FOUR GREAT, MUST-READ BOOKS ABOUT WOMEN, PATRIARCHY & EVANGELICAL FAITH

As is often the case, I struggled with apprehension about how to start this BookNotes column. I often start with some thank you to those who have ordered books from us lately and perhaps remind folks of our previous BookNotes. I know some of you have studied those previous lists and we’re glad to continue to offer those 20% off deals on those recent BookNotes. There’s some good stuff reviewed and we are glad for those who have sent orders our way. This Covid thing has been hard and Beth and I are grateful beyond words for your support of our family biz here in PA.

This new set of reviews means a lot to us. We’ve identified ourselves as evangelical feminists, I suppose, since we read All We’re Meant to Be in the early ‘70s. Authors as diverse as James Olthius from Toronto and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen from Philadelphia and my grandma, a Free Methodist occasional revival preacher (not quite as noteworthy as Len Sweet’s grandmother that he writes about in Mother Tongue but she comes close) have shaped us. We’ve studied the Biblical texts and stand with those churches that fully support women in leadership at every level of the church and culture.

Good people can disagree about such things and often we learn as we stretch ourselves into new territory. If you’re not inclined to appreciate these sorts of books, we thank you for bearing with us — maybe even giving it a try. Sometimes we read books that we disagree with and they don’t change our mind, but we know the “other side” better, which is nice. Whatever the outcome, we hope you order some of these books which I’m about to suggest and they are widely read, and seriously discussed.

To get our cards on the table, I will just say this: we believe that Christian patriarchy and the relatively recently coined phrase “Biblical womanhood” (and “manhood”) are wrong-headed and can be hurtful to both our witness in the world and to women and girls involved in the church. Not to mention to men and boys. The books below make the case better than I can and so we highly recommend them.

Of course, there are legitimately complicated questions of Biblical hermeneutics and, like, say, the debates about same-sex attraction or Biblical nonviolence, some who hold to certain views have hardly studied the texts involved. (I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people about what the Bible does and doesn’t say about same-sex attraction or war and often, those with the most outspoken opinions don’t even know the key texts.) So, again: we have to know that (and how) the Bible shapes our views. As a card carrying evangelical – if there was such a thing as a card to carry other than a subscription to CT and the tendency to get choked up when hearing come-to-Jesus altar calls – I do believe the Bible, properly understood and wisely interpreted, is normative for what views we should have about such things as my aforementioned evangelical feminism.

I like the common sense decency of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s We Should All Be Feminist (the title drawn from her tart comment to a fellow Nigerian Igbo guy) and agree with her “fifteen suggestions” offered to Ijeawele, but as a Bible-believing Christian, I want to be clear that it is God’s Word that should decisively inform us. Not common sense or assumptions about kindness or cultural mores or politics. It is the Bible that is a “light before our path.” The authors of the books below all agree.

Having said that, it is also true (and I think there is Biblical warrant for this, by the way) that our human experience influences us and our life in God’s world; that is, our experience matters. I’ve got a mom, a mother-in-law, a wife, and two daughters and bunches of women besties. I care a lot about their well-being. I believe in Jesus’ “golden rule” so can’t imagine – knowing as I do the statistics of women sexual assaulted in our culture – not fiercely wanting a better, safer, more just culture for them. Put simply, just like I would never go to a church that said black people couldn’t be ordained, simply because they were black, I would never join a church that would say my daughters can’t prophecy.

I’ve read Joel, you see. And I celebrate the liturgical calendar and we just spent some time in Acts 2. The Pentecostal Holy Spirit with her tongues of flame have fallen on women and the text insists this fulfillment of covenantal promises is true truth, a blazing new reality. You can try to stop it, but the Spirit will surely show up again (see Acts 15) and drag you along into this new thing God is doing. Whatever subsequent teachings have come to us in the letters of the great Apostle Paul, they must be interpreted in light of this great reality. And those who oppose it, well, remember Acts 10:15, when the Spirit warned Peter about failing to get on board the inclusive gospel train.

There is more that should be said, and others more qualified than I have done so. I’m glad, just for instance, for recent books like Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts by Lucy Peppiatt (IVP; $22.00) and, a few years back, Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism by John Stackhouse, Jr. (IVP; $20.00.) I’m glad they are in November 2021 re-issuing a new edition of Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy edited by the impeccable Gordon Fee (IVP; now $40.00; the new edition will be $45.00.) I haven’t mentioned Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice by Sylvia Keesmaat & Brian Walsh (Brazos Press; $29.00) lately, but it gets readers enmeshed in these questions in first century church in Rome in a provocative and amazing way.

In recent years certain sorts of fundamentalist Christians – some who are exceptionally smart and who have influenced me considerably – have pushed back against many evangelicals arriving at gospel egalitarian sensibilities by coming up with this new nomenclature of “Biblical manhood and womanhood.” Indeed, an organization, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), and a Bible translation, the English Standard Version (ESV), came out of all of this reactionary, anti-feminist anxiety.

And now, in three definitive recent books, all of this is being exposed as unhelpful and theologically inadequate. We get the big, cultural backstory told from the vantage point of a Reformed, evangelical historian (Du Mez) and it is breathtaking. It is amazing and out in paperback next week (June 8, 2021). We have a (former) Southern Baptist evangelical with a PhD in medieval studies (Barr) telling her story of trauma and new hope. Du Mez calls it “a game changer.” And a wise and impeccably fair woman (Byrd) just calling for a more solid Biblical strategy for discipleship for women and men brings this to focus. I couldn’t put down either and have been eager to tell you more about them. I follow those essential three by another – a memoir, really – of a brave young woman named Meghan Tschanz with a global mission experience, telling of her own sadness about how women are treated in the third world and, also, within pious evangelical circles, She has a light touch, but shares how she coped with confusion, shame, resistance, and about her road to eventual empowerment. This one brings everything into clarity as it tells in horrifying detail, details of her life working against sexual trafficking and the abuse she saw and the harm she experienced from the “purity culture” and radical submission teaching she got from the churches of her youth. Wow.

I am thrilled to seriously recommend these four significant books. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Calvin University’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez is mostly historical and luminously done – I’ve reviewed it briefly here before but it is now out in paperback. Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth is partially a heart-rending narrative of a Southern Baptist woman and her youth pastor husband who had to leave a church they loved because of the church’s anti-women theology and structures; she counters this unpleasantness with amazing theological studies from church history. Wow – what a book!

EACH ARE 20% OFF.

Use the order link at the end of the column which takes you to our secure order form.

(While supplies last this next week or so we have a nifty little sticker which reads “End Christian Patriarchy” designed by Brazos Press as a gift for those who buy The Making of Biblical Womanhood. We’ll try to enclose that as a little gift for one and all.)

We appreciate your support – especially those good customers and friends who disagree with us on this. We hope you’ll consider these books and read them as a practice of nurturing the Christian mind, knowing what you do and don’t believe, and being open to others. I know many of our readers are not affiliated with fundamentalism or evangelicalism so this isn’t about your tribe. We get that. But, still, these are just amazing books and we think you should order them, for a variety of reasons. In any case, are grateful.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Liveright) hardback, $28.95 – OUR SALE PRICE = $23.16

NOW IN PAPERBACK, $18.95 – OUR SALE PRICE = $15.16 The paperback has a lengthy, new preface.

I wrote in a review almost a year ago that we wished we could tell you much more about this breathtaking, important book; we respect the author immensely and affirm her keen historian’s eye and good writing. Dr. Du Mez is a beloved professor of history at Calvin University in Grand Rapids; she herself grew up in the conservative Dutch Reformed faith community – her father was a theology professor at Dordt College in Iowa. She is both a scholar of conservative American religion and very much a part of it. And, believe me, she knows her stuff. This book is the best overview of the rise of evangelical culture that I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot.) From early Billy Graham to Veggie Tales to the CBMW she knows this topic well and does a marvelous job explaining how we got where we are.

And, as she says in the important new preface in the paperback, her inbox has been flooded with hundreds of emails saying this is the story of my life. From her historian’s look at Teddy Roosevelt’s ruggedly masculine ethos to Wild at Heart citing the rough rider as some kind of model for discipleship to the exceedingly painful times of 2020 into early 2021 (the murder of George Floyd, President Trump’s people and their brazen uprising in the capitol) Du Mez connects the dots to illuminate, as we say nowadays, our cultural moment.

A few years ago, by the way, Du Mez wrote a major, scholarly work on Katharine Bushnell and 19th century Christian feminism called A New Gospel for Women published by Oxford University Press ($34.95.) I once quipped that this new book, Jesus and John Wayne, is a continuation of that story, the 20th century evangelical push-back against the dignity of women with the intentional celebration of macho-men and what was called “muscular Christianity.” The result has not been good and this oddly American expression of militant faith has had huge consequences for the witness of the evangelical church in the last few generations.

Of course, her flow of the story shows that a manly (and, therefore, the logic goes, militaristic) sort of faith perspective was often front and center – boldly, bluntly so, drawing on images and metaphors of soldiers and fighters and athletes and (as she shows) violence and defeating enemies – and this tough-guy stuff in the middle of the 20^th century animated missions and organizations like the Promise Keepers by the end of the century. Her chapter carefully exploring (through in-house documents and internal correspondence) how the PK movement itself struggled to achieve a balance around traditionally macho tones (which I found a bit heartening) which gave them phrases like “tender warrior” is fabulous. Who noticed, though, that their lingo changed after 9-11 and then the Gulf War as they intentionally developed an even more militant posture (often scapegoat Muslims.) She documents how in one case a second edition of a PK book removed all the citations of being a peacemaker. Who noticed that their attendance started to decline when they added racial reconciliation as one of the goals? Du Mez is not unkind or inappropriate in exposing this; she is working as a social historian does, looking at the evidence and weaving a narrative, but she is also writing as a concerned Christian, warning us all who care about faith and public life about the machinations and ungodly shenanigans behind the scenes. Her portrayal is simply riveting for anyone who cares about the religious landscape in recent American history.

As a Boston Globe review put it, “It is impossible to do justice to the richness of Jesus and John Wayne in a short review…” It is rich indeed.

Of the many books out these days wondering how the far Christian right could have possibly gotten so deeply involved with and excited about a hedonistic, divorced, playboy (who has paid hush money to porn stars) — and there are a lot of books as it is just such a unbelievably breathtaking historical development nobody could have seen coming — Jesus and John Wayne is truly one of the most important. It is important not as mere journalistic expose but because she looks back decades to explore the roots of the current nationalism and militancy.

And she does it with flair and verve. In the start of the first chapter she writes:

The path that ends with John Wayne as an icon of Christian masculinity is strewn with a colorful cast of characters, from the original cowboy president to a baseball-player-turned-preacher to a singing cowboy and a dashing young evangelist.

Dr. Du Mez is not just looking at the current extreme leaders of the Trumpian religious right such as the bombastic and disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr. and millionaire Pentecostal Paula White, but she explores Dr. Dobson, the aforementioned Promise Keepers, the purity ring/purity culture movement, the gonzo macho yelps of Wild at Heart. She offers astute and lively observation of much of the material culture of evangelicalism, from Veggie Tales to the Left Behind novels, the rage in anti-Muslim books after 9-11, the camo and US flag headbands of the Duck Dynasty guys, and so much more, bringing insight about how all of that white evangelical gumbo piled up, forming a civil religious nationalism that was more than patriotic, but militaristic and idolatrous.

I do not think one needs to have particular concerns about militarism, say, as I do, to be grateful for her work in showing how Jesus’s message has in many ways been compromised by those on the religious right. Her chapter about evangelism and chaplaincy programs (for instance, at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Spring) raised profound questions about faith in a pluralistic culture. She is not overstating these concerns and never crosses over into needless polemics. Again, she is a working historian and has done an extraordinary amount of research and pulls together wide sources to frame this story of how majority/white evangelicalism has drifted into civil religion, gladness about patriotic chauvinism, domination, violence and even war, and, sometimes, nearly complicit in sexual abuse. Her documentation is impressive and tragically compelling. J&JW is a must read for any who care about the integrity of the gospel and the direction of evangelical faith in these days.

Interestingly, the Thomas Nelson publisher just recently re-issued a revised edition of Wild at Heart by John Eldridge. (My own feisty and rather flamboyant 2002 BookNotes critique was, somebody said, the first critical review of that bestseller that was published. Dr. Du Mez didn’t cite that, so I’ve got no need for any full disclosure other than to say I’ve been annoyed by that bad book for decades. I do not know if he changed some of the more stupid things in there – that men need to save a “blond beauty” and that the murderer, adulterer, Braveheart guy was “closer to the spirit of Jesus than Mother Teresa,” but it seems Du Mez’s respected scholarly critique isn’t stopping the popular evangelical press from doing its macho thing. Sigh.)

You may not agree with all of Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s assessment of this or that aspect of evangelical subculture or her conclusions about how this John Wayne testosterone populism contributed to the way evangelical sexual abuse scandals were handled or how some white evangelicals aligned themselves with Trump, even given his admission of sexual assault, or as he publicly encouraged people at his rallies to punch or rough up others.

Agree or not, this is a book for anyone who has lived through the past fifty or so years of evangelicalism. Or for anyone who wants to know about this major aspect of not only what we might call religious history, but American cultural history. From Christianity Today and Billy Graham’s stance on Martin Luther King, to the impact of the cult-like Bill Gothard, from the DeVoss family’s Amway to the evangelical celebration of Ollie North, from the partnership of evangelicals with Catholic dynamo Phyllis Schafly to fight abortion, to the recent popularity of Wayne Grudem and John Piper’s teaching about traditional gender roles, this remarkable book offers a truly wide-ranging account. She shows the backstory and the development of much that influenced the subculture that gave us both Anita Bryant, say, on one hand, and Amy Grant, on another; Pat Robertson on one hand and Francis Schaeffer or Ron Sider on other hands. What a movement it has been, and Du Mez knows it well.

As one who has made a living smack in the middle of much of this, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation sure rang true to me. Beth and I have been appalled at Christian Bookseller Association trade shows to see life sized cut outs of Ollie North, who oversaw corrupt support for death squads that massacred children in Nicaragua; we saw ideological idolatry with Bibles with American flags on them and shallow books saying men need respect but women don’t; books that called for father-arranged marriages, that soft-pedaled the Confederate support of slavery, well financed organizations pushing their macho agenda or ordinary mom and pop booksellers. Even mostly well-respected books have included some really despicable teachings and we have been implicated in much of it.

And if you are not part of the evangelical subculture, this will be an ideal guide to learning about what makes it tick, where it all came from, and how it got oddly harnessed to a vision of life that isn’t particular Biblical, but nationalist, militaristic, materialistic and, at worse, racist. Jesus and John Wayne works its magic by being a wonderfully told social history weaving together stories of folks you’ve heard of and some you haven’t, of movements and organizations you’ve heard of and some you haven’t, but pulling them together in an amazingly coherent and colorful picture of what some of us have lived through in these recent decades. We agree with reviewers who have described it using words like stunning and searing and deeply perceptive.

Please read these two quotes that capture her thesis and explain why this book is an important bit of American history and why it is so very important now.

Jesus and John Wayne demolishes the myth that Christian nationalists simply held their noses to form a pragmatic alliance with Donald Trump. With brilliant analysis and detailed scholarship, Kristin Kobes Du Mez shows how conservative evangelical leaders have promoted the authoritarian, patriarchal values that have achieved their finest representative in Trump. A stunning exploration of the relationship between modern evangelicalism, militarism, and American masculinity. — Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

Wielding supreme command of evangelical theology, popular culture, history and politics, as well as rare skill with the pen, Kristin Kobes Du Mez explodes the myth that evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in spite of his crude machismo. It turns out that the opposite is true: for generations, white male evangelical leaders and their supportive wives have been building a movement of brazen masculinity and patriarchal authority, with hopes of finding a warrior who could extend their power to the White House. In Trump they found their man. This is a searing and sobering book, one that should be read by anyone who wants to grasp our political moment and the religious movement that helped get us here. — Darren Dochuk, author of Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Woman Became Gospel Truth Beth Allison Barr (Brazos Press) $19.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I am sometimes unsure of claims made that insist a book is a “game-changer.” Pioneering, unsurpassed, significant, vital — yes. But too often the very ones setting the rules of the game being studied will not find a book compelling, or, more likely, will not ever read one that challenges their role as rule-makers and referees. Yet, if enough read and grappled with fresh ideas there can be a groundswell, a tipping point, a reformation. No lesser a light than historian Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez thinks that with this new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, it just might happen. Du Mez writes,

This fervent, bold, and sweeping history of Christianity and patriarchy is an absolute game changer. Future debates will need to reckon with Barr’s contention that the subjugation of woman has nothing to do with gospel truth.

One can hope. And, taken alongside Du Mez’s own devastating historical critique (and the careful, irenic, and exceptionally sound Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, mentioned below) and a handful of other such texts, we might see an erosion of the unbiblical and often hurtful hegemony of Christian patriarchal views and the other unfortunate social consequences that follow from them.

Professor Du Mez is right about Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. It is fervent and bold and, for those with ears to hear, very, very compelling. Dr. Barr is a clear and passionate writer whether she is telling her own story as a longstanding Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) wife of a youth pastor, driven from her beloved local congregation over her (and her husbands) honesty about their egalitarian convictions or her work in the academy as a respected medievalist. She can tell a convincing tale about the machinations of a local evangelical/fundamentalist church as well as she can inspire us with stories of empowered 12^th century nuns who taught Scripture or late Middle Ages pastors whose wedding sermons (in Latin, of course) say little about gender roles (as do those pushing for so-called “Biblical” womanhood) but invite men and women to mutual submission as they both honor Christ alone.

My, my, many contemporary readers, perhaps ill-informed by popular evangelical stereotypes and punditry, will be surprised at how disinterested many conservative evangelicals actually are in examining the Biblical evidence that doesn’t fit their strict gender assumptions and how very spiritual and Biblical some medieval Catholic writings are. Which faith tradition has been most faithful to gospel-centered teachings of grace and focused on Christ and His ways? It is a live question that her book suggests over and over. You will learn a lot, both disquieting and inspiring.

The thesis of this passionate book is simple: a certain movement of mostly Reformed, often Baptist, theologians and popular writers who wrote the “Danvers Statement” and formed the “Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (John Piper, Wayne Grudem, Denny Burke, Kevin DeYoung, etc.) insist that they are right in teaching what Biblical womanhood and manhood is and it has created within evangelicalism a strict and harsh movement that has demeaned and hurt many. (And, for some, this male-centric worldview has propped up even a heretical view of the Trinity called “the eternal subjugation of the Son to the Father” showing how their social agenda about power and hierarchy has influenced even their view of God.) They say that this simply what the Bible really teaches and they run with it (with guys like John Piper instructing women who are at home when a mailman visits how to speak in a way that doesn’t deflate his masculine identity). As a historian, Barr shows that this late 20^th century and early 21^st century push-back against more egalitarian soundings within evangelicalism, is not in keeping with the beautiful orthodoxy of the best of church thinking down through the ages. She – perhaps inspired by Du Mez, but perhaps not – explains how this pitching of Christian patriarchy as “complementarianism” arose (as the back cover puts it) “from a series of clearly definable historical moments.”

As Scot McKnight write of it, “Barr’s careful historical examples drawn especially from medieval history hold together a brilliant, thunderous narrative that untells the complementarian narrative.” McKnight exclaims, “I could not put this book down!”

You may not have heard of the Danvers Statement or the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood and their mission, but it very much a part of the religious landscape and there are dozens and dozens of books for women or men explaining the joys and wisdom of taking up this sort of submissive “Biblical womanhood.” (It is such a thing that a decade ago the late Rachel Held Evans wrote a book exploring Biblical texts about women and actually doing whatever they said in the part slapstick and part deadly serious A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband ‘Master’ and a spat of books and podcasts and conferences rose up and called her either blessed or heretic!)

Many otherwise fine evangelical movements and denominations and organizations have endorsed the CBMW. The strategic Southwestern Baptist Seminary and the Presbyterian Church of America and other such stalwart institutions give it widespread circulation and gravitas. (Indeed, the flagship book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism weighs in at well over 675 pages and it is used in many conservative seminaries.) I suspect many of our readers are not aware of much of this (while some, I am sure, accept it.) Believe me, this is important.

Beth Barr begins her story with her own inner anguish. It is her story to tell but she and her husband are increasingly out of synch with their strictly anti-feminist church body. It is painful. In these sorts of churches, a woman like her – with a PhD in theological history and a professor at a Christian university – dare not teach teen boys Sunday school. This obsession with one or two verses (misunderstood, many would say) of Saint Paul (while missing other clear texts) silencing women in church creates a fetish so odd that one of her late teen college kids sincerely asked if she had her lecture notes given in the university approved by her husband. She assured him her husband – who did not have a PhD in medieval history! – had no desire or authority to do such a thing.

You may find this a bit extreme, but it is, I assure you, not uncommon. This gendered hierarchical approach is cemented deeply in the very worldview of those who stand in this tradition. As Aimee Byrd observes in Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, those in the CBMW movement view gender roles as ontological. That is, they aren’t even “roles” or “tasks” or “callings” but cemented into the natural law of the universe.

(This is why for some, again, they needed to adapt a heterodox view of the Trinity – that the pre-existent Jesus is not one in being with the Father but submits hierarchically in some chain of command – because that sort of hierarchically Triune kind of God Himself naturally is the most foundational support of a vertical, chain-of-command view of gender and family and society. This is deeply theological stuff and the scholars behind it are serious and, most non-compromising on one iota. Recall the impact on social thinking and cultural goals even international politics described in Jesus and John Wayne to see where this leads.)

Over the years I have read many books that offer alternative readings of the Biblical texts that seem to insist that women ought not preach, that submission is only for women (despite Ephesians 5:11) and have long wondered why these common sense explanations are so controversial in some circles. I assume you know some of them that help us understand what Paul did or didn’t mean in Corinth or why he said as much to young Timothy.

(I realize that many conservative evangelicals within mainline denominations that ordained women in the 1970s left those denominations not necessarily or primarily over the ordination of women, but because the debates about it and the proponents for women’s ordination in those years in those denominations seemed less interested in obedience to Biblical authority with even national leaders just glibly dismissing key Pauline texts. Let it be said, clearly – Beth Barr is not an old-fashioned theological liberal who would dismiss the Bible with the wave of a hand. Not at all.)

Still, it has always seemed to me that the patriarchal interpretation need not be at all a foregone conclusion among those with high regard for the authority of Scripture, and in fact, cannot be, since Paul honors as leaders specific women in the NT. Of course, the Holy Spirit clearly falls on women as well as men to prophecy (look it up!) It has seemed to me that one must be particularly stubborn and loyal to some patriarchal ideology not to see and concede this. I get it that it is complicated (and that there are differences between functioning leaders like Huldah or Noadiah, who argued with Nehemiah and the apostolic teaching in the early church) but the plethora of good books exploring all this has convinced me of the egalitarian perspective. To be honest, when I heard The Making of Biblical Womanhood I didn’t think I needed to read yet another. But once I read the first page, I was hooked.

Like Scot McKnight, I couldn’t put this down. The Making of Biblical Womanhood explores not only Beth Allison’s own story – which was heart-rending and reminded us that these are not abstract ideas but that they traumatize real people and real churches. What agony this book explores. If Christian charity creates an attitude of empathy and sympathy, as it surely does, this family’s story will move you deeply.

Also, there is very good (and lively) scholarship here. Professor Barr explores the Biblical texts and the history of their translation and interpretation. She shows how some women are “written out of” the English Bible – for instance, see her exploration of the infamous Junia vs Junias rendering of Romans 16:7 (and the question of what it means to consider her as one with the apostles.) Barr looks at specific Biblical texts, writes well as a historian about the early church, the pre-Reformation times, and Reformation era understandings of key texts. She shows that the road to what many now call “Biblical womanhood” is rooted in whole lot of very unique debates about specific Biblical subjects. It was fabulously interesting and added new levels of conviction and passion in me.

It is obvious that she brings a well-informed and well educated, quite knowledgable eye to recent interpretive debates.

For instance, Barr describes the backstory of those traditionalists who alleged that the use of gender inclusive language (that is, “humankind” instead of “mankind,” etc) of an updated NIV was driven by some compromising spirit of the age and which eventually lead to the formation of the ESV translation, done quite openly as an anti-feminist translation.

With chapters like “Sanctifying Subordination” and “Making Biblical Womanhood Gospel Truth” there is some overlap with the Du Mez history. There is more Biblical exegesis and as a medievalist she is able to describe pre-and-post Reformation documents and practices regarding women, the home, the family, the church.

Some of this is surprisingly contemporary. Barr exquisitely tells of her own experiences as her story somehow intersects with well-publicized events such as the 1980s conservative purge of theological moderates from the Southern Baptist seminaries and denominational agencies and the rise in the new century of the #metoo movement as the sexual abuse of women and children in evangelical churches became part of the national discourse. Even the recent conversations about these things led by (and the often vile backlash against) former Southern Baptist Bible teacher Beth Moore gets a mention.

The last chapter of The Making of Biblical Womanhood is especially moving, entitled “Isn’t It Time to Set Women Free?” Barr writes about women of the past who fought for recognition of their gifts and authority. She nicely tells of C.S. Lewis’s friend Dorothy Sayers (a 1915 graduate of Oxford) who, to Jack’s dismay, affirmed women’s ordination in the Church of England in 1948 and a thirteenth-century female author of Christian fiction (yes, she says, thirteenth century readers loved “trashy romance novels”) named Christine de Pizan who fought against crude and misogynistic views in then-contemporary fiction. Dr. Barr tells about women church historians who are discovering long suppressed stories of women missionaries, preachers, teachers, translators, evangelists. (In true memoir fashion, she tells of her husband buying an expensive CD and book set from U2 which made her feel she could splurge on her heart’s desire, a thick text called Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker. Ha.)

And Barr reveals one of her darkest experiences, involving a guy shaped by the exceptionally authoritarian Bill Gothard Seminar movement. If you’ve read Du Mez (or any number of mainstream exposes of the ugly side of the evangelical movement at the end of the 20^th century) or paid attention to sexual abuse scandals among the “pro family” religious right you know the name. God bless Beth Allison Barr for channeling the trauma from her own story and for stewarding well her own professional scholarly gifts in a way to serve us all. It will help heal the pain that some readers experience and it will introduce others to the harmful impact some accepted teaching has.

Barr wouldn’t have had to relive this story. She wouldn’t have to be a public figure, an advocate. But she did (and now has faced a painful backlash from aggressive social media opponents.) I commend this book to you no matter what you know about the “Biblical womanhood” movement or, more generally, what you think about Bible-based feminism. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth is a great read, an important expose, exciting, and a helpful foundation for formulating your own view of gospel truth. Very highly recommended.

Recovering From Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose Aimee Byrd (Zondervan) $18.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I have highlighted this book before, telling you about it, commending it, celebrating this fine, relatively conservative, evangelical thinker. We’ve appreciated her other books written out of what I believe is a PCA background. In 2016 she wrote No Little Women: Equipping All Women in the Household of God (P&R; $12.99) arguing for and explaining how to have ordinary, evangelical church women be taught more meaty sorts of theology rather than the often touchy-feely, shallow stuff of women’s devotional Bibles, women’s Bible lessons, and women’s retreats. Without challenging men’s ownership of key leadership roles in the church, she lamented that not enough is done to seriously equip women in serious Biblical and theological awareness. Insofar as this is a problem in all sorts of churches (ahem) that’s a helpful book. It sort of emerged from her previous book, Housewife Theologian that had a cover that was a nostalgic throw-back to white middle class women of the 1950s, which was a great book turning “housewife” and “theologian” on their heads. The cover didn’t do it justice, but scholars like Carl Trueman got behind it, noting it was written “with gusto and enthusiasm.” Advocates of “Biblical womanhood” like Susan Hunt and Gloria Furman endorsed it, which indicates the “Gospel Coalition” and CBWM circles she ran in. That she now writes about “recovering” from some of that is especially poignant. And, it is remarkable.

This great recent Recovering From Biblical Manhood & Womanhood… book deserves a much longer review, but I need you to know at least three things.

First. It is very well written. That line about an earlier book written with “gusto”? This has it even more. Recovering From… is clever, funny, even, quite interesting, and works the story of removing yellow wallpaper wonderfully as a motif (from the cover art to the “peel and reveal” that end each chapter. Well done!) Ms Byrd is passionate but not strident. It’s a really engaging read and I highly recommend it for showing how serious, even contentious, theological topics can be explored with wit and fidelity and grace.

Secondly — and I cannot emphasize this enough: Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a love letter to the evangelical church and, like her other books, is situated firmly within the centrist confines of sharp evangelicalism. Her podcast (“Mortification of Spin”) is done for The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. For Pete’s sake, she says good things about the book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Some of the chapters of this book were talks given at pretty conservative churches, including some PCA congregations. (Recall, they do not ordain women to be preachers or elders.) This is not militant or heavy handed. She is obviously a sound disciple of Jesus illustrating His virtues and maturity.

So, Ms Byrd does not fit the caricature of a progressive Christian feminist. She does not call herself that (and doesn’t cite the usual suspects in that tradition.) She is a conventional Bible scholar and well trained, even conservatively, theologically speaking. She’s the kind of person who sent out a tweet happily showing off her purchase of the recent biography of Herman Bavinck by James Eglinton. She cares about finely tuned theology so much that she had to be the one to call out members of the CBMW for complicity in supporting goofy heresy about an alleged hierarchy of subjugation within the Trinity. You see, recovering from “Biblical womanhood” or not, she is honest before Scripture, loyal to the God of the Bible revealed in Christ and honors the great creedal tradition of Nicene Christian conviction and classic Protestant theology.

Serious, Reformed scholars like Covenant College theologian Kelly Kapic says stuff like this:

It would be wonderful if all of us might listen attentively to a sister who is calling all believers – woman and men – to grow in their love of Scripture even as she asks us to recognize our blind spots and problematic assumptions.

So, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood is well written, delightful, even, at times, and it has as its primary agenda to be faithful and honorable as it engages the Bible well, standing in and with the clearest sort of historically orthodoxy evangelical theology. There is nothing sensational, shallow, or unwise. As Jen Pollock Michel notes, Aimee Byrd’s book is so important because, “wading through the cultural murkiness, Byrd returns us to Scriptures with theological rigor.” And that she does.

Thirdly, although I’ve framing this remarkable book as gracious and charitable, interesting and informative, moderate and faithful, it does – let’s be honest – name names and call out the big boys who are perpetrating great harm in the name of the gospel. She does tell some of her story and it is frustrating how she has been patronized and even demeaned. Even a non-threatening, moderate voice like her rocks the boat.

I love how she draws on literature and popular culture a bit to clarify where some gender assumptions come from. She helps us be more discerning about presumptions and attitudes and she peels back some ugly stuff in contemporary evangelicalism and reveals what’s going on underneath.

Golly, it seems like it ought to be common knowledge by now, but we really do need her section called “What makes a masculine male and what makes a feminine female?” and her discussion of “What makes masculine or feminine virtues?” Like any doctor poking around the sore spots, it hurts a bit. Some will take offense. Byrd goes out of her way to affirm much about her theological opponents, but she also is forthright. This books is not aimed at the scholarly community but is for ordinary believers; yet, it feels less like prophetic expose (as the above two titles perhaps could be read) but more like public debate — fair, logical, measured. It is a powerful, genuine call to deeper discipleship and Christlikeness and for all of us to grow up into better faith and considerable holiness.

If you are interested in the topic of women’s faith formation (or for that matter, women in the Bible) this fine work will be helpful. If you are not so sure of the criticism of “Biblical womanhood” and want a reliable, clear, theologically evangelical voice (Byrd does not, as far as I know, believe in women’s ordination, btw) this book will nudge you or your church towards a more generous view.

If you care about the flourishing of congregations and especially of their call to be a school of discipleship for all, note the important subtitle of Recovering From Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose. Which – spoiler alert! – is not to make men and women somehow confirm to specific or limited roles as defined by anti-feminist traditionalists, but to help us all find ourselves robustly in the big, redemptive narrative of Scripture, the Holy Book that includes stories that were not called (as Byrd cleverly notes) “The Book of Boaz” but the “Book of Ruth” and that, near the end, has the great missional apostle named Paul passing the holy baton to co-workers in the Kingdom, woman with name Phoebe and Junia. This great book is an important resource for the church of Jesus Christ and a guide to all that want to help women and men recover and be whole.

Women Rising: Learning to Listen, Reclaiming Our Voice Meghan Tschanz (IVP) $17.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

If the previously mentioned books are by academics – one a historian, the other a theologian, and the third a lay Bible teacher and “housewife theologian” with tons of scholarly chops – Women Rising is a fresh voice of popular spiritual memoir. The author, Meghan Tschanz, is young, passionate, honest, astute. She’s a good writer and a thoughtful young adult, but her book brings a very different feel than the ones above. Did I mention it’s a memoir?

Women Rising: Learning… draws on several big picture studies of analysis. Indeed, the formidable Carolyn Custis James, author of Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women, wrote an excellent foreword, but it is mostly her own story. And what a story it is.

Tschanz sounds very much like many admirable young women I know, women who caught a vision in their college years about making a difference, who through careful reading and some short term mission trips and study abroad experiences came to care about some of the most important things we can care about in this broken world. She joins with others, affiliates with a bold mission that serves the poor, and, soon enough, grew to be engaged with anti-trafficking work. Meghan’s often exciting story (leavened with the light details of friendships and packing and parents and dating and the mundane routines of prepping for mission work) unfolds chapter by chapter as she deepens her awareness and learns how to listen to women in developing countries.

Many of these stories will surely grab your heart but one is illustrative. In one chapter Tschanz talks with women who experienced female genital mutilation and as most know, this violent custom is debated widely within indigenous cultures and among their missionary guests. The cultural and medical complexities, the heartbreak, the struggle (and her not necessarily handling it with the most possible wisdom) shows part of her learning how to navigate local cultures and grave injustices. It’s good stuff.

Of course, she eventually tells of their up-close-and-personal friendships with sex workers and those being prostituted and trafficked. How she and her friends care so earnestly and desire to bring true, meaningful aid (and, when appropriate, gospel proclamation) is so admirable. She needn’t cite the great books about wholistic mission because she lived it and tells her story nicely. And it is a story that takes us around the world and inside not only the unsavory places where women are demeaned but also inside the dorms and hotels and campsites the Western missionaries and organizers and global workers lived.

(If this were an academic article, I’d put this in a footnote, but, for the record, although Women Rising isn’t a book about this sort of bigger picture stuff, I am sure the author Meghan Tschanz knows volumes like the several books by Gary Haugen of IJM or Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development by Brant Meyers or Whole and Reconciled: Gospel, Church, and Mission in a Fractured World by Al Tizon, with a foreword by Ruth Padila Deborst. I hope she knows the stories of Liberation Is Here: Women Uncovering Hope in a Broken World by Nikole Lim and works like From Risk to Resilience: How Empowering Young Women Can Change Everything by Jenny Rae Armstrong. And I’m sure she knows the rigorous research in The Cross and Gendercide: A Theological Response to Global Violence Against Women and Girls by Elizabeth Gerhardt and the powerful Scars Against Humanity: Understanding and Overcoming Violence Against Women by Elaine Storkey. These are all books we’ve highlighted before and commend to you for those interested in global patriarchy, books that would offer more developmental substance to her anecdotes.)

Meghan Tschanz’s story walks us with engaging prose through her years working to reach women who are at risk. However Women Rising: Learning to Listen, Reclaiming Our Voice is more than the story of one US woman learning about the global abuse of women. It is, in a sense, her own discovery and coming to awareness of the patriarchy baked in to many of the evangelical institutions with whom she valiantly worked.

What is going on when the mission is to fight sexism seen in such ugly ways as sexual trafficking but the churches and sending ministries with which she served where themselves mired in male chauvinism and insistence on hierarchical structures which assumed women’s submission? What to do when she finds herself trying to help empower poor or trafficked women, helping them trust their own voices and esteem, and realized that her own voice, her own esteem, has been seriously harmed by the false, patriarchal assumptions of her own evangelical traditions? In some ways, this very personal story is a case study of the big picture critique offered by Du Mez. Barr, Byrd, and others.

I found reading some of this really enjoyable – part of the plot is her wishing to date and her own struggles with a godly understanding of all that, and many young readers will relate. Yet, some was anguishing to read – in part because people I know have been there, being rebuked and mistrusted by organizations we love for not towing the line, shamed for being interested in justice not just “over there” but “in here, too.” For asking questions about institutional cultures and an over-reliance of male leadership. Tschanz writes with humility and candor and grit and grace, and it is beautiful to see her grow and emerge more boldly as the story unfolds. As it says on the back, “Meghan calls Christian women to amplify their voices for righteousness – and she calls the church to listen.” Yes, yes!

In Carolyn Custis James’ excellent introduction, she explains the uniqueness of this book so well. She writes, after explaining that some of the book is about third world women and girls who endure mistreatment:

Meghan’s work is unique in that she doesn’t distinguish those women from herself and other women in the evangelical church. She masterfully weaves in her own often costly journey as a young girl growing up in the evangelical purity culture amid pervasive teaching about female submission to male leadership that diminished her sense of self and created an alarming vulnerability. Later, when confronted by horrific violence against women, a crisis of conscience compelled her to ask deeper questions. One of the many strengths of this book is that she doesn’t just describe the issues, she drills deeper to explore how the church’s gender theology is part of the problem and needs to be reexamined against this wide-angle perspective.

Listen to this, one of many enthusiastic accolades:

Women Rising should be required reading for Christians. For every girl and woman who has been made to feel small, demeaned, violated, and confused, and for every man who has bought into the lie of female subordination and missed out on all that half the church has to offer, Meghan’s words speak freedom and hope for a better way.”–Blythe Hill, CEO and founder of the Dressember Foundation

Well, there you have it. One great, fascinating book by a historian. Another by a church historian and theologian. Another by a lay theologian and Bible scholar, and a very moving memoir by a woman on the front lines working for justice, helping women reclaim their too often muted voices. I know some of these four women have faced exceptional attention and some of their critics have been rude and even cruel. Pray for them. And, please, considering buying their books. Thank you very much.

It is very helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. Although we can’t say here exactly what your order would cost since the weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide.

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options, and, of course, UPS. If necessary, we can do overnight and other expedited methods, too. 

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.25.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $7.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “Media Mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $8.00 for one book or two to most places.

PLEASE LET KNOW KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER. IF YOU PREFER US MAIL, PLEASE INDICATE WHICH METHOD OF US MAIL.

BookNotes

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We’re sending out this quick BookNotes newsletter not with any brand new titles or big sales, but with a great invitation for you to join, if your schedule permits, an online conversation tomorrow, Friday, May 21^st at 1:30 ET.

Please register for this free online Zoom event HERE.

Mark it down so you don’t forget. It’s going to be good.

Do any of you recall when we had Karen Swallow Prior at our Hearts & Mind shop in Dallastown talking about her then brand new book On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life by Reading Great Books? What a fun and edifying evening it was. She was still hurting from her severe accident – her parents drove her here from Virginia, a charming bit of somewhat famous author book tour trivia that might win you some points in some circles but which struck us as wonderfully generous. She was great, and I was nervous with the crowd and her prestige and, to be honest, wanting to make sure the event wasn’t too weighed down with seriousness. We had an impressive display of all the classic books mentioned in On Reading Well. Some folks were there who do not naturally gravitate to the Great Books (let alone Christian reflections on Aristotelian virtue ethics) and we wanted the evening to make sense to all. It’s a fine line for me to be my goofy self, try to offer some authentic dignity to a dignified guest, and yet keep the event upbeat and light.

Karen was marvelous to chat with and a great teacher, presenter, interviewee. She read from the book, took questions, and we all gushed. I reminded folks of her marvelous first memoir – Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T.S. Poetry Press; $14.99) – and her very interesting and I think important work on the writer and abolitionist Hannah More, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson; $24.99.) She was one of the playwrights and poets who worked with William Wilbefroce and the Clapham sect, using the arts and literature to help reform the moral imaginations of the people so that actual legislative change to end slavery might actually stand a chance.

In more recent years Dr. Prior has collaborated with Joshua D. Chatraw to edite a volume called Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan Academic; $29.99) which I liked very much (and reviewed at BookNotes HERE.) It covers all manner of contemporary topics and issues, often with a few different perspectives offered. What a good resource it is! You’ll have to scroll down a bit through other good ones to find my BooksNotes celebration of Cultural Engagement, but I hope you check it out. And it is still on sale!)

Some of you may recall that I had the privilege of hosting another conversation with Karen Prior – this time on facebook live, presented by the good folks at Plough Publishing. The honoree of the evening was writer was Gina Dalfonzo, author of The Gospel in Dickens: Selections from His Works, for which Karen wrote a fabulous foreword. (Plough Publishing; $18.00. It’s still on sale at our 20% off as we described here.) Again, I was nervous, tried to keep it light, but the conversation, fun and fascinating as it was, was necessarily serious. These women authors are thoughtful and care about things that matter.

Can great literature, like Dickens (in that case) make a difference in our lives? In our world? To talk about virtue in these hard times is no small thing and to find inspiration from the gospel portrayed or hinted at in great literature is a major gift. Prior spoke a bit about that and she invited, nicely, Ms Dalfonzo to tell us more.

THIS IS MUCH OF WHAT WE ARE ABOUT.  I say all this to again illustrate some of what Hearts & Minds is about – reading, talking about books, encouraging conversations, trying to change the world for the better, learning to see how books of various sorts can transform our worldviews and our characters, and somehow – please God! – allow us to become the sorts of people that can bear witness to the very good news of Christ’s Kingdom a-coming. When you shop with us you are supporting a family-run, indie bookstore that is trying in our own small way to reform some of what faith-based bookstores are about.

We are inspired in our work by so many these days, not least of which is The Trinity Forum.

The Trinity Forum is an organization founded by Os Guinness (who, by the way, has a brand new book out that I will write about later called The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai’s Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom (IVP; $25.00.) They sponsor remarkable, important speakers and live conversations and they arrange reading groups for those throughout the country who are will to read solid excepts of classic writing. They offer a lot of great content and we appreciate them a lot. You should join!

Their usual host of their Forums is the very sharp, delightfully eloquent, always charming, Cherie Harder. To hear her interview scholars, writers, public intellectuals, artists, and theologians is always a great blessing, and to watch her offer intellectual hospitality to so many is breathtaking to me.

Over the years The Trinity Forum has hosted events live (mostly in a stately hall in DC) but they now serve us all by doing their programs on line. Ms Harder has hosted thoughtful and stimulating speakers as diverse as  modern artist Makoto Fujimura to Ruth Haley Barton on the spirituality of solitude; from political pundit and legal thinker David French to hip-hop artist and activist Sho Baraka. She has interviewed philosopher James K. A. Smith, Dr. Lydia Dugdale, journalist David Brooks and — twice, I believe — a feisty and wonderfully friendly conversation between conservative Catholic philosopher Robert George and radical black leader Cornel West, dear friends with very different views of things. The moderated Trinity Forum conversations – questions and replies – are usually astute and a great part of the evening.

I say all this to remind you that The Trinity Forum is a great resource (and many of their conversations are archived) and to remind you that this Friday, at 12:30 EST, Cherie Harder will again be talking with Professor and writer Karen Swallow Prior.

They will be discussing the relevance of reading Jane Austen.

As the good folks at Trinity Forum put it:

Austen offers a trove of wisdom to anyone who desires to live and love more fully and truthfully. As Prior writes in a recent Trinity Forum Reading, Austen is a “clever satirist, an insightful moral philosopher, and a deeply Christian thinker.” Her humorous writing, complex characters, and insightful observations on human behavior disarm our defenses and demonstrate the power of the virtues of humility and prudence, and the balance of reason and passion, perception and perspective.

Speaking of Austen’s Christian faith, Prior says,

Hers was the restrained, quiet, and personal faith of her Anglican tradition. Her novels are less altar calls than liturgies of ordinary life.

Austen’s world may feel quite removed from ours, but her focus on such everyday liturgies illustrates the importance of the seemingly mundane and illuminates the path towards repaired and rightly ordered relationships. We hope you will join us!

YOU CAN REGISTER RIGHT HERE

By the way, to further illustrate Dr. Karen Swallow Prior’s interest in helping us appreciate some great literature, she has annotated and introduced a few classic novels in special editions, nicely created by B+H Publishers. We’ve got them, of course. See her editions that they are calling “A Guide to Reading and Reflecting.” such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and, of course, Austen’s Sense and Sensibilities, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein. Each sell for $17.99 but at our BookNotes 20% OFF each are only $14.39. (Rumor has it she is working on two more for 2022.) Nice, huh?

It is very helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. Although we can’t say here exactly what your order would cost since the weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide.

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options, or, we use UPS. If necessary, we can do overnight and other expedited methods, too. We’re at your service.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.75.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $8.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “Media Mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $9.00 for one book or two to most places.

PLEASE LET KNOW KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER.

BookNotes

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DISCOUNT

20% OFF

YOU CAN PRE-ORDER ALMOST ANYTHING. As we often say, there is nothing complicated about PRE-ORDERING books from us. You hear about a forthcoming book and want it as soon as it releases? Just let us know. Particularly zealous about a certain author and want to order her next book whenever it comes out? No problem; we’ll get you on the list. Except in those odd cases of self-published authors who don’t distribute through real stores, we can get almost anything.

Just go ahead and order that soon-to-be-released book from us when your thinking of it, and it’s done. We have you covered. If it is one we will be announcing in BookNotes or reviewing later, we will give you our 20% off discount, too. Nice, huh?

We wanted to highlight a few forthcoming titles that we are excited about for you to PRE-ORDER now. Some of these are books we care about, so we’re thrilled to help launch them into the world, so to speak. We’ll deduct the 20% off discount and send them either (a) when they are first released or (b) we can hold them together (if you are ordering more than one) and send ‘em consolidated when the order is all here, compiled. I guess that is stewardly, conserving shipping resources a bit. Just let us know how you want us to serve you best.

These forthcoming titles all wanted to be announced together, or so it seems that is what I heard them whispering to me. In a way, they are all about cultivating our creative side, bringing out the inner artist, being – in the great phrase from that great book by Andy Crouch – culture makers. These are new books by folks who, in one way or another, are working hard to help us all up our game, to inspire us to be the sort of winsome and creative, faith-filled presence that could bee seen as signs of life. Yes – pre-order these books and join the effort to bear witness to abundant life, for yourself and others, for our culture and our institutions. We need some fresh thinking and enduringly faithful presence these days. These books can help..

I’m going to say more about a few of these, as you can see. To save you time and me some energy, I’m just going to mostly list the others and let others describe their value. But I will admit it — we are friends with Justin McRoberts and Margie Haack and Sean Smucker and we have personal hopes that their books will be widely known so I try to explain them and share our enthusiasm. They deserve it. PLEASE ORDER ANY AND ALL TODAY. Thanks.

It Is What You Make of It: Creating Something Great from What You’ve Been Given Justin McRoberts (Thomas Nelson) $18.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19  RELEASE DATE: JUNE 1, 2021

We often use that phrase “it is what it is” and, today, believe me, it was an okay thing for me to say. Some things are just out of our control, sideways or worse. Some of you know more than I. We get it.

However, my good friend Justin McRoberts has convinced me that it really isn’t a very faithful thing to say most of the time; in fact, it ain’t even so. Hardly anything, he reminds us, just is. We sometimes say, even in colorful language, that things happen. To us. This is almost like some sort of fatalism, as if we’re stuck, no matter what, without options or agency. In Justin’s view, though, that which happens are things we are given. And we have tools to make of them what we will.

I love that word in this context, that we are given things to do. I think I heard it put that was first from the elegant writer, deeply influenced by monastic spirituality, Robert Benson. Others might think of Mary Oliver’s poem asking what we will do with our “wild and precious life.”

Learning that in wisdom and grace is a big part of the art of living well. Things are rarely just what they are.

Almost all of the stories in McRoberts’ It Is What You Make of It are about his own work as an artist, broadly defined. He’s been a stage man (oh, wait until you read the story about the Shakespeare competition!), a folksinger, storyteller, writer, organizer, life coach, church planter, podcaster, but his stories are deeply human, real life stuff about relationships and fear and failure and hope. McRoberts talks about reconciliation and wholeness, about making changes and facing the complexities of the ongoing struggle for solid integrity. The stories he tells are captivating, sometimes funny, irresistible. A few are pretty raw as he shares episodes that were clearly not his best moments.

The cover is pretty stupid, if you ask me, and yet I had tears in my eyes as he told the story about that dumb plastic cactus. It’s simple but so good. The cover is fabulous, now that I see what it is about. (See it is what you make of it.) Our foibles and failures, too, are, after all, what we make of them. And sometimes – literally (you’ll have to read it yourself) – all you have is an inexplicable, dumb, blow-up cactus.

A few of us who recall Mr. McRoberts’ first record label –5 Minute Walk – and some of his edgy/cool 1990s label mates will love when he talks about his early days recording, performing, and touring. (And doing a few gigs filling in for the lead singer of the great third wave ska band Five Iron Frenzy! Who knew?) But the takeaways are clear for any of us, mostly about producing work, a body of work, that allows us to connect with others. He quotes Seth Godin about the role of love in art and it isn’t sentimental or sappy. This is a weighty view of our imagination and human culture-making. Justin has his feet on the ground even if he dreams big. He’s as visionary as Bob Goff, it seems, but, man, he keeps it real. Really real.

This brand new book is great for anyone who has a creative streak, or who wants to cultivate more of that righteous zip in his or her lives. As he says in the first pages, since we are made in the image of a creative God, such a desire really should include us all. We are designed for this stuff; we are made to be makers.

It Is What You Make of It: Creating Something Great from What You’ve Been Given is a book that – if I’m being honest (which, after reading Justin’s revealing and candid stories here, I have to be) – I might not have picked up if I didn’t admire and like the author so much. I trust him a lot and would read whatever he offers. You see, there are a lot of books these days about kicking up the energy, never giving up, not letting circumstances defeat you, being a social entrepreneur, joining God in the healing of the world, doing your thing. Most are okay, but some tend to wear me out, not energize me. Some make me roll my eyes – I don’t have much patience for those with that super posed, slightly edgy image, coifed with just a tad of rebellion, but who are well resourced and privileged and just talk about their own personal fulfillment all the time. Getting ahead, finding your sweet spot, being a “creative” — always as a noun.

Justin, I dare say, is different. He’s funny and humble but yet has, as he himself puts it, a big, “every square inch” of creation being restored redemptive worldview. He’s gritty and graceful, kind – or wants to be – and invites us not just to get off on our own ambition, but to make something of the opportunities and resources we have, something that might leave the world in a bit better place. He understands a lot about power and wealth and poverty and racism and doesn’t shy away from being honest about those realities.

As an old Young Life guy will do, he riffs on gospel stories, and he does it well. He weaves insights from aesthetics and design principles to hard-learned life lessons to Bible stories and back again to help readers process this call to make something of whatever life hands us. To be real and to be better, with others.

From his comments about the blind guy in the gospels who was at first only sort of healed, to the story about being a KISS fan at age 6, to some tender stuff about his wife and children, to the debacle that was the making of the otherwise great CMYK book, It Is What You Make of It is a quick, fun, read, inspiring for anyone who needs some guidance to get on with things. I recommend it, especially for younger adults (even teens) who will appreciate the breezy, direct, writing. Or any who feel stuck, annoyed with their circumstances, wishing for encouragement to dream some serious dreams.

The discussion questions to ponder at the end are well designed, thought-through, a helpful. Your going to need a journal, so get one of those, too. Although he does say that if it has to be in a notebook in which you write recipes, that’s okay, too, as long as it isn’t near any beet recipes. He hates beets. But he does want you to journal along because he really, really wants this to help you in your own creative journey. That’s part of what his mission is these days, coaching, consulting, helping – life as performance art. Buy this book and join him!

No Place: A Memoir Margie Haack (Square Halo Books) $24.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99  RELEASE DATE: MID-JUNE 2021

This great memoir deserves a longer review, but one doesn’t want to spoil too much – that’s part of the adventure of reading a memoir, after all. For now, you should know that it is the second memoir in a trilogy that is being issued (or in the case of book 1 and book 3, re-issued, eventually) by the good folks at Square Halo Books. Book 1 in the “Place” trilogy is The Exact Place in which Margie Haack writes about her girlhood, poor as can be, in rural Minnesota. I raved about that a decade ago and have pressed it into the hands of a number of folks who like good storytelling, honest writing, literary memoir about coming of age and, in her case, finding a deep relationship with God by becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. The Exact Place ends as she is grappling with her place in life, but confident that she was where she was meant to be all along. The cover art is being changed and will it will be reissued in the Fall of 2021.

The second book, coming out very soon, has a different tone – it is at times less confident about being at the “exact place” because in many ways, in her early young adult years, her early marriage, and her early, eccentric faith and ministry (more on that below) she really was out of sorts, often sensing an alienation that is the opposite of being at home. She was, in a way, in no man’s land, and the title hints at some of the ominous nature of this part of her life’s journey.

No Place is one of the very favorite books I’ve read this past year and we cannot wait to share it, selling it here on line and telling others about it. I have to wonder, as I sometimes do, if I would have liked this book had I not known anything about Margie and her husband, Denis, who figures prominently in No Place. It chronicles, after all, much of their meeting and dating and early-married life, so my friendship with and deep admiration of the two of them colors why I wanted to read this delightful part of their backstory and why I cared so much about it. But here is my hope: even if you never read The Exact Place or do not know anything about their ongoing ministry as the curators of Critique journal and her Notes From Toad Hall now called “Coffee…”) newsletters, and their drop in center of a home that was the closest thing the US had to a L’Abri that wasn’t an official L’Abri, even then, you will not be able to put this story down.

Where to begin to tell you about this marvelous, fascinating, honest, and utterly captivating memoir?

Two or three things for now. First, she is very honest about their lovely (if at times painful) early years of marriage that was sweet in the telling even if it was difficult. I’m not sure if most couples have this kind of drama but many do, and without sounding clichéd, she shares their quotidian misunderstandings and slights. As a few early reviewers noted, readers will be glad for this candor, helping us all realize we are not alone in our marital stress and our less than glorious relationships. Coming of age in the late 1960s in the context of (get this!) both the hippy counterculture and the fundamentalist Christian subculture put their worldviews in considerable tension. And it made their marriage complicated, especially as Denis and she came from considerably different backgrounds. This hard love story is beautiful to behold and it was a nice part of the story.

More pages of No Place are given, though, to the broader context of their adapting to their own sense of calling in the world, their place, their mission. This is forged in the midst of this clash of cultures as they moved into a hippy commune that was a part of the Jesus movement, wanting to bear witness to Christ’s love to the counterculture. And this is exceedingly complicated. In this way, it is much of the cultural story of the late 60s and early 70s told through the eyes of this one woman and her spouse.

(I have to insert here – and Margie would approve – that a part of their story includes discovering, eventually, the writings of Francis & Edith Schaeffer, who combined a cultural awareness of the times and heart for the disillusioned youth of the counter culture. Two of the books that were very important to them in those years were recently re-issued by IVP in their “Signature Classics Collection” series, namely, Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There (with a new foreword by the Haack’s very good friend, Steve Garber) and, with a long blurb on the inside by yours truly, Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever.)

You can imagine the bone-deep questions that captured them, which they obsessed over: is the world groovy, or is it sinful and demon-filled? Is human culture—art, literature, cinema, rock and roll, even new cuisine from kitchens foreign to their safe, white-bread upper Midwest background – a good part of God’s good world or the devil’s playground, dangerous, worldly, to be avoided? Is the world fundamentally a playground or a battleground or both? Is the American way of life consistent with a Christian vision? What about war and ecology and gender roles and alternative medicine and the individualism built into suburbia? What, really, is the church? All sorts of nearly subconscious assumptions came to the fore – especially, it seems, in Denis whose family was exceptionally rigid and whose faith was exceptionally legalistic. (As this book shows, Margie learned to be curious about all sorts of things, for instance as she was mentored in new ways of cooking with a whole-grain and natural sort of diet, which had huge political implications about our food system and American farming habits.)

As they moved out of the straight-laced fundamentalism of their youth (and the black and white answers that came as obligatory to that fundamentalism) and moved into a ministry among hippies and cult gurus, druggies and hitch-hikers, people into everything from witchcraft to Marxism to LSD, the scenes that played out (and how it so deeply touched their hearts and attitudes) became the grist for one heck of a book. No Place is a personal and spiritual memoir set in some of the most interesting times of the last 100 years. It is Margie’s story, yes, but the backdrop looms.

Dear readers, not only does this combustible clash of worldviews and lifestyles create the context for a great story, it would make a great movie! It is very well done. We dare not – Margie does not let us – caricature all this: it cannot be reduced to a clever summary banner: fundamentalist kids join the counterculture to tell them about Jesus! Corrupt and narrow-minded Christians leave behind their legalism to be as free as the hippies! No, it is not that simple and certainly not that easy. But it is true, on their way to a deeper more faithful, Biblical vision of goodness and beauty and grace, they had to leave behind some of the disdain for this world promoted by their fundamentalist sect. And to share God’s love and a gospel-centered worldview with the kids of the counterculture – at least as they experienced it in the commune in New Mexico — they did have to learn to appreciate some values that were not congenial to many conservative churches. Like Francis and Edith Schaeffer teaching the drop- outs on the road to Marrakesh in Europe, Denis and Margie found that one of their greatest strengths was not only their cultural awareness but their desire to live out of incarnational love. They had to learn to really love. They had to make a place out of no place, embodying real love in the high desert. This moving book helps us see how it happened.

It continues, too – spoiler alert – as they move on after the Jesus Movement commune. Denis takes some menials jobs. Margie writes beautifully and honestly about their first birth and raising a baby while trying to eke out a living. Denis worked in youth ministry for a while at a well intended church. The story develops and even if the high drama of the commune has subsided a bit in their lives, the memoir invites us into the next leg of their journey. It is nothing short of a gift to read such interesting ruminations on trusting God as they made their way to a clearer sense of vocation and hope.

Andi Ashworth, co-founder with her recording artist husband Charlie Peacock, of the Art House movement, wrote a very good foreword to No Place in which she tells not only about their friendship and cherished correspondence but how much self-awareness and courage she took from reading the memoir:

Andi writes, in a letter to Margie:

After Chuck and I were married in 1975, we spent the next years trying on an array of beliefs and lifestyles. We had no mentors or safe, hospitable places to help us figure things out. I can only imagine the difference it would have made if we had a Denis and Margie in our lives. Having said that, what makes your book so beautiful and believable is that you tell it all true. The struggles of self and of marriage, the realities of hospitality, the shaping effect of family, and the slow formation of faith and vocation in all its mess and pain and joy.

She continues:

Margie and Denis have traveled many roads to find out if Christianity is worth living and dying for. She writes about this with a striking, emotional honesty. There’s no skipping over the hard parts or the funny parts, which makes this book such a compelling and fascinating read. The story rings true.

Another younger wife, mother, and artist who has been influenced by Denis and Margie, is the singer songwriter Katie Bowser, herself an astute lover of books and culture. She had an advanced copy of No Place and writes:

When I read Margie’s first book, The Exact Place, I reveled in her Annie Dillard-caliber storytelling. I was moved by the unbelievable empathy, wit and clear-sightedness with which she regarded her younger self. It felt like greed to hope that she would plumb those depths again someday and share stories and insight for the station of life I am now in — marriage and parenting. Margie’s courage, hilarity and honesty in No Place are a strong and gentle hand to hold for the rest of us who are stumbling along as we learn to walk by faith.

As I was trying hard to capture my appreciation for this book in a few pithy sentences, I came up with these two endorsing paragraphs. If I’m lucky, at least part of one might be on the back cover. It would be an honor.

There are memoirs that are so interesting and well written that one just enjoys spending time within the story they tell. There are others where the author has learned much, perhaps the hard way, and we are wise to listen in, absorbing her hard-won truths. And there are those that are sheer testimony, giving glory to God who seems the real actor in the story’s drama. It is rare when a memoir is all three, and Margie Haack’s No Place is thankfully one of these rare treats that is fun to read, offers profound wisdom, and through which we learn much about the God who is there.

To say that Margie Haack has been through a lot isn’t the half of it. Many enjoyed her exquisite, colorful Exact Place but now, in No Place, we get the next decades of her life, set in the often wild days of the Jesus Movement. Just as she invited us into her impoverished early days in the first memoir, now we learn about her young adult years, her marriage to Denis, their struggles with toxic fundamentalism (and each other) and then — wow! — the vivid experiences of their life in a late ’60s, counter-cultural, Christian community reaching hippies, druggies, and, yes, those seemingly akin to zombies. What sort of place was that? How did it shape this generous, thoughtful, and widely respected couple? Did no place become some place, some place like home? No Place is a candid and splendid read, one you will not be able to put down, and through which, perhaps, you will find your own good place.

 

He Saw That It Was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World Sho Baraka (Waterbrook Press) $22.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60 RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2021

I hope you know the good hip-hop art and social activism of Sho Baraka; this book is simply stunning and I wish I had time to tell you more about it in the detail it deserves. If Justin McRoberts’ book is filled with his earnest stories and inviting us to “make something of what comes our way” Sho – who Justin has shared stages with, by the way – takes this vision to the next level. He is serious as an artist, he is serious as a cultural critic, he is serious about the implications of the affirmation of God’s declaration about creation; he is honest as a black man in a predominantly white culture who wants to be prophetic and outspoken, but to do so Christianly. The subtitle is exactly right for this must-read book: “Reimagining Your Creative life to Repair a Broken World.”

As a rap singer and hip hop activist, he has studied how stories work; as a lay theologian, he knows that theologian truth often is told best through the allusive arts. He was raised on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance (and, who knows, may someday himself write a novel.) In the book he cites Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison and (get this) a George MacDonald novel, for instance, and explores the nature of a good story. He’s got lots of solid Bible, invitations to think hard about culture-making, and how to be gracious even in the midst of working in multi-cultural settings. He’s a good thinker and a generative leader. (Some of our readers may recall that he was one of the founders of the AND Campaign. His given name, by the way, is Amisho Baraka Lewis. He attended Tuskegee University and the University of North Texas.

Sho is one of the most strikingly original Christian thinkers of his generation. Ours is a time for courageous Christ-centered creativity. Sho rarely tells us what we want or expect to hear but speaks with artful poetry, fierce insight, and gracious justice about the issues of our era. I hang on his every word.” –Timothy Dalrymple, PhD, president and CEO of Christianity Today

“Sho has not written a book for only creatives. He has written a book that will help all of us think intentionally about how the work we do (whatever it is) can be leveraged to fulfill God’s purposes. He Saw That It Was Good is the wonderful mix of history, theology, art, and cultural analysis that we need in this moment. I highly recommend it.” –Esau McCaulley, PhD, assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College

The great forward to this book is by legendary sportscaster and Christian spokesperson Chris Broussard, who very wonderfully links Sho Baraka’s work with classic black literature and the arts, giving appropriate shout outs to Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and Absalom Jones. This should assure us that this is a solid, mature book – if witty and upbeat – which offers historic principles from social movements that will help us cultivate our own creative callings, no matter what we do. This book, as the back cover puts it, will help you “return to your biggest and truest story.” Your life (and your world) need never be the same.

Our friends at the respected Trinity Forum hosted an event just a few days ago (May 14, 2021) with Sho Baraka which you can view here. There’s some very thoughtful questions from participants (per usual) and it’s worth listening to the whole thing. The conversation with their director Cheri Harder was called “Reimagination & Repair: Creativity for the Life of the World.” 

Finding Your Yes: Living a Life That’s Open to God’s Invitations Christine Wagoner (IVP) $16.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80 RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2021

Well, in my comments about McRoberts’ book, above, I noted that I often tire of books that are too positive, upbeat, and overpromise about the ease and joy of finding your sweet spot and being in the bliss and flow of a truly creative life. It’s just harder than that, and I mistrust books that make human flourishing sound to easy, or too self indulgent (in our hard and harrowing world.) So I was not sure if I’d want to promote a book about “finding your yes” as if just saying yes is the key to “your best life ever.”

Rest assured, discerning readers, your BookNotes columnist has not grown soft. I trust IVP and I’ve heard good things about this feisty, creative author. For her purposes in this book, the “finding your yes” slogan is, in fact, about taking the risk to listen well to God’s promptings and to be eager to engage with opportunities God offers us to step out in faith. In other words, this is less a book about the bold and artful life and more a book about spiritual formation, which, come to think of it, is more of an art than a science. If anybody of the experience and candor of Christine Wagoner invites us to be attentive to the movements of the Spirit and gives us practical tools for “living a life of openness to the invitations of God in our lives” we should rejoice. We should buy a bunch and pass ‘em out. This is a key component, I think, of a Spirit-filled life, learning to hear and follow the promptings of God.

As Andy Le Peau (an editor at IVP and author of the excellent Write Better) notes, Wagoner’s book is “hopeful yet realistic.” That is, the opportunities God puts in our path “may be big or small. They may lead to success or disappointment. We may have doubts or courage. But through stories, Scripture, and hard-won wisdom, Wagoner shows how God can use it all.”

Tender, authentic, and touching with so many diverse stories of saying yes in the face of hope and heartache, Christine Wagoner leads us with hospitality and warmth toward God’s invitation for us all, using Scripture, stories, and prayer. Every person considering saying yes to God should read this book to find strength, comfort, and hope in discerning steps of faithful risk taking. –Sarah Shin, author of Beyond Colorblind

‘Perhaps freedom to simply be open to either yes or no with no expectations would be a stretching invitation for you,’ writes author Christine Wagoner. Until a number of years ago, I was a consummate ‘yes girl.’ It was akin to my addiction to people pleasing and approval seeking. My yes was to all the requests of others. Yes can be quite a tricky notion: Too little yes can cause life to be flat and unimaginative, dare I say boring? Yet too much yes can find us depleted, listless from the wear and tear of over-commitment. Wagoner helps us to walk around in and try on the way of yes, and then turn on our own internal compass for finding a (good) yes. –Juanita Campbell Rasmus, author of Learning to Be: Finding Your Center After the Bottom Falls Out

Why Do I Feel Like This? Understand Your Difficult Emotions and Find Grace to Move Through Amandi Peace (IVP) $18.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40 RELEASE DATE: MAY 25, 2021

Almost all of the books on creativity and books on personal growth talk about getting over the hard stuff, the blocks, the dip, the hurdles. Hard feelings and difficult emotions are obviously part of that. Again, there are too many books that are either too dismissive of serious pain (even trauma) and I suppose there are some that are too tediously detailed in examining every psychological nodule of one’s interior life. As we sometimes warn, too, some are almost too religious, using faith as some kind of blessed token to protect us and free us from the hurts of our fallen world. Amandi Peace seems to avoid the pitfalls and here gives us an interesting, positive, but realistic study (okay, what one reviewer called “bracing”) of how to move through complicated feelings. It’s something I know I need, especially these days. Ya know? Why Do I Feel Like This? is written as a book for women, addressing women’s particular anxieties and stresses.

Here is how the publisher describes some of her project:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all sorts of conflicting, difficult emotions. But psychology professor and personal development coach Dr. Peace Amadi can help you navigate the complexity of your emotions and live through them in healthy ways. With insights from both psychology and Scripture, this book offers you a clear plan to get your peace back and find your joy again.

Better, here are some high raves from reliable women:

Few bridges have been built to connect scientific psychological research and practice with spiritual faith communities. Dr. Peace Amadi’s book builds this necessary bridge. It offers tangible tools, helping those struggling with mental health difficulties to better understand how to improve their mental health. This is a gift to the Christian community.”–Jenny Wang, clinical psychologist and founder of the @asiansformentalhealth community

It comes naturally to avoid what we don’t want to feel–especially if we believe we can’t heal, that we can’t survive the journey into our own pain. Yet I’ve learned that difficult emotions don’t go away–they just go underground. And there they undermine our foundations until finally we must turn our attention their way. In this book you’ll find tools for acknowledging complex emotions, bringing them into the light, and welcoming God’s healing work. — Amy Simpson, author of Troubled Minds and Anxious

For far too many of us, important conversations around the emotional realities of anxiety, shame, and depression have been glossed over in the name of trusting God. We’ve all had experiences of receiving well-meaning but ultimately deeply unhelpful advice that equates having faith in God with being free of any emotional struggle. However, in this timely book, Dr. Peace Amadi shows us a path to a different way. With stunning clarity, wisdom, and compassion, she helps us learn how to reframe the important inner work of engaging with God through our emotions, even when it’s difficult and confusing. Her profound expertise in psychology, vibrant faith, and warmth come together to create a unique resource that feels like we’re somehow sitting in her classroom and at the same time having a heart-to-heart over coffee with a trusted spiritual mentor and friend.  — Tracey Gee, leadership development coach and consultant

Terraform: Building a Better World Propaganda (HarperOne) $24.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99 RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2021

Thanks to HarperOne I’ve had an early version of this for a while and I keep dipping in to it, checking it out, reading portions out loud… it’s one of those books that most will read straight through but that allows, I think, for a more creative and haphazard approach. It is a colorful and creative work of art itself. Some of the prose is brilliant, energetic, vital. There’s lots of poetry and some very good pen and ink drawings that I found quite moving. Prop is an amazing man, thoughtful, energetic, and friends with Sho Baraka (so it is cool they both have books and new music out this month.) His non-stage name is Jason Petty and he is the son of a Black Panther who grew up in the hood of South Central.

And, for what it is worth, the amazing Jeremy Courtney of Preemptive Love penned a great foreword, sent in from his own very hard place near a Syrian war zone, standing in solidarity with people being massacred by ISIS and, sometimes, bombed by the US. That the exceptionally creative justice seeker and peace-maker JC draws on Prop’s good words and counts him as dear friend speaks volumes!

The title bespeaks of his creative vision; the word means to create a livable world out of an inhospitable one, making it a perfect image or metaphor for the transformational power of the gospel itself.

Listen to this description of the book:

In this deep, challenging, and thoughtful book, Propaganda looks at the ways in which our world is broken. Using the metaphor of terraforming–creating a livable world out of an inhospitable one–he shows how we can begin to reshape our homes, friendships, communities, and politics.

Here is how the publisher describes it:

In this transformative time — when we are redefining what a truly just and equitable world looks like, and reflecting on the work that needs to be done both in our spiritual and secular lives–Propaganda rallies readers to create that just world. He sheds light on how nefarious origin stories have skewed our views of ourselves and others and allowed gross injustices, and demonstrates how great storytelling and excellent art can create and shape new perspectives of the world and make all of us better.

I hope to revisit this wild ride of a book later, but for now, the best way to assure you it is one you should pre-order now is to share just a few of the many rave reviews. Please read them carefully as they capture much of the importance of this forthcoming volume.

What is this book? Is it poetry? Prose? Wild ramblings? Social commentary? Inspiration? Provocation? Yes to all of it. Yes to Prop’s beautiful, faithful imagination and to his sharp-eyed, open-hearted observation of the world around us. Yes to his gorgeous call to dream, to cherish, to remember, to breathe, to love.” — Jeff Chu, co-curator of Evolving Faith, and author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?

“Propaganda brings the gifts of his brilliant thoughts and powerful words into a book that not only inspires us to believe that we can recreate a world in which beauty and justice flourish but gives us the tools to do so.” — Jenny Yang, Vice President for Advocacy and Policy, World Relief

“Brilliant, searing, and completely new, Prop doesn’t just teach us about terraforming, he literally terraformed something new and generous – and funny! – with this book. It will give you a whole language and lens for co-creation of a more beautiful and true world.” — Sarah Bessey, New York Times bestselling author of A Rhythm of Prayer

“Propaganda’s brilliant prose crystallizes into this refreshing, comprehensive guide for anyone who has yearned to transform themselves and their communities.” — Ian Morgan Cron, author of The Story of You and co-author of The Road Back to You

“The culture is at an inflection point and we need voices that can rightly interpret the times, voices that can inspire humanity to move forward. In walks Propaganda with the fire of a Black prophet and a tongue sharp like a sword ready to do the painstaking work of terraforming our souls. Terraform is gritty, masterful, and wholly transcendent.”– William Matthews, Artist x Advocate, Singer-Songwriter, co-host of The Liturgist Podcast

A Journey of Sea and Stone: How Holy Places Guide and Renew Us Tracy Balzer with a forward by Scott Erickson (Broadleaf Books) $16.99       OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59  RELEASE DATE: JUNE 8, 2021

It strikes me over and over these days that those who want a creative, purposeful, imaginative life ought to pay attention to creation (not transcend it) and the materiality and particular shape of our localities. A favorite, serious book I reviewed a few years ago remains a key title for artists: Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life by Jennifer Allen Craft (IVP; $32.00) which calls artists to be attentive to place.

Well, A Journey of Sea and Stone will be a beautiful way to remind us of that, paying attention to what she calls “holy places” and the spiritual practice of pilgrimages to (as the poet famously said) to bring us back to our starting places, perhaps seeing things as if for the first time. Who knows, maybe seeing all things not only as sheer gift but as holy. This forthcoming book is about the author’s significant journey to Scotland’s Isle of Iona. She shows how these hallowed spaces of the island “sculpted, bended, and sustained her spiritually.”

There are also some rich illustrations reflecting Iona’s stunning terrain and Celtic heritage, “providing spiritual seekers and armchair travelers a fresh entre into the world of the sacred, wherever they may be.” Nice, huh?  And the forward, I should mention, is by painter and arts educator/instigator Scott Erickson, who co-wrote two books with the above-mentioned Justin McRoberts (Prayer: Forty Days of Practice and May It Be So: Forty Days with the Lord’ Prayer and gave us last year the amazing Honest Advent. He actually has a new book coming in January 2020; stay tuned.)

By the way, one of the great blurbs on this forthcoming Journey of Sea and Stone (beside the lovely support of poet Luci Shaw) is from novelist Leif Enger. I hope you know his amazing Peace Like a River and Virgil Wander. He writes such beautiful praise:

Which books keep you sane when the world locks you down? For me it’s those with marrow-deep ties to the geography they describe–Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, Timothy Egan’s pilgrimage to Rome, Henry Beston’s year on the beach at Cape Cod. New to this heartening shelf is Tracy Balzer’s A Journey of Sea and Stone, the tale of her longstanding love for the cloistered island of Iona, off the Scottish coast. We all have places we seem to have known forever. In lucid, rhythmic prose, Balzer develops a spiritual travelogue of solace and gratitude, of openness to wonder and reason, and of a longing for what Beston called ‘the dear earth itself underfoot.’ This is a welcome book.

 

The Weight of Memory: A Novel Shawn Smucker (Revell) $15.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79 RELEASE DATE: JULY 6, 2021

Okay, Hearts & Minds friends, BookNotes readers, fans and friends. This is a book I’m asking you to consider. I’m hoping many of our supporters will get behind it, recommending it for their book clubs, choosing it as a novel to read, perhaps gifting it to the curious and open minded.

As we’ve said before, Shawn Smucker is a dear friend and good customer. He has written a pair of spectacular YA speculative fiction fantasies, The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There (Beth is still waiting for a third) and a handful of moving, well written, and particularly thought provoking adult novels, like Light From Distant Stars. Each has a bit of weirdness to them. Okay, maybe a lot of weirdness in the case of his Dante homage, These Nameless Things.

Shawn has also done a book in the memoir genre, telling of his friendship with a refugee from Syria who had settled in Lancaster, PA, and what Shawn learned from this new, somewhat needy neighbor. (Once We Were Strangers: What Friendship with a Syrian Refugee Taught Me About Loving My Neighbor is also great for book groups or adult classes.) It’s very good.

The forthcoming Weight of Memory is his best yet. Some of the lines are just stunning as he turns a phrase or offers a metaphor. We hope to feature him here at the store this summer – maybe a backyard book launch, Lord willing– I would love to hear him read some of this out loud. He and his wife, Maile Silva, (who do a fabulous podcast together about the creative life, being parents and spouses and writers, cleverly called “The Stories Between Us”) are tremendously fun and kind people and having them here would be our great honor. More than a year ago we had hoped for a book launching event for These Nameless Things but Covid but the brakes on that.

In any event, we are now taking pre-orders for The Weight of Memory which, of you order it now, will come with an autograph and a simple art piece that is themed from the novel itself. For those who have a classy library or want solid hardbacks to take to wherever you read fine novels, we can get a hardback edition, too (for $29.99; our discounted price for that would be $23.99.)

This well-done novel is a story about, well, a lot of things, including death (which will come as no surprise to Smucker’s many fans.) It’s not a big spoiler to say the opening chapter is the main character with his young doctor, getting the terminal diagnosis. It is cleverly writer, captivating. I was hooked from the first page. Throughout there are these good lines that just make me smile, including the line in that first chapter where the patient sits on the examination table awaiting the news in the doctor’s office and “the paper underneath me crackles like electricity.”  Later, on a hot day as kids come out of school, their feet shuffle “like sandpaper.” Later, he mentions a Pentecostal preachers shoes which “shone like the deepest reaches of space.” I’ve seen that guy and his shoes, I thought.

I’ll tell you about the plot as the publisher describes it – my evaluations will have to wait until later. The plot revolves around Paul Elias who, upon receiving a terminal diagnosis, must find someone to watch over his granddaughter, Pearl, who has been in his charge. Paul decides to take her back to Nysa — both the place where he grew up and the place where he lost his beloved wife under strange circumstances forty years earlier.

But when he picks up Pearl from school, the little girl already seems to know of his plans, claiming a woman told her.

When they get to Nysa, Paul reconnects with an old friend, is nearly undone by the onslaught of memory, but that’s not even the half of it. Pearl starts vanishing at night and returning with increasingly bizarre tales and reality itself seems up for grabs. The Weight of Memory is both suspenseful and a bit introspective so will be appealing to many different sorts of fiction readers.

I like the way the publisher puts it: In The Weight of Memory “the past and the present mingle like opposing breezes, teasing out the truth about life, death, and sacrifice.” Pre-order it today and stay tuned for more info about possible gatherings and readings with this wonderfully creative writer.

It is very helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. Although we can’t say here exactly what your order would cost since the weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide.

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options, or, we use UPS. If necessary, we can do overnight and other expedited methods, too. We’re at your service.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.75.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $8.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “Media Mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $9.00 for one book or two to most places.

PLEASE LET KNOW KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER.

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As Mother’s Day approached I naturally thought of my mom who died two summer’s ago. I miss her dearly and never tire of telling how she got me interested in the ecology movement of the late ‘60s. She was a simple farm girl growing up with a father who was for a while a tenant farmer in Centre County. For a while he managed a secluded hunting lodge where rich men from Philadelphia would decamp to camp. He was a trout fisherman, but mom wasn’t rugged or outdoorsy. She certainly was no bohemian – I pretended to be the family hippy and she did not approve.

But yet, she read (alongside Christy, Catherine Marshall’s Appalachian autobiography) Silent Spring, the groundbreaking anti-pesticide work of Rachel Carson, which was part nature writing and part expose about DDT. Mom loved birds (and cherished her ornamental plates with painted birds, and a few framed Ray Harm prints that rivaled the realism of Audubon.) She was sad that our modern stupidity would harm God’s creatures. It was pretty much as simple as that, I think – she loved nature, she loved birds, and while she was learning to be thoroughly modern, she understood that big corporations were doing bad things polluting our Earth. She got our little church youth group to pick up litter on that first Earth Day in 1970.

(By the way, as an aside: did you know that the remarkable Rachael Carson grew up in Western Pennsylvania? Her Springdale homestead is actually under care of a small Presbyterian church out there whose pastor over the years has been a good friend and faithful customer.)

So, even though mom was not a deeply literary reader, she truly delighted in the fruit trees and expansive fields of the home I grew up in and the small woods into which she and my dad moved in the early 1970s. She enjoyed trailer camping with my dad and in her elderly years liked going to see “the lake” at a local State Park.

This week’s BookNotes highlights recent titles about nature (which I prefer to call creation as per Norman Wirzba’s From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World) that I think many of our customers will love. I share them now in my mother’s memory. I hope they inspire the serious readers among us to continue to dig into this long-standing genre of “nature writing” and, as the Psalmist insists, to see the very creation as that which worships God. The heavens speak and the trees clap their hands, you know. Mom would have liked to hear me talk about books like this, I know that; she might have even bought a few and placed them next to her Rachel Carson.

To order these or other good books, please click on the “order” button at the bottom of this column which takes you to our secure order form at the Hearts & Minds website where you can safely enter credit card info. Don’t forget to tell us how many copies you may want and what your shipping preferences are.

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Chasing Dragonflies: A Natural, Cultural and Personal History Cindy Crosby, illustrated by Peggy Macnamara (Northwestern University press) $24.95       OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

This lovely book was one of my absolute, favorite reads last summer as I sat outside reading day by day, late into the dusk. If it were not for the demands of our mail order business in the worst of the pandemic I would have dedicated a long review just to this, so taken was I with it. It is interesting, informative, funny, and at times so moving I had to wipe reluctant tears. I recommend it to anyone who cares about the outdoors and obviously to those who love the lovely little insect-like creatures.

Dragonflies are considered beautiful – and, in some places, considered fearsome – the world over. We all know that there are birdwatchers and most know there are those who are dedicated to tracking butterflies. Honeybees are now so endangered that folks follow them. Who knew that there are clubs and groups and scholarly researchers – including what Crosby calls “citizen scientists” – who painstakingly track these odes?

Crosby is a good and honest writer and she says, without sentimentality, that “dragonflies changed by life.” The story is one she unfolds as she speaks about her depression, her faith, the solace found in nature. (Indeed, she wrote a stunning book decades ago about prayer practices as she worked to replant prairie grasses.) She writes well about her sense of self and her sense of place. As a workshop leader and teacher on natural history in the Chicago area she has honed her communication craft and as a coordinator of dragonfly monitoring programs at the Morton Arboretum and the Nachusa Grasslands, she has deepened her uncanny ability to see, to really see, and to invite others into wonder.

Chasing Dragonflies does wonderfully what many books like this do less well; she weaves mythology from around the world with science bits; she tells of her own journey into the study of natural history with glorious details of her work and advocacy. She offers lots of fascinating facts about the little critters and draws us into her gentle but adventurous storytelling of her kayaking and canoeing journeys into streams and swamplands. The rhythm of the book is excellent, the pacing and balance between passionate eco-writing and heart-felt personal revelations and hard science and great life lessons – it all just works so delightfully well. Chasing Dragonflies is a book I want to tell others about and yet fear it will seem to obscure, too dainty. Trust me. This is a great read. Get it, give it, talk about it, and – who knows – maybe you’ll be inspired to, as one reviewer put it, “get up and get out there.”

Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the Wilderness Nick Ripatrazone (Broadleaf Books) $25.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

This brand new hardback is one of my favorite books this season and I simply couldn’t put it down. It isn’t directly about creation or in the genre of “nature writing” (although the long and gorgeously written introduction is, indeed. Ripatrazone knows his north Jersey watershed well and writes beautifully about the flora and fauna he and his family see in their local hikes.)

Yes, the book invites us to explore the spirituality of the wilderness. But it does this by way of literary reflection. Ripatrazone is a college lit prof and culture editor for Image Journal. He wrote the significant (and significantly reviewed) Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction which showcased his considerable literary insights (especially about Catholic novelists and his own skillful writing chops himself.)

Wild Belief is an ingeniously arranged study of various faith-based literary figures who wrote about the wilderness, whose own encounters with the wild creation (and the wild God of creation) formed their souls and informed their writing projects. Poets and prophets, indeed.

First, Rip (man, I hope that’s his nickname) offers a very good introduction to the topic in a strong opening chapter “What is the Wilderness” drawing (naturally) on Stegner et al. He moves to the nature of prophecy (quoting Merton, among other poets and ecologists and Bible scholars) and explores how, in the Bible, God shows up in nature (and, especially, in the motif of the desert in both the Older and Newer Testaments.)

In each remaining chapter he covers one or sometimes two writers, each with a certain sort of theme that makes them good conversation partners. Professor Ripatrazone offers really good biography of these writerly characters and in inspiring, helpful, teacherly, ways, highlights key lines from their work. Reading Wild Belief is like taking a whole college class and it’s the kind you would never, ever miss, even if you might want to take a stroll through the outdoors right afterwards. I wonder if he’s the kind of teacher who, on a warm Spring day allows the class to meet outdoors.

Space here does not allow – and it is a bit above my own pay grade, anyway – to studiously review these informative chapters. But here’s the summary. I hope you are inspired to order it from us. It’s really, really good.

After the first two excellent general chapters get starts with a poet/priest you most likely know of. (Heck, Eugene Peterson used one of this poet’s lines as a book titles more than once.) It’s a chapter called “Wild Creativity” where explores the life and faith and poetry and aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is nearly worth the price of the book and I was very, very glad for this good chapter.

The next chapter, again, was stellar – Ripatrazone calls this one “Stewards of the Gloriously Indifferent” by comparing and contrasting two contemporary writers, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams. Again, this is well worth reading, especially if you’ve taken up either of these authors. (I know I don’t have to tell you how important the Kentucky famer Mr. Berry is, but I do hope you’ve read some Williams, at least Refuge and Red; I recall reviewing here at BookNotes her remarkable Finding Beauty in a Broken World.) Rip brings these two authors together and I leaned in to every word.

The next two chapters explored the life and work of Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, and William Everson; the Everson chapter is called “A Tremendous Sublime.” This was mostly new ground for me but was so interesting – for those interested in the interface of faith and writing and for those interested in the interface of writing and wilderness and nature.

Wild Belief moves next to a chapter many will love as it explores the life and work of Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin under the heading of “Salvific Wilderness.” Oh my, this is rich and will not only give you a vision for the great outdoors, but will help you read these writers with an awareness of their unique, often Christian, creation-based worldviews.

We’re shelving a copy of this great book under literary criticism here in the shop and another under nature writing. While it is more technically the former, it moves us to the latter and offers, as Ripatrazone’s conclusion puts it, “A Clearing in the Wilderness.” By drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ed Abbey’s legendary Desert Solitaire (I was waiting for him to show up!) John McPhee’s writings on the Jersey Pine Barrens, and Pope Francis’s ecological encyclical Laudato si’, Ripatrazone invites us to see afresh, to look for a clearing, to enter a fertile transformative spirituality. Kudos to the recent publisher Broadleaf for bringing this kind of good and interesting and generative book to us. Highly recommended.

The Oak Papers James Canton (HarperOne) $27.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I was hooked on this literary and thoughtful memoir by the first few pages where the author tells of visiting a tree in his home region of Essex, England, that was eight hundred years old. “The tree was a mere sapling when the Magna Carta was signed, when King John reigned over England,” Canton plainly writes. I read that line three times trying to let it sink in.

We recently needed to have a three-story tree behind our house brought down and despite the excitement of the mechanics of it all – the loud buzzing from morning to evening, leaving us with a middle chunk of trunk that weighted over 10,000 pounds – it was very sad for me. I’ve been almost obsessed with wondering how old it was. (Yes, yes, we can count the rings, sort of.) But let’s face it, what I thought was old and, in its prime, even majestic, was dwarfed by the ancient oak described in this splendid, lyrical journey about the mysteries and splendors of life in God’s good creation.

As Canton goes to his beloved tree he soon learns that it is the only one remaining from an ancient grove – some of the trees had stood there for a thousand years! – that was egregiously chopped down in the 1950s in the name of progress. (Progress! Why left-leaning folks call themselves “progressives” these days is beyond me as that modern idol often leaves much ruin in its wake.) Canton visits his tree and tells us much about it. As one reviewer put it, the book “shows us how paying attention to our gnarled green elders can reveal rich layers of culture, psychology, and ecology.” If you liked (or were intrigued by) the much-discussed The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben – who himself calls it a “profound meditation” – you will certain enjoy The Oak Papers. Novelists, poets, scientists and naturalists have all weighed in, saying it is a book of magic, of perception, of great love.

By the way, speaking of trees, I have reviewed it before, but you may want to know, that the paperback version of Matthew Sleeth’s lovely Reforesting Faith just came out from Waterbrook ($16.00.) In a way, it is the grand overview of the unfolding drama of the whole Bible shown by way of trees in Scripture. The subtitle only explains some of what is going on in that fine little volume: “What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God and His Love for Us.” We still have the neat, slim, hardback, and now this nice new paperback.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed Editions) $25.00            OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00

This book came out last fall to enthusiastic acclaim and I’ve been wanting to celebrate it here ever since. Ms Nezhukumatathil is an esteemed poet of mixed ethnicity, a lovely writer, delightful thinker and upbeat teacher. Her previous books of poetry have been well-received and her work has been anthologized in some prestigious poetry collections; it is notable for someone so young to be rising in serious literary circles. (Her most recent collection of poems is done with her very popular friend, the poet and essayist and urban gardener, Ross Gay.) She is a professor of English and teaches writing (and environmental literature) in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi

This recent, slim, hardback book – it’s a Milkweed Edition! — is a collection of lovely essays crafted from beautiful prose explaining (mostly) various animals and plants (with illustrations, nicely, if whimsically done, by Fumi Nini Nakamura.) Yep, this is nature writing that is not overly dense, not too intense, but slowly catches up to readers in ways that are revealing of her life as a minority woman growing up in a white culture. It includes some philosophizing and some science and some personal narrative, as most of our most engaging natural history books do. I might describe it almost as a memoir, but, geesh, she writes about colorful dancing frogs and narwhals that swim upside down and weird salamanders called axolotls. With almost child-like wonder she really, really enjoys these creatures.

World of Wonders really is about the nature of these animals, even as she invites us to “wander and wonder.” (Don’t you love the word “astonishments” in the subtitle?) Scott Russell Sanders calls the essays “praise songs of a poet working brilliantly in prose” It’s entertaining and enjoyable and yet, again, there is more going on than meets the eye at first blush. It was named the “Book of the Year” by the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain. As the prestigious Kirkus Review says, “Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s writing dazzles with the marvel of being fully alive.” NPR said at the end of 2020 that it was, “Hands down, one of the most beautiful books of the year.”

World of Wonders, kind of like Aimee, is flabbergasted, gobsmacked, and astonished with glee by all kinds of creatures and phenomena, all kinds of kin, from flamingos to catalpas, from monsoons to corpse flowers, from dancing frogs to axolotls.                  — Ross Gay, Poets & Writers

In thirty bewitching essays, Nezhukumatathil spotlights natural astonishments raining from monsoon season in India to clusters of fireflies in western New York, each one a microcosm of joy and amazement. With her ecstatic prose and her rapturous powers of insight, Nezhukumatathil proves herself a worthy spiritual successor to the likes of Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard, setting the bar high for a new generation of nature writers.        — Esquire, Best Books of Fall 2020

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders is the first book to make me feel like a firefly as much as it reminds me I’m still a black boy playing in Central Mississippi woods. The book walks. It sprints. It leaps. Most importantly, the book lingers in a world where power, people, and the literal outside wrestle painfully, beautifully. This book is a world of wonders. This book is about to shake the Earth. — Kiese Laymon

These are the praise songs of a poet working brilliantly in prose. Each essay compresses a great deal of art and truth into a small space, whether about fireflies or flamingos, monkeys or monsoons, childhood or motherhood, or the trials and triumphs of living with a brown skin in a dominant white world. You will not find a more elegant, exuberant braiding of natural and personal history.” — Scott Russell Sanders

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions) $16.00     OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

Those who love good “nature writing” (and who know Orion magazine) may recognize the publisher “Milkweed Editions” as a fine Minnesota-based publishing imprint that always does a very classy job. Late Migrations is a wonderfully done work with full color art pieces by Billy Renkle supplementing the glorious, vivid, if at times unusual prose.

I forget when we first heard of this; Renkl is a New York Times opinion writer but maybe it was on NPR who called it “magnificent.” I know what most made me want to get it was the New York Times Book Review claim that it was “equal parts Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott with a healthy sprinkle of Tennessee dry rub thrown in.” How can you resist that?

Late Migrations is not firstly a book of natural history, however. It is a collection of sometimes very short pieces, essays, really, that hang together and unfold as Renkl tells of her unforgettable parents, her family, and the “bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.” It is said to “ring with rapture and heartache” and it does indeed offer astonishment about the natural world. The natural world she speaks of is mostly around her suburban Nashville home.

I hope you know the spectacularly creative and rich novel (about trees) called The Overstory by Richard Powers. Powers writes of Late Migrations:

A compact glory, crosscutting between consummate family memoir and keenly observed backyard natural history. Renkl’s deft juxtapositions close up the gap between humans and nonhumans and revive our lost kinship with other living things.

As one reviewer said, “Conjure your favorite place in the natural world: beach, mountain, lake, forest, porch, windowsill, rooftop? Precisely there is the best place in which to savor this book.” Good advice! What a book!

Earth Our Original Monastery: Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature Christine Valters Paintner (Sorin Books) $15.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.76

Many of our customers love Chrstine Valters Paintner, a Celtic spiritual writer who has done bunches of books on everything from contemplative photography to lectio divino, from Celtic spiritual practices to her acclaimed The Artists Way. Her most recent (which we have, of course, is called Sacred Time, about being intentional about embracing the church calendar and sensing God’s call to order our days in more spiritual ways.) About a decade ago she did a book that I sometimes list when I’m going recommending books about finding God in the outdoors called Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements.

This one that came out less than a year ago plays with the idea of a monastery, and suggests that Earth is that first place where we meet with God, “where we learn our most fundamental prayers, participate in each day’s liturgy of praise,” and experience the wisdom of God embedded in the seasons. As the back cover says, “She explores monks, mystics, and saints who have experiences the goodness of the Divine in nature and invites us to find solace and spiritual revelation in the wonder of God’s creation.”

This book does indeed give us poetic and artful glimpses into this exact process, but, significantly, it gives us specific practices (as mundane as a ritual with herbal tea to feeding birds.) There are litanies and prayers, some more complex than others, some deeply theological (like taking a walk while pondering Gerard Manley Hopkin’s notion of “inscape”) to others that are more reflective, like creating poems prompted by her gentle invitations.

Some may think this verges on pantheism and others may not fully appreciate the interfaith perspective on a few pages, citing Buddhist poets or indigenous practices, but most if overtly Christian, Biblical, and rooted in stories of saints who communed well with land and creatures.

Wilderness of Hope: Fly Fishing and Pubic Lands in the American West Quinn Grover (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press) $26.95            OUR SALE PRICE = $21.56

Fly fishing books are quite a sub-genre within outdoors writing, perhaps because – who knows? – those who tie flies are a bit more literary and the artfulness of the craft lends itself to reflection and poetic writing. Maybe it’s the legacy of Izaak Walton and Norman Maclean. (And, while I’m digressing, let me say again that The River Why by James David Duncan is one of my all time favorite novels ever, and is, on the surface, about the debate between bass fishing with worms versus fly fishing as a kid fishes his way up a mysterious river.)

And so, I thought Wilderness of Hope might have some of this fisherly charm, but I also was struck by the subtitle. What is “public land” and why does it matter? (Ohhh, I hope you know Wallace Stegner’s old essay on that, and Wendell Berry’s contribution.) I didn’t know if Grover was as mad at the then-President Trump (and Republican Presidents before him) for his desecrating moves to sell off wilderness preserves and allow oil drilling, but I hoped so. I don’t know what I was looking for – gentle fly-fishing stories and some anti-Trump zeal that was truly conservationist?

Well, these literary meditations are from his life and as Braden Hepner puts it, “conveys the mystery and pull of the trout rivers that run through the American West.” Yes, he is like Annie Dillard or even (as Hepner says) like Thoreau. It will deepen “your capacity for wonder” and seek time to ponder what matters in your life and family (which just might be finding a way to spend more time fishing.)

And, yes, Wilderness of Hope did not disappoint my hope for a political statement about the value of wilderness – indeed, finding wild and native trout on our public lands happens because we’ve allowed them to be. Grover makes a powerful case for the role of vast public spaces and develops a bit of a political ethic that includes preserving and protecting what must be seen as not mere material resources but are somehow nearly spiritual in value.

As many reviewers have noted, Quinn Grove is a truly great writer; he teaches English at Brigham Young University in Idaho. In this marvelous volume he offers “long luxurious passages on nature’s elusive tributaries.” Through his storytelling and meandering he lifts up “places worth knowing.” And, I’d say, places worth protecting.

Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World Kathleen Dean Moore (Counterpoint Press) $26.00                        OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

A few weeks ago I wrote a quick announcement about this new volume by Kathleen Dean Moore, and since it fits so properly – urgently, event – right here, I’ll reprise that little shout out. This splendid new hardback means a lot to me and I hope you’ll consider it.

I have not had the opportunity to write much about the beautiful, eloquent, interesting, captivating, and often very moving nature essays of Kathleen Dean Moore for a while – her last was a somewhat more political and philosophical study, the important Great Tide Rising: Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change and then the very fun novel, Piano Tide, both which we’ve announced at BookNotes. This recent release is sort of a “greatest hits” collection of her earlier books that I loved so much, drawing also from articles never in book form, but mostly including excerpts from beautiful collections of memoir and natural history and storytelling about her experiences in the outdoors such as Holdfast, Riverwalking, Wild Solace, and the wonderful Pine Island Paradox. The organizing theme whereby certain excerpts and essays suggested themselves is around wild sounds, the music of creation. What a great gift for those who appreciate profound and enjoyable nature writing. Earth’s Wild Music is a gem.

Here is what the publisher promises about it:

“In her newest collection, Moore selects essays that celebrate the music of the natural world as a reminder of what can be taken from us-the yowl of wolves, tick of barnacles, laughter of children, shriek of falling mountains. Alongside these selections are brand new essays born from the sorrow and iniquity of this new age of extinction, all bearing witness to the glories of this world and the sins against it. Each group of essays moves, as Moore herself has been moved, from celebration to lamentation to bewilderment to the determination to act. In Earth’s Wild Music, Moore reminds us that whatever is left of the planet after its pillaging is the world in which those who remain must live. Whatever genetic song-lines, whatever fragments of whale-squeal and shattered harmonies are left, that’s what evolution will have to work with. Music is the shivering urgency and exuberance of life on-going. In a time of terrible silencing, Moore asks, who will forgive us if we do not save the songs?”

I love that reviewer Leonoa Todaro (in Catapult) says Moore is “Steeped in nature, brewing alternately with love and rage.” Yes! And then, this: “Moore writes at the intersection of ode and alarm inhabited by the spirits of Mary Oliver and Rachel Carson.” You can see why I wanted to list this one again.

Here is the helpful starred review from the sober industry journal, Booklist:

Exceedingly knowledgeable, experienced, and expressive, this former philosophy professor shares tales of her adventures in the far north, prairies, woods, and beyond, all while emphasizing Earth’s gloriously varied soundscape: the songs of birds, frogs, and whales; the calls of bats and wolves . . . Moore details all that we’re losing to climate change, spiking gorgeously precise descriptions and dramatic tales of wildlife encounters with grim statistics about the escalating die-off of birds and other species, the ‘great starving’ underway in the oceans, and the ongoing destruction of forests and wetlands . . . We must prevent the looming silence, Moore asserts, by forming a chorus of voices raised in solidarity with all of Earth’s wondrous and essential life forms.

Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration Sara Dykman (Timber Press) $27.95                              OUR SALE PRICE = $22.36

Okay, where do we shelve this, dear readers? Under “nature” as the book itself suggests? Under outdoor recreation? Travel? It is all of that as you can tell from the very clear title – this is the story of a woman who road her bike from Mexico to Canada and back, following the best she could a migrational kaleidoscope (yep, that’s the word for it, or, alternately, a flutter) of Monarch butterflies.

Told with a good eye for detail, she takes us along her unusual adventure. As Robert Michael Pyle (author of Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage) says of it

Sara Dykman followed the extraordinary monarch migration by bicycle, and came back to write about it. She has recorded it well. Her almost incredible account captures the animal itself, the continent it crosses, and its plight with style and deep connection.

I’ve read a few other good books about people doing bike trips across the lands. I’m sure you’ve read hiking books, those books about guys on foot. They are always fun, but this one has this extra level of purpose and this extra degree of beauty on offer. She knows how fragile our eco-systems are and in a way this mostly fun adventure tale is a wake-up call, yet again, from those often missed on the edges; that is, it reminds us to be aware of the hurting on the margins. Even if the margins are as glorious as a kaleidoscope of Monarchs.

Everywhere Holy: Seeing Beauty, Remembering Your Identity, and Finding God Right Where You Are Kara Lawler (Thomas Nelson) $17.99                OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I don’t want to drift too far afield from our theme of nature writing and this book could just as easily be shelved (as we do in our store) with other books about finding God in the ordinary, sort of the “spirituality of the mundane” as we’ve written about here before. From Kathleen Norris’s little The Quotidian Mysteries to the popular The Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Warren to Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places by Kaitlin Curtice and so many more, this narrative by Lawler could fit right in.

I mention it here, briefly, though, because throughout this memoir she does write nicely with a storyteller’s voice, helping us see God “hidden in plain site” (yes) but also to help us appreciate creation around us. Lawler writes wonderfully about her Western Pennsylvanian mountains, about flowers and birds and gardens and tea, vacations and hikes, work and play, stars, noticing, always noticing, the good stuff. (She mentions a tragedy on the Susquehanna River, too, and a child’s scary bout with Lyme Disease.) Everywhere Holy isn’t about the outdoors, as such, and she certainly isn’t a natural history writer like, say, Dillard or Moore, but she does write nicely about what she sees. For some of us, this is a good way in, and we happily recommend it.

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion: Essential Writings Liberty Hyde Bailey, edited by John A. Stempien & John Linstrom (Cornell University Press) $26.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.56

For those who have followed the history of faith-based, Christian views of Earth-keeping and creation-care and the dignity of rural life, the name from the very early 20^th century, Liberty Hyde Bailey, might ring a bell. He wrote lyrical poetry and prose and was considered my many to be “The Father of Modern Horticulture.” (Not to mention one of the founders of 4-H.) I first learned of him when a group organized in part by Ron Sider, which became the Evangelical Environmental Network, reprinted some of his early work decades ago. In a sense he was a precursor to our contemporary ecological worldview and certainly an influence on the likes of Wendell Berry. As Amy Halloran, author of The New Bread Basket puts it, “Bailey spoke to an early generation of environmentalists and this collection brings his affection for plants and nature to contemporary ears.” Indeed, as she suggests, his affection is contagious. Let us hope so.

This “gardener’s companion” is a major contribution to LHB studies and a delightful gift to anyone wanting a poetic and wise view of the holiness of the earth and the goodness of the seasons. He writes, here, as Mary Swander (the Poet Laureate of Iowa and editor of Farmscape) writes on the back cover, about “the cycles of nature, from the blossoms of his beloved apple trees in the spring, to the ripening of gourds in the fall, to the snow falling on the greenhouse in winter.”

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion is a very handsome hardback, almost 300 pages, including older essays, magazine pieces, columns, and copious drawing and illustrations, even poems, published on gardening, all compiled and published together for the first time. There is wit and grace here, and solid advice and lovely encouragement for anyone who wants a classic vision for caring for their corner of God’s green Earth. As Bailey wrote in 1941, nearer the end of his career, he hoped his writing “contributes to the understanding and dignity of plant-growing. The grower should be proud to be in the company of so many kinds of plants.” Nice, huh?

Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives – and Save Theirs Richard Louv (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) $27.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.36

I suppose you have at least heard of Louv’s much-discussed and very important Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Well, as the always-wise Bill McKibben says, “Richard Louv has done it again!” McKibben continues, “A remarkable book that will help everyone break away from their fixed gaze at the screens that dominate our lives.”

The rave reviews just on the back cover are extraordinary – “a wondrous tapestry”, “powerful and a must-read”, “brilliant, wise, eloquent.” David Orr, a very important ecological educator in Ohio says it is “a powerful summons.” Indeed.

Can this affirmation of our essential connection to animals help cure what ails us, help heal our loneliness and boredom, our disconnection and broken relationships, our ennui and mental health struggles? I think at least somewhat. It isn’t the only thing, but it is (Biblically speaking, I might add) a key thing. Richard Louv is right to connect us to nature and, in this case, to animal creatures.

I am sure I’d have some quibbles philosophically about his assumptions about the nature of humans – I resolutely do not want to say we are animals for theological reasons, but I get that we are (as Francis of Assisi and Francis of L’Abri both said) we are brothers and sisters to our fellow creatures. The great Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal notes that Louv at least urges us to be “open-minded about animals and reposition our species inside the natural world. “

We have a good number of books about animals, and pets, even grieving the loss of pets. This one looks powerful and foundational, even if you may not agree with all of it. Wow.

Wild + Free Nature: 25 Outdoor Adventures for Kids to Explore, Discover, and Awaken Their Curiosity Ainsley Arment (HarperOne) $22.99                                    OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I suppose some of our readers — the younger and hipper ones, I guess — are aware of the “Wild + Free” brand. You maybe follow them on insta or at least have visited their popular facebook pages. This book is, as you’d expect, just dripping with charm and loveliness, eye candy for those who love cute kids with a certain aesthetic and vision. Ainsley Arment and the Wild + Free community have curated (of course they have) a very nice array of activities that can lead kids to wander, capture, savor, and be involved in the great outdoors.

There are programs and ideas such as having a backyard mud kitchen, making edible flower and herb cookies, doing an heirloom seed exchange, learning Plein air painting, cultivating mushrooms and gardening, even in the city.  As they say, this was “created by parents and loved by kids,” It’s really nicely done and makes this stuff doable and joyful. Cheers!

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Merlin Sheldrake (Random House) $18.00                        OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

We heard an interview with Sheldrake on one of the NPR talk shows (1 A, maybe, or Fresh Air) and it was memorizing. I’ve yet to crack this open, but we’re glad to be a faith-based bookstore that also wants to share cutting edge books of popular science, books that are well written and help us understand better our place in God’s good world. Sure we can get easy inspiration from sunsets and beautiful trees, but fungi? Well, yes.

And, according to serious, intellectual reviewers, the book “…expanded my appreciation of what it means to be alive” and shows that “the universe is sublime.” Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk and the great collection Vesper Flights, says Entangled Life is “one of those rare books that can truly change the way you see the world around you”

Oh if more of our straight up books about Christian faith and discipleship had such an impact on readers.

“I fell in love with this book. Merlin is a scientist with the imagination of a poet and a beautiful writer… This is a book that, by virtue of the power of its writing, shifts your sense of the human. . . . It will inspire a generation to enter mycology.” –Michael Pollan (Bay Area Book Festival, 2020)

“Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing . . . a remarkable work by a remarkable writer, which succeeds in springing life into strangeness again.” –Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

“Reading this book, I felt surrounded by a web of wonder. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, so long as you have the means to perceive it. This book provides the means.” –Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

Nearly every page of this book contained either an observation so interesting or a turn of phrase so lovely that I was moved to slow down, stop, and reread. . . . This book rocked me into remembering that nature, especially fungal nature, is big and encompassing and creative and destructive. It reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime.” –Rob Dunn, Science magazine

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from the University of Cambridge for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Pretty impressive, eh?

Belden C. Lane (Oxford University Press) $29.95 OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

I have reviewed the amazing, important, provocative books by Belden Lane on several occasions and I simply couldn’t do this list – even though most of the ones we are naming are fairly recent – without giving a quick nod to this 2019, previously mentioned hardback. Lane, who teaches theology at Saint Louis University, has written dense and scholarly works including a book on the history of religious environmentalism and one on spirituality within the Reformed tradition. (Lane is a PCUSA clergyperson.) Most popular, though, are two that are somewhat similar.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford University Press; $17.95) weaves together a memoir of caring for his mother who has Alzheimer’s and cancer and meditations of finding solace in significant hikes into severe deserts and mountains. He has studied well the desert fathers and knows much about the mystical traditions of the ancient church and he is an avid and serious backpacker, so this book became exceptionally popular among those who care about these things.

Even more popular is the brilliantly conceived Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice (Oxford University Press; $24.95.) In this mountaineering memoir, he takes a certain spiritual classic with him on a series of hikes, each hike described in light of his engagement with the work he took with him on that trip and its particular theme. They are well ordered, each chapter telling of the next leg of the journey. With chapters like “The Irish Wilderness and Columba of Iona” and “Rockpile Mountain and Thomas Trahern” and “The Maze in Canyonlands and John of the Cross” and “Mt. Whitney and Martin Luther” you can get the idea; there is nothing in print like it and it is very interesting. After two wonderful introductory chapters, there are thirteen other trips documented, with companions as diverse as Teresa of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, and Mohandas Gandhi.

All of which is to lead us to this latest, The Great Conversation where Lane similarly takes a certain spiritual master, the work of a mystic or prophet or pray-er, to a certain location. It isn’t a trip or travelogue as much, and there is no trailhead or ascent or failure or returning home. He goes to a brother or sister in creation – a tree, a rock, a lake, or, I should say, places – deserts, islands, starfields, caves, rivers – and compares what he learns as he communes with them with what the great spirituality writers are teaching. He is confident, properly so, if one is Biblical, that creation can speak to him and he can, if humbled and in proper awe, enter “the great conversation.” Naturally (I use the word knowingly) he believes, also, that we can hear from God, perhaps in and even through creation. This is a landmark book, I think, deepening not only our “beyond stewardship” paradigm (as the book by that title from Calvin College Press puts it) but within the field of finding God in the natural world. As Richard Rohr puts it, this book is both “beautiful and true.”

God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul Mark Buchanan (Zondervan) $25.99                        OUR SALE PRICE = $20.19

We have raved about the wonderful God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul previously; I would read anything Mark Buchanan writes, I think, and he just keeps getting better and better as a great writer and profound spiritual guide. We so appreciate this exploration of the benefits of walking and of various sorts and styles of walking. It is the best book on the subject.

The Way Under Our Feet: A Spirituality of Walking Graham B. Usher (SPCK)  $18.00             OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

This new one, though, The Way Under Our Feet, is by an author we did not know; we order books in from the UK sometimes and this one struck us not only for the great title and subtitle but for the handsome wood-cut cover that I adore. Usher is an Anglican Bishop and a working ecologist so naming this book now just seems fabulously spot on. He’s literary and theological, offering great insights about a slow and careful lifestyle, about being attentive, also to the Earth around us, but to others and to our own interior lives. It is wide-ranging and lovely in that sense, but like with Buchanan’s. please don’t think of this as a simple field guide to exercise or a simplistic religious devotional. The Way Under Our Feet really is about the “social construction of reality” as one sociologist puts it, and is about how we see, how we lean into life. There are some nice stories and funny anecdotes but it is also more profound that you may realize. It is about, finally, experiencing life, from “remembering” to “going” and more. It is a book that you will learn much from and that you will not soon forget.

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Certainly any of this handful of books listed above would make great personal reads for your own enjoyment and edification. As the weather warms we hope you are able to be out more (even if we have good reason to avoid crowds.) These will help you appreciate your outdoor experiences more, I bet. Many would be fun to do with book clubs or small groups, I’d think.

Ideally, some could be used as a foundation to inspire projects like the “Opening the Book of Nature” program created by Frederick Krueger and Vincent Rossi. Or, you could consider the brief and programmatic book (and leaders guide) by Robert Gottfried and Frederick Krueger called Living In An Icon: A Program for Growing Closer to Creation and to God (Church Publishing; $12.95. OUR SALE PRICE = $10.36.) I’ve mentioned it before and commend it again if you want to take some of these books above and apply them to an interactive and experiential Christian education and spiritual formation program. If you can’t find a faith community to do this with, why not call a friend and just do it yourselves. Living in An Icon is full of activities and reflections, Scripture and action, ways to bring the Bible down to Earth and our faith to life. Enjoy!

For those who want to think a bit more about this whole subject of human interaction with nature — God’s creation — and a theology of it all, our experiential education and spiritual formation as found it books listed above could be supplemented by any number of solid books on what we used to call “earth keeping” or “creation-care.” While protecting our groaning planet from the perils of our way of life (and the ugly government failure of its God-given calling to punish polluters) is not the topic of this column — we have lots of books on a theology of creation care and have written about them in other BookNotes, some of those books are stellar to help us get a solid Biblical framework.

In other BookNotes we’ve promoted For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision of Creation Care by Steven Bouma-Prediger or Introducing Evangelical Eco-theology: Foundations in Scripture, Theology, History, and Praxis edited by Daniel Brunner, Jennifer Butler and A.J. Swoboda (both by Baker Academic.) We really appreciate Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World  in the excellent “Biblical Theology for Life” series by Zondervan. Not too long ago we highlighted the small but so solid Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says about the Environment and Why It Matters published by IVP Academic. I do hope you recall our short review of Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care edited by David Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun, published in 2019 by Calvin College Press which is a small collection of concise essays that are nearly brilliant. It’s a must for those who want to always be reforming their Christian worldview.

To these sorts of books I’ll now add the recent and very valuable Celebrating Nature by Faith: Studies in Reformation Theology in an Era of Global Emergency by H. Paul Santmire (Cascade) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE + $20.00

Santmire is one of those important theological voices that has influenced many creative leaders of the faith-based creation care movement. Accurately or not, I tend to think of him alongside of another great, pioneering Lutheran scholar on these things, Joseph Sittler. In any case, this recent volume has Santimire reflecting on “how to live with nature according to the Bible” and commends (not unlike the above mentioned Beyond Stewardship from Calvin University folks) moving from “stewardship to partnership.”

He does this by way of looking at Martin Luther’s theology of nature (“announcing theGod who is in, with, and under all things” and putting that into conversation with Jospeh Sittler’s vision of the cosmic Christian and “nature transfigured.” He offers an academic chapter called “The Theology of Nature as an Emergent Field of Promise” and invites “multidisciplinary reformation explorations.” Yes!! The final chapter is a first-person theological narrative which he calls “celebrating nature by faith” from which he choose his title of the whole book.

And then, there is this, one of may great children’s resources we might suggest. Hello Earth! Poems to our Planet is written by Joyce Sidman and illlustrated by Niren Asiaian Lorda (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers) $18.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This is an oversized kids book, a moody and yet evocative hardback with great kid art, which has garnered lots of great reviews; Sidman is a Minnesota writer who has done books of poetry for children that have received the Newberry Honor Award and Caldecott awards as well. The “Eerdmans Books for Young Readers” imprint is honored by literary experts and beloved by librarians and those with an eye for particular artful books for children. This one, for grades 3 – 6, I’d say, is, as you can see, poetry — but poetry with a twist. These are poems to the Earth.

And the poet wrote them (in a reversal of a more common workflow) after viewing the artwork for each spread.

I think Sandra O’Connor, writing for School Library Journal, explains it well:

This understated book of poetry spotlights planet Earth. The text covers scientific theories, including plate tectonics and continental drift, conservation, and the human impact on the planet’s ecosystems. It is worth noting that Sidman did not write the poems first; rather, she worked off of the illustrations to create the stories. This unusual and unique workflow approach could be worth discussing with young readers. The artwork depicts Earth at a distance, and readers will feel as though they are omnipotent observers of the action happening on or beneath Earth’s surface. The soft color palette provides a soothing tone to even the fieriest concepts, like volcanic explosions. The clever illustrations present an “I Spy” experience for readers; they will enjoy uncovering what feels like secret moments in many of the spreads-boa constrictors quietly winding through the treetops and a couple stealing a kiss at a restaurant. Sidman’s poetry is conversational and spare, but it hits at the heart of the very human connection with Earth. Readers may be left wanting more, but that’s also reflective of how people may wish for more answers and solutions to mankind’s complicated relationship with the planet. A must-have for all schools and libraries that wish to maintain a current and vibrant poetry collection for young people.

It is very helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. Although we can’t say here exactly what your order would cost since the weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide.

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options, and, of course, UPS. If necessary, we can do overnight and other expedited methods, too. We’re at your service.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.25.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $7.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “Media Mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $8.00 for one book or two to most places.

PLEASE LET KNOW KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER.

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To order these or other good books, please click on the “order” button at the bottom of this column which takes you to our secure order form at the Hearts & Minds website where you can safely enter credit card info. Don’t forget to tell us how many copies you may want and what your shipping preferences are.

 

USPS “Media Mail” is cheapest but slow and often delayed. USPS “Priority Mail” is a few dollars more (depending on the size of the package, of course) but usually only takes a few days. UPS may be more reliable but most costly. Don’t hesitate to inquiry about exact costs, which we could determine after we know what you want, weigh the package, and enter the accurate address to determine an accurate charge.

Serious Dreams: Bold Ideas for the Rest of Your Life edited by Byron Borger (Square Halo Books) $13.99                                                   OUR SALE PRICE = $11.19

Long time readers of BookNotes may tire of me plugging my own book, but for those who are less familiar with our work here at the bookstore, you might find it interesting to know that I edited a book in which I’ve got two chapters. I’m mostly over the awkwardness of telling people about it as we have become increasingly aware that God has used it in the lives of many young adults. We highly recommend it as a thoughtful, small gift to honor the transition of college students out into the work world, helping them commence with a robust Christian vision and thought-provoking guidance.

Here’s the short version: Serious Dreams is a collection of seven lively graduation speeches given by Christian leaders we admire. Some you may know from their wonderful books – Richard Mouw, John Perkins, Amy Sherman, Steve Garber. We love the contribution of the eminent philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff who was the graduation day speaker at Calvin College a few years back, although I sometimes say that Amy Sherman’s good talk about using one’s work to serve the common good (delivered at Malone College In Ohio) captures what we hoped from the book as clear as any. I have written before that Claudia Beversluis’s beautiful use of a Wendell Berry poem in her commencement speech inspired me to put this anthology together. Graduating or not, her talk, and the others here, are inspiring and well worth reading. I’m told my chapter isn’t too bad, either.

We added questions to ponder after each chapter, which invite readers to process the upbeat messages. I added a long introductory chapter about the normal stuff of moving home, finding a job, starting small. One person said it helped them more than any of the admittedly breathy and passionate talks.

As we were putting this together a few years ago, our friend Erica Young Reitz was working on her own book on the practicalities of transitioning out of college. She was kind enough to write a helpful epilogue for Serious Dreams loaded with solid ideas of next steps and wise choices for those leaving their college years. It is a nice closing afterword, helping Serious Dreams not only be a big inspiration about Kingdom living and a catalyst helping young adults take faith into the marketplace, making a difference in their careers and callings, but a down-to-Earth resource with some sensible practical advice.

Obviously, we’d be honored if you consider sharing this with college graduates you know. We’d sure appreciate it if you’d tell your church about it, too. Spread the word. Thanks.

The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship & Work Steven Garber (IVP) $20.00                                                                OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

Again, this is a book I’ve recommended often, and had we not been in the thick of Covid quarantining, I’d have named it as one of the very best books of 2020. I love Garber’s eloquent and elegant writing style and how he imbues small things with big meaning. This compact-size, small hardback is a very handsome book – there are artful, full-color photographs for every chapter – and it makes a perfect little gift.

For those that know Garber’s Visions of Vocation you may know that his heart is heavy to share the joy of a life well lived; the examined life, yes, but more, — given to service and a unique sort of integrity. In this collection of talks, essays, and messages collected in a bunch of short chapters, he uses the language of being seamless. You can catch it in the subtitle – there is an integral connection between worship and work. Our love spills over into life and learning and this book is a testimony of those who embody this seamlessness. It helps model and thereby evoke a longing for greater integrity and wholistic Christian living. Garber is a great storyteller of a somewhat intellectual sort and he tell us about those who bear witness – often without being that vocal about it – to a life that makes sense, that coheres, that is missional and purpose-driven and that becomes a joy to behold.

Steve knows a lot of people who are worth hearing about, although he tells their stories quietly, without breathy sensationalism. He tells, here, about his own life, his foibles and fears, his work and witness, movies and songs he’s appreciated, books he values. There are some truly wonderful essays here as he takes us around the world and lets us look over his shoulder as he helps others relate belief and behavior, Sunday and Monday, living well in work and play, family life and public life. I can hardly imagine a college grad who doesn’t deep down long for this kind of coherence, meaning, integrity and in this book, in short, readable chapters, Steve shows that we can actually live this way, seamlessly.

The Seamless Life is lovely, thoughtful, with short chapters enhanced by photos, almost like a fun travelogue as Steve shares stories of his own efforts to respond to God’s grace in this holistic and honest way, inviting us all to care for what matters most.

The reports we have received from his three books and the significant impact they’ve made on readers rival such testimonials by readers of any books by any author we know – it is notable the remarkable stories people have shared after reading his work. This little one is a great choice for a gift for morally serious young adults and while you’re at it, get one for yourself, too.

The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God’s Purpose for Your Life Os Guinness (Thomas Nelson) $16.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I suggest this book most years as college graduation rolls around and any other time I get a chance. It is one of my all time favorite books and should be in the hands of every young adult who reads seriously, who cares about the trajectory of their life, or who wants a sturdy Christian vision for vocation, calling, purpose and meaning.

The Call is important as it makes the case as eloquently and thoughtfully as any I know that all of us (not just priests and nuns, clergy and missionaries) are called by God to take up holy vocations in the world. We do all we do for and with God, and there is no “secular” career that can’t be considered as a redemptive avenue for God-glorifying witness. All areas of life matter and God’s clarion call rings out in everything. This book has meaty (but short) chapters laden with stories of historical figures, writers, artists, scientists, statesmen, and others who embody this whole-life vision of “all of life redeemed.” It shows the most Biblical and sound way to discover the joy of a well-examined and deeply devoted life. It is transformational and challenging and it makes an impressive gift.

Younger adults – teens and collegiates – may have heard of a hip and cool, conversational version of some of this in the great Garden City: Work, Rest and What It Means to Be Human by John Mark Comer (Zondervan; $19.99.) Or even a bit, at least implied, in Bob Goff’s upbeat books, like his very helpful 2020 release, Dream Big: Know What You Want, Why You Want It, and What You’re Going to Do about It (Thomas Nelson; $26.99.)

Now that they are entering the adult work force and more existentially searching for their next steps and piecing it all together, they ought to have this intellectually lively book under their belts. Os Guinness is one of our great Christian spokespersons of the last 50 years. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God’s Purpose for Your Life is wise and mature, thoughtful and very well written, not sentimental or silly. As Tim Keller has written “In modern Christian literature, there is nothing quite like Os Guinness’s classic The Call…” It is very highly recommended.

Worked Up: Navigating Calling After College Paige Wiley & Luke Bobo (Made to Flourish) $10.00                                                            OUR SALE PRICE = $8.00

This is a slightly oversized, thin, workbooky sort of resource, full of color and good graphics on the inside, a prefect tool for today’s vivid readers. (In fact, the covers come in several different colors!) It isn’t heady or hard, but offers great (and, too often, rare) insight informed by the likes of the above books; it is so solid. (Truly – this little post-college tool is sharp looking and fun but deeply influenced by Guinness and Garber and the sorts of authors found in Serious Dreams.)

Made to Flourish is an organization dedicated to helping church leaders think about ways to equip parishioners to live life meaningfully and wisely “in but not of” the culture at large. Most keenly in this project they help folks think about living out faithfulness in the work-world, bearing witness in the marketplace, connecting Sunday and Monday as their founder Tom Nelson puts it in his great book Work Matters.

Worked Up invites young adults transitioning out of college to consider what story they are a part of, how to think about vocation and calling, and it has brief and colorfully presented units with titles like “Work is Service. Passion is Privilege” and “Cultivating Virtue.” I can’t say enough about this great book – that almost resembles a little magazine or journal – and even if you don’t find it substantial enough as a gift, I think it would be fabulous as a small group study or young adult class. Buy a few of these and see if you can get them into the hands of those who could start a little study/support group. It’s tremendous and will be incredibly helpful, I’m sure.

After College: Navigating Transitions, Relationships and Faith  Erica Young Reitz (IVP) $17.00                                                                   OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

I mentioned above our very dear friend Erica Reitz as one who graciously wrote a small chapter for my Serious Dreams book. I describe it almost every year as a great and useful gift idea for young adults you know.

Erica lives in State College, Pennsylvania, home to Penn State University where she has conducted semester-long classes for seniors as they prepare to transition out of their colleges, their convenient clique of friends who are all the same age, their local churches that are often driven by young-adult ministry. I say this to assure you that she has spent years honing this material and this book is exceptionally wise and on-topic, with real life stories of students she knows well. Blurbs on the back include striking endorsements from the likes of Katherine Leary Alsdorf (founder of the New York Redeemer Center for Faith & Work and co-author of the magisterial Every Good Endeavor), Steve Garber, and Shirley Mullen President of Houghton College.

I like the observations of Derek Melleby (Director of OneLife Institute) who says, “Erica is a keen listener: she listens well to God, recent research and student stories to offer a roadmap for success in today’s world.”

Ready to Rise: Own Your Voice, Gather Your Community, Step Into Your Influence Jo Saxton (Waterbrook) $16.99                                                 OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

We heard and met Jo Saxton several years ago at a Fresh Expressions conference and immediately became huge fans. We’ve reviewed and promoted her previous books, including the great book for women called More Than Enchanting: Breaking Through Barriers to Influence Your World and another on vocation, daily choices, and our truest identity The Dream of You: Let Go of Broken Identities and Live the Life You Were Made For. She’s upbeat, inspiring, practical and pretty dang vibrant.

Saxton’s 2020 release, Ready to Rise seems to bring her various insights in her other books together as the subtitle says. This really is about finding oneself, gathering a community of others, and learning to make a difference – “stepping into your influence” as she puts it.

Megan Tamte (founder and co-CEO of Evereve) says it is “a winning combination of an honest friend, challenging preacher, and inspiring leadership coach.” That’s it! I’ve been waiting for this graduation season to help promote this book that I think would make a swell gift for anyone needing some coaching and encouragement to explore gifts left unwrapped and a purpose to embrace.

Ready to Rise is written mostly to women – as one blurb on the back by Rev. Gail Song Bantum says, it is an “empowering alternative to the often-toxic narrative that have shaped many women.” So give it to young ladies you know. But, you know, I enjoyed it a lot, so maybe these 14 chapters would be exciting for some guys, too. It’s good for those who are hoping to become leaders, working for change, or finding their potential in new roles as rising women leaders.

Chasing Wisdom: The Lifelong Pursuit of Living Well Daniel Grothe (Thomas Nelson) $24.99 hardback OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99 – OR – $18.99 paperback OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19                                  please let us know which you prefer

Considered “one of the most powerful communicators of our generation” (Esther Fleece, of No More Faking Fine) this author is a fabulously fascinating character. Damiel Grothe is a mega-church pastor (in Colorado Springs) and yet a bit of a mystic. He’s young-ish, but rooted in ancient wisdom and the writings of the sages. He’s a pastor but interested in the wider world, curious and engaged and helpful. It all made sense to me when I realized he was mentored by Eugene Peterson, to whom this fine book is dedicated.

In Chasing Wisdom Grothe appeals to younger adults (and others who especially feel the world’s joys and heaviness.) The introduction which talks about his first-hand experience of a mass shooting is called “Bullet Holes and Broken Hearts.” It’s hard not to keep turning the pages after that!

Grothe is conversational, direct, and upbeat even as he cites the creative likes of mod artist Banksy and poet Mary Oliver, Bible guys Brueggemann and Buechner, writers Dorothy Sayers and Thomas a Kempis. It’s a great book, interestingly written.

I think this would make a great gift for college grads because of this theme of chasing wisdom, living well, pursuing the things that matter most. It’s not weird or arcane, though: there are sensible chapters about loving Scripture, going to church, creating space for a quiet life; you’ll love a great chapter called “The Wisdom of an Old Library” and there’s stuff about rest and lament, action and service. You will be investing in the sustainable long-term habits of faith of others as you share this with them. Highly recommended.

God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life Timothy & Kathy Keller (Viking) $20.00                                               OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I hope you know about  Tim and Kathy Keller’s lovely, compact-sized, hardback devotional called The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms (Viking; $20.00.) If so, I need only say that this one is just like that, but on the Biblical book of Proverbs. It’s a solid hardback with a ribbon marker, with thoughtful daily devotionals arranged for a whole year’s worth of reading.

It may be obvious, but let me say it: this an ideal gift for anyone in a life transition because of the unusually practical sensibility of Proverbs, offering wisdom and vision in a way that spells out healthy ways to “navigate life.” I can’t imagine a young adult who wouldn’t benefit from this whether they are particularly religious or not.

As the Kellers put it, God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life offers an artful vision of life that is “at once moral, realistic, and just.” What a great gift this would be…

Be Kind To Yourself: Releasing Frustrations and Embracing joy Cindy Bunch (IVP) $15.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

What a sweet little resource this is, a handsome, small book that is loaded – and I mean loaded –with practical practices, meditative disciplines, ideas and suggestions about taking care of one’s interior life. That contemplative leader and teacher Ruth Haley Barton wrote the forward should give you a hint that this is serious stuff, transforming, empowering, real tools for making space for God so God can bless us with Christ-like sanity and hope.

I suppose not every young adult feels a need for these sorts of experiences of quiet time and meditative practice. But I’m sure many, many do.

“There is a sweet space where wisdom and innocence meet in the relationship between those who have given themselves to the rhythm of spiritual formation for a long time and those whose commitment is new. Cindy Bunch found it and then set the table for all of us to come together, using the same practices, to explore who we are in God and who we can become.”–Suzanne Stabile, author of The Path Between Us and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast

Morning and Evening Prayers Cornelius Plantinga (Eerdmans) $19.99                             OUR SALE PRICE – $15.99

This is a brand new, small-sized hardback (without dust jacket) that is handsome in a sober, no-nonsense style. I am sure many Hearts & Minds friends appreciate the wordsmithery gifts of writer and theologian Cornelius Plantinga. (He is president emeritus of Calvin Theologian Seminary and senior research fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.) You may know him from the remarkably beautiful Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living or his wonderfully provocative theology of sin nicely called Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be. At workshops I do on reading widely I regularly tell about his must-read book for preachers that any life-long learner will enjoy, Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists. Anyway, he’s a favorite author, an astute thinker, a good theologian, and a very good writer.

Here, in Morning and Evening Prayers, Plantinga offers well written but dignified prayers, in a little volume offering a month’s worth of prayers for morning and evening each day. In a way, this reminds me of the classic by John Ballie, Diary of Private Prayer.

The almost two page-long morning prayers, naturally, look forward. The evening ones look back over the day. In this simple rhythm, a life-long practice could take hold of reflecting well on one’s life, one’s whole life, by bringing it all regularly before the gracious and sovereign Triune God.

This little prayer book just came out and has been called “earnest and unassuming” as it expresses essential Christian longings and hopes and dreams, “making space for any state of heart or mind…” Could be a nice gift, eh?

God Above All: 90 Devotions to Know the Life-Altering Love of God (Zondervan) $16.99       OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I am so taken with this, both its handsome and artful presentation, its well crafted heft, (blue flyleaves, glossy paper, a ribbon marker) and, of course, that it offers upbeat and contemporary reflections by a modern woman reflection on quotes by the ancient African church leader. Many young adults I know are on a August kick – think of Austin Gohn’s introductory A Restless Age: How Saint Augustine Helps You Make Sense of Your Twenties (GCD Books; $11.99) or James K.A. Smith’s spectacular and very popular On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts (Brazos Press; $24.99, hardback -OR- $19.99, paperback.) So this very nice chunky, new devotional could be very appropriate to some of your young friends.

I’m not unrealistic, though – many church kids, even smart college grads have little knowledge and even less interest in the significance of this towering figure from the fourth century. However there are churches that would love sharing a book just like this. On the left hand page there is a sizable August quotation, under an intriguingly art piece, the same design as the cover. The following pages are short reflections explaining a bit about the context of that quote and it’s relevance for our own daily lives as restless seekers in this new millennium. It’s a beautiful devotional making Augustine’s ancient writing accessible for today.

Love Is the Way: Holding on the Hope in Troubling Times Bishop Michael Curry (Avery) $27.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

When we reviewed this a year ago, almost, we were delighted at how many non-Episcopalians purchased it. Curry is, as you may know (perhaps from his famous homily that he did at the royal wedding a few years) the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. And this is his wide-ranging, wonderfully vivid, lively book about love. As journalist and historian Jon Meacham says, it is “a profound and essential book.”

Every chapter of Love is the Way is phrased as a question. From “How Do I Find God’s Love” to “What do Dolly Parton and Desmond Tutu Have in Common” to “I’m just a regular person – can my love have an impact?” each chapters tells stores, is laden with good quotes, and develops an expansive and generous sort of faith rooted in core values and big dreams. He is, in many ways, a public theologian and we are delighted to suggest it as a great book for open-minded and searching young adults.

It is very helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. Although we can’t say here exactly what your order would cost since the weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide.

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options, and, of course, UPS. If necessary, we can do overnight and other expedited methods, too. We’re at your service.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.25.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $7.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “Media Mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $8.00 for one book or two to most places.

PLEASE LET KNOW KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER.

BookNotes

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Thanks for those who ordered from our last BookNotes column. We did some fairly extensive reviews of a few fascinating books, from Leland Ryken’s Recovering the Lost Art of Reading to Freeing Jesus by Diana Butler Bass to the very important Reparations by pastors and public theologians Duke Kwon & Gregory Thompson to the Sentinel imprint’s excellent study of American placelessness and agricultural towns, Uprooted by the wonderful new writer Grace Olmstead. We’re glad for those who subscribe to BookNotes and support our small town family biz here in south central Pennsylvania. We hope you are filled with renewed resurrection hope after this beautiful Easter weekend.

Although it is hard for me not to weigh in and offer comments about the books we most care about, this time I’m going to try to beat the clock and only describe briefly a batch of books that came in within the last week or so.

As you know, we’re a full-service bookstore stocking all kinds of things from all sorts of perspectives. Although I like reviewing titles here at BookNotes I thought I’d just announce these that came in recently so you can see the breadth and diversity and scope of just some of what we find notable. And this doesn’t even include children’s books, fiction, poetry, or new Bibles and Bible studies. My, my, where to begin? Well, here are a few, mostly brand spanking new.

You can order these by clicking on the “order here” link at the end of the page which takes you to the secure order form page of our Hearts & Minds website. Just follow the directions, telling us what you want, how you want it sent (USPS or UPS or back-yard, curb-side pickup here in Dallastown) and we’ll follow up, taking care of the rest. We look forward to the pleasure of serving you in this way.

 

22 NEW BOOKS THAT ARRIVED LAST WEEK     ALL 20% OFF

Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty Ken Starr (Encounter Books) $26.99

OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Judge Starr rose to fame when he was appointed to the independent counsel that investigated alleged financial misdeeds from then Governor Bill Clinton’s Whitewater connections, which, as most of us know, shifted (against Starr’s personal wishes) into explorations of a sex scandal and the eventual impeachment about the President’s lying under oath, etc. Starr’s memoir about those years, Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation, was hard to put down. This brand new one explores the principles of American religious freedom and explores both Constitutional questions and lots of legal cases, from freedom of religious speech to the rights of organizations and churches to conscientious objection of various sorts. Some of the cases he describes are ones he himself litigated so regardless of what side a reader might be on, it offers a ringside seat, and is well worth reading. He explores the bi-partisan passing of the RFRA and notes how current leaders (including President Biden) seem to have flip-flopped against the reasonable accommodations outlined there.

Besides helpful introductions to legal principles and arguments, Mr. Starr offers other stories, too, about how free religious groups can (and he would say, should) serve the needs of the community; he is clear and inspiring, telling about friends as diverse as Joanne and Chip Gaines (friends from Waco) and Bob Goff (who he knew year before he became a best-selling motivational speaker and coach, from Bob’s own days at Pepperdine Law School) and his global justice work against child slavery, the radical Catholic Dorothy Day, and good churches that serve the homeless with gusto, even when sometimes seemingly needlessly hassled by government bureaucracies.

Ken was a friend with “the notorious RBG” as she was sometimes playfully called, as we saw in a moving Wall Street Journal tribute he penned after her death; he is always gracious in describing those whose perspectives are different than his own. Starr has served in distinguished ways from circuit judge for the District of Columbia, as law clerk to Chief Justice Warren Burger, and has argued thirty-six cases before the US Supreme Court. There are other books that study religious liberty that are more scholarly, and some that are more basic. (In a few weeks we’ll get the forthcoming one by Andrew Walker, the excellent Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age (Brazos Press; $19.99.))This one is very helpful, I think, covering the major cases in the field, noting where he thinks the courts got it right, and where he thinks the justices erred. The impeccable Princeton professor of jurisprudence, Robert P. George, calls it “marvelously lucid.”

Every Moment Holy: Volume II – Death, Grief, and Hope Douglas McKelvey, illustrations by Ned Bustard (Rabbit Room Press) $35.00                                                        OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

I suppose you recall our rave, rave reviews of the first volume of litanies and responsive readings and prayers for ordinary life events. There is a full size leather-bound hardback and a smaller, flexible compact edition of EMH Volume 1 but this new one only comes in the larger, leather-bound hardback. Believe me, it is even more beautiful and lavish than the first, a beautiful companion volume, with prayers about grief and loss, lament and hope.

We are honored to be able to sell this and hope you let folks know it is now out. It is surely one of the most unique and special resources published this year. Kudos to the very cool, artful, and faithful Rabbit Room folks and to our good friend Ned Bustard for his expert design work.

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (second edition) Marilyn McEntyre (Eerdmans) $19.99        OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If you have followed BookNotes for a while you know that dear Marilyn McEntyre is one of our favorite authors. (And you will know we raved a month ago about her brand new and very important book Dear Doctor: What Doctors Don’t Ask, What Patients Need to Say.) This new edition is updated with new examples and illustrations and has a cover to match her recent Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict. I quote Caring for Words often and cannot say enough good about it. McEntyre’s main thesis, first delivered as the legendary Stone Lectures at Princeton, is that words, like natural resources, need to be stewarded well, lest things get toxic. The book offers “stewardship strategies” for caring for words well. One reviewer said it offers a sustenance and delicacy. And deep, good wisdom. Don’t miss it.

Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity Stephen Roach, with Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books) $11.99                                                                       OUR SALE PRICE = $9.59

I’ve been waiting for this, having read an advanced copy of the manuscript and elated by it. I will tell you more about it another BookNotes, I hope, and I assure you it will be on future lists I may get asked to do about books on aesthetics, the arts, and Biblically-faithful views of creativity. (I even showed it as a pre-order item at our specially-curated online, e-commerce Jubilee Bookstore, in the arts category.) There is solid Biblical teaching here, good Christian thinking, drawing on good sources, from Calvin Seerveld and Dorothy Sayers and Thomas Merton and Leland Ryken and Mako Fujimura and the like. (Roach is himself quite remarkable, directing the stunning faith/arts event, The Breath and the Clay Experience.) The chapter in Naming the Animals are short, the foundation solid, the writing lively, as the invitation for all of us to take up the calling of being creative, playful, inventive, curious, makers, artful, is offered thoughtfully and winsomely – it’s all here. What a book — a lovely, compact sized, well-done guide to opening up this dimension of your life. There are Ned Bustard artworks enhancing the chapters, too, less elaborate than the work in Every Moment Holy but, still, his signature linocut style. Cheers!

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation Anna Malaika Tubbs (Flatiron Books) $28.99                                                                  OUR SALE PRICE =$23.19

Did you hear the NPR interview with this author last week? My, my, may, what a strong idea for a great book, and what remarkable women it showcases. Three great biographies in one, interlaced with insight about their famous sons and the earth shattering times in which they lives and died. Did you know that Mrs. Alberta King was much better educated than her famous husband, “Daddy” King? Have you ever heard anything about Louise Little, Malcolm’s mother? How about Berdis Baldwin? These women had similarities, as individuals and as mothers, and considerable differences. Kudos to Anna Malaika Tubbs, a Cambridge PhD candidate in sociology and a Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in anthropology.

Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel Eric Mason, editor (Zondervan) $27.99    OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

Those who follow BookNotes know we have promoted Rev. Mason’s books before (and have heard him a couple of times at the CCO’s Jubilee Conference which we help with yearly in Pittsburgh.) This sturdy textbook has 15 chapters, serious but not overly academic, rich, but not vague, this highly anticipated volume features a top-notch lineup of contributors. They say it is the first evangelical book to focus on the sects and ethnocentric ideologies prevalent today in the Black community. As it says on the back cover, “It introduces readers to each of these alternative religious groups and provides practical tools to engage them apologetically and combat false teaching.” As Kirk Franklin puts it, “This book shouts loud to our times!”

My Vertical Neighborhood: How Strangers Became a Community Lynda MacGibbon (IVP) $17.00                                                                     OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

We stock almost every new book IVP does and I couldn’t wait for this, the story of a woman moving from a small city in eastern Canada to a high-rise apartment in Toronto and how she learned to love her neighbors, neighbors of all sorts. This is a book about hospitality and ministry, yes, but more it seems to be an inspiring story about friendship, about the risks and rewards of trusting Jesus’ way of caring for others. Check out these very, very positive reviews:

Riveting, fascinating, authentic, vulnerable, funny–this book grabbed me and I could not put it down. Lynda’s neighbors are established, lonely, secular urbanites in a high-rise apartment building. When she prioritizes them over church connections, they become her best friends. What does it mean to love a neighbor? ‘Pay attention,’ she says. ‘Notice. Engage. Welcome. Open your door. Accept their invitations. Give time. Laugh. Debate. Apologize. Forgive. Cry. Celebrate.’ Caught up in the quirky lives of Brian and Rachel and Yolanda, we see how community can flower in sterile spaces, and urban hangouts can be sanctified. There is awkwardness and misunderstanding and swearing and sex talk and even invitations to strip clubs, but the joy of Jesus shines through. — Miriam Adeney, professor, Seattle Pacific University, author of Kingdom Without Borders: The Untold Story of Global Christianity

I hadn’t meant to read My Vertical Neighborhood in a single sitting, but Lynda’s warmth, authenticity, and vision made me realize I was encountering a soul-friend-which is what I suspect happened to her neighbors, who we meet in this book. Anna and Ron, Yolanda and Nicolai, Brian and Rachel could not be more different, but they become Lynda’s found family — and, through this book, ours. Her beautifully told stories made me long for the kind of community she describes. Friendships filled with awkwardness and acceptance, feasts and forgiveness, trust and tenderness. Lynda doesn’t offer a how-to on hospitality. There’s an industry that already supplies that. What she offers is something far more important. She resets our imagination through tales of lost parrots and Christmas pajama parties. A tender dance in a nightclub and a fast friendship formed at a Starbucks. Unexpected prayer requests from Kiribati and unanswered spiritual longings in a Bible study. Studies tell us we live in the loneliest era in history. Lynda invites us into a better story.”  —  Greg Jao, assistant to the president, director of communications and external relations, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, author of Your Minds Mission.

R.C. Sproul: A Life Stephen J. Nichols (Crossway) $34.99                                                                  OUR SALE PRICE = $ 27.99

Sproully, as we sometimes called him – RC to nearly everyone else – lived in Western Pennsylvania when I was a college student and he was vibrant, intellectual, deeply Reformed, culturally aware, freelance teacher, trying to be somewhat like Francis Schaeffer, who influenced his early vision for the Ligonier Valley Study Center. We visited there from time to time and I had long conversations with him on several occasions. He helped create the nationally-respected CCO (Coalition for Christian Outreach) campus ministry (which Nichols oddly doesn’t mention) and with Wayne Alderson, pioneered the “value of the person” work-world movement for labor-management reconciliation based on the dignity of the worker, a social reform that Nichols describes alongside RC’s colorful youth, his conversion, and his rise to international fame as a conservative Calvinist and teacher and best-selling author. From his relationships with the usual suspects – J.I. Packer or Chuck Colson, say – and the not so usual (golf buddy Alice Cooper) this book celebrates, as Joni Eareckson Tada puts it, “a man worth remembering.” 400 pages, with photographs.

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir Sherry Turkle (Penguin Press) $28.00                                         OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

This book actually came out a month ago, but we just got it in – and I’m glad we did. You surely know Turkle as an MIT professor and TED Speaker and Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year recipient and prolific author who has for decades been exploring the role of media in our lives, especially in the lives of children being raised in the digital generation. Her very fruitful recent books have included Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and the very important Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. This recent one is a major volume, a memoir that makes personal some of her insight about “how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines.” This is said to be both vivid and poignant (and a “one-of-a-kind page-turner”), the story of a curious girl from an unusual family, now public intellectual, due to Turkle’s own courage and virtue. Blurbs on the back are from the likes of Arianna Huffington (CEO Of Thrive Global) and novelist Jen Gish and feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan. As Gilligan notes, her father and first husband seem not to show much empathy, and so this explores how Dr. Turkle developed into the empathetic listener and humane woman she is.

Saints, Sufferers & Sinners: Loving Others as God Loves Us Michael R. Emlet (New Growth Press) $17.99                                                                          OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I was eager to see this a month or so ago and due to a snafu at the publisher we never got our shipment. With their regrets, we now have it, so we’ll announce it here as if it is new. It’s new to us, and maybe to you – and it is very, very solid. We value Mike as a friend and customer and respect his good work — especially a book on how to wisely apply the bible called CrossTalk: Where Life and Scripture Meet and his small but useful book Descriptions and Prescriptions: A Biblical Perspective on Psychiatric Diagnoses and Medications. I think this new one, Saints Sufferers & Sinners deserves a much fuller review, but for now, just realize this – this is a rare book that takes the conventional Biblical theology about the human condition and in clear and helpful language explains that people are simultaneously saints and sinners. And, wisely and rightly, he adds to that famous dictum, that we are also sufferers. That is, we are sinners and we are sinned against; we have hurt others and we have been hurt. We are beloved and redeemed in Christ and damaged and yet implicated if not out and out complicit in the world’s awful mess. Which is to say that in all our relationships, and certainly whenever we are trying to assist others, we start with a posture of grace.

This book is not too complicated or lengthy so is good for anyone who wants to clarify their mess of feelings and be clearer about their identity. But since Michael is a counselor, he not only guide readers toward self-understanding in light of a gospel-centered vision, but outlines a model for understanding others. There is a section in each unit about how this plays out in counseling sessions so although it is not primarily aimed at therapists, pastors, or those in the helping professions, professionals will, indeed, learn much. I very much appreciated the large parts I read and I am glad for the chance to announce it here. Get one for yourself and anyone you know who does formal or informal counseling with others.

Dr. Michael Emlet has given us a treasure. He’s primarily focused on how we relate to others through the triple lens of saint, sufferer, and sinner. He’s particularly strong at blending those lenses together. The result? You can begin to look at and treat people as fully human. His experience as a counselor grounds his thoroughly biblical insights in real life. This immensely helpful book isn’t just for counselors—it’s for all of Jesus’ followers.  Paul Miller, Author of A Praying Life and J-Curve: Dying and Rising with Jesus in Everyday Life 

As Christians, we know we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, but it can be hard to know what it means to offer love to our neighbors on the ground in concrete, daily ways. In this deep, rich, and practical book,  Michael Emlet draws on Scripture and years of experience as a Christian husband, parent, church member, and counselor to help us more faithfully and fully love our neighbors, our spouses, our children, and all whom God brings into our lives. Through this exploration of what it means that we are all simultaneously saints, sufferers, and sinners, which is shaped by the wisdom of the Bible on every page, those who read this book will come away better equipped to fulfill the Great Commandment in the quotidian moments of everyday life and ministry. Kristen Deede Johnson, award-winning author; dean and professor of Theology and Christian Formation, Western Theological Seminary

True Companions: A Book for Everyone About the Relationships That See Us Through Kelly Flanagan (IVP) $24.00                                             OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

When InterVarsity Press (IVP) issues a book in a handsome hardback with a dust jacket, it’s a big deal and a very special release. With blurbs from Bob Goff and Aubrey Sampson (of the book about suffering and lament, The Louder Song) and Katherine Willis Pershey (whose memoir about being a mainline pastor and wife and mother, Any Day a Beautiful Change I really loved) and with a forward by Ian Morgan Cron, I thought this writer really gets around and must have extraordinary writing chops. And something tender and vital to say. It looks spectacular.

The exquisite writer Carolyn Weber says,

What a brave, beautiful, and bountiful book that sings with quiet wisdom on the power of loneliness and the sanctity of companionship.

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age Richard Beck (Broadleaf) $24.99                                                                          OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Richard Beck is a beloved and lively professor at the conservative evangelical Abilene Christian University, a popular, if sometimes provocative Sunday school teacher in a hospitable Church of Christ and Bible study leader at a maximum security prison and is increasingly the sort of author that one might want to read anything he writes. (His last book was called Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash.) This new one looks beautiful, about discovering viable systems of meaning and authentic faith in the secular age and finding “the love, grace, and presence of God everywhere.” As Julia Sparks Attalla of Fuller Theological says, “What Richard Beck has done in Hunting Magic Eels has lit my soul on fire!” Wow.

Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World Kathleen Dean Moore (Counterpoint Press) $26.00                        OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I have not had the opportunity to write much about the beautiful, eloquent, interesting, captivating and often very moving nature essays of Kathleen Dean Moore for a while – her last was a somewhat more political and philosophical study, the important Great Tide Rising: Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change and then the very fun novel, Piano Tide, both which we’ve announced at BookNotes. This recent release is sort of a “greatest hits” collection of her earlier books I loved so much, drawing also from articles never in book form, but mostly including excerpts from beautiful collections of memoir and natural history and storytelling about her experiences in the outdoors such as Holdfast, Riverwalking, Wild Solace, and the wonderful Pine Island Paradox. The organizing theme whereby certain excerpts and essays suggested themselves is around wild sounds, the music of creation. What a great gift for those who appreciate profound and enjoyable nature writing. Earth’s Wild Music is a gem.

Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal Mark Bittman (Houghton Mifflin) $28.00                                                        OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

What an amazing work, a study of the history and evolution of food, with an eye to sustainability and ecologically sound health concerns.The spork on the warm cover is a stroke of design genius, emblatic of so much, eh?

Anti-globalist justice intellectual Naomi Klein says it is “a joyful and transformational read” and Bill McKibben says it has “opened a new window to our understanding of this perilous moment.” By “expanding the concept of junk food he takes us one a fascinating tour of modernity, with some powerful suggestions for change.” It has been called landmark, pioneering, sweeping, and certainly entertaining, not unlike Bittman’s reputation as a cook, food writer, cookbook author, and delightful TV chef.

Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System Gary Paul Nabhan (Broadleaf) $26.99                             OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I promised not to lapse into longer reviews so I will just say that I intend to describe this more fully later as it deserves to be known among our Hearts & Minds friends. Nabhan is known as “Franciscan Brother Coyote” and is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been called “the father of the local food movement,” As an Arab American, he has interacted with farmers and farmworkers from Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Oman, and the US. He keeps orchards and gardens and greenhouses at his home in Patagonia, Arizona, although is also a fisherman from the shores of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. And he’s a Bible guy. Wow.

Here is how the publisher describe this magnificently interesting and inspiring book:

Climate disasters, tariff wars, extractive technologies, and deepening debts are plummeting American food producers into what is quickly becoming the most severe farm crisis of the last half-century. Yet we are largely unaware of the plight of those whose hands and hearts toil to sustain us. Agrarian and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan–the father of the local food movement–offers a fresh, imaginative look at the parables of Jesus to bring us into a heart of compassion for those in the food economy hit by this unprecedented crisis. Offering palpable scenes from the Sea of Galilee and the fields, orchards, and feasting tables that surrounded it, Nabhan contrasts the profound ways Jesus interacted with those who were the workers of the field and the fishers of the sea with the events currently occurring in American farm country and fishing harbors. Tapping the work of Middle Eastern naturalists, environmental historians, archaeologists, and agro-ecologists, Jesus for Fishers and Farmers is sure to catalyze deeper conversations, moral appraisals, and faith-based social actions in each of our faith-land-water communities.

“Who better to give us a fresh reading of the Jesus story than one of our leading agrarian writers and practitioners? In Jesus for Farmers and Fishers, Gary Paul Nabhan’s vast scientific and agricultural acumen melds with a deep contemplative wisdom. The result is one of the most insightful readings of the Gospels I’ve encountered, read through the eyes of the very people Jesus served: fishers, farmers, bakers, gleaners, migrant farmworkers. Here is a book for today’s food justice movement, and for anyone who hungers for restoration of our lands and our communities.” –Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament, and founder of the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-Being Program at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

“I am hungry for this book. Gary Paul Nabhan calls us to discover the tastes, scents, and textures of food in the Gospels and encounter the people who grew it, caught it, and cooked it. Nabhan’s work plunges us into the way of Jesus that turns things upside down and inside out. The powerful are brought low and the lowly raised up. As Nabhan digs into the complexity and depth of injustice in Gospel times, we’re shown stories that interweave with those of field hands and food service workers who provide our food–at great cost to themselves.” –Anna Woofenden, author of This Is God’s Table: Finding Church Beyond the Walls

“Gary Nabhan’s work reminds us of what I can describe only as a sort of historical wonder…” –Wendell Berry, author of The Unsettling of America

 

The Beatitudes Through the Ages Rebekah Eklund (Eerdmans) $35.00

OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

This came just yesterday and I can’t wait to dip in. It is a sturdy, nicely made hardback worthy of such a major, serious work. Dale Allison, genius of Princeton Theological Seminary says in the foreword,

This volume has humbled me, leaving me cognizant of how little I really know . . . Beyond being a boon for exegesis, this book is a treasure of sermonic possibilities. It holds much that is not on the pages of the commentaries that typically line the shelves of pastors’ offices. So if one is looking for fresh thoughts for preaching, they are here in abundance. Furthermore, interpretation and application are, for Eklund, not separate things. Here she stands in line with the misnamed pre-critical exegetes. The latter were consistently interested in how one might enter into the Beatitudes and bring them to life. Like them, Eklund is not a disinterested observer.

It is not an overstatement to describe Rebekah Eklund’s book as stunning. Clearly written. Delightful to read. Erudite while being open-hearted and open-handed. I learned something new (and old) on every page. This will become the new standard work on the Beatitudes. — Jonathan T. Pennington, author of The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing

Rebekah Eklund’s heart is large, and her imagination broad; her eye for detail is sharp, and her curiosity winsome; her energy to pursue an unlikely hypothesis is generous, and her patience to unearth an esoteric source unending; her passion for truth is relentless, and her joy in Christ’s upside-down kingdom infectious. Blessed are those who read every word of this book and treasure it: for the glory and playfulness of God’s good future are theirs. — Samuel Wells, vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London

To You All Hearts Are Open: Revitalizing the Church’s Pattern of Asking God Scot McKnight (Paraclete Press) $14.99                                         OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

This little paperback by an author who is both one of our premier Biblical scholars and most appreciated popular writers is a small gem. It, too, deserves to be explored carefully. I can tell you this much, simply: it has lots of Biblical material as he learns from Scripture what we mean by petitionary prayer. What does it mean to take up the great privilege of being in God’s presence in this special way and then to ask for stuff? My, my, McKnight shows how there is Biblical teaching and, more, Biblical patterns.

The church over time has learned much about this, and in the more liturgical traditions these prayers are called “Collects.” So, To You All Hearts Are Open is about the practice, postures, and patterns of collects. Yep.

As Dr. Winfield Bevins notes, “If you are looking for a refreshing introduction to petitionary prayer that is rooted in the Great Tradition and deeply biblical, this book is for you.”

Providence John Piper (Crossway) $39.99           OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99

This will be in the shop any day now, so knew I should mention it. Obviously, at over 750 pages, it is magisterial in intention and scope. As the publisher says:

Drawing on a lifetime of theological reflection, biblical study, and practical ministry, pastor and author John Piper leads us on a stunning tour of the sightings of God’s providence–from Genesis to Revelation–to discover the all-encompassing reality of God’s purposeful sovereignty over all of creation and all of history. Piper invites us to experience the profound effects of knowing the God of all-pervasive providence: the intensifying of true worship, the solidifying of wavering conviction, the strengthening of embattled faith, the toughening of joyful courage, and the advance of God’s mission in this world.

They continue:

From Genesis to Revelation, the providence of God directs the entire course of redemptive history. Providence is “God’s purposeful sovereignty.” Its extent reaches down to the flight of electrons, up to the movements of galaxies, and into the heart of man. Its nature is wise and just and good. And its goal is the Christ-exalting glorification of God through the gladness of a redeemed people in a new world.

There are some things about John Piper’s work and some of his views that I oppose. He has inspired me, often, and moved me deeply. There are other times I’ve found him abrasive, although, to be honest, even when he’s bombastic and too sure of himself, it beats authors and pastors who don’t seem to care much about much of anything or can’t work up the energy to say what they believe or why. His passion and boldness and zeal for Christ and the gospel, even if I’m not exactly where he would be on some things, is admirable. (Just see in this 6 minute promo video how he jokes about writing a 700 page book and then his passionate explanation of why he thinks the content of this book is so very important.)

His explanation of this most fundamental topic of the purposeful sovereignty of God may be one of those things where we disagree, but since I have not studied this major work, I can’t say. I know people I respect will disapprove. But, agree or not, for those that want a deep dive into Scripture in ways that draw out this high view of God’s sovereign rule, this will be a must-read resource, a landmark book that the studious pastor Piper has worked on for decades. Some have called it breathtaking, God-glorifying, written to enhance the joy of God’s people, a magnum opus.

Endorsements have poured in from all over the world. There are rave reviews from leaders in Christian seminaries or church movements in China, Russia, Quebec, South America, Germany, Africa…

This is a book about the providence of God, written by a man who has spent his life expounding the glory of God. This volume is substantial, as its subject matter demands. Piper moves from the time before creation to the second coming of Christ, showing that the providential acts of God are pervasive through time, circumstances, and people as he explains the staggering power of the self-sufficient God. — Miguel Núñez, Senior Pastor, International Baptist Church of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Piper has the gift of making complex ideas easily understandable. Under the general theme of providence, he deals with some of the most difficult themes of the Christian faith–the relation of God’s sovereignty to man’s decisions, the origin of evil, God’s use of evil people and the devil to accomplish his goals, and election. From a South American standpoint, where so many questions about God’s ways arise from a context of rampant neopentecostalism, health-and-wealth gospel, poverty, and corruption, this book is much needed. — Augustus Nicodemus Lopes, Assistant Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Recife, Brazil; Vice President, Supreme Council, Presbyterian Church of Brazil

John Piper’s magisterial book is a robust antidote to the weak view on God’s providence held by many Christians today. His exposition of the subject is thorough in scope and saturated with biblical insight. Piper is a model of the pastor-theologian as he not only describes providence but also shows how our understanding of providence can deepen our lives. — Tremper Longman III, Distinguished Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Westmont College

Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century John Loughery & Blythe Randolph (Simon & Schuster) $18.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I have gone on and on about this several times here at BookNotes, explaining how important it is as a major work on Day and how it was so very interesting now only about her faith and politics and the Catholic Worker movement she inspired, but about US history, especially as told from what would have been her vantage point. It was one of my favorite books of 2020 and although we didn’t get to our annual “Best of” awards due to Covid, this would surely have been named. I heartily recommend it.

It was a great privilege that I had a short review published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about a year ago. The thick hardback sold then for $30.00 (we now have it at $20.00) but it has just now released in paperback. What a great read in this handsome paper edition that – if I may brag a bit – includes a blurb on it from yours truly. This is so cool for this small town reviewer, I must say. Right there on the cover of a major book from this prominent publishing house next to some famous names, it shows what I wrote a year ago:

Magisterial and glorious; it captures intimate details and offers new insights into Day’s colorful life even as it places her in the broader context of radical movements and the landscape of causes during the 20th century…it may be that Mr. Loughery and Ms. Randolph have given us the definitive biography. —Pittsburgh Post Gazette

 

No Longer Strangers: Transforming Evangelism with Immigrant Communities edited by Eugene Cho & Samira Izadi Page (Eerdmans) $19.99              OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

What a remarkable group of contributors a few who are authors you may know (Sandra Maria van Opstal, Jenny Yang, Ann Voskamp) and others who have years of specialized experience sharing the gospel with particular immigrant communities. This offers “a new vision for evangelism that honors the most vulnerable.” This is a good book for anyone doing research into faith-based approaches to immigration (and refugee resettlement and the like) but, truly, it is also a book about missional outreach, evangelism, disciple-making, congregational ministry.

Hate, Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another Matt Taibbi (OR Books) $15.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

The hardback went out of print last fall and this brand new paperback includes a new introduction (or a “post-election preface” as they call it.) Taibbi is a smart and sassy reporter – “smart and scathing” the New York Times calls him, with “freewheeling analysis.” He has written brilliant exposes in Rolling Stone and co-hosts the Useful Idiots podcast. Here is explores how both Fox News and MSNBC are mirror images, creating echo chambers of alternative facts and one-sided worldviews, with primarily money-making agendas, using a strategy that is less news and more giving the people what they want to hear, so to speak – demographic-driven. You can see Hannity and Rachel Maddow on the cover, which is bold for a lefty like Taibbi.

As the Jacobin journal puts it, Hate, Inc. “is as hilarious as it is grim: behind the buffoonery of the 24-hour news cycle is a propaganda system devoted to upholding the power of entrenched elites.” This is clever – one chapter is “how we turned the news into sports” and disturbing. The author’s own biases are evident (the publisher calls it “part tirade, part confession”) but exquisitely so in an appendix where he interviews Noam Chomsky.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America Alec MacGillis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) $28.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I’ll admit I’ve got this one – for obvious reasons – tucked away over at our house for me to dive into soon. I’ve heard a few interviews and I hope you have, too. I’ve read some reviews and they are nearly all raving! As Jacob Hacker (a Yale University professor and author of Let Them Eat Tweets) says, Fulfillment is “journalism at its very best: a powerful panoramic account of America’s skyrocketing inequality across people and places.” This is not like Nomadland, really, but it somehow reminds me of that – the displacement, inequities, angst and financial disruption caused by, in this case, Amazon. Like other books on WalMart, say, it shows how their tax credits cost us millions and drain local taxes, infrastructure, and more as they extract much from the local economy.  It is a story that is so much a part of our national landscape that to be informed citizens (not to mention consumers) we ought to be aware.

Just read some of these back cover blurbs so you see why it is an important book for any of us:

MacGillis has set out to do something different. The Amazon depicted in Fulfillment is both a cause and a metaphor. It’s an actual engine behind the regional inequality that has made parts of the United States ‘incomprehensible to one another,’ he writes, stymieing a sense of national solidarity… The result is galloping prosperity for some Americans and unrelenting precarity for others… MacGillis suggests that one-click satisfactions distract us from taking in the bigger picture, whose contours can only be discerned with a patient and immersive approach. –Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

Alec MacGillis takes the ubiquity of [Amazon] and blows it up into something on the scale of Homer’s Odyssey in his new book … MacGillis’s story is as emotional as it is analytical — he visits characters and industries affected by Amazon, demonstrating over and over again that the empire is irreparably changing every aspect of American life as we know it. Sometimes the things we see every day become invisible. MacGillis asks us to look closer. — Amy Pedulla, The Boston Globe

Fulfillment is a mind-bogglingly thorough book, a hybrid of urban history, reportage, profile and research on people and places that have been impacted by Amazon. MacGillis is equally adept in animating the economic picture . . . A compendium of tragedies large and small. — Elizabeth Greenwood, San Francisco Chronicle

Amazon is the campfire we have chosen to commune around, and MacGillis’ book takes a wide, expansive look at how this campfire has become a firestorm whose embers incinerate the very workers, consumers, and communities that are drawn to this warm, culture-eating glow… MacGillis asks us to truly process what Amazon’s pandemic profitability means for the nation. The takeaway is quite sobering: The fates of the company and the nation had diverged entirely. — Patrick McGinty, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A ground-level tour of the United States of Amazon… The individual stories in Fulfillment are chilling . . . The book is also the story of a political system captivated by the idea that what is good for Amazon is good for America. — James Kwak, The Washington Post

Alec MacGillis practices journalism with ambition, tenacity, and empathy that will command your awe. Like one of the great nineteenth-century novels, Fulfillment studies a social ill with compelling intimacy and panoramic thoroughness. In the process, Jeff Bezos’s dominance and its costs are made real–and it becomes impossible to one-click again the same. — Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of World Without Mind

And, this:

Anyone who orders from Amazon needs to read these moving and enraging stories of how one person’s life savings, one life’s work, one multigenerational tradition, one small business, one town after another, are demolished by one company’s seemingly unstoppable machine. They are all the more enraging because Alec MacGillis shows so clearly how things could have been different. — Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

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All books mentioned are 20% off. Just use the link to our order page, below.

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• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.25.
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BookNotes

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Thanks so much for those who have been so supportive of our store in this past week in our role as a bookseller for the virtual book launch party for the authorized biography of Eugene Peterson called A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier (NavPress; $28.00 – our sale price $22.40.) What a joy it has been to sell so many of these fabulous books to so many folks who love Winn, the author, and, of course, who esteem Eugene Peterson. I hope you saw my post at Facebook reflecting on how meaningful it has been and how grateful we have been for Winn to encourage people to order books from us. What an honor, and what a blast!

While we certainly have enjoyed Collier’s amazing biography of Eugene Peterson, I look forward to reading next week the recently re-issued older book of Peterson’s called Living the Resurrection: The Risen Christ in Everyday Life, this edition comes with a foreword by son Eric Peterson in which he writes briefly about Eugene’s funeral celebration. It is published in a compact paperback (NavPress; $9.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99.) In it, Peterson reflects on three post-resurrection episodes of Jesus and three practices we can embrace inspired by these three gospel stories. What a lovely little book for these next weeks!

Still, we need to press on grappling with the insights of some brand new books that are just out by some very contemporary authors. Peterson himself, of course, was a voracious reader and stood in a theological tradition that emphasized reading, study, and the ministry of being a life-long learner. So let’s do this!

SIX BRAND NEW BOOKS.  ALL 20% OFF.

Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence.      Diana Butler Bass (HarperOne)  $26.00                        OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

This should be one of the most talked about books of this season, if not this year, because it is so very interesting, a story so well-told, and, yet, provocative; challenging, even. This is what makes for a good book, friends — a book that makes you think and may be generative for you making up your mind (maybe even in fresh or unexpected ways) about things that matter. In this case, Diana Butler Bass tells her own journey – almost like a spiritual memoir – of knowing Jesus in different ways throughout her life. She calls her project memoir theology (not just a memoir that is theological, but the actual doing of theology, informed by her life story.)

Diana is one of those writers I so appreciate because she has written a lot and, to me at least, her works seems to hang together. As a religious history scholar (with a PhD from Duke) she has written books about congregations and demographics and the broader religious landscape. And she has experienced many tribes and tributaries within the broader stream of Protestantism in the late 20^th century and early 21^st. There are not that many people who experienced faith in mainline denominational settings, within soft fundamentalism, progressive evangelicalism, with those who are seriously Reformed and those who are highly liturgical, who know well Gordon Conwell professors and Marcus Borg and Phyllis Tickle. Anytime she starts writing, you know it’s going to be really, really interesting.

She has written things that have revealed much about her own life, most obviously in two books I adore — Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community (Church Publishing; $22.95) and Broken We Kneel: Reflections on Faith and Citizenship (Church Publishing; $18.95.) The first is unlike any book I have read and we commend it to anyone interested in faith formation or congregational life because it does seem to tell her own faith journey by way of various (Episcopalian) parishes she was a part of. That is, it is an ethnographic memoir, a look at a handful of churches, exploring those congregations, their ministries, their vision, their family systems, their leadership, worship, strengths and weaknesses as seen through the lens of how she experienced them and her own evolving faith.

Broken We Kneel is a short book that takes place after 9-11 and revolves around questions of the idols of nationalism and unquestioned patriotism, about war and peacemaking as she navigates her own conscience while working at an Episcopal church near the Pentagon that was excessively hawkish. In a sense, I have often said that this is a continuation of her Strength for the Journey book as she explores her own faith’s demands and comforts and convictions in light of one more congregation of which she was a part, for better or worse.

These are both marvelous books by a woman who knows her stuff – Bass attended an upscale, evangelical Christian college, earned her Masters at another exceptional evangelical seminary, and completed a PhD in religious history (supervised by George Marsden, no less) at Duke – but they are personal, too, enjoyable for those who like their sociology, religion, theology, told in personal, conversational ways.

Freeing Jesus is, in many ways, like Strength for the Journey but rather than narrating her faith journey by way of congregations, she does so in light of the various sorts of Christologies she has embraced throughout her life. It is her most personal book yet, even as it draws on the requisite scholarship about various aspects of Jesus’ identity, character, and mission. The subtitle (“Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence”) says almost all you need to know — in various times in her life she almost has (or the Christian culture of which she was a part seemed to) put Jesus in a box. He is this but not that. We call him this, but never that.

The title alludes to setting Jesus free from those denominational and tradition-bound constraints and integrating these diverse aspects of who Jesus is. This is a tremendously helpful project and I suspect it will cause readers to evaluate their own religious upbringing and past and present. How did we understand Jesus then, and how do we understand Him now? What does the Bible says? Are there some things His Spirit might be calling us to let go of, or embrace anew? Might we need to “free” Jesus, ourselves? Diana tells her own story and it very, very interesting, but, more, it is important.

Happily, Diana is a “both/and” sort of thinker, not an “either/or” one, a characteristic (dare I say a spiritual gift?) I have long valued in her work.

Admittedly, there are those who see her as only a fierce critic of evangelical approaches but I have never quite felt that way – she is critical of less than adequate insights and hurtful practices but usually with a nod to the strengths of her past churches, previous theologies, or older practices. This is nicely evident in this book (with some great stories) especially, as she endeavors to free our views of Jesus from limited construals. She is critical of some of the fundamentalist strains of her younger years and apologizes to those whom she may have hurt in her days as a pretty dogmatic Reformer. (Get out your old copy of Strength for the Journey, gentle readers, and do some cross referencing. The stories do overlap, you know.) Butler Bass does solid (if not comprehensive) Biblical scholarship, showing how the gospels themselves present Jesus as more than any one caricature, not held by any one box or label.

Freeing Jesus is written as a linear story, from her Baltimore childhood’s “what a friend we have in Jesus” Methodism and youthful days admiring the do-gooder, be-nice, teacherly Jesus, to her adolescent years of worshipping the soul-saving, He died for me, Jesus as Savior, to her radical discipleship days in college of grappling with the public implications of Christ as Lord, and on through her conservative Reformed theology years while at Gordon-Conwell to her more recent awareness of what it means that Jesus is “the Way” and a sacred Presence. (We all bring our own biases to any book, of course, and the last chapter, for me, was the one I least appreciated, but that’s another story, I suppose. For what it is worth, some cross-referencing might be useful, here, too – see her very creative and fascinating book on church history called A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story which ends with some similar notions of a God of Presence in a postmodern culture.)

It would seem that she has evolved from one view of Jesus, one Christology, as the theologians put it, to different (more sophisticated?) ones. I know there are many that will resonant with these experiential Christiologies as they themselves have, like Diana, moved from a civil-religious and pleasant mainline Protestantism to a fiery evangelicalism or liberationist-oriented Kingdom activism model; they may have mastered systematic theology or embraced an orthodox sort of sacramental/liturgical worldview, and may have deconstructed some of that and moved on to contemplative practices and mystical encounters. In a way, this mirrors much my own journey and in each chapter as she tells her experiences I nodded in knowing agreement. Yes, yes, yes – that was just how it was. I know some of you are going to find yourself in this very story, or something close to it.

However, I do not think this is the best way to describe this story, a linear process from mild to wild, from dogma to ambiguity, from simple to sophisticated, from liberal to evangelical to progressive to mystic. That may be how some will take it, but as Bass herself has said more than once, it is wiser to integrate various aspects of our experiences and lessons leaned, creating more of a spiritual mosaic, with pieces of the puzzle finding their place in the emerging whole of who we are, who we are becoming, inspired by our understandings of who Jesus really is, and who He has been for us at various points in our lives. I do not think, no matter the linear format of the memoir portions of Freeing Jesus, that it is an evolving story of progress, from bad to good.  Notice that word in the subtitle, “Rediscovering Jesus as…”

(This process of “freeing” Jesus from the boxes we put Him in, this task of critical analysis and doing experiential theology, is not an inherently liberal or odd or deconstructive process. To be sure, the Bible gives us these different ways of understanding God’s role in our lives and it is helpful to be attentive to which understanding has most grabbed our attention, touched our hearts, informed our practices. In the history of redemption, as the story unfolds, the “old old story” is reinterpreted in new ways in new eras, appropriated, passed down, but understood anew. That’s just Bible 101 stuff, right?  We could say the same thing about, just for instance, the way we describe salvation and the work of the cross – some talk about atonement, reconciliation, healing, redemption, adoption, liberation, debts cancelled, freedom offered, guilt forgiven, purpose restored, victory over evil, and more. Good theology is rarely either/or but both/and. That’s just how the Bible works, coming to us as story and narrative and poetry and a contradictory jumble of teachings, sayings, lessons, laws, and letters. It’s a joyful and righteous task to integrate it all into some sort of coherent worldview, isn’t it? Diana, who now does stand in the tradition of mainline progressive faith – I love a picture of her with her nice dress and pearls standing next to her pal, tattooed and edgy Nadia Bolz-Weber, realizing that they are soul sisters – is offering all of us in all corners of the Body of Christ, a great gift and wise challenge. We need bigger visions of Jesus, not more constricted ones.)

I could write much about the stories Diana shares in each of these good chapters. As I noticed and as she has admitted (in a wonderful THINGS NOT SEEN podcast where she was expertly interviewed by the very well-informed David Dalt) she wrote in fresh and almost naïve ways in the earlier chapters of the book because that is how it felt to her in those young years. (When she quoted “It only takes a spark…” from the song “Pass It On” I almost cried!) Later things become more fraught and she describes what seems to be almost spiritual abuse, or at least heavy-handed men insisting they alone had the final, certain interpretation. Portions of the writing grows more tense. In this way, Freeing Jesus is a moving book, gripping at times.

Bass writes with passion as she tells of different books or authors that influenced her on different parts of her journey and she writes beautifully, near the end, about how she hopes to bring these various aspects of who Jesus is revealed to be into a consistent, theologically sound and Biblically-faithfully picture of Jesus the Christ.

More than a decade ago Diana wrote a book called Christianity After Religion (HarperOne; $16.99) She had written several others about healthy practices of healthy churches that seemed to push back against the end of the twentieth century media conceit that mega-churches were the only churches that were thriving and that right-of-center evangelical theology was the only sort that existed. Christianity After Religion surprised many by noting that there was a demographic tsunami of those leaving the church and that there was little we could do to stem that tide. We had to reinvent the faith, she seemed to be saying, if we wanted to minister to the spiritual needs of the de-churched and unchurched, the “Nones” and the “spiritual but not religious.” In that book she referred to the standard religious studies lingo of belief, belonging and behavior, three aspects of any religion and keys to the study of any religion. What sort of belief, belonging and behaviors will we see in this brave new world of 21^st century spirituality?

Her next three books are answering that very question. In 2015 she wrote a book about belonging (exploring how we belong to, among other things, nature and neighbors) called Grounded. Then she did a book about fresh spiritual behaviors, including the practice of Gratitude. Next came the most daunting, and it was to be an exploration of theology, exploring what we in the Christian tradition can/should believe in this postmodern era. Alas, she had to talk her publisher into this passionate focus, not a broad theology, but Christology. She wanted to write about Jesus.

Freeing Jesus, as she explains in the podcast, is part of this trilogy of books that follow up her Christianity After Religion project. Fair enough. For those who follow her work, though, I see it as one to be read in tandem with Strength for the Journey, her book about congregations.

I hope this book will introduce her to a new batch of readers, readers who don’t know any of her books but know that their life of following Jesus has tipped and turned, shifted and deepened, even as new aspects of their discipleship have unfolded and been disclosed as they have listened to the life. For anyone who wants a friendly book, written perhaps in the best way theology can be written, on one’s feet, on the road, going through life, refracted through our real life experiences, Freeing Jesus might be just the book you need to help you get in touch with the Jesus’ you have known, the aspects of His identity that have once meant most to you. Maybe you will turn inward a bit even during this upcoming season of Eastertide, and ponder this biggest question of all, not finally asked by Diana, but asked by Jesus Himself: “Who do you say that I Am?”

Diana Butler Bass is one of only a few modern Christian writers who can absolutely blow me away with both spiritual insight and beautiful writing. She is a brilliant scholar and a wonderful storyteller, charming and devout, erudite and deeply human. She speaks for me in Freeing Jesus as in all her books. — Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn

With each new book, Diana Butler Bass goes more deeply into what it means to be a Christian now, in a moment when many can’t summon the energy or the hope required. This may be her finest yet. — Bill McKibben, author The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation

Combining childhood memories and mature theological musings, personal story and Christian history, Gospel texts and present-day contexts, Bass invites all feeling caged by doctrine, silenced by tradition, or afraid of doubt to find not just freedom, voice, and the glory of mystery, but also to find Jesus on their own terms and in their own lives.” –Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Bible With and Without Jesus and The Misunderstood Jew

Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson (Brazos Press) $24.99                                           OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

You surely know that we have tons of books on race relations, multi-ethnic ministry, racial justice issues, and books by minorities – authors of color, as some say these days – and titles about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native cultures. It has been an interest of ours since before we opened the story and while we know there is so much more to know, more to grow into and experience, we are proud that we have long stocked books on inclusion and diversity, white privilege and insights about God’s call to be anti-racist. We have overtly Christian books and those not rooted in Christian faith. We have adult books and kids books. We have old ones and brand new ones. We hope it helps in these days of a resurgence of blatant racism and discriminatory policy.

I say this to set the stage for my quick comments insisting that this brand new book is excellent. Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair is co–written by an Asian-American evangelical pastor/Biblical scholar/public theologian and a white scholar/activist/artist and it is simply one of the very best books on racism that I have read in years. And there have been an awful lot of good ones, just this year.

We have basic ones, honest ones, spiritually inspiring ones, angry ones, those for beginners, for med-level readers, some that are super-scholarly. This one, Reparations, is exceptionally profound but accessible for nearly any interested reader. It is offering some fresh insight and covering what might be new ground for many as it explains basic concepts about our legacy of institutional racisms as clearly as any book of this sort. It is deeply rooted in a Biblical vision but seems written in a manner that even non-religious readers would appreciate its candor.

Perhaps one of the reasons I think this is surely one of the best books of 2021 is because it is tackling a question that has been raised in several places, talked about in almost quiet hushes as a dreaded topic. Who doesn’t want to work against racism? Who doesn’t even realize there are some structural or institutional obstacles that have to be addressed (not least prejudicial policing and judicial practices that cause what has come to be called racist mass incarceration. Most people of good faith know that racism remains an issue and cause for lament and anyone who knows their Bible knows that breaking down cultural and ethic barriers is a constant theme of the gospel itself.

But reparations? Really?

This is controversial stuff and seemingly endlessly complicated, impossible, perhaps, to wisely adjudicate even if one concedes that the wealth of most established white Americans has been derived from systems set up years ago that were exploitive, unjust, and caused a unarguable housing, education and material asset gap between races. Most of us know now about the inequities even after World War II, how white people of my parents generation got what we all called the G.I. Bill, even though black soldiers did not. Most of us now know that loans were widely available for baby booming young white families to populate the growing suburbs in the middle of the 20^th century but red-lining and other fundamentally unfair banking and real estate practices continued even after they were denounced and, in some cases, prohibited. But, still, that was years ago and who should pay whom to make things right? It’s almost too much to ask, and so we do not think about it much. Are we all really implicated in our place in history? There is no overtly Christian book like this that I know of that is doing this sort of serious, thoughtful, and important work, adding to this necessary conversation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “A Case for Reparations” 2016 article in The Atlantic was not the first or only major think piece about this in recent years, but it certainly was a bellwether hotly debated. I do not know of any popular-level, thoughtful, book-length response in all these years from Christian authors of this sort. (Kudos, Brazos Press!) Reparations is historic, and in this sense, agree or not with its modest proposals, it is one of the most important books in a long time. If you care about this topic, you should own it.

Let me be clear about two things: firstly, this new book offers a vision of this question that is thoughtfully rooted in the Biblical teaching about justice and restitution. Evangelical Christians informed by direct Bible teaching were among the pioneers what of what is now called “restorative justice” and this alternative sort of criminal justice theory is widely assumed by social conservatives and liberals alike to be a helpful, Biblically inspired theory, a Scripturally rooted approach to criminology (shaping both practices and attitude.) It is out of this vision of a theologically infused and Biblically based perspective that Kwon and Thompson have developed their proposals. Some of it is simply groundbreaking material.

Nobody, in my view, should offer opinions about this topic without having read this book. It is, in this sense, definitive, thus far.

I agree with historian Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism who says “Reparations is a book for this moment.” He notes that “while Christians should have been leading the way on this all along, sadly, too many have demonstrated compromise and complicity instead.”

Of course, not all who disagree with these proposals are necessarily compromised or complicit in institutional racism or resistant to making things whole, but, we must admit, some are. There are still those are who complicit in (if not aligned with) the forces and structures and practices and policies that tend towards injustice. I think it is true that in this fallen world, standing in this history as we do, we are all implicated in one way or another. In any case, agree or not, this book is thoughtful, urgent, important, and moves the conversation about faith-based racial justice work in a concrete and specific (and surprisingly local) direction.

As one reviewer has put it, the authors have done “a compelling job laying out the historic legitimacy, the moral necessity, and the biblical urgency for reparations from slavery.”

Please consider this endorsement of the book by conservative, evangelical Gospel Coalition leader and pastor of Anacostia River Church, in Washington DC, Thabiti Anyabwile:

Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson have given us the careful yet daring, gracious yet trenchant, historical yet relevant, principled yet persuasive teaching the church and the world has desperately needed. Here is a study written with a rare combination of pastoral tenderness and intellectual rigor.

You will learn (if you have not noticed) that the very word “reparations” is akin to the root word “repair.” Jews, of course, describe God’s call to repair and mend the broken world by using the phase tikkun olam. Biblically based as they are, Kwon and Thompson remind us that we must own the ethic of restitution; we must own the ethic of restoration. There is “a call to repair.” They present this call in the very way Anyabwile describes, with tenderness and intellectual vigor. It is gracious yet trenchant.

Again, I think Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, is very important and although I guess I cannot promise this to all readers, I found it hard to put down. It is gripping, compelling, interesting, inspiring, wise. Our friend Tish Harrison Warren calls it “a rare book” that is “blessedly troubling.” The Biblical scholarship is impressive, the footnotes are fabulous, the stories moving, and careful suggestions really stimulating.

I am glad for the long introductory chapter that highlights three sorts of understandings of, or levels of, racism, to which they add a fourth. This is very good stuff and worth the price of the book just to have these clear descriptions and insights at your fingertips. So good.

So, again: firstly, Reparations is interesting, Biblical, compelling, and urgent.

Secondly, just a quick word about these authors. Kudus to these two scholars and leaders who are not black for being so informed by the black experience in America and informed by the faith-based aspects of the historic American civil rights movement. Duke L. Kwon is a Korean American pastor in urban Washington DC with a heart for cross-cultural community about whom it has been said that he is “uniquely situated as a mediator in public conversations about race.” He has contributed chapters to two sober-minded, theologically sound but honest books that emerge from the PCA tradition, Heal Us, Emmanuel: A Call for Racial Reconciliation, Representation and Unity in the Church and Hear Us Emmanuel: Another Call for Racial Reconciliation, Representation, and Unity in the Church. He has written for The Washington Post and Christianity Today.

Gregory Thompson, by the way, is known for having written and produced a highly regarded hip hop musical – think Hamilton – set in Memphis, about the historic sanitation workers strike that drew Martin Luther King there in April of 1968. He lives in Charlottesville (he has worked at UVA with both James Davison Hunter and Charles Marsh.) He currently is working on an initiative to build a national memorial to the Underground Railroad outside of Philadelphia and is a research fellow in African American heritage at the historic (HBCU) Lincoln University and is the James Lawson Fellow for Faith and Justice at Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis. Two years ago at the Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh he told me he is hoping to write a book about the nonviolent strategies of MKL. This is some some deep, good stuff.

Very highly recommended.

Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We Left Behind Grace Olmstead (Sentinel) $27.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

I have an affection for books about small towns and rural places. I’ve reviewed several here, have highlighted others at events, and have even done lectures and sermons on ministry in small towns and forgotten rural places. I’m interested in the thick, regional locales of American culture – the rural South, the great mid-West, the rustbelt cities and towns, the great American Southwest and, of course, the weird glories of Appalachia. My one grandfather was a coal miner and the other a tenant farmer, and both were expert fly fisherman, so maybe I get it honestly. Most small towns are not like white-bread Mayberry USA and Uprooted reminds us of that by focusing especially on her own small town, Emmet, Idaho. Her great, great, grandparents down to her grandparents and parents were farmers in this lush agricultural region and after having moved to the East Coast to go to college and after having stayed in the suburbs of DC, she now wonders if it was right to abandon the legacy of her family’s homestead and farming legacy.

We’ve heard of “brain drain” and we’ve commended books like Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by Patrick Karr & Aria Kefalas (Beacon Press; $20.00.) It’s in the edges of stories like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Dirt by Mary Marantz and (speaking of Idaho) Educated by Tara Westover and in great fiction (like, as Grace Olmstead reminds us, the Wendell Berry novel Remembering where Andy Catlett has lost his land and his sense of membership in the community.) From Sarah Smarsh’s award winning Heartland to Timothy Carney’s brilliantly told Alienated America to one of my favorite books of last year, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (by Mari Mutsuki Mockett) to the lovely, decent, small-town writing of Michael Perry, or even the Academy Award nominated movie based on the nonfiction reporting in Nomadland, we are all wondering what is becoming of our places, what happens when we leave.

The very first few pages of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind made me fight back tears – because it says in a few pages what so many of us feel in our hearts and also just because it was so artfully and wonderfully written. I knew then that this was going to be a great, great read.

And it is. Grace Olmstead is smart, deeply religious, witty, and the sort of writer who is hard to categorize in terms of the often-limiting horizontal spectrum left to right. She writes for Christianity Today and First Things and The National Review. She is committed to conservative principles, it seems, which leads her to be what Rod Dreher has called “crunchy cons.” She (like Wendell Berry, say) values the local, the small, the traditional, and therefore necessarily opposes suburban sprawl, Walmart, agribusiness. She is so shaped by her rural, farming place that she must resist the monied forces of modernity that she shows is exploiting and extracting resources and vitality from farming communities. She knows her De Tocqueville and cites Simon Weil on “rootedness” and tells the stories of contemporary free-range radicals like the delightful Christian restorative farmer Joel Salatin. But she has Idaho and its crops deep in her memory.

In fact, Uprooted was not exactly what I expected. It is a wonderfully told story of her own family’s past, a bit of the history of farming in the pacific North West (including reference to what should be unbelievable, but is sadly believable, racist laws saying those of Asian descent couldn’t own land, etc. etc.) As I turned page after page I thought I might skip ahead – enough of Idaho history, gold rush, dust bowl, Great Depression, her family’s genealogy and ups and downs. But I kept reading because I didn’t want to miss a thing. Olmstead is such a fine writer and such an energetic storyteller and a good history teacher that I learned and learned, grew sad and happy and angry and more. What a story.

Uprooted, then, follows a classic and useful device, telling a big, sprawling story of American cultural history to help us understand big social dilemmas and our ethical quandaries (buying organic? supporting free-range beef production, caring about our local social ecologies) by way of telling one particular story. By exploring Emmet, Idaho, and her own journey East she has drawn us all in to the large questions of sustainable, faithful, wise living in our own places.

I was a bit surprised by how much about farming and farm culture there was in this book. In a way, it is a primer on culture and agriculture, on land stewardship and animal husbandry, sheep and trees and irrigation and pesticides and more. If you like the agrarian stuff of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson and Fred Bahnsan and Norma Wirzba, you will love Uprooted. If you are interested in economics or agriculture, soil biology or stewardship of water and forests and animals, this really is so informative. There’s a lot of agricultural history and critique of the downsides of agribusiness and government policy and policy makers from the notorious Earl Butz (Nixon and Ford’s Secretary of Agriculture) to Trump’s Sonny Perdue.

If you want a gentle bit of prodding to ask if you owe anything to your past, your extended family, even your old hometown, this will inspire you to wonder. If you are concerned about the thinning communities and alienation creeping across most of our land – if you want to be a “sticker” rather than a “boomer’ (to use the words of Wallace Stegner as Olmstead does.) Uprooted is a great read and while learning and being entertained it raises the haunting question: What are we will to sacrifice for profit and progress? Young, talented, caring and obviously lovely Grace Olmstead is candid. She hasn’t quite figured it out herself, either.

“Olmstead does the important work of examining perhaps the most overlooked aspect of American identity: place. For those privileged enough to choose where they make their home, she suggests a value set beyond cultural prestige and financial conquest–belonging, commitment, stewardship. Uprooted offers our fractured society a path toward wholeness.” –SARAH SMARSH, author of Heartland

“Many rural young Americans face a conundrum–should they stay true to their roots and lose out on a big career, or leave behind those they love to try to make a difference in the world? Olmstead handles this problem beautifully and honestly, highlighting its urgency, all while avoiding easy answers.” –CHRIS ARNADE, author of Dignity

“Uprooted helps us understand what is lost when people lose their connections to particular lands and communities. It also helps us appreciate what is gained by a patient and enduring commitment to nurture the places and people that nurture us. Reading Olmstead’s book confirms that the need for roots is one of humanity’s universal and essential needs.” –NORMAN WIRZBA Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University Divinity School, author of Making Peace with the Land and Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading: A Quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful Leland Ryken & Glenda Faye Mathe (Crossway) $21.99      OUR DISCOUNTED PRICE = $17.59

Above I mentioned I love books about small town life and the social history of how our culture has developed as it has. Yep. But – surprise! surprise! – this bookseller (just like many of our bibliophile customers) loves books about books. Of course two favorites in recent years have been The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs, the first about enjoying books, the second about learning from old, old authors. But, geesh, I recently re-read for like the third time the brief but fabulous little pocket sized book about book covers The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lariri.

So we are obviously happy to tell you that the legendary Christian critic (and old school lit prof at Wheaton College) Leland Ryken has joined with novelist Glenda Faye to remind us again of the joy and art and value of reading. As journalist Janie Cheaney says, it is “both practical and inspirational.”

As I often say when out doing talks (or, these days, on Zoom) about books or the spiritual value of reading, it is helpful to recall that God made humans in God’s own image – that is, we are image-bearers of a creative, speaking God. No wonder Adam and Eve named animals and wrote poetry and no wonder humans to this day tell stories, and offer the common grace gifts of writing good fiction, nonfiction, poetry and more. God’s gift of language and creativity spurs some of us on to be writers and should spur all of us to be glad recipients of the holy – if often profane — gifts of said writers.

Leland Ryken has worked out a very coherent and beautiful worldview in earlier books about art, music, literature, about work, time, leisure, even. I’ve respected and learned much from his thoughtful Christian books inviting us further in to this deep awareness of God’s good gifts found in God’s good creation. I still treasure a text he edited, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing that was done through Harold and Luci Shaw’s publishing imprint (He also did a surprisingly fascinating book called Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were which has stuck with me for years.)

And so, when I realized Ryken and Mathes were doing a new book on the art of reading I was excited. It obviously addresses the current decline of serious literacy – obviously brought on (in part) by smart phones and Google and Facebook, as documented by folks like Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) and Maryanne Wolf (Proust and the Squid and Reader, Come Home) and, of course, Neil Postman. But it is not just a lament of our lack of literary skills and commitments these days, it teaches us how to learn to not only value but also enjoy time with the printed page.

In a way, Recovering the Art of Reading is, at least in part, a more theologically infused, culturally-engaged, updated version of How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. It really does offer a lot of practical suggestions as it holds up reading as a delight.

Much of this book is going to be treasured by book lovers. Some of it will be life-saving for those drifting fro their passion for learning and needing to be reminded of God’s call to delight in and appreciate the role of books in our lives. Some will disagree with some of it. And for a book about not just the true and the good, but the beautiful, some of it seems notably clunky. (Having several pages about a rather arcane discussion about which translation of War and Peace is best early on, as an illustration, I guess, of the complexities of some classics, seemed odd and uninspiring to me. The long tirade about dishonest in memoir and creative nonfiction felt almost vindictive against Oprah for hosting – decades ago – a memoirist who eventually admitted he made up some of his tale. )

Still, some of this just sings and some of it is a bold reminder of why books matter, why reading well might be considered an art, and the calling of creativity and writing, even.

And then there is the big middle section, offering expert guidance on wise ways to approach different genres – nonfiction, children’s books, poetry, novels, fantasy, the Bible. What good words about “words of delight.”

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading is not a deep and captivating story about reading as we might find in something like The Call of Stories by Robert Coles or the literary reflections of Toni Morrison in her Goodness and the Literary Imagination or as enjoyable as the tender and surprisingly delightful End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. It is more in the mode of the excellent On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior.

David Urban, a professor of literature at Calvin University notes that he found some of it “harrowing” and that it “persuasively exhorts us” which, if we seriously engage this book, will cause us to be “blessedly refreshed.” How’s that for a promise? Learning to read with greater care and success is surely worth it. Recovering the Lost Art… is a resource that will help you be, as they put it, be a ‘partner with the author.” Yes!

Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation Peter Scazzero (Zondervan) $26.99                        OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Just when I thought that maybe Peter Scazzero’s “emotional healthy” franchise had run its course, with his Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Emotionally Healthy Church, Emotionally Healthy Leader, and his wife Geri’s Emotional Healthy Woman, I was more than pleasantly surprised, I was elated, to see the chapter titles, the depth of obvious insights, and the extraordinary broad influences that appear in the remarkable footnotes. I was a tad cynical of another Christian celebrity writing yet another book about the same old thing, and I think I fretted needlessly. It seems abundantly obvious from my quick skim that the brand new Emotionally Healthy Discipleship is a fresh and potent volume that will live up to its vital subtitle.

Just listen to this quote of endorsement on the back from Scot McKnight:

“There is so much to like in Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Discipleship—he pushes against the ‘let’s get ‘er done’ approach to measuring discipleship and advocates instead a slowed-down be-with-God measure to following Jesus. What I like most is his emphasis on getting to know the crucified Jesus and ridding ourselves of the Americanized Jesus.”

It is brand new, but I can tell you a few quick things.

Firstly, although it is pretty well written and influenced by a very wide arrange of authors from Fleming Rutledge to public theologian Richard Mouw, from Celtic poet John O’Donohue to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. Although he is informed by this ecumenical and often beautiful writers, in his book he is teacherly, instructional, with charts and goofy diagrams. Okay, great diagrams, if you like that sort of thing. It’s a guidebook, not beautiful or meditative literature, although he does tell some powerful stories of lessons learned, often the hard way.

Secondly, there is some lament about the gaps and inconsistencies and problems in our churches who seem to tolerate casual faith and shallow discipleship. There are some self-assessment tools, and a couple of diagrams to help us diagnosis our problems. Did I mention the sidebars and diagrams and charts? There are cheesy charts.

The heart of the book is an extended exploration of seven marks of healthy discipleship. This is rich, good stuff, packaged plainly and usefully, ideal for study among church leaders.

Thirdly, I didn’t realize this as it was presented to us to consider stocking (some publishers are really helpful and clear about their titles, others less so) but now that our copies have arrived and I’m looking through it, I realize that this is, in fact, a significantly re-written and seriously expanded version of The Emotionally Healthy Church. If you knew that good book you may recall the subtitle of it: “A Strategy for Discipleship That Actually Changes Lives.” In a sense that early version was grappling with not just discipleship, but disciple-making. How can the local church be that healthy place that encourages healthy disciples?

Scazzero says here in this new one that he has learned so much and our culture has changed so much in the last decades that there is only about 20% or so of the old book remaining, so it really is an almost completely new book. Still, this vision and plan for creating emotionally healthy disciples has as its locale and strategy a healthy local congregation. If you loved that one, you may want this, which, although rooted in that earlier version, is more than just revised, it is considerably expanded into nearly a new book.

Fourthly, notice the gracious things Scazzero says about Rich Villodas, lead pastor at the church Scazzero and his wife founded in Queens, NY (New Life Fellowship Church.) As we have promoted Rich Villodas’s The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus, we have said that Scazzero had really influenced, Rich, and that may be so. It seems evident, though, that Scazzero has been significantly influenced by Rich, especially his role as a Latino leader and passionate instigator of multi-ethnic ministry. It is no accident that black leader and justice advocate John Perkins has a nice endorsing blub on the back of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. Many of the stories that illustrate the principles in this book come from their own New Life Fellowship Church and are notably multi-ethnic. Praise the Lord for that sign of Kingdom health and rejoice with us that this sort of book series continues to break new ground In helpful, transforming ways, rooted in ancient, true faith. (Ancient? This evangelically minded, urban church leader has as an appendix in the back of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, on the Nicene Creed! Thanks be to God for that, too,)

Hinge Moments: Making the Most of Life’s Transitions D. Michael Lindsay (IVP) $22.00            OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

Hinge Moments comes at a time that many people, it seems, are sensing a need for change. There is restlessness everywhere. Whether it is of necessity – jobs demolished or changed beyond recognition due to the pandemic, long-held professions no longer viable (think of the lay-offs in higher education) or due to one’s recent illnesses and new limitations – or whether this season of quarantine and mourning has just caused time for reflection and recalibration (and maybe learning to listen better to the voice of God) folks really are shifting their sense of life’s purpose, their goals, their options. If this is you, you are not alone; trust me.

And so, Michael Lindsay, President of Gordon College and former sociology prof at Rice University, has given us a great gift in offering mature and thoughtful guidance about “making the most of life’s transitions.” Hinge Moments is thoughtful and interesting, a book that maybe could be description using the leadership buzz words “adaptive change” but written for leaders in their personal lives, and, actually, for all of us.

Dr. Lindsay, you may know, produced a major book almost a decade ago that had been published by a prestigious, serious press called View from the Top: How People in Power See and Shape the World in which he interviewed major elite leaders in a variety of spheres, getting them to talk about their views of success, leadership, values, desires, hopes, dreams. They talked about habits and strategies and their efforts to influence their institutions, but they talked about less obvious things, too.

Before this new book arrived, I wondered if the seeds of Hinge Moments might have been sown when Lindsay listened well to some of the world’s top executives and leaders talking about what mattered most to them. Looking at it now, here in the shop, I realize that, indeed, theses stories of success and failure in navigating key moments of decision and transition emerged from that ten-year study of 550 “Platinum leaders.”

Of course, he is an evangelical Christian, a sturdy, thoughtful, moderate theological voice amidst many extremes, these days, balanced and wise. He has charted seven phases of transition, actually, so this is fairly series – not cheap self help bravado or super pious spirituality. As in View From the Top and his previous Oxford University Press book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, he has learned to draw insight from interviews and move into great storytelling, inspiring examples, good advice, noticing patterns and gleaning insight. One reviewer (Karen Swallow Prior) notes that the new Hinge Moments is a “delightful treasury of stories, science, and wisdom.”

I mentioned that due to Covid or economic hardships or just the perennial mid-life crises that some of us experience (in a whole bunch of decades of our lives, it seems) many folks are itching for a change. We may be seeking or facing change. But lets face it – life is about transitions for all of us. It is our story – we are on the road, on a journey, in the wilderness, more than not. We all experience opportunities and transitions, as commonplace as new jobs, new neighborhoods, new churches, or new life experiences. Beloved parents die; old anguishes are resolved opening up new spaces, we have an empty nest or a new, long-term household member. Oddly, we end up with financial loss, or maybe a windfall. Some changes are momentous, others less so, but we all, often, face transitions and we have to learn to navigate these pivotal times with more wisdom and care. We need to be ready.

I like that Lindsay calls them “hinges.” Hinges are on doors, you know, so the question in times of transition is often “should I walk through that door”? As it says on the back cover,

Getting key moments of opportunity right can change our lives for the better and getting them wrong can pose problems for years to come. The way in which we meet these hinge moments can have a lasting effect on our personal happiness, our contributions to our career and society, and on our family life.

Lindsay tells a tender story in the opening pages about his own unexpected opportunity to leave his college teaching gig as he was recruited to be the 8^th President of Gordon College. He turned them down, but soon afterwards, a beloved relative was killed in an awful car accident. It became a hinge moment for his family, shocking them into realizations about time and opportunity. The tragedy inspired them to take new steps and re-open professional negotiations.

Popular pastor and Christian writer Mark Batterson notes that,

We live in a world where the only constant seems to be change. Michael Lindsay identifies key factors that will help you navigate transition points in your life, personally and professionally. It will help you not only survive but thrive the sea of uncertainty.

This very helpful description by Philip Ryken (himself an evangelical college President) explains what many will appreciate in this book and whom it might be most useful for. Maybe you or somebody you know? Read this:

If there is a time for everything, as the Bible says, then there is a time for gifted leaders to move from one season of life or place of service to the next. This beautifully written book is a handbook for life’s transitions–from the restlessness that often precedes a change of calling all the way through to a new season of meaningful, productive leadership. Michael Lindsay is the perfect guide. Through his extensive research and influential work in higher education, Dr. Lindsay knows more about leadership than just about anyone. In this inspiring book he uses stories from his extensive network of fellow leaders — as well as history and the Bible — to help his readers get and stay prepared for whatever comes next.

Here is the table of contents of Hinge Moments: Making the Most of Life’s Transitions by D. Michael Lindsay:

1. Approaching the Doors in Our Lives: Considering a Change
2. Standing Outside: Why Change Hurts Your Head
3. Straddling the Threshold: The Space Between Spaces
4. The Welcome Mat: Landing in Your New Space
5. The Deadbolt: Earning the Key Through Trust
6. The Hinge: The Virtue of Affixed Flexibility
7. Passages: Growing Through Major Life Changes                                                      8. Discussion Guide.

++++

Well, I’ve written enough about these six books to hopefully inspire you to order some, if not all. These are rich and thoughtful works, important, we think, among the best of the month, surely.

Naturally, there are dozens of other brand new books we have in the shop, and since we are still not open for in-store browsing due to Covid, they are piling up. If you are in the area, we can do curbside show-and-tell, backyard customer service; if the day is nice, come on over!

If you are one of our beloved mail-order friends, we are grateful for your support. You are literally keeping this ship afloat. Thanks for those who have tried to rustle up more business through us, spreading our info to your church or library or book club or college fellowship.

For one and all – stay safe, be well, read on.

All books mentioned are 20% off. Just use the order form link below and tell us what you want.

It is VERY helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship them. Although we can’t say exactly since each order’s weight and destination varies, you can use this as a thumbnail, general guide. It’s your call, folks. PLEASE LET US KNOW.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.25.
• USPS has another option called “Priority Mail” which is about $7.00 for one or two books and that gets more attention than does “media mail.”
• UPS is more reliable but about $8.00 for one book or two to most places.

BookNotes

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DISCOUNT

20% OFF

Whew, that last BookNotes — the newsletter/blog/book review column from our Hearts & Minds Bookstore here in central Pennsylvania — was a delight to send out and was apparently enjoyed by many of our subscribers. Thanks for the encouraging notes.

There was that link to our admittedly limited and temporary spiffy new e-commerce website that we called the Jubilee Bookstore because it was a platform designed to supplement that big conference on the grand story of the gospel and how it effects every area of life. Designed firstly for college students, it has over 50 categories of books — art, science, education, nursing, politics, social action, spirituality, church life, engineering, business, sports, and more — easy to order with a automatic shopping cart and easy-peasy media mail shipping costs all figured out for you. More efficiently slick then our usual style here at our old-school website from our old-school bricks and mortar, small town shop.

And there were those 15 reviews of 15 brand new books. From the must-read Dear Doctor by Marilyn McEntyre to the powerful The Gravity of Joy by Angela Williams Gorrell to the latest Anne Lamotte (Dusk, Night, Dawn) to the new Broadleaf edition of Padraig O’Tuama’s beautiful In the Shelter to the notable companion to the PBS series, The Black Church by Henry Louis Gates, and the new release of a collection of old Eugene Peterson sermons (preached during Lent in 1984 at Christ Our King) that BookNotes offered some great, great titles for your consideration.

One little sidebar, though, added as an after-though, almost, to that list of recent titles, was really noticed. It was just this, in eye-catching blue:

We are still taking PRE-ORDERS for Winn Collier’s forthcoming, authorized biography of Eugene Peterson which releases March 23, 2021. It is called A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson (Waterbrook Press) $28.00. Our SALE PRICE = $22.40.

And so, here, again, is a reminder to order this now. (Just click on the link at the bottom of the page which will take you to our secure order form page. Enter your info and we’ll take it from there, shipping them March 23rd, as soon as they become available.)

A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson by Winn Collier (Waterbrook Press) $28.00

OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

RELEASING 3-23-21

We reviewed this forthcoming biography of “Pastor Pete” by our friend Winn Collier initially in a BookNotes early last fall inviting folks to pre-order it, back when we thought it was to be released in November. (You can read that review here.)

We announced it again, later, noting that due to Covid, the new publication date was March 2021. (In that review we also highlighted a lovely book co-authored by Eugene and one of his sons, Eric, who himself is a Presbyterian pastor in Washington state. That book was a lovely set of letters exchanged back and forth between father and son about the nature of the pastoral vocation and stuff about serving the church well. (You can read that review here.)

And we mentioned A Burning in My Bones in passing in another list or two over these long, hard, Covid months. It has given us all something to look forward to, eh? This authorized biography of Eugene Peterson is, no doubt, one of the best and most anticipated books of 2021.

I want to keep this fairly brief for those wanting to pre-order the book now, so won’t say too much more. I trust you know that Peterson was considered one of the most important religious writers of our time, thoughtful, learned, but down to Earth; no-nonsense about church and discipleship. He didn’t like formulas or cheap faith or anything glitzy. He was awkward even about his fame. Peterson was a Presbyterian pastor for many years in Bel Air, Maryland, translated (or, as his publishers insisted saying, paraphrased) the entire Bible into what is known as The Message. He wrote numerous others books, including some of my personal, all-time favorites. He was a writer in residence for a year at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and then he taught at Regent College, an amazingly good graduate school in Vancouver, British Columbia. That got him back closer to his beloved Montana where he retired with Jan, hiking and birdwatching and writing and praying — and reading. What a reader he was! (We know this because he was a loyal Hearts & Minds customer, sending us orders via fax back before he gave in to email. Often he’d call, with his deep and gruff voice. In the collection of letters to his son that I mentioned above (Letters to a Young Pastor: Timothy Conversations Between Father and Son) he has a paragraph or two telling Eric about a book he was enjoying. We had recommended that very book to him and he got it from us and I was so glad, here, years later, to see our little bookselling efforts paying off as he spread the word about good authors, fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction.

Biographer Winn Collier was deeply influenced by Peterson. Winn did a PhD in American literature at UVA on the great Wendell Berry (who Peterson and I talked about on occasion) in part because Eugene encouraged him to do so. Winn wrote a very creative and fabulous novel, himself, called Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, published by Eerdmans ($16.99) — written as a series of letters by a down-to-Earth, almost cranky older pastor who grows to love his small-town, small congregation. Eugene Peterson called it a tour de force and exclaimed that it captured things about the church and a pastor better than anything he had ever read!

Winn’s earliest books were paraphrases of classic writing, too, channelling for us the deep contemplative spiritually of the likes of older mystics like Francois Fenelon. No wonder Peterson liked him so.

I say this to assure you that I can hardly think of anyone better suited to putting pen to paper (and before that, the ear to the phone, and car on the road, interviewing hundreds of people from Peterson’s past, tracking down archival stuff, going over letters and papers from his earlier days, etc. etc. etc. doing the primary research with lively curiosity and reverence.) Jan (who died a year after Eugene) and the Peterson kids, all grown now, of course, have affirmed Winn as the authorized biographer and we are very glad to commend his own integrity and insight and wit and faith as the sort who would “get” Reverend Eugene Peterson, “Pastor Pete.”

When I had the great privilege of reading an early version of this I was taken with how some of the prose resembled Peterson’s own. I doubt that that was intentional. The other day I read a page or two out loud to Beth (a passage about how understanding Montana is important to understand the man) and we both felt it was so good it nearly took our breath away. The book has charm and substance, it is a good read, as we say, and really insightful. Knowing something about the life and formation, the work and ministry, the legacy and love of this man from Montana, is a delight as is reading any good biography, of course. But because the subject is himself so interesting and thoughtful and faithful in ways that are needed now, I think reading A Burning in My Bones will be a deeply influential and transformative experience for some of us. We invite you to enter into the story, learn about Peterson’s childhood and young adult life, his ministry and writing, his older life and times, and revel in the beautiful, artful prose.

I could tell you just a bit more about Petersons life (and reading habits!) and that we stock all of his books, here. But telling that tale is a privilege and duty given by God to Winn Collier. Tolle Lege, as Peterson sometimes said, quoting Saint Augustine. Pick up and read!

The book releases March 23rd. Our sale price at 20% off makes it $22.40.

If you click on the link below it will take you to our secure order form page. As we say there, it is secure so you can safely enter credit card information. Tell us how you want it sent and we’ll take it from there, doing the discount and enclosing the receipt in the package. OR you can ask for us to just send you a bill so you can pay by check later. That works for us.

We can send the book to another person if you’d like — if it’s a gift, we can gift wrap it for free and tuck in a little note saying who its from. Just let us know how we can help. It would be our pleasure, especially this time around, with A Burning in My Bones.

Please don’t forget to tell us how you’d like us to ship your order. As a basic guideline, for one book, anyway, here are some options.

• USPS has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheap but slow and probably delayed. That’s $3.25. Ever since the former President cut the budget for the USPS they are understaffed and slower than ever.
• USPS has “Priority Mail” which is about $7.00 and that gets more attention than does “media mail.” Both can be delayed since USPS is struggling, but it might be faster.
• UPS is more reliable these days but about $8.00 for one book to most places.

+ + +

If you would like to be part of a very special celebration of the book — an on-line, virtual book launch party — we’d invite you to register for the event with Winn Collier, Eric Peterson, and Liz Vice (an amazing African American vocalist and artist who we have noticed on the great Porters Gate worship albums.) It is being called “An Evening with Eugene, Story and Song” and we hope you can join in at 8:00 EST on Tuesday evening, March 23rd.

REGISTER HERE.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

The last BookNotes column was important and we hope you saw it.

We described a brand new (perhaps temporary) Hearts & Minds online e-commerce website.

This new web-based, curated bookstore clearly does NOT show all of our in-store inventory (not even close) but it DOES offer a handful of good suggestions in about FIFTY categories of books! Wow.

From church life to politics, from the arts to science, from global issues to medical care, from spirituality to racial justice, from theology to popular culture, and more (a lot more — forty-plus categories more) this custom curated e-commerce site is a good indication of much of what we’re about here at the shop.

It was designed for students and adults taking in the CCOs virtual Jubilee 2021 conference, so there is a bit of particular connection there. (The books of Jubilee speakers like Tish Harrison Warren, Jon Tyson, Ashlee Eiland and Justin McRoberts, are highlighted and we show the books that I described in four jam-packed book talks that aligned with the themes of the four major Jubilee talks – creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.)

All of the other titles shown are great – it is why we picked them. Some are more basic, other more complex, and our annotations, as always, try to inform book lovers about the style and strengths of each. Most are overtly religious, some less so. It was a lot of work putting it all together and we’re not sure how long we’ll keep it up as is, so you really ought to check it out.

In that last BookNotes we offered a 10% off PROMO CODE for anyone ordering in that convenient shopping cart platform.

If you’d rather order at our more standard, personal website at our usual website order form page, you can do that, too. Just mention that you saw whatever you’ve selected at our J Bookstore site and we’ll give you the discount.

Spread the word, won’t you? I think I can pretty confidently say you’ve never seen this mix of titles and this scope of topics in any bookstore, ever. As we’ve said boldly to some, we think it will blow your mind seeing theological books on everything from farming to racial justice, from science to film, from prayer to politics, from counseling to church, from worship to work.

HERE IT IS.

https://heartsandmindsbooks.square.site/

NOW. A LIST OF BRAND NEW BOOKS for MARCH 2021

Here are reviews of brand new books that we’ve mostly gotten in since we’ve last written. Man, the new titles just keep coming and we are thrilled to be able to say we’ve got stacks of these, waiting for you to order. These, shown below, are all 20% off.

In the Shelter: Finding Home in the World Padraig O Tuama (Broadleaf Books) $19.99        OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is surely one of the season’s most highly anticipated books, at least in some circles, since the author became an overnight sensation with the NPR poetry podcast which he hosted launched a year ago. We had an earlier version of this as an import from the UK  – Padraig O Tuama lives in Northern Ireland in a spirituality and peace-making community called Corrymeela and we’ve stocked his other books such as Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community and the poetry collection Sorry for Your Troubles. We’ve long been fans and have friends that know him. (And – get this! – we have his brand new co-authored reflections on the book of Ruth called Borders and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story for our Times [Canterbury Press; $20.99.])

But this new US edition? Fantastic! It is just such a richly written book offering luminous reflections, short essays, prayers, and poems that will invite you to become more generous and open and kind. As David Dark says, “Receive his holy vision immediately and as often as possible.”

This handsome new North American edition is a compact sized paperback with deckled edges and textured paperback. It sports a fabulous endorsing quote from U2’s The Edge and, inside, includes a new chapter, a new poem, and a new foreword by Krista Tippett. This is what a beautiful, quality paperback can be like, offering both style and substance. Ar dóigh

Dear Doctor: What Doctors Don’t Ask, What Patients Need to Say  Marilyn McEntyre (Broadleaf Books) $16.99        OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

You surely know how much we esteem the literary musings of Marilyn McEntyre, from classics like Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and When Poets Pray to her lovely, little new Lenten hardback, Where the Eye Alights: Phrases for the Forty Days of Lent. As we’ve said in other BookNotes reviews, Marilyn teaches literature – poetry, novels, memoirs, and the like – in a med school. Yep, reading novels and poems (including about illness and loss) can make health care providers better at their jobs. She loves doctors and loves helping them be more empathetic and present to their patients.

Dear Doctor is her brand new book, which is, among other things, about being a more candid and assertive patient. It is an honest call for health care that is more humane by being more patient-centered. The first wonderful “letter” in this set of letters is addressing the awkwardness we all feel sitting half naked and cold before a doc who most likely isn’t looking at us (but staring at his device.) McEntyre is frank and bold and honest and at times funny and writes gloriously. One reviewer mentioned her great agility in exploring these many facets of the doctor-patient relationship; another says these letters are wise, yet another says it simply: the book is inspiring.

I can’t tell you how much I agree, how excited we are to see this make its way into the world, how so very appreciative we are of her speaking some important truths to these important public servants who too often are less respectful as they might be to their vulnerable clients.

Marilyn McEntyre’s Dear Doctor: What Doctors Don’t Ask, What Patients Need to Say moved me to tears for my own complicated reasons but mostly because we are so very, very glad such a eloquent, thoughtful, and good little book exists. Buy a few and share them widely, with health care providers and patients you may know.

The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found Angela Williams Gorrell (Eerdmans) $21.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Speaking of crying through a book, this is brand new and I’m only part way through it, but it is beautiful, human, deeply faithful, really tragic, and yet beautifully hopeful.

Here’s the very short version – a quick summary that doesn’t do its eloquence and profundity justice: Ms Gorrell is a great writer and energetic, young teacher with a recent PhD who gets hired by the wonderful Miroslov Volf to be part of a Yale research team studying human joy. With a good grant, their Joy Project was connected to the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and just before she was set to start teaching a class (on what makes life worth living) a beloved young adult relative took his own life. Reeling from that tragedy, another young adult nephew died from an unexpected health matter. The night before teaching her first class ever at Yale she got the phone call that her opioid-addicted father was slipping away. She faced three horrible deaths in less than a month while starting to research what bring joys and human flourishing. Can you imagine?

This heavy memoir about depression and addiction and grief and loss and struggle and hope doesn’t seem to have a false line in it. The exuberant forward by Volf made me want to pick the book up immediately; he honors her and it is itself very touching. In The Gravity of Joy Gorrell is honest about the troubles in her family – the first several chapters includes much about her previously vibrant, lawyer father and her faith-filled upbringing. Even as she tells her story, she weaves other insights gathered from the interviews done by the Joy Project team and while it is grave, it is captivating and sad.

And then she starts telling the stories of the women she met while doing a Bible study in a prison. Oh, my. Wow.

As Parker Palmer puts in on the back, “There is not spiritual cheerleading here, no cheap grace.”

This powerful read has gotten some stunning reviews. I love these moving recommendations by important, thoughtful folks.

A searingly honest, devastatingly painful, profoundly wise — and beautiful — book. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. Angela Gorrell is a scholar with the courage of the most authentic memoirist. She generously and unflinchingly brings the theological discussion of the most sublime subject–joy–right into the middle of the mess of life and lets it unfold in surprising and wondrously disrupting ways. — Tod Bolsinger author of Tempered Resilience: How Leaders Are Formed in the Crucible of Change

The Gravity of Joy is a story of hope in hard times. Angela Gorrell artfully tells her story of faith, pain, and joy. She weaves it with the stories of others–family, women she met in prison Bible study, students, travelers, she met on her journey. And she shares a truth that perhaps is discovered only by those who have faced love and loss — especially those society has used and abused, denied dignity to in life and death: that joy comes in the mourning. I encourage all who hunger for justice, peace, acceptance, and comfort to read this book. In its pages you will find beautiful prose and hope that even in the darkest of spaces, places, and times — through addiction, suicide, sudden death, prison, abuse, and despair — love reigns, truth reigns, joy reigns. — Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for National Revival and author of Always With Us?

The Gravity of Joy is a unique exercise in vulnerable theology. Weaving memoir and journalism, theology and testimony, Gorrell invites us into the unthinkable to discover the possibility of a joy that surpasses understanding. Written with eyes wide open, this book is a reminder that the cracks in a broken heart can be openings for grace. — James K. A. Smith, author of You Are What You Love and On the Road with Saint Augustine

Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter Timothy Keller (Viking) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

Speaking of hope and joy in the midst of suffering. Did anybody see Tim Keller on “Morning Joe” the other day? One of our staff said he talked about seeing the colors of the river in new ways given his different pace of life and attentiveness with his serious cancer diagnosis. He had a brilliant piece about living with such a diagnosis in The Atlantic last week and he alludes to writing this new book, Hope in Times of Fear.

It is, as you might guess, a fairly intellectual, but yet nicely written and impeccably clear argument for the bodily resurrection of Christ. It offers an apologetic, some cultural analysis, at one point tells some of his own story, including 12 chapters offering different sorts and descriptions of hope. There is certain hope, future hope, glorious hope, subversive hope, hope for relationships, hope for justice, hope in the face of suffering, and more.

His description of “the great reversal” – our sinful condition replaced with God’s gracious goodness, darkness to light, mourning to dancing — is solid and inspiring. I have not read much of this but surely, surely will. I am sure you know someone who needs this persuasive case for the implications of orthodox belief on the things that matter most.

I jumped ahead and read the intriguing epilogue, which riffs on a favorite song of mine, Noel Paul Stookey’s “Building Block” which takes its cue from Psalm 118 about the stone that is rejected becoming the cornerstone “of a whole new world.” Keller shifts to a Psalm of lament asking if the dead can praise? Ahh, yes, because of the rejected one and the “great reversal” we indeed surely can. It is a tender and wise and realistic meditation closing a must-read, wonderfully important book for our own fearful times. Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter is highly recommended.

This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be Eugene H. Peterson (Waterbrook Press) $18.00                      OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I have read only one chapter in this recent volume, but I can tell you two quick things about the book – and that is really all I need to say. These are sermons preached in the 1980s by our late friend Eugene Peterson at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, MD. It was a Lenten series Pastor Pete did in 1984, actually, and the editors assure us they did not edit them much at all.

There is one extra long introductory sermon that was pieced together from another source – sounds like the formation of the canon, almost (ha!) This late edition rounds out the book very nicely and is so seamlessly integrated one might not know it was preached later in Peterson’s life, and not to his late 20^th century suburban Maryland parish.

I’m sure you are hearing good sermons this Lent. (Well, I’m hoping you’re hearing good sermons.) Most preachers work hard and do pretty well. But even most pastors know that some are exquisitely gifted at preaching (and that some are able to work harder at it than others.) Your preachers will not be offended if you commit to reading a few more well crafted sermons this season. Rev. Peterson wasn’t a very fancy preacher nor a spectacular communicator. He read his sermons; he was a Presbyterian for God’s sake. But he had a gift and he stewarded it well. And these sermons were offered for God’s sake, as part of weekly worship, to inspire and instruct his ordinary, gathered flock. Maybe you, too, need some substance and good sermons this season — not glitz or drama or spectacle, just no-nonsense, beautifully constructed, Bible preaching. This Hallelujah Banquet could be a real lifeline for you.

And here is the second thing you should know: these sermons are on the book of Revelation. Yep. You may know that Peterson went on a few years later to write a pretty remarkable set of reflections (not exactly a commentary) on the Apocalypse of Saint John called Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination. I suppose that good book had its genesis in these very sermons. We are glad that have made their way into a new Peterson book this year of our Lord 2021.

Oh, and a third thing I should note – there is a great reflection/study guide in the back (even with blank pages for journaling.) The editors explained how Peterson disapproved of anything formulaic or suggesting simplistic answers or forced spirituality, so they are careful to invite folks to pray and discern God’s voice to them in their own setting and context. It’s a nice touch for This Hallelujah Banquet.

ALSO: We are still taking PRE-ORDERS for Winn Collier’s forthcoming, authorized biography of Peterson which releases March 23, 2021. It is called A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson (Waterbrook Press; $28.00. Our SALE PRICE = $22.40.)

The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton Sophfronia Scott (Broadleaf Books) $17.99                              OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I am very interested in the writings of Thomas Merton and have read my fair share. But I think I am even more interested in books about the New York/Kentucky monk, about those who have encountered Merton, those who have read him, those who have grappled with him. You may recall that I did an extended review a year or so ago of the fabulously interesting The Monk’s Record Player by Robert Hudson which was about Merton’s fascination with Bob Dylan circa 1966; I have given shout outs to the remarkable report of a pivotal weekend with Merton called Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat by Gordon Oyer. I often recommend one edited by Jon Sweeney called What I Am Living for: Lessons from the Life and Writings of Thomas Merton (although Sweeney has a new introduction to Merton coming in April.)

But this new one, The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with… – by a heck of a great writer, an African American woman living in New York as Merton once did – may be the best of this kind. I was immediately captivated by what was going to be a quick skim and I spent much of last Sunday afternoon listening in as Sophfronia dialogues, through her writing, across the decades, with Fr. Thomas. What a book. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote the great foreword and she says “The beauty of this book is that [Scott and Merton’s] intimate conversations open outward to include anyone listening in, confident that what is deeply true about any of us is deeply true about all of us.”

Other back-cover endorsements include a rave review by Dr. Willie James Jennings and Patricia Raybon. Ms.Raybon is right – “If you know Thomas Merton you must now know Sophfronia Scott.”

Kudos to Broadleaf for doing so many good books lately, and designing them so very nicely. This is a lovely, well-done book and we are grateful.

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense N.T. Wright (HarperOne) $17.00                             OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

At long last! Finally! Hooray! This great book has been a fairly expensive (and, I might add, a bit plain-looking) hardback since 2006. That’s fifteen years I’ve been waiting to tell you that this is now in an affordable paperback. And, happily, this brand new paperback is pretty nifty looking. The letters are embossed just a bit, as is the bit of greenery on the front. The font is good and the white cover is bright. It is a better looking book in paperback than the hardback was.

The material, though, is the same — stellar and, as you’d expect, wonderfully written. It is a somewhat more foundational book with the solid themes Wright has picked up again in his recent (marvelous) Broken Signpost: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World. If you liked that one – and it is brilliant! — you will very much appreciate this as its necessary prequel.

The point, as you may know, is that, not unlike Mere Christianity (that doesn’t play so well these days with younger readers) there are things in our daily experiences – our longings, our hopes – that are so real they must be there for some purpose the are signals of transcendence. We sense voices calling (for meaning, for beauty, for justice, to be loved) and that echo of a voice that we seemed wired for just might be coming from God. Something about our experience of the creation just might be a signpost pointing to a Creator. Perhaps those deep questions and longings could be answered by the Biblical story. This is Wright’s effort to help modern skeptics in our secular age see the plausibility for the truthfulness of the gospel story. Simply Christian is persuasive and speaks to the heart and the mind; it invites us to a deeply personal faith that has cultural significance. It is, as one reviewer wrote, “a rigorous and mind-expanding explanation of the essence of Christianity.”

We are so glad to finally be able to announce this as a brand new paperback, handsome and as thoughtful as ever. Highly recommended.

The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Penguin Press) $30.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

There are so many resources coming out throughout the year to help us all learn more about the experience of non-white folks in America and with Black History Month each year, there is even more. Although we think it is important to continue to feature books that chip away and help us learn and learn again about how to be anti-racist (and you know we have a lot!) this new book on the history of the black church is a treasure, a gem, a masterpiece. For another customer recently I made a list of the best books we had or knew of about the history of the African American church and I named some standards and some favorites and one or two that I think are really important. But this? This! This is the one!

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an important and rather charming public intellectual whose good books should be well known. He has made films and is known for his recent foray into genealogy as shown in his “Finding Your Roots” TV show. He is a distinguished professor at Harvard and prolific author and his last book – it came out about a year ago in paperback – was Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin; $20.00.) The brand new one, The Black Church is simply the best book on the subject and it is happily a delightful companion to the much-acclaimed PBS documentary.

Literary world advanced press on this was very favorable. Some of these are from journals that don’t always or easily give out “starred” reviews and such kudos:

Readers of American religious and African American history will not want to miss this title. — Library Journal

Through meticulous research and interviews . . . Gates paints a compelling portrait of the church as a source of ‘unfathomable resiliency’ for Black ancestors as well as the birthplace of so many distinctly African American aesthetic forms. . . .Powerful, poignant, and ultimately celebratory. Let the church say, ‘Amen!’                                   —Kirkus (starred review)

A brisk and insightful look at how the Black church has succored generations of African Americans against white supremacy. . . . Punctuated by trenchant observations from Black historians and theologians, Gates’s crisp account places religious life at the center of the African American experience.  — Publishers Weekly

And then, there are these reviews by Gates colleagues and sometimes conversation partners, two other esteemed black public intellectuals, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude.

Read these:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has once again delved deep into the doings and sufferings of Black people in the USA! This time he gives us a rich story and riveting song of the profound forms of spirituality and musicality that sustained Black sanity and dignity. Although Gates rightly highlights the centrality of the ambiguous legacy of the Black Church, he also explores the crucial realities of Islam and other non-Christian religious practices. And the last powerful and playful chapter on his personal dance with an elusive Holy Ghost lays bare his own signifying genius grounded in a genuine love of Black people and culture! — Cornel West, author Why Race Matters

Absolutely brilliant — a book that should spark a very rich conversation within the field and echo far beyond it. Its reckoning with the Holy Ghost in the context of Gates’s own childhood is extraordinary. More than a wonderful synthesis of a deep literature about Black Christendom, it is a necessary reminder of where the Black community has found its strength to persevere, and to fight, and where it must find it still. Not least, Gates shows us that sacred music has never just been music; it is a taproot and a through-line across all of American history. A necessary and moving work.                    –Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again

Texting Through Cancer: Ordinary Moments of Community, Love, and Healing Jan Woodard (Upper Room Books) $17.99                              OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

When I heard not long ago that this book was about to come out I was so glad, and was particularly happy to hear it was being done by the reflective, spiritual publishing house arm the famous The Upper Room ministry. They always do a good job with their good books, and we were grateful to God that this book would be nicely published.

You see, Jan Woodard is the mother of an old friend, a good friend from the same town where I went to college – the home of classic actor Jimmy Stewart; Indiana, Pennsylvania. I believe we met more than once at some Christian conference or another and when we heard that Jan was sick and writing a set of columns for her local paper – the Indiana Gazette – we were somehow touched. That someone would use their cancer for the sake of others, to tell her story, to artfully write about her journey, is naturally touching. That it was somebody we felt an even small connection to was meaningful. That it was somebody who was a good writer and frank about it all makes it great.

Jan signed all her columns about her cancer story with the famous “All will be well” line from Julian of Norwich. Not bad for a small-town, Pennsylvanian, United Methodist, eh? To be clear, this isn’t a superficial hope or trendy sentiment, as Jan studied contemplative spirituality during these years, her suffering became a catalyst for her deeper discipleship and her move into a cohort of fellow-travelers who studied monastic spirituality, went on pilgrimages (even to Iona!), embraced Celtic practices, and more. Her telling about learning these things isn’t mystical or deep, just very plainly and nicely explained, tinged always with the vexing unknowns of her breast cancer.

Writing shifted her focus to others, we are told. It kept her from feeling sorry for herself. It helped her move from fear to faith.

As it says on the back Texting Through Cancer “shares the beauty Woodard discovered in ordinary moments and the peace found in surrendering her cancer to God.” She lived to know that the manuscript was at the publishers and was glad to know her texts become newspaper columns would bless people worldwide as they did in Indiana. When her husband called the shop the other day I got off the phone and prayed through sadness and ended up glad that this book was on its way. It’s going to bless others and remind us all that “all shall be well.”

Dusk Night Dawn: On Revival and Courage Anne Lamott (Riverhead) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I have said it before – we adore St. Anne’s honesty, her faith born of struggle and addiction and sorrow, her joy. We love her creativity and her upbeat spirit. She’s kind and wants to be kinder and she is spiritual and wants to walk in grace more consistently. She tells these things in fun and clever ways making her one of the great wordsmiths of our time. Man, can she turn a phrase. And make me laugh. Beth, too. What a storyteller! She is a novelist as well, but her fiction is no match for her memoiristic, true stories, which make me verklempt and chortle within the same few pages.

Like her others Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, or Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, Lamott is working on these questions of how to have personal hope amidst much loss and grief and how to help repair the world itself. What’s that saying about it’s better to light a candle than to curse the dark? Well, she does a bit of both, and better than many of us. Her books are a delight and nicely religious in a bohemian kind of offbeat way. And did I say she can tell a story and turn a phrase? This looks like a great book, handsome, solid, interesting. I’m sure many of her fans will snap it up and start reading it as a Lenten read. Do it!

God of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World Andrew Wilson (Zondervan) $17.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

When this first was being described in a pre-publication catalogue that we booksellers get, I misunderstood a bit. I thought it was mostly a book about finding God in the ordinary things of life, a spirituality of the ordinary. There are a lot of books like that and we love ‘em. We even have a sub-section of our spirituality shelves about the spirituality of the quotidian and ordinary. And in a way, this book’s title and subtitle would lead you to believe it is just that.

I suppose we will put one in that section but, really, the subtitle is a bit misleading. It is less about experiencing God as we walk in God’s creation, but learning about God in ordinary earthly metaphors in the Bible. And that is done very well. As Hannah Anderson – who did write a book about finding God’s glory in nature, called The Turning of Days — writes on the back “From rainbows to donkeys to everyday tools, this is a delightful primer in learning how to truly see things for what they are.” Or, as Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition says, this book “weaves biblical theology with everyday illustrations.”

Hanson and Anderson both promise that we won’t see ordinary stuff in the same way again, we will see things for what they really are. I’m not so sure about that, as I believe that in God’s world, things are what they are; creatures; Psalm 199:91 says all things are servants of the Lord. (Which is why I love the title about a faith-infused worldview for farming by Joel Salatin called – get this! – The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs.) The Bible exalts the creation itself as praising God and the creation narrative reminds us that God called his stuff “good.” We don’t have to spiritualize things or have them point us to God in order to appreciate them. They just do it in their very thingness and we can enjoy them as they are. Plato was wrong that this world is some shadowy cave and we need to get to the really real. The Christian Science cult teaches that and in a way Buddhism teaches that. It was a heresy of the early church (Gnosticism) that failed to affirm the essential realness of the real. But we Christians sing “This is Our Father’s World” – right?

Okay, I’ll admit, I’m getting a little arcane here, maybe pressing a distinction without much of a difference. Which is why although I don’t think this book is quite so much about finding God in the world, it does, in a very important way, help us do that.

You see, God of All Things is mostly about what the Bible says about certain things. Every chapter is a great teaching about something in the Bible that the Bible itself tells us points us to God. So, to be honest, unlike, say, Hannah Anderson’s book or any number of other “spirituality of the ordinary” reflections, I don’t so much want to go out and see God’s good world after reading a chapter of God of All Things, I want to read another chapter and learn more about what the Bible says, its colorful images, its creational metaphors, its honey and gardens and pigs and sex and stones as pointers to God in the text. In a way, the editors got the subtitle of this book backwards – it is, by my lights, about “rediscovering the everyday world in the sacred story.”

So each chapter is about a thing described in the Bible and something it teaches us about God.

And that, my friends is a great project. After spending a few hours doing this kind of Bible learning — seeing the wonderful ways the Bible speaks of the “things of God” – the things! — we just might be able to go out into the world of things and encounter them anew. This isn’t a spirituality of natural history or even creational theology. It is Biblical theology about the character of God and God’s ways as revealed in ordinary things. And for that, we are grateful and recommend this sturdy study. As Duke Kwon says of it, it is “a tour of delight! Read God of All Things and you will be certain to grow in godward worship and childlike wonder.”

Sensing God: Experience the Divine in Nature, Food, Music, and Beauty Joel Clarkson (NavPress) $15.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

If you tracked much with my conversation above – the strengths of God of All Things and my take on the misleading subtitle – this one by theology student and lit lover Joel Clarkson is more perfectly in the genre of what I sometimes call “the spirituality of the ordinary.” While Andrew Wilson helps nudge us – heck, it’s a holy push – to see God’s declaration in Scripture that things reveal things about Himself and to learn to read the Bible with an eye to how it helps us reframe our daily perception of the stuff of life, Joel Clarkson takes us right, smack-dab, into the wonder and mess and goodness of this life, experienced with our senses. As he says, “So much of our faith is lived out in our heads. We study the Bible, sit through sermons, pray with our eyes closed. All of these are good things. A healthy Christian life, however, goes beyond these essentials.”

Yes! If as young Mr. Clarkson insists (based on the Bible’s own teaching – his theological orientation is similar to Wilsons, actually) “the glory of God is woven into the world” and we can experience it with our senses, then the very goodness of God is waiting to be tasted and seen in everything around us. We need to get our noses out of the Book a bit and into life, abundant life.

As our friend Marlena Graves (author most recently of The Way Up Is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself) writes of it:

“Refreshing. Restoring. Reorienting. Clarkson accentuates the good, true, and beautiful in the reality of our lives and in creation, beckoning us to stop, look, listen, taste, touch, and hear for ourselves — to experience our triune God and the Kingdom with our whole being. The book itself is a feast because it is steeped in God’s life. It is true and elicits joy. Through it, I have beheld God. It is a book for such a time as this, and I couldn’t be gladder for it. I highly recommend it and look forward to more from Clarkson!                   — Marlena Graves, author of The Way Up Is Down

Abstract painter and Christian thinker and author Makoto Fujimura wrote the foreword, which speaks volumes about its substantive aesthetic and its vision. Listen to this line for the foreword:

In a world where many acts of violence are called sense-less, this book lights the path toward a senses-full experience, now a necessary condition toward healing our fractured culture.          — Makoto Fujimura, author of Art + Faith: A Theology of Making

Ashley Hales is an author we respect and her book Finding Holy in the Suburbs asks vital and lively questions about finding lifestyles of grace and beauty in the shadow of Costco and cul-de-sacs. And she is onto something, something like natural theology or common grace or a spirituality of the ordinary in the built environment. It didn’t surprise me how she resonated with Sensing God. Ms. Hales writes:

Both creation and the Incarnation show that God cares deeply about the stuff of earth. The problem is that most of us neglect capturing wonder in favor of productivity, efficiency, and hurry. Helping his readers develop a robust vocabulary of Christian imagination, Joel Clarkson gives us a feast for our senses. Theologically rooted, artistically curious, and reflective, Sensing God can help us learn again how to taste and see that the Lord is good.     — Ashley Hales, author of Finding Holy in the Suburbs

The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship Daniel K. Williams (Eerdmans) $27.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is a biggee. A big book and an important book. I hardly have to explain it as who doesn’t long for a more civil, collaborative, heart of democracy that sees public service less in terms of which party wins but about whether the common good flourishes and public justice is enacted. The Bible is very clear about the demand for public life and insists that justice is one of the great attributes of God and one of the great values God wants built into the structures of human cultures. Government comes to mind, obviously, but in all of social life, God desires justice. And things now in our culture – partisanship, hostility, inane posturing, disinformation, conspiracies, conflict, deceit – are not just or good.

I have written passionately about the need for enacting the Biblical principle of developing the mind of Christ and the holy habit of “thinking Christianly” to shape our views of politics and our convictions about public life.

Too many of us vote inspired by principles and ideas inherited (wrongly or rightly) from the secular world, from an unwise diet of being exclusively informed by Fox News or CNN. We haven’t taken the time to study up on what the Bible says and what the best Biblical interpreters and teachers have said, about the nature of the state, the role of the government, the flourishing of the commonwealth, the different kinds of justice, each needed for the common good. We may even care about values other than justice when it comes to politics (like liberty, say, or having low taxes, say, or being a global leader or militarily strong or the meaning provider for the citizenry even though the Bible doesn’t not teach those things about the task of the government.) It is why we raved about Kaitlyn Schies’s The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor (IVP; $17.00) which asks what sort of attitudes and habits we’ve developed about civic life and asks how we were shaped into these ways. It is so, so good!

To encourage responsible and faithful Christian citizenship I’ve highlighted books like The Good of Politics by James Skillen and the heady Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies by David Koyzis or the comprehensive process of how to do all this by Ronald Sider called Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement. I often tell people at least to start with the simple and clear, short and sweet The Political Disciple by Vincent Bacote. Each of these invites us to be Biblical people influenced by Christian thinking in light of the Bible, and each end up with some sort of hybrid, third-way, alternative vision that isn’t left or right or even on the charts of that unhelpful spectrum.

The Politics of the Cross by Daniel Williams (an academic American historian and an evangelical adult Sunday school teacher) is working this same ground and he does so with academic credentials and a passion to be a good citizen and good neighbor. He is a follower of Jesus before he is an American, and he is an American before he is red or blue or purple. With the Scriptural call to be agents of healing and hope and Jesus’ command to be a peacemaker, Williams sets himself not only to “think Christianly” and Biblically about the issues of contemporary politics, but he frames this effort guided by his hope to repair the breaches between Republicans and Democrats and to restore some civility and common sense about the common good. He does this consistently throughout the book making it a resource unlike any of seen.

Williams is eager to find common ground on bipartisan strategies and build a persuasive consensus on moving forward where we can. This book is detailed and brilliant and it has left me with much to consider. I will be revisiting The Politics of the Cross after my quick skim and studying it more carefully, pondering, praying, talking with others, maybe even changing my mind about some long-standing convictions. Who knows, maybe it is what you need, too?

If you are pretty partisan – I hope you know who you are — you need this book. If you are adamantly non-partisan and want to see ways to make civility and bridge-building more of a reality, you need this book. If you think common ground means mostly compromise and settling for less than what we most deeply believe, you really need to read this hopeful, principled, and realistic work. If you think that Christians can’t be simultaneously somewhat affirming and also seriously critical of both historical ideologies (left and right) and both current major parties, you’ve got to read his even-handed, sober, theological concerns about each party. Wow.

Please read these recommendations carefully. I think you might realize, especially given the crisis of our times, that this is book you should buy and study and share.

Daniel Williams is one of our finest historians of evangelicals and politics. In The Politics of the Cross, he draws on his previous works, but takes us even deeper into these issues through timely theological reflections on how evangelical Christians should engage in public life. His chapter on abortion alone is worth the price of the book.          — John Fea author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

We live in a time when far too often partisan politics and catchy slogans replace thoughtful Christian engagement. Fiery rhetoric is often detached from fair-minded assessment of the past and present. It occurs on both sides of the aisle. Thankfully we have people like Daniel K. Williams, who offers both the nuance of a historian and the concerns of one committed to the fullness of ancient Christian concerns. This book will at times surprise, but also hopefully inform and encourage, those seeking to more faithfully navigate the debates of our age.                                                                      — Kelly M. Kapic Covenant College, theologian

Partisanship in the United States has reached unsustainable levels. With characteristic care and earnestness, Daniel K. Williams proposes a practical and satisfying way forward for our national discourse that is deeply informed by history, Scripture, and Christian tradition. Operating from the assumption that church and state interests need not be at odds, and Democrats and Republicans need not be mortal enemies, Williams offers a needed voice of wisdom, compassion, and maturity to a nation that seems on the brink of moral, political, and spiritual collapse. If ever such a voice was needed in American civil discourse, it is now. And if ever there was an example of a Christian thinker for such a time as this, it is Daniel K. Williams.                                                   — John D. Wilsey The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, author of American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea

The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently Amy-Jill Levine & Mark Zvi Brettler (HarperOne) $34.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99

Okay, I’ll admit that this one is not brand, brand new. It came out in the early winter, 2020, to be honest. But it has been sitting here stacked up in our Bible section and I’ve been itching to tell you about it. (We are glad a number of folks have inquired and called about it.) Alas, with Covid and the holidays and Jubilee and the hectic pace of the work here, I’ve just not gotten to read it. I have wanted to study up and weigh in, telling you my thoughts. But as Dana Carvey’s SNL caricature of George Bush went, “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.”

But I will remind you that we have all of Amy-Jill’s books (including her other recent 2020 release, a well informed, six-chapter paperback, Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven, nicely published by Abingdon Press.) You most likely know her name and story.

Dr. Levine is a Jewish professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt, a Christian divinity school. She does not see herself as a Christian although she is respectfully knowledgeable, even passionate – some would say feisty — about, church history, Christian theology, and, especially, the gospels. She edited on Oxford University Press The Jewish Annotated New Testament.

Importantly, she knows that Jesus and his earliest followers understood His own Messianic claims. “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name, it is his title. Nobody who studies the gospels denies that Jesus said this about himself and that his earliest followers worshipped him as God and thanked him as Savior and obeyed him as King. They joined his movement to advanced His Kingdom, doing so by marshalling the Old Testament story of Israel, appropriating it, as we say.

And there is the rub. There is a difference between a Christian reading and interpretation of the Bible and a Jewish one. Professor Levine and her co-author, Duke Religion Professor Marc Zvi Brettler, are a great team to tackle this huge project.

The range of those raving about this on the back cover is itself remarkable. There are Jewish scholars, evangelical leaders, a Roman Catholic Jesuit scholar, and writers as diverse as Peter Enns and Richard Elliott Friedman.

I like Enns’ quote, in fact: who says it is a “call to action.” Jews and Christians embracing their own and one another’s interpretive heritage,” he says, “will foster greater understanding and respect.” Let us hope so.

Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality Rachel Joy Welcher (IVP) $17.00   OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

I do not want to say too much about this as I may revisit it when I do a longer essay I’ve been working on describing other books on sexuality, including some recent memoirs about sexual attraction and identity and better treatment of our LGBTQ siblings in Christ. There are a lot of diverse books coming out and some are very well written. More later.

For now, though, I want to highlight this very well-done book by Rachel Joy Welcher, a woman with a Master’s in lit (from the impressive St. Andrews), who is an editor at Fathom magazine and a published poet. She is doing something rather rare in this thoughtful book and it can be easily described. Like several other (often painful and important) books with stories of young people (usually women) left discouraged and wounded by the fundamentalist and evangelical fetish about sexual purity, she “pushes back” against what has come to be known as the previous evangelical world’s “purity culture.”

In the bookstore here and in the raising of our three kids we never felt comfortable with this overblown and often fear-based and shameful insistence on religious purity, since, well, since Jesus overturned most of the purity codes and touched sinful lepers who filled the faithful with disgust, women during menstruation, those who were, as we’ve learned to put it politely, sexually active. As much as we affirmed the standard Biblical teaching that intimate sexual expression is designed for marriage, the language of purity just drove me crazy. We never did the purity rings, the daughter-daddy dances, the constant haranguing about modesty, making an idol of virginity.

Not all evangelicals were so fascinated with this, but if books like Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay  Klein and the stories they tell are true, there are lots of lots of younger adults who have looked back and felt deeply uneasy, in some cases traumatized, by this sometimes public shaming with youth groups, church camps, Sunday school classes and those taking their cues from the increasingly right wing politics of Focus on the Family. Some, now, happily or unhappily married, resent the dumb promises their youth leaders guaranteed, that sexual abstinence in teen and college years would yield a great marriage and fantastic sex life later.

And here’s the thing: in many of these accounts, those who have moved on to a less strident approach to God’s good but fallen gift of human sexuality have left traditional Christian approaches almost all together. Or they have left Christianity all together. (That is the story of many in Klein’s Pure reporting and it is heartbreaking for those of us who think connection to the story of God in Jesus through the church is essential for normative human flourishing.) Many of those pushing-back in several books and a plethora of blogs and podcasts have not only called for refining how we think about sexuality but have often so deconstructed the faith that in some cases it is no longer tethered to the Biblical testimony at all, or not even Christian at all. As I’ve said, some have just walked away from this legalistic and shaming part of their upbringing, this judgmental ethos, leaving faith behind altogether.

(That the formerly heavy-handed Joshua Harris of Soverign Grace church, famous for the strict and in our view pretty stupid I Kissed Dating Goodbye has renounced his book, and has left his wife and Christianity, is just one very public example of the intensity and complications of this discussion.)

And this is what makes Rachel Joy Welcher’s new IVP book very, very useful for many. Agree or not with her fairly conventional sexual ethics, she is robust and firm in her reconsideration of purity culture, offering a gracious and culturally wise, compassionate and faithful approach instead of its weird strictures. It is fairly simple to say (as it does on the back cover) that Welcher’s Talking Back “rejects legalism and license alike” but what that looks like, what kind of path she charts, how she “steers us to the good news of Jesus” is complex, nuanced, and often beautiful. The book is really interesting and very well written. It is a book that is so valuable for those who want to critique and even renounce some of the former evangelical attitudes and habits without leaving the evangelical fold or a  Biblical orientation.

Most books on “purity” and modesty and the like that I’ve seen are in fact, either legalistic (if not even toxic) or pointing to what might be unhealthy license. Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality is a balanced, gospel-centered, gracious and yet firmly orthodox view. She has listened well and studied the current literature. Talking Back to Purity Culture is well researched, it is solidly Biblical, and yet offers at least somewhat of a new approach. It will be “too much” for some, I fear, and “not enough” for others. Yet, there is nothing like it and we recommend it for your consideration.

Blurbs on the back offer rave reviews from Karen Swallow Prior, from Barnabas Piper, from Jessica Van Der Wyngaard (director of “I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye” documentary.) These are voices that are not quite like, say, Linda Klein or Nadia Bolz-Weber’s passioante and moving Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad about Feeling Good (about Sex.) These are main-stream, moderately conservative, culturally-savvy and gracious evangelicals who affirm this book for pushing them a bit and standing up to problems in the conservative sub-culture of the evangelical church.

Listen to these two remarkable affirmations of the book:

Impeccably researched, gently written, and a timely word for those who grew up kissing dating goodbye, wearing purity rings, attending abstinence rallies, and waiting (perhaps waiting still) for their ‘one.’ Welcher is deft in her exploration of what went right and what went wrong for the lives of millions of Christians-before marriage and after it-and she is careful in her admonition to future leaders and lovers. A needed and healing work.  — Lore Ferguson Wilbert, author of Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

Talking Back to Purity Culture is saturated with gospel truth and clarity that confronts the overwhelmingly legalistic, shaming, and hopeless rubric of purity culture―especially the ways in which it blames young women for the sins of their brothers and fathers. Parents, and especially you moms, it’s time to speak the truth to your children about sexuality and to assure your daughters of their worth as created in God’s image. I’m thrilled to recommend this wonderful book.  — Elyse Fitzpatrick, author of Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women

Remember, it is helpful if you tell us your shipping preferences when you order. Media Mail is cheapest but slow. (Just for instance, it’s $3.50 for one book.) UPS is more reliable, but costs more.  (Just guessing, but to most places for one or two books it’s about $8.00.) It depends,  course, on how many you are purchasing and to where we are shipping. If you want advanced details just ask and we’ll gladly figure it out for you ahead of time..

Our order form page over at our website is secure so you can safely enter credit card info OR it invites you to just ask for a bill so you can pay by check, later. Click on “inquiry” (below) if you have questions — but don’t forget to ask what you want to know. 

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Yep, you read that right. Welcome to the 21st century Hearts & Minds.

Our old school, (but secure) order form page where you have to type in your own order and converse with us about shipping options is a bit clunky and inefficient — Neil Postman’s “loving resistance fighters against technopoly” that we are — does have, some say, some odd charm. We try to keep the personal touch and not give over our bookseller chat to automation. Just the other day somebody said Jeff Bezos never wrote to him to confirm an order. I wouldn’t know since I don’t know exactly how they work, but we have created a bit of a brand, as they say, out of being homespun, earnest, and low tech.

Alas, kids today. And Covid.

We always sell books at the annual collegiate Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh run by the CCO campus ministry, a big fact about which I’ve dropped hints often. But of course, this year the conference is all virtual. So, we’ve come up with a way to sell books to students, to help equip them with the relevant Jubilee vision view of whole-life discipleship, by setting up a on-line, e-commerce, Jubilee bookstore, curated just for them and their event.

Beth and I are associated with CCO and, in fact, had a hand in planning some of the early Jubilee events (in the late 1970s, believe it or not.) It’s gotten bigger and more energetic, but the worldviewish, relevant, “all of life redeemed” sort of missional Christian faith, relating the good news of Christ’s Kingdom to their studies, their personal and public lives, calling them to thinking well about their academics and their future careers, all remains the heart and soul of the conference. This year they have the theme borrowed from Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper, that Christ is claiming “every square inch” of his good but fallen creation. There isn’t any aspect of our lives that isn’t touched by the goodness of God and the redemptive grace of Christ. Through His creating, sustaining, and empowering Spirit, we get to participate in the healing, hopeful, work of renewal and reformation that is going on all around us. This includes our worship and church involvement and includes our work lives as well. God’s people hear this many places, but we believe it is never heard with so much gusto as at Jubilee. When we gathered last year, right before Covid, our huge book display was right outside the ballroom where there were about 4000 folks and we and our team of volunteers talked about books relating faith and life around the clock.

We know students who have come to faith at this gathering, touched by God with the message of forgiveness and challenged to sign up for a life-long long obedience in the same direction. We know people who have bought books from us there that, in their own words, truly changed their lives. It is the hardest and the biggest and the most rewarding thing we do, year after year after year. We believe these sorts of resources about all areas of culture and the Lordship of Christ over every square inch can be truly transformational.

This year — going live all day on Saturday, February 27th — Jubilee will be virtual. On line. Please pray for the students that this year will be watching, some of them, alone in their dorm rooms, or in socially distanced watch parties. In fact, maybe you can join them.

Yes, you can sign up now. The registration fee gets you access for a month which means you can attend all the plenary events with speakers like Jon Tyson, Tish Harrison Warren, Ashlee Eiland, and more — and over 20 workshops. And you’ll get to hear all four of my 7- minute book announcements, citing books that related to their main stage talks of creation/fall/redemption/restoration.

But here’s the lede I almost buried: CCO and their Jubilee team invited us and helped us create a temporary, e-commerce, automated, shopping-cart, all digital, pop-up online Hearts & Minds Jubilee Bookstore. Yep, I have curated about a dozen books in about 50 categories.

This is what it is like in our store, but folks don’t always notice. We have, and can talk to you about, books on engineering and nursing, art and psychology, education and business. There are Christian scholars who have written wisely about historiography and there are faithful practitioners working in regenerative agriculture. We love telling about thoughtful Christian books that guide us beyond our political divides and Christians in the sciences who are showing that faith and scientific work are not at odds. To tell young university students as they prepare to enter their professions that God cares, that God is with them, and that God expects them to be agents of change for normative institutional reformation, well, it’s a big deal. And using books as tools for that full-orbed, “every square inch” being redeemed, that deep relationship between Sunday and Monday, it’s why we started Hearts & Minds in the first place.

Want in on this? You ought to consider singing up for the conference– that allows you top quality access for a month! — but you don’t have to sign up for the conference to get into our Hearts & Minds e-commerce bookstore. Just go to the CCO Jubilee conference website and scroll down past the speakers and workshops and other good stuff til you get to their description of our role in their amazing event. We are honored and wanted you to see it.

Check this out, here:  https://www.jubileeconference.com/

Or, cut to the chase an enter the store here: https://heartsandmindsbooks.square.site/

Again, this is our temporary, new, second Hearts & Minds website, a supplement to, an addition to, our store and our ordinary secure Hearts & Minds order form page. You can still get (almost) anything you want by visiting us per usual. No worries. But we really wanted you to see this modern, automated, click-and-put-stuff-in-the-shopping-cart e-commerce website. It’s the 2021 Jubilee Bookstore and you, our friends and followers, are invited in to place your orders that way. It’s going to be a blast. Check it out!

To make it easier and even more appealing, you can enter this PROMO CODE at the time of checkout. Just enter in the promo code box the letters BOOKNOTES10 and it will automatically deduct 10% off anything you order at that site. Oh yes, you’re very welcome.

This BOOKNOTES10 discount promo code can be used as often as you’d like for one month, until March 27 2021, which is the duration of the Jubilee 2021 website. Who knows what we’ll do with all this later, since some of it is quite specific to the speakers and topics of the CCO event. But these are good, good resources, friends, and we’re delighted to invite you to shop a bit extra this month, browse around our selections, and use that discounted code. Send us an order. You’ll get an automatic reply showing the calculated shipping cost. Not as personal as you expect from us, but it’s pretty darn 21st century, eh?

Just to say it one more time: this new on-line store does not replace our ordinary website, which is also secure, and you can still browse all our old BookNotes at the standard/old Hearts & Minds site. The Dallastown shop is still closed due to Covid but we’re doing lots of mail outs and curb side customer service in our back parking area. As always, serving the gathered folks at Jubilee is a huge project, and we anticipate a lot of orders this next week or so. We continue to value you as our ordinary customers but hope you can be excited with us as we serve this rising generation of young Christian leaders, hoping they will learn to become better readers, thinking well, and serving God with all they’ve got. Won’t you pray with us, that this unique Hearts & Minds/Jubilee Bookstore is effective and bears worthy fruit for God’s Kingdom. Thank you, thank you.

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