memory” in the book, reflecting on the author’s childhood, his own family, his own faith. As such, the book invites us into Middle Earth and invites us onto the Hobbit’s journey by way of his own first, fresh encounters. Don’t you love it when you read about a person falling in love with a book, with a story? We who are bookworms and we who send out BookNotes believe deeply in the transformative power of books. Call this a great example, exhibit one, perhaps. As famous Tolkien scholar and fanboy Tom Shippey notes of The Tower and the Ruin, Drout shows that Lord of the Rings, “is not just a story. It’s a life-changer.”

Also, it is hefty and big. This isn’t always a plus in weighing the value of a book, but in this case it is extensive and thorough and full of joy and yet appropriate gravitas; one reviewed called it “deeply felt.” I wouldn’t list here, now, a cheap bubble-gum intro (although these may have their place for the right readers.) In this column, though, I want to highlight truly excellent books for serious readers; trust me, this is one that is important. It is pitched as “a leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.” And, I might, add, asking how it is that this story has felt, for many, like truly entering another world, perhaps unlike hardly any other reading experience.

Thirdly, again, Michael D.C. Drout is not only a memoirist reporting of his own reader’s journey but he is am esteemed scholar, a professor of Medieval Studies, and some would say he is shining new light on these classic stories. There is sharp analysis and profound reflection on what makes these tales good. As a study of the impact of these epic stories and the unique fantastical world JRR created, it is learned and scholarly. This guy knows his stuff.

Michael D. C. Drout combines his reader’s journey through the major works of Tolkien with his personal journey as the son of a reading father and the reading father of a son. The result is an erudite and insightful discussion that shines new light on old stories. ― Verlyn Flieger, author of Splintered Light

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life Suleika Jaouad (Random House) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Speaking of books making an impact and the serious transformation one can have through the habits of the reading life, this is a book by a woman whose book (Between Two Kingdoms) has been named by many as one of the best memoirs they’ve ever read. Suleika was a young adult at Princeton when a rash appeared and she was eventually diagnosed with a very rare and deadly sort of cancer. It’s a big and captivating book — I read it last summer when Beth first got her breast cancer diagnosis — but that is another story. The Book of Alchemy is an anthology she created, almost like a big devotional or reader, in which she offers journalling prompts to reflect on one’s own life, inspired by the text she shares.

The pieces are diverse and not often overtly religious, but they are examples of excellence craft in the essay form. There are 10 essays in 10 different units, under the rubric of On Beginning, On Memory, On Fear, On Seeing, On Love, On the Body, On Rebuilding, On Ego, On Purpose, On Alchemy. Within each section there are pieces you’ve never seen, by authors many of us may not know. But a few are by author’s some of us have read, such as Ann Patchett, John Green, Beth Kephart, Kiese Laymon, Jedidiah Jenkins, Salman Rushdie, Kate Bowler, Mavis Staples, Anif Abdurraquib. And, oh, her husband Jon Batiste.

Call this “a guide to the art of journaling” or “a meditation on the central questions of life.” Buy it now and you’ll be using it for a year, at least. Wow.

Living Logos: The Fiction of Michael D. O’Brien Greg Maillet (Pickwick) $34.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.20

Pope John Paul II wrote in 1999 a lovely “Letter to the Artists” which we used to stock. He suggested there that “art can be a bridge to religious experience.” Michael O’Brien is a very prolific, conservative Roman Catholic author who has given us over a dozen novels, each full of honest searching, struggle, faith and doubt and grace. We have at least one customer — a Protestant, actually, who orders them one by one, working though his considerable literary oeuvre.

Interestingly, his publisher, Ignatian Press, did a small, handsome paperback which we have touted in previous BookNotes columns about the arts entitled Art and Sacrificial Loe: A Conversation with Michael D. O’Brien in which a painter (like O’Brien, a Canadian Catholic) discuss the role of love and mercy and suffering in their work in an interview format.)

Greg Maillet’s recent book, however, is a more focused study, exploring his fiction, his popular character Father Elijah, and goes into greater detail on two of O’Brien’s most recent novels, By the Rivers of Babylon and Letters to the Future. What is going on in these stories, and how do they “stretch reader’s imagination into an eternal, sacred world in which the Living God has the final word”?

Maillet is a professor of English at Crandall University in Moncton, New Brunswick Canada. He was the co-author (with Baylor’s David Lyle Jeffrey) of the weighty, major work in IVP Academic’s Worldview Integreation series called Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice. So he has a superb framework for evaluating thoughtful, faith-infused literature.

Listen to this great endorsement by a Catholic professor of literature, Natasha Duquette, who says:

Greg Maillet accurately describes Michael O’Brien’s faithfulness and orthodoxy as a Catholic writer living and creating from the margins. His analysis of O’Brien’s critical clarity from the sidelines implicitly places O’Brien’s work alongside great Catholic satirists of the past, such as Alexander Pope and Dante Alighieri. By approaching O’Brien’s novels through the lens of theological aesthetics, Maillet does justice to their literary and spiritual heft.”

The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life Heidi White (Goldberry Press) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Goldberry Press is a small, new outfit that has, so far, done solid work releasing some great resources on art appreciation and this new title that looks to be nothing sort of glorious.  I was hooked on the first page of the introduction as the author (in a piece called “Stories as Icons: How Literature Reflections the Divided Soul”) tells about a dying grandparent and how Anne of Green Gables saved her life.  “Right away,” she says, “I recognized that young Anne Shirley, red hair notwithstanding, was just like me — lonely, grieving, disoriented, unguarded, bewildered, stranded in a universe of insoluble contradictions. How can a world be simultaneously laden with such deprivation and beauty?”

The linkage in the introduction of literature to icons is deliberate. She, indeed, does think stories can be iconic (“visual representations of spiritual realities.” There are elegant and nearly universal patterns that can show up in good literature and she is going to explore these wondering what makes stories so powerful. And here is one of her major theses:

“I think the world’s great stories (including our own) dwell upon the mystery of one immense dilemma — the fallen nature of the world and our innate longing for restoration.”

Is there a division between duty and desire? What is the nature of our fallen reality? She gets at that (again, in the rich introduction) by reflecting on a stunning interaction from Perelandra.  She draws from this that “every real life person and every fictional character is fractured along the fault line of duty and desire.” That is what she means by “the fractured soul.”

This is going to be a very rewarding read, I am sure. It is a delight to tell you about it, and hope that you enjoy learning about it here. As the flyleaf says, it is “one part memoir, one part literary excursion, one part ode to the value and beauty of stories.”  Put Homer and Shakespeare in conversation with Isaiah and the Apostle Paul and throw in a pinch of deep medieval spirituality. Can stories shape our souls? Of course.  Children’s storyteller S.D. Smith says “Heidi White is a phenomenal writer and her book is a gift.”

Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know edited by Haley Stewart (Word on Fire) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

Haley Stewart is a fine writer, herself (she opens this with a chapter called “A Good Novel Can Change Your Life” and has curated and compiled what looks to be an excellent introduction by a variety of thoughtful women and men, to a handful of distinctively Catholic novelists, some of whom you will know and some, I bet, some of us have not heard of. I’m sure there will be new doorways into new authors for you if you give this a try.

And, to be honest, I’m not sure if all the authors were practicing and faithful Catholics. They were shaped, at least, by a Catholic imagination.

The endorsers on the back of this are vibrant and enthusiastic and include some lovely, wise writers I trust — evangelicals like Joy Clarkson and Jessica Hooten Wilson, for instance (see their blurbs below) and Thomas Hobbs, the brainy cultural critic and philosopher from Baylor, who says it is “a terrific volume that demonstrates the way Catholicism has informed and intern been enriched by the imaginative works of a number of female authors, most of whom have been unduly neglected.”

It also bears the endorsement of Marcie Stokman, founder of the Well-Read Mom and author of the wonderful Catholic paperback The Well Read Life. If she likes this, it surely is a winner.

Women of the Catholic Imagination looks at (among others) the great Nobel Prize winner, Sigrid Undset, Caryll Houselander, Rumer Godden right up to contemporary writers such as Muriel Spark, Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, and, in a chapter I can’t wait to read, Donna Tartt. Wow.

Each essay in this book beams a light on a Catholic luminary who may have been overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Now, thanks to this book, the brilliant women of the Catholic imagination shine forth. Reading this collection not only introduces you to more friends in the Church but also extends your reading list! — Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints 

This exciting collection of essays on the life and work of Catholic female literary figures calls out not only to Roman Catholic readers but to those who are interested in the way that literature can evoke those truths we find it difficult to speak about without the help of story, and the legacy of women throughout history who have done just that — Joy Clarkson, author of You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer—A Contemplative Meditation on Language in Scripture and Poetry to Find Meaning and Understanding in Our Words 

The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics Rebecca Britten Weiss (Orbis Press) $24.00 //OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

Orbis Press, you may know, is a publishing ministry of the Maryknoll Father and Brothers and broke into the religious (and even wider, mainstream) publishing world in the 1970s by becoming the chief global voice of liberation theology. All the early liberation theologians  such as South and Central American Catholic leaders like Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, Oscar Romero and Jon Sobrino, at first, and then black Protestants like James Cone and now even some evangelicals do culturally engaged and theologically punchy, provocative works published by the storied publishing house.

The Books That Made Us fits their publishing agenda, although it isn’t liberation theology. It is, however, a provocative critique of famous Christian writers who have largely not been critiqued for their racism, classism, anti-Semitism, and the like. Rebecca Britten does a brave and interesting job showing what’s wrong with some of these otherwise great authors.

Two quick things: she does not say that should be cancelled or fully condemned and she finds good, even wonderful stuff in their (sometimes) flawed writing. Also, she is not the first to bring a critical (faithful?) lens to some of these writers. (I recall a particular challenging piece in The Other Side magazine in the 1970s showing the racism and sexism in Narnia.) I have not seen in a long while a concise and appreciative clique as found in The Books That Made Us.

What are the “modern Christian classics” she dissects? After two good chapters in the section called “OUr Problematic Christian Literary Landscape” in which she invites us to “deconstruct the imagination” by looking critically at “the books that made us and marred us” she offers chapters on a bunch of classic writers. She studies G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

The book then offers two pieces — “How We Read Matters” and “So Why Read These Books?” Followed by a plea to do better. You may not know all of these authors, and if you do, you may not agree with her reading of them. But this is good stuff, energizing and challenging. One reviewer, a Lutheran, calls it “an earthquake” that “tears down idols.” Weiss has been on a transforming journey in own faith and life (and reading habits) and she is an important conversation partner.

Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition Patrick Downey (Davenant Press) $44.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $35.96

Davenant Press is an academic think tank and publishing venture that produces exceptionally well-done and exceptionally obscure / arcane titles, drawing on church history and early Anglican thinkers (think Richard Hooker, for instance) with titles on canon law and historic orthodoxy and public theology. For those drawn to this stuff they are a rare find. This one at first glance, seems a touch out of their wheelhouse but yet it is like them — deeply academic, drawing on historical theology and infused with learned philosophical rumination. We have more engaging studies of humor, most of which are not funny, but a few that are making a fun case that humor is a good thing for human flourishing. I’d say this is not one of those.

Serious Comedy has an emphasis on the seriousness of both tragedy and comedy in Western modernity. While it might bring to mind Buechner’s famous Telling the Truth is does not have the charm of that little classic. However for anyone who wants a comprehensive (430+ pages) overview, starting with Aristotle and a lot of Plato, on through Hegel and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, this is said to be “a masterful overview of the Western literary tradition” in conversation with the literary nature of the Bible itself.

Dr Louis Marko, the renowned classicist from Houston Baptist, says it is “bold and original” and that “it left me intrigued, chastened and grateful.” We are glad to stock it here at Hearts & Minds.

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