Whenever I do a BookNotes listing books about public life, civic engagement, political theology and the like, as we did last time, I worry that — as important as it always is — some people can’t quite muster up the energy to look out to the world. Care as they might, it’s just too much. Even when times are tough (maybe especially when times are tough) there are those who are personally aching and for understandable reasons, need to care for their own deep inner pain and anguish or for sick or hurting loved ones. With more than one cancer diagnosis in our family, I get that.

And, for some of us, the personal and social problems are so overwhelming, we can hardly imagine what it means to have hope. Are you with me?

A book I intended to list last time but didn’t is a daily devotional for those who are aching about our public life, who are filled with compassion about the threats the poor and immigrant families are facing but who are losing hope in our public institutions. Reading the books I listed last time could be depressing even for the most hopeful, so I wanted to mention this, a small devotional by a fascinating theologian from Princeton Seminary, Hanna Reichel, called For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional (Eerdmans; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) For those who perhaps don’t want to read the excellent titles I reviewed last time (at least not now) and who are in need of short devotional reflections that are meaty and hopeful and deeply aware of the societal and political crisis we are in, it will be, believe it or not, hopeful. Blurbs from folks we admire — Jemar Tisby, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Mariann Edgar Budde — have all raved. As Kristin put it, it is “sparingly written yet conveying remarkable historical and theological depth.”

It’s a good book to segue from last week’s reviews of works of public and political theology and analysis to this one on personal traumas and navigating the hurts in our very selves.

Another segue title, bridging those hefty social concerns from last week towards what some might call the self-help / self-improvement genre, is one I’ve already mentioned here Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics by Sara Billups (Baker Books; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) It’s an amazing book by a talented, tender author, who actually brings into what we might call the personal growth genre some astute social and cultural insights. As the sub-title suggests, our neurological systems are often a-kilter and sometimes (especially these days) it may be because our social and political systems are off.  Even institutions we used to trust, like the church, are experienced as harmful. Anxiety lives in our bodies and in our cultural architectures. This is a practical self-help book that names all manner of concerns and some of us need this kind of culturally-astute advisor. As the excellent therapist / author Aundi Kolber says, “Sara Billups masterfully takes her reader by the hand and honors the deep complexity of what it means to be human and to follow Jesus in a world like ours.” So there ya go, a “bridging” book linking our social analysis from the last BookNotes and a solid intro to this week’s lists of more personal needs.

I have always been inclined towards a public sort of theology, whether it is talking about the integration of faith and work, the relationship of faith and science, Christian approaches to the arts,  caring for the Earth, learning more about racial justice, or advocating for the poor, these are the things (through God’s grace, I’d say) I’m inclined to care about. The Bible says this is as it should be — need I cite chapter and verse? — so that gospel-informed vision of cultural engagement has shaped our bookselling business over these forty-some years. We are glad for those customers who stick with us, life-long learners about all kinds of stuff.

And yet.

There is so much personal grief and pain (emotional and physical) and so many folks sad about relationship ruptures and losses of all kinds. It isn’t easy to live well in this kind of world and tensions plague us all.

 In this BookNotes we will list some books that might be good reads to help you along. If you carry a lot of anxiety or burden (and, really, who doesn’t?) this one’s for you. And if you have the good fortune to not have much illness or fractures in your family and church, if you understand self-care and enjoy the gift of emotional wholeness, then this, too, is for you. You have the strength to care for others and to learn a bit about their journeys and experiences would be a very wise move. Read about what helps now, while you can.

I think I will offer this pattern:

First, a handful of what I’ll call general self-help resources that are good for all, foundational, even, for starters. They might help frame KJ Ramsey’s memoir a bit; in any case, they are wise and sane self-help-styled resources.

Next, my comments about a stunning new memoir about facing deep pain and illness (and a shift in the experience and articulation of faith) just released, The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive by K.J.Ramsey. Painful to read but often witty, hard and joyful; I couldn’t put it down.

Thirdly, I’ll share a random bunch of books that came to mind while reading Ramsey. Her powerful memoir brought up a lot of stuff for me and it might for you, and I just can’t help myself naming some others. I hope you find my random listing of (somewhat) related titles interesting, and maybe you’ll even order some. We’re here.

FIRST: TWELVE EXCELLENT FOUNDATIONAL, PERSONAL GROWTH TITLES

You Are a Tree and Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer Joy Marie Clarkson (Bethany House) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We bookworms here will love this and even if you aren’t a lit freak, that’s okay — she’s really clear about why metaphors matter and how thinking well matters. She is a very fine writer, accomplished in a variety of genres. How many writers who have done books like hers called Aggressively Happy also have a PhD in theology of the respected University of St. Andrews? She is currently a research assistance in theology and literature at King’s College, London.

I will quote the back cover (please don’t skip it as it is so intriguing. After noting Palm 1:5 she writes:

Sometimes we describe ourselves as trees. When we’re thriving, we speak of being rooted and fruitful, in a good season. When we struggle, we might describe ourselves as withering, cut off from friendship and the world. These ways of describing ourselves matter because they shape the ways we live.

But in a world dominated by efficiency, we have begun to use more unforgiving metaphors. We speak of ourselves as computers: we process things, we recharge. In doing so, we come to expect of ourselves an exhausting, relentless productivity.

You Are a Tree examines how the metaphorical descriptions we use in everyday life shape the way we think, pray, and live. Weaving together meditations on our common human experiences, poetry, Scripture, and the Christian tradition, Joy Marie Clarkson explores how metaphors help us understand things like wisdom, security, love, change, and sadness.

This book invites you to pay attention — to your experiences, and to the words you use to describe them. That attention reveals a richly layered and meaningful world, a refreshing perspective that nurtures wonder, gratitude, and hope.

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

In late 2024 Brazos released a magisterial, big Kelly Kapic book that is nearly essential (You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News; $23.99 // $19.19.) It was one I promoted here as a must-have, at least until this shorter one came out last Spring. You Were Never Meant to Do It All is not a repeat of his bigger book, but it is a companion devotional with new content, with quotes from the book (and other authors) giving us a practical guide to dipping into the theology of our self-hood, our limits and our creatureliness, bit by bit. The big one is great, but for many of us, this solid 40-day reader is just what we need. Reading one or the other, or both, you will come away with a happy sense of your human-ness, your need for dependence (on God and others) and will want to nurture relationships that can be fruitful for all. You don’t have to do it all. You can lighten up. Kapic is a pretty serious about helping us get this message of our worth and of freedom. Yes.

This 40-day reader, I’d say, is just the sort of theologically rich but practically useful book that really helps us ordinary folk utilize other self-help books by getting us to think well about who we are as creatures, and how we ought to live in God’s world.

Just so you know, this devotional has insights from Kapic, allusions to the bigger book, lots of other great quotes, sidebars and reflection questions to ponder and process.  It’s very impressive.

Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone Tara Owens (IVP) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I adore this book and come back to it often. We recommend it for a more embodied approach to our friends who buy spiritual formation stuff (Tara is a spiritual director herself and runs Adam Cara Ministries in Colorado Springs.) I sometimes worry that the important renaissance in mystical writing these days emerges from a dualism between the body vs soul, between the seemingly secular over and against the so-called sacred. Embracing the Body is a good way to help those with an interest in prayerfulness and even monastic lifestyles to not get so lost in their interior castles that they forget that we are flesh and bones. And that that is good.

Sometimes, we’ve shared this with those who are so down-to-earth, missional and incarnational that they hardly care about their interior lives. This fine volume can help bridge that gap for them, too, as it affirms creaturely life, invites us to listening to our bodies as part of our spiritual practice. Can mundane stuff about our bodies lead us to God? Yes, Owens says, deliighfully yes.

I love Lauren Winner’s endorsement; she writes:

This book is beautiful, learned and wise. It will make you think, and it will make you want to say ‘amen’, and, more important, it will enable you more fully to live as a body. — Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God, Still, Wearing God, Still

And maybe even better, read this great blurb by Gary Moon, director of the Dallas Willard Center at Westmont College:

Tara Owens’s Embracing the Body is a gift for anyone seeking to understand how the body — with all of its twitches, itches and bentness toward false unions — is not an enemy of spiritual formation but an amazing gift from God and the ground for personal incarnation — experiencing the reality of the apostle Paul’s number one teaching point, Christ within. She makes great use of real-life stories and engaging theological reflection. — Gary W. Moon, author of Becoming Dallas Willard: The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower

One of the great things of naming this here as a foundational book is that, in fact, Tara Owens plays a small role in The Place Been Our Pains, the memoir by K. J. Ramsey. She’s a long-time pal and shows up in the new book. Nice.

Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships Curt Thompson (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Curt Thompson has only become more esteemed and appreciated as an author, public speaker and therapist since this first book of his more than 15 years ago. On my must-read suggestion list are his books The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community both nicely done in hardcover by IVP) and The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope which is now in paperback from Zondervan. None are redundant and you cannot afford to miss them, I’d say.

Despite a cover I don’t particularly like, Anatomy of a Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships is a great, great book, not only for his candor and wit but for how he draws serious connections between the discoveries of neuroscience and lively, Christian faith. He’s honest about the human condition and he’s got a wholistic Kingdom theology that is foundational for him, integrating his science and his faith. I love this guy and really value this solid work.

Blurbs on this book have been from a variety of brain scientists and pastors, theologians and Biblical scholars. To see the late evangelist and social action guy Tony Campolo, spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton, psychologist and counselor Tim Clinton, world class Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, and reformational philosopher Jeffrey Dudiak all chiming in is a real joy and speaks volumes.

The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life Justin Whitmel Earley (Zondervan) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Justine Earley is known and beloved for his books A Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and a very good one on loneliness and friendship, Made for People. In each, there is deep theory presented with delightfully simple clarity and little charts and graphs helping readers make goals and take steps and access personal growth. I usually don’t like those kinds of books much, but these colorful pages are charming and  really useful. The Body Teaches the Soul is produced with that same blend of theology and spirituality and incredibly practical ideas and lists and take-aways. He looks at exercise and nutrition, rest and work, spirituality and the life of the mind among other embodied habits to cultivate/

This is foundational in that in it, Justin offers a subtle but radical teaching that our bodies are not separated from other parts of our lives and that our body and breath all go together. With this study of ten habits, with lots of stories, The Body Teaches… is a fun way to “reconnect with your whole self and repattern your whole life in the image of the God who made you.”

Good News About Self-Care: How Nurturing Your Soul, Your Self, and Your Sanity Honors God Benjamin Espinoza (NavPress) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

A friend of mind helped a bit in the editorial process of this and told me months ago that I’d really appreciate it. Now that it is here, I see that she is really right. It’s solid, creative, wholistic and very pleasantly written. Espinoza starts off noting that for many of us, “self-care” sounds a bit indulgent, maybe even bougie and shallow. Uh-huh; I get that.

This pastor-theologian offers a “beyond the surface” approach presenting self-care as a deeply Christian practice; valuable and imporant. And he highlights the inter-relationships and crossovers of our own relationship with God, others, and society. Maybe reading this and caring for ourselves can “fuel a mission to love God and neighbor wholeheartedly.”

As the back cover notes, most of us are facing a lot of exhaustion and stress (and even Christian leaders are facing burnout at higher rates than usual.) The framework Espinoza offers is going to be helpful, I’m sure. He has served at Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester, New York, by the way, and is current pastoring a church. There are a lot of great endorsements on the back but one by my friend Marlena Graves is particularly compelling. She says that Espinoza “adroitly highlights that Christian self-care is countercultural, enabling us to resist the culture’s push for productivity and the dehumanization of ourselves and our fellow human beings.” Wow.

To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope Amy Julia Becker (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We’ve highlighted this often and think it is just an excellent read, a very good book to provide insight and encouragement. Amy Julia Becker is a very good writer and has graced us with two previous books, one on raising her disabled child (A Good and Perfect Gift:Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny) and the other called White Picket Fences: Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege. She not only writes wonderfully but she thinks well and, as Sharon Hodde Miller puts it, has written a book in To Be Made Well that “is ideal for those who “are tired of simplistic answers but still searching for hope.” As I have said before, this is particularly good on the interweaving of personal wholeness and society health. It looks at the pain and the hard stuff and invites us to a pathway to healing. This is a self-help / personal growth book for those who have an allergy to simplistic formulas and self-indulgent, self-help. Highly recommended.

Whole and Human: Forty Meditations for Liberating Body + Spirit Rohadi Nagassar (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This is brand new and I’m very excited to look through it for a couple of reasons. First, good folks I admire — hospice chaplain J.S. Park, Native writer Kaitlin Curtice, African-American activist Terence Lester — each have enticing blurbs on the back. I would have ordered some anyway but these were good endorsements and make this a solid recommendation..

Secondly, I read his previous book — also on the Mennonite publishing house, Herald Press — called When We Belong: Reclaiming Christianity on the Margins. It is a fabulous book insisting that the gospel must be offered in ways that include the marginalized and outcast and it is both a challenge to those in church leadership and a comfort to those frustrated with the church as it often is. “Don’t give up on Jesus”, I hear that book saying — but don’t let the church fail further. Another one of his that we have is called Thrive: Ideas to Lead the Church in Post-Christendom. He’s a guy to pay attention to.

This very new one, Whole and Human, is about awakening to your senses, moving beyond mere survival and “embracing the truth that each of us deserves to flourish.” In each of these sections, Nagassar guides us in what seems to be really robust (and Biblically-informed) reflections based on each of our five senses. Cool, eh? The categories he works with are land, body, spirit, and justice. Wow.  I like that Terence Lester says he writes with “the clarity of a prophet and the tenderness of a healer.” This is not your grandma’s daily devotional.

Janai Auan, author of Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized says, ”These reflections feed the fire of our spirituality so that we have the strength and compassion we ned to help warm a cold world.” Nice, eh? Again, this seems like a really tender and gentle (if provocative) shift from last week’s BookNotes about the dangers of tyranny and the dysfunctions of right-wing religion, into a lovely embrace of a healing journey living aware and alive in the real world.

Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life MaryAnn McKibben Dana (Eerdmans) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If I have time and energy later in the summer I might do a longer review of this. While not fully agreeing with every word, every word was a delight, a joy, a challenge, with so much clear, lovely prose and such heart, such honesty, so much hard-won wisdom. Rev. McKibben Dana (a PCUSA pastor) wrote a upbeat memoir-ish book decades ago called Sabbath in the Suburbs, then a fun book several years back how a stint learning stand-up comedy helped her be a better follower of Christ and pastor; then she did one on hope. I”m a fan of her writing and thoughtful, generous orientation that will appeal certainly to mainline church folks.

In the beginning of this new one she tells of the hardship she and her husband were gong through in those years of writing her earlier books as parents of kids with severe mental health disabilities. Her words, told as a mother, in the introduction to Better Than Normal brought tears to my eyes as I nodded in comprehension. She is not at all morose but the book has its heartbreaking moments noting how we are all hurting, all carrying burdens, and if we are not now, we sooner or later will be Life happens. She knows more of these burdens than many and yet she writes without any self-pity.

As I have mentioned before at BookNotes, when I first started this lovely, thoughtful book, the structure follows a pattern: each chapter starts with a normal attitude that our culture endorses — certainty, comfort, productivity, competition, say — and shows how that tends to work, for some, and how it marginalizes and and hurts those cannot or will not conform. From those with neurodiversity to non-binary kids to those with mental illnesses, just for instance, there can be healing and hope and authentic belonging when we shift towards a different approach, what she calls “off-script” virtues. Each chapter in Better Than Normal looks at the strengths and weaknesses of these seemingly normal values and ways of being and then shows that Christ calls us to subvert those conventions and take up contrary values. For each so-called normal thing, she names a different kind of normal, a shift from one unhelpful posture to another more laden with real hope — “From Certainty to Curiosity” for instance. Can these moves empower us, set us all free?

This is a rare book, a stimulating read with a mix of personal stories, philosophical and theological reflection, personal and communal guidance. Some of the chapters are about individual values while others are on communal values (“From Artifice to Authenticity” and “From Blandness to Beauty” are two of the communal moves she explores.) It’s not an academic treatise on what it means to be human, nor a simple self-help handbook, although there are plenty of provocative take-aways. Anti-poverty activist and writer Liz Theoharis calls it “liberating, loving, and deeply prophetic.” It is imaginative. Don’t jump ahead but she ends with a fabulous story from Stephen Colbert about failure and laughter and community. Thanks be to God.

Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself — and to God – When You’re Wounded, Weary & Wandering Chuck DeGroat (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I am such a fan of this author. We still carry his first book, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places about times of transition; he did a widely read IVP release about narcissists in church, another on Eerdmans for anyone (including church leaders) called The Toughest People to Love. Anyway, this recent one is one of the best books in the personal growth and self-help category I have ever read. It is wise and deep, thoughtful without being academic. He cites ancient Christian writers, tells stories, draws on up-to-date psychological insights such as those drawn from neuroscience, attachment theory and the like. There is a chapter on addictions, even, which is good for anyone, highlight the nature of compulsion and the nature of grace. DeGroat promises to help us “discover how to heal the hidden hurt” that stuff that happens to us leaves behind. We can wisely let go of buried pain. We can face whatever is blocking our path to resilience and joy. We can discover real rest and renewal as we connect with God, others, and ourselves.

There are a number of very fine faith-based books on this whole topic these days, and I believe this is one of the very best.  Besides the wise and good writing and the profound insight, it is loaded with exercises, reflections questions, bullet points and helpful tools to help you process the 9 great chapters. DeGroat is a beloved professor of pastoral care and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan and serves as director of a clinical mental health counseling program there. Healing What’s Within is going to be useful for many and is a great book to have on hand. Highly recommended.

Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground Your an Ever Changing World Michaela O’Donnell & Lisa Pratt Slayton (Baker Books) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I’m telling you what: everybody could use this incredible book. It is interesting and helpful, spiritually wise and vibrant with Kingdom vision, complex and yet easy to read. From “doing the inner work of waking up and letting go” to developing the capacity to “embrace the unknown with confidence” reading Life in Flux is like having two paid life coaches at your side.

O’Donnell made extraordinary contributions in the faith and work space, writing Make Work Matter and developing a whole bunch of life hacks to navigate change with distinctive Christian faithfulness. Her writing partner is the great Lisa Pratt Slayton, a founding partner and CEO of Tamim Partners (that does, in fact, provide coaching and consulting executives, business, nonprofits, and churches.) Lisa did a stint at the helm of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation and is a long-time friend; she helped steer the fabulous Jubilee Professional conference there in Pittsburgh years ago.. These two women are both impeccably suited to help us think about coping with the changing world we all find ourselves in.

Whether you are doing mostly okay, only moderately unsure about some life stuff or are deeply wounded and truly in serious flux, this book will help. They remind us how to face the pain and uncover the desires and longings under the surface (especially in times of transition.) They remind us of some old adages (knowing your self) and push us to “stay attuned to your rhythms and values” as you move forward. Believe me or not, I hardly know a book like it.

This is a must for leaders, in the corporate world, the nonprofit sector, or churches. Sure. But it is for anyone wanting useful guidance on living well in the world with “practical postures and transformational prayers” as Kara Powell put it in her rave review. Who doesn’t need that?

Mourning God: Grieving Loss, Wrestling with God, and Finding Your Way Tiffany Stein (NavPress) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Any set of books offering a foundation for cultivating a Christian imagination for daily living in this broken world needs to include some reading on the really tough stuff. And we have shelves and shelves here at our shop on theodicy  and coping with hard times. You know the aching questions — why? where is God when it hurts? what the hell is going on? How long, O Lord, how long?

If you’ve cried out to God in near despair, feeling the loss and disorientation of grief, you know that, at that moment, reading a book may be the last thing you want to do (or have energy to, even if you wanted to.) Read some now while you can. Have them ready to read (or share) later. In Timothy Keller’s very good Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering he invites readers to skip the first third if they are in the immediate throes of grief since it may be too abstract and philosophical for that season; he invites readers to jump to the more practical stuff.

There are gripping, raw journals of grief like Lament for a Son by Nick Wolterstorff and heavy but inspiring memoirs like A Grace Disguised by Gerry Sittser — one of our most recommended, nearly a modern classic. There are books that are not Biblically oriented but breathtaking and wise such as one K.J. Ramsey mentions in her memoir (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller) and there are the thoughtful, literary writings of funeral home owner and undertaker Thomas Lynch such as his The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest. From psalms to poems to creative approaches like Looking Up by Courtney Ellis on birding as a way to process grief to My Favorite Color Is Blue: A Journey Through Loss with Art and Color by Roger Hutchison, there is something for everyone. You get my point. Send me an email if you want other suggestions — we have a lot of grief and sorrow.

I list this very new one, Mourning God by Tiffany Stein, because it is new and raw and yet seems to be a very solid (and personal) study of the topic. It especially notes ways our views of God may change when God seems painfully absent during times of loss. She is not wrong. This book is deeply personal, very much aligned with classic Biblical theology, and yet honest about her own transformation — mourning her loss and mourning God in laments — when her infant son died. She doesn’t say too much about it (it isn’t primarily a tender memoir) but it does offer wise and compassionate teaching, admitting “the silence and confusion” that accompany losses of many kinds. There are discussion questions, too, to help readers process it all.

Tiffany Stein is a graduate of Oklahoma Baptist, an ordained non-denominational pastor, and now a fourth-grade educator at a Classical School in Austin, Texas. Her husband is the pastor of The Well, a Christ-centered church community in the city. This book is readable, practical, honest, but remarkably clear about the gospel and the sacred presence of the tender and risen Christ, even when we are mourning.

+++

The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive K. J. Ramsey (Convergent) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Reading well-written memoirs is always beneficial, I think, seeing how people narrate their lives and make sense of life’s bigger questions helps us with understand others, gaining empathy, and more.  I call it a spiritual practice which can shape us in subtle and not so subtle ways. And it can be like reading a novel, happily getting lost in narrative, prose, character development and the like. I’ve read memoirs that have more twists and turns than your standard fare beach novel or spy show on Netflix. I’ve stayed up late since many are true page-turners.

Memoirs of pain, sorrow, or coping with hard stuff are often particularly powerful, poignant, moving. I think of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story and her award winning, big, messy The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath or Nancy French’s well-told Ghosted or Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss or This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley which we keep trying to press into people’s hands. Memorial Days is a recent memoir by writer Geraldine Brooks about the death of her husband and it has now been released in paperback. Earlier today I sold a copy of Between Two Trailers by Dana Trent (with a gushing foreword by Barbara Brown Taylor) for a person who needed a wild look at Christian faith set in the context of some really broken people.  Nothing beats a good memoir.

Although she doesn’t dwell on it on this new memoir, K.J. Ramsey was once known as a thoughtful, evangelical thinker, mentored, at least in part, by good folks at a generously Reformed Christian college. Her first book, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers, about chronic pain, carried very impressive endorsements by the likes of reliable evangelicals like Brian Fikkert, Karen Swallow Prior, Chuck DeGroat and Todd Billings. Great writers, too, loved her — from Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Shannon Martin, say. The therapist Alison Cook (who wrote Boundaries for Your Soul) loved it, too. KJ blended her own stories of chronic illness and neuroscience and theology into a really excellent book. Dr. Kelly Kapic, an impeccable scholar and Godly leader at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, TN (I mentioned his You Don’t Have to Do It All above) wrote a really good foreword. That was in early 2020.

Her next was even more passionate and creative, an anguished and imaginative Biblical reflection, The Lord Is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love, drawn obviously from her serious study of Psalm 23. She did an edgy/beautiful gift book of poems and photos, too, as a supplemental volume called Common Courage: Prayers and Poems to Find Strength in Small Moments. These two were stunners, amazingly rich and evocative reflections — the Bible study, the poems, the struggle, the hope. Good, good folks have been with her through those, too — Curt Thompson wrote a moving foreword to The Lord is My Courage and artist Scott Erickson did one for the poetry collection; I hope that gives you a sense of her success as a therapist and a Christian writer. I found those books very moving and very helpful. The Lord is My Courage tells more of her story but unpacks, in bits and sad pieces, how she and her husband, Ryan, were dismissed from the church at which he worked. They were big-hearted and seemingly faithful, earnest church planters creating a faith community known for authenticity and care and it ended very badly. They lost financial support, even, and moved into the basement of her parents in another state. Some of you know this sense of betrayal and dislocation. I have never read a book on the twenty-third Psalm writing about that kind of “shadow of the valley…”

Both This Too Will Last and The Lord Is My Courage are ideal for anyone wanting these sorts of reflections on theologically-rich, Biblically-rooted, honest and even courageous laments about physical pain and emotional anguish. She is candid about their lives but the books are still more in the genre of Christian discipleship and faith formation in that they explain and guide us to deeper faith even as her stories ground her (Biblically-informed) guidance in real-world experience. As thoughtful seminary professor Justin Holcomb puts in on the back of The Lord is My Courage,

If you have ever felt like darkness is your only companion, you won’t find yourself blamed in this book. You’ll find yourself pursued and embraced by the patient and compassionate love of a God who meets you in your pain. — Justin Holcomb, author of Know the Creeds and Councils

Marlena Graves, a person who knows a thing or two about some of this, and author of The Way Up Is Down, says this:

As we wind our way through Psalm 23 with Ramsey’s guidance, we are offered grace and direction as we seek to become whole — especially in dealing with pain and shame related to abusive shepherds and churches.

The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive, Ramey’s  brand new one, stands in this same sort of tradition, offering, on one hand, deeply faithful guidance about hard times. But it is different than her other ones in two big ways: firstly, it is a memoir. This does not attempt to be didactic, guiding you, the reader, to what you should think, believe, or do. Her great storytelling talents are on full display here as she recounts so much of her hard, true story.

And secondly, she seems to have shifted from her theological clarity, gracious and open-minded as an evangelical as it was. She has been wounded by the church and found fresh renewal with a broader experience of the Spirit, despite less involvement in the conventional church. She hashes some of this out in the book — even lamenting that some will see this as a book of deconstruction, which she says it is not, really. In any case, for those eager for the same sort of robust theological reflection or Biblical exploration, you should know that The Place Between Our Pains is just not that kind of book. And she may not be that kind of an author anymore, citing Hebrew lexicons, Walter Brueggemann, and New Testament genius Kenneth Bailey.

So, The Place Between Our Pains really is a memoir of her journey into exceptionally dangerous illness, inexplicable pain, dramatic visits to the ER and stays in the hospital. Hospitals, for that matter. I’ve read a number of such autobiographical accounts of illness and the one this most reminded me of — and this is a huge compliment! — is Seleika Jaouad’s spectacular Between Two Kingdoms. You may have heard of that New York Times bestseller (or seen American Symphony, the documentary her husband, Jon Batiste, did about their relationship ) so I hope you know I say this as not only a compliment to Ramsey’s writing style and ability to convey the electricity and drama of the health emergencies, but also to just help you determine if this book is one you should read. If you liked that one, you’ll appreciate The Place Between Our Pains as well. If you like Jaouad’s amazing account, but wished for more Christian spirituality, Ramsey’s story is told in the context of her life of faith in the time she’s telling about, which includes the writing of those previous books. Again, her new book isn’t like the first two in that sense, but it is more related to conventional Christian faith than Between Too Kingdoms. They both are about young women experiencing catastrophic illness and they both include some road trips. So there’s that. What fun.

It is weird for me to say one can enjoy a book about another’s pain, her coping with scary, weird symptoms and an eventual diagnoses of Lupus. I mean no disrespect and I read and recommend these sorts of volumes with care and intention — to embrace another’s story can be practice of hospitality, giving the author (a fellow human, naturally) the space to share her tale. As such, maybe you should take off your shoes, as it is holy ground.

I hope that KJ doesn’t mind me saying this, though: such sacred encounters with another story, even when that story includes moments of deep desolation, can be rewarding and even an enjoyable reading experience. It’s easier with KJ because she is such a colorful character, a wit and comic, even. You will find lively writing and while she’s not quite like Anne Lamott or Kate Bowler or Nadia Bolz-Weber, she can help you gape and smirk and grin and laugh. She’s a delightful piece of work, as they say, and a romantic (lucky for Ryan!) and sometimes her story is almost outlandish — the heartache and the hope. Hard as it is, you will enjoy it.

One of the reasons you will enjoy it so is because she takes delight in little things — seeing a double rainbow on the way home from the Mayo Clinic, the fact that a dreaded stay in a dreaded hospital room has a window facing Pikes Peak, and because she excels in some really beautiful nature writing. “Distant clouds above the mountains contrast above an aquamarine sky like ships in a sea.” Her mention of “fragrant white lilies” and a tree’s “diamond-shaped bark.” Oh, and she can cuss like a sailor, too, which feels about right. And that she can find joy in being open to whatever life brings, including in and to what she has called her “mystifying body.” This becomes a major theme, the discovery of joy. You need to allow her story to touch you in this very quest. With this story, her subtitle about joy speaks volumes.

The Place… begins, in fact, with a road trip trying to revisit places where she once first discovered joy and beauty. That book was not meant to be, as that trip and project was cut short due to intense health emergencies. Later, she notes that, “When I started writing this book I thought I was on a pilgrimage into my past to find the good I overlooked, but now I know it was always a pilgrimage into the present, to greet the good that coexists with grief.”

Even as she continues to face some frightening new symptoms, we wish her well, and celebrate the release of this new memoir.

“When I started writing this book I thought I was on a pilgrimage into my past to find the good I overlooked, but now I know it was always a pilgrimage into the present, to greet the good that coexists with grief.”

TEN RANDOM BOOKS THAT CAME TO MIND WHEN READING KJ RAMSEY

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

I can’t help but start here since it is by the woman who wrote one of the most known and appreciated memoirs of cancer and hard, hard recovery, and great joy, the aforementioned Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Suleika Jaouad. (Random House; $20.00 // $16.00.) I mentioned her above in my words explaining Ramsey’s A Place Between Our Pains. And it makes sense, since Ramsey’s book is exactly what much of this is about — keeping a journal, writing down the bones, getting it out, telling your story. The Book of Alchemy is not really by Jaouad, but edited and curated as she offers excepts and pieces by famous writers on the art of journalling.

Yep, it’s about the art of journalling. And so much more.

The Book of Alchemy is an edited volume with dozens and dozens of entries and is really a meditation on big questions and curiosity and change — Hanif Abdurraqib says it offers “an entire galaxy” — and it draws on amazing writers such a Pico Iyer, Kiese Laymon, Jon Batiste, John Green, Elizabeth Gilbert, Beth Kephart, Alain de Botton, my friend Lisa Ann Cockerel (of Eerdmans publishing!), Nadia Bolz-Weber, Ann Patchett, George Saunders, Kate Bowler…. The list goes on and on. It is beautiful, historic, even, having all these many writers in one big volume about the practice of journalling. Kate Bowler says of it that it is “the perfect mix of incandescent wisdom and kick-in-the-pants motivation to start your own creative journey.”

Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow Jay Stringer (Convergent) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Stringer, like KJ Ramsey, did his first book on a legacy evangelical publisher. His book based on research with those facing unwanted sexual desires (Unwanted) advocating that we “listen to our lust” was a bit edgy for NavPress, even (even though they do amazing work on faith-filled engagement with issues around sorrow and trauma.) Like KJ Ramsey, he moved to a more progressive and broadly oriented publisher, known and respected around the country. I do not know what this indicates but it seems right. It is fitting; while Desire may not be brimming with conservative, evangelical preaching about the Bible, it is rooted in generous faith and is lively and in many ways brilliant. I reviewed it before and for some reason, reading KJ’s memoir, I kept being led to think about this question of yearning, longing, desire. And I wonder if KJ knew Stringer.

Because that is what is behind so much of her story.

Jay Stringer (a therapist now in New York City) has done amazing work thinking through this deep theological and anthropological question — are we, as James KA Smith puts it, citing Augustine, “what we love”? And how does that work, even neurologically? Jay has interviewed scores of people about their deepest desires and, without shame and with plenty of grace, invites them to think this through. It’s an amazing book, important for almost any serious memoir — the under-the-hood backstory. Chef Will Guidara, who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality — I noted this the first time I reviewed Desire at BooNotes — says it is “a master class in caring for the human spirit, Desire turns the work of hospitality inward, changing how you understand love, purpose, and what ie Eans to serve those around you and yourself.” It will change how you understand love and purpose. Wow.

Dan Allender has an amazing blurb on the back, as does Sheila Wray Gregoire, who notes that Stringer “gives you permission to stop running; to stop trying so hard; to stop the self-criticism; and most of all, to start desiring again.”

This is maybe what is one of the driving motivations of KJ’s memoir. She says it is about searching for joy, of being taken by beauty. She knows enough psychology to know that this really is, finally, about desire. Jen Hatmaker notes that desire can be “both a miracle and a minefield.” Read KJ’s memoir and then get this one. It’s big and beautiful.

Joyful, Anyway Kate Bowler (The Dial Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

In a way, this is a no-brainer to list, a great woman in a similar sort of setting — a more progressive faith than old-school fundamentalism, but still deeply alive to God’s presence and the call to Christ-centered discipleship and with the terrible affliction of life-threatening illness. Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) are excellent memoirs and offer wise, deeply Christian insight. You should own them both!

This new one, Joyful, Anyway, has a cover full of shiny balloons that I don’t think does the book justice. It is almost compulsively clever and every page has chuckles and head-shaking phrases and pronouncements that will make you smile. But the book, as cheery as the writing is, is deadly serious, and the first portion is intense, about what she called “the ache.” This is about the existential dread one faces if one… uh, is human. Is half-aware. Is honest. Hardly anyone escapes this angst and she is honest enough to name it, like some medieval jester (or a child saying the emperor has no cloths.) She believes that Christian joy is the fruit of all this awe we get when facing this world of wonder (again, a theme explored in KJ’s The Place Between…) but it is, I suppose we can say, given her terminal cancer and more, hard-won insight. Very hard-won. It is not cheap, even if at times it is funny as hell.

I have an old acquaitance who continues to be a fun and feisty evangelical author, Margaret Feinberg. Years ago, Margaret was doing a new book project with an odd-ball experiment of saying yes to everything. She thought living with such abandon might lead to joy or freedom or something alive in her spirit. As she was starting that new, positive, habit she got cancer, seriously. (Seriously? she thought!) She could hardly write the book on positive joy, but on she went, bringing balloons into the waiting room to bring smiles to others at death’s door. I was worried that a book about cancer entitled Fight Back with Joy: Celebrate More, Regret Less, Stare Down Your Greatest Fears would be seen as needlessly glib, maybe even what we now call “toxic positivity.” But Margaret pulled it off, insisting that joy is more than whimsey and can be a weapon in our greatest battles. It’s a good little read and I think of it now in comparison with and in contrast to Kate Bowler’s mighty Joyful, Anyway. I don’t think Bowler cites Margaret, although she might have — even if she’s a professor of theology at Duke — and I am not sure if KJ knows her, either. It’s just one more reminder that Bowler is on to something big and important. Joy, Anyway, is full of stories like her earlier books and is a very great read.

So there you have it: joy, anyway, isn’t just a cute quip by quirky Anne Lamott. It’s a very impressive plea and hope and prayer from a writer who knows more than most of us about suffering and anxiety and, just maybe knows more than most about real joy. Joy Anyway by Kate Bowler is an amazing, even profound gift.

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience Tish Harrison Warren (Convergent) $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I hope you, too, think of Tish Warren’s new book when thinking about all this stuff about resilience and hope and beauty and joy, even when (especially when) one isn’t feeling it. When life is hard, as it is for many of us. What Grows in Weary Lands is simply one of the best books on this topic, certainly one of the great Christian resources for reasonable service in these crazy days. I adore her other books and recommend them widely. If you don’t have this new one, you should. I hope I enticed you in my previous review, but I’ll say it again here, now. This book really does help those of us who want to find solid (usually ancient) Christian practices than can form within us some way to keep on keeping on. To know God in and through our hum-drum (or worse) days and dark nights. Warren did not crank this out quickly or easily; it, too, is a book that emerged from some hard places.

I would love to hear a podcast or round-table conversation with Tish and Bowler and Ramsey (and Margaret could bring balloons and her Holy Spirited passion for finding God in the ordinary, as well.) What conversation these interesting, funny women would have. Each from slightly different corners of the evangelical wing of broad Christian faith, and all maybe shifting a bit here and there, it would be a great discussion. In the meantime, reading their books side by side, bringing them into conversation with each other would be a fabulous experiment. What Grows From Weary Lands is a book of the year (I’m saying now, half way through the year.) I hope you order it from us.

Read this book if you have discovered that you do not get through life without going through a desert; read this book to discover that the desert brings a kind of life you cannot find anywhere else. — Andy Crouch, partner for theology and culture, Praxis, and author of The Life We’re Looking For

So many of us are bone-tired — tired of all the noise, the hurry, the drama, and, at times, even tired of prayer. Into our cultural moment of chronic exhaustion, Tish Harrison Warren offers us a spirituality for the weary. . . . Warren is one of our best living spiritual writers; her ability to blend Christian spirituality and insights from church history with beautifully down-to-earth honesty and raw humor, all while keeping our soul hopeful in God, is a rare gift. —John Mark Comer, author of Practicing the Way and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

The Night Is Normal: A Guide Through Spiritual Pain Alicia Britt Chloe (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I have a friend who said this book nearly saved her life. She’s a solid and mature Christian woman who has read a lot. We knew the book a bit, had it here, realized the writer has done some fine stuff. I liked her 40 Days of Decrease, but these days books about the spirituality of painful times, the experience of anguish, the need for lament, a theology of aloneness are all plentiful. I never read this until I realized how much my friend found it helpful.

Britt Chloe is a fine writer, an evangelical with an honest faith that grapples with hard stuff. Tough answers for tough questions, you know — until there are no evident answers. Until things really fall apart. Until God seems silent. She is smart enough to know she is not the first one to experience a dark night the soul or know what Weber called “disenchantment.” She wants to normalize suffering, help us all not feel so alone when we sense God’s absence, to not feel so fearful, so alarmed. I do not recall if she cited Lauren Winner’s eloquent memoir about a mid-life sense of God’s absence — Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis it was called — but even as I read KJ Ramsey’s memoir, I sometimes wondered if she read these kinds of books. Not super philosophical theodicy texts, but not cheap voices which try to cover-up the pain, either. Sort of in the same ballpark as Tish Warren’s above mentioned What Grows in Weary Lands, Dr Chloe’s work is readable, touching, practical, and wise.

I like her metaphor of night and her insistence that the “night is not your enemy.” I know she does draw on Gerald May who drew on Saint John of the Cross for contemporary experiences, even of depression. Many of us know how Barbara Brown Taylor tried to normalize the night in her brilliant Learning to Walk in the Dark. That was more memoiristic, rooted in her narrative and her Bible reflection. This Night Is Normal has a more “self help” sort of feel, which is why I’m listing it here, now. It is one of those sort of books that can redeem the simplistic and cliched formulas of too many of those sorts of books. It’s really good and without knowing it stands on the shoulders of all of KJ Ramsey’s vital works.

Alisa Britt Chloe’s writing is lovely and comfortable talking about faith even though she went through this hard season of loss; one chapter is called “spiritual frustration” and that it putting it mildly. But she endured and nurtured the sort of faith that grows best in the depth of the dark. The Black author and Bishop, Claude Alexander, says she “has put her ears to God’s heart and mouth to help us navigate the night seasons of disillusionment with God.” Most of the chapters are very short and easy to read. It’s a useful resource for many (and there is a workbook / study guide to help you process it as well.)

Drawn By Beauty: Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life Matthew Z. Capps (B+H Academic) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

There are numerous books about our human capacity to engage beauty, to behold, to imagine, to take in splendor. Some make it a theological thing, writing about God’s own beauty, citing everybody from hefty Catholics like Hans Von Balthasar to Puritans like Jonathan Edwards, while others dig into a theology aesthetics. (See, by the way, the rigorous new IVP Academic book What Is Beauty? An Introduction to Art & Aesthetics by philosopher Dennis Bray.) But I thought of this whole topic, and how Capps gets at it, when reading KJ’s The Spaces Between Our Pains. Because for her, being drawn to beauty — and finding joy — is part of our human wiring, part of our capacity as people made in the image of a Creator-God. For whatever reason, we are drawn to beauty.

And, note the distinction in phrasing: yes we are drawn to beauty, by, as this book puts it, we are drawn by beauty. What do we mean by that? How does the sublime, the sensing of awe that leads to wonder, serve us in our becoming more Christ-like in our discipleship journey? In our human journey?

I do not know if KJ would care much for the theological details of this book which, as the back cover promises, “illuminates a captivating truth: God has enchanted our world to draw us to him, the ultimate source of all beauty.” (This, by the way, is the solid theological thinking undergirding the marvelous little collection of essays published by Square Halo Books called Why We Create: Reflections on the Creator, The Creation, and Creating edited by Brian Brown and Jane Scharl; done through the Anselm Society in Colorado, I thought of this book, too, when reading KJ.)

I guess I mean to say that Matthew Capps is a pastor of a Baptist Church and his book is part of the “Christ in Everything” series done by theologically conservative thinkers at Broadman + Holman. It isn’t a dry treatise or theological textbook or stuck in the culture wars many in the SBC are known for. It is fabulous and meaty without being dense, nicely reflecting on the meaning of experiences of beauty that “draw us out of ourselves toward something greater.” Drawn to Beauty shows how beauty is essential for the deepest sort of spiritual formation and vital for our discipleship and church lives. As Russell Moore says it, “This book will help you in our discipleship and will prompt you to see the things around you in a different way.”  And, yes, Capps nicely cites Mako Fujimura and Calvin Seerveld, who I wrote about a few weeks ago. KJ would agree, awe and wonder and embodied glory are all part of the plan. Indeed, we are drawn to and by that which is good and beautiful.

When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need Rebecca Bloom (Broadleaf) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Yes to joy and yes to beauty. Appreciate creation, love others, fine meaning in the awe of being alive, even when we’re almost not. KJ Ramsey’s book drew me to these big questions and pushed me to ponder how that works. It’s a memoir, a story, an account, and it underscores that quest in her own life.

But it is also a story about a woman who is ill and faces unhelpful healthcare systems and less than perfect professionals in those systems. Let’s face it, joy and beauty are part of this narrative, but it is mostly about her illnesses. Obviously this book came to mind.

More than one friend of ours have raved about this and others, too — like Delia Ephron, a Hollywood screenwriter and author has said, “Trust Rebecca Bloom.” It makes me want to send it to any woman facing hard medical issues. A woman leader from the NYU School of law says it is “a rare mix of legal savvy, practical expertise, feminist perspective, and deep humanity to help us navigate the nation’s unruly trio of healthcare, employment, and benefits systems.” There were moments in KJ’s memoir that I smacked my head in frustration — not really disbelief because we’ve been there — as the paperwork piled up or the chirpy person on the phone says to have a nice day when they put you one hold before denying benefits. Ugh. I’m told this book might help navigated some of that and Bloom may be the health advocate you need.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead Books) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I have written about this at great length a few years ago and it continues to come to mind often, including when reading about KJ’s pain-filled story.  It was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award and was called “remarkable” by Andrew Solomon and “essential” by The Boston Globe. It has been considered nearly a landmark exploration of the rise of autoimmune diseases and of course the rise of chronic illnesses. Naturally, I thought of this when reading abouit KJ’s odd autoimmune disorders. Believe me, it is in our family as well with relatives who have struggled with Lupus and MS and Scleroderma and Celiac Disease. This book captured my interest right away.

O’Rourke is a very fine writer, a journalist and poet and essayist. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and edits The Yale Review. So she is not a blue-collar rural gal, but an urbane New Yorker. I don’t relate to that immediately, existentially, but loved reading about sophisticates and their lives, her story. And then her undiagnosed illness gets worse and worse and the expense and time for appointment after appointment builds up; most readers will be captivated. She “blends lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy.”  More than a memoir, she argues for a “seismic shift in our approach disease.” It is an education and, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “a ray of light into those isolated cocoons of darkness that, at one time or another, may affect us all. “

This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith Darcey Steinke (HarperOne) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is a very new book to which I gave a BookNotes shout-out not long ago. At our BookNotes we like to keep folks informed of important new releases and we told why this one should be noted; some of it is unforgettable. Elizabeth Gilbert says it is “a work of piercing grace… a work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth.” It’s a beautiful book, what another novelist (Steinke is known as a fiction write, herselfr) called “excruciating and holy.”

It has also been called “a love letter to the body in pain” and it really does remind us (it’s odd we need reminded) of our embodied life, the nature of the body’s capacity for pain and ecstasy, too. It moves from memoir to some science writing to reporting. From the history of early understandings of pain to the latest neuroscience research to her own passions and insights, This Is the Door is a major volume that I predict will be around a long time. And I couldn’t help but think of it while reading The Place Between Our Pains. Wow.

Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World Shannan Martin (Revell) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I hardly know what to say about this. Shannon Martin is a cool, edgy writer, conversational and punchy, deeply Christian but with a generous and gracious openness. I liked her Start With Hello about neighborliness; she works for a nonprofit that serves the hungry in Goshen, Indiana. And she’s a great storyteller.

It isn’t surprising that I’d think of her when reading KJ; she is witty and full of love and life. Counterweights seems to start with the assumption that we are burned-out and broken-down, weary, stressed, fearful. Whether it is the “nervous systems” of our political and cultural life weighing us down or the “nervous systems” of the hurts we hold in own wounded hearts, many of us are a mess and we know it. This almost light-hearted book is a quick ramble through a whole bunch of things to do, practices, gifts and graces, for “holding hope in a heavy world.” Her stories will bring you hope and her ideas will make you smile.

What’s fun — and I suppose what first drew me to this when reading Ramsey’s The Space Between Our Pains — is that the sections here are alliterative and KJ quips that she loves alliteration. Me too. I’m a sucker for a book which starts under the rubric of “Madness + Miracle.” And then moves to “Lament + Longing” to “Poverty + Plenty” and ends with the last quarter about “Barriers + Belonging.” If you’ve read this far you can see the interlacing connections between these themes and the other books suggested here, all fine companions to Ramsey’s memoir. Just those sub-headings of the four sections of Counterweights might catch in your throat if you’re open. It’s no wonder one anonymous reviewer said these counterweights are “a small act of resistance to despair.” Yup.

There is mature and subtle theologizing here, if something so practical and down to Earth can be called theologizing. Her insights about faith formation are good, lively, even. But there are these sidebars that are almost whimsical — “10 Things That Improve with Time” (including cast iron, cardigans, bluejeans, body positivity) and “Things I’ve Changed My Mind About” (which includes everything from oysters to country music to thinking God is disappointed in me) and her own “Top Ten Best Thrift Store Scores” which cracked me up. Her list of ten “Novels I Loved Lately” are intriguing, believe me. Throughout this resource she seems, like KJ, to be drawn to beauty, inviting readers to carve out some comfort and make space for joy and goodness.

If you like chatty, conversational prose, upbeat but raw, honest talk about things that matter, Counterweights might be a fun book for you.

I hope you realized from the last BookNotes that as I complimented Mako & Haejin Fujimura for their new book called Beauty x Justice that their fascinating book is not merely sharing the vocations of Haejin (a human rights attorney) and Mako (an artist) but that the two of them, together, are uncovering the integral nature of these two aspects of God’s promised shalom. Beauty and justice are not fully separate things and not just blended; I’m thinking, for what it’s worth, of Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s notion of “enkapsis” and the interlacing of aspects of God’s world. Mako and Haejin are helping us see two related dimensions of God’s multi-dimensional sturdy but broken creation.

I love books that help us (in whatever aspect of life or society) live into the broad scope of Christ’s redeeming work. To live well in God’s world we must be rooted in God’s own story, which points us towards a certain hope of the restoration of creation in all its varied anticipatory aspects. Kudos to Mako & Haejin for helping do that.

If you missed that epic BookNotes explaining all of Mako’s books, I hope you check it out HERE.

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In this BookNotes we will revisit a theme that I have written about on and off for nearly as long as we have been doing BookNotes. We’ve long protested the admixture of far right ideology with religious faith and reject what used to be called rather tamely “civil religion” which now is seen for the ugliness that is often is: white Christian nationalism. Starting with Jerry Falwell (who I talked with about this very worry) and Pat Robertson’s  accommodation of evangelical faith to the hard right in the 1980s, the so-called religious right has in recent years devolved into a horrible caricature of Christian truth and life. It simply must be renounced by all Christians and certainly by evangelicals whose sisters and brothers are behind much of the most troubling accommodation of faith to toxic, corrupt, and often violent politics.

This ideology is not the same as the national socialism of Nazi Germany as some kooks on the far left say, but it does have frightening similarities in tone and content with a sort of authoritarian racism. We’ve seen it for years, now. It is unarguable (even if many claim otherwise) that just like Falwell affirmed the racists who targeted brothers like Desmond Tutu and Alan Boesak in South Africa (or the US trained assassins who murdered Oscar Romero in El Salvador) the current Republican and MAGA leadership are often equally cavalier in joining the stage with literal neo-Nazis.

These are among the most urgent socio-political facts of our age.

Brothers and sisters: what follows is not some knee-jerk, cranky “Trump Derangement Syndrome” tantrum. Anyone who tosses that term at everyone who protests Trump’s many vile positions and statements and golden statues is not being morally or intellectual serious.

I suppose there may be troubled, impulsive people with something like a mental health disorder who blame every single thing wrong with the whole world on Trump, but these books I am about to recommend to not do that. They are impressive, studying the trends of far-right thinking and how that could be a harbinger of even deeper ideological moves towards something akin to fascism. Certainly we’ve seen Republican leaders fail to criticize their leader when he suggests he need not follow the law. It is unbelievable and we haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime.

I’ve been reading the 12 listed further below (and many more, actually) for months and this is my report. I hope you follow along and I hope you order some, sooner rather than later.

BUT FIRST

Allow me to start with ten quick recommendations of books I’ve mostly mentioned before that might frame our thinking about all this, including your evaluation of my recommendations. This handful are mostly positive, almost timeless, in offering Christian insight about public life. One is a pre-order that looks to be excellent, coming next month. I hope you’ve got a few of these for starters.

More could be said, but here are 10 preliminary good ones for living well in these days:

Habits of the Mind: Intellectual Life as a Christian Calling James Sire (IVP) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I do not think that we are all called to become what some call intellectuals, but, as John Stott put in, in a book we gave away during our grand opening four decades ago, “your mind matters.” We do have to use whatever gray matter God gave us and steward our ability to think and make choices about the issues of the day. Sire had spend nearly a lifetime reading widely and learning to think about learning; this classic has so much in it that it would be helpufl for almost anyone, from younger Christians to life long amateur learners to esteemed college professors.  We have to think well, especially in this age of propaganda and disinformation and ideological bromides. We have a whole self of books on the Christian mind; this one is fascinating and wise, and I wanted to recommend it see here as we start.

So many of the problems of the failures of our public witness have to do, I think, with the lack of appropriate categories and Kingdom vision to inflame our intellectual habits. We aren’t “radical” — from radix, meaning “the root.” We haven’t thought through foundational questions from a Christian orientation. We must not view faith as a nice little blessing on top of our own ideas, like some kind of Christian icing on the cake; rather, our approaches to everything — in this case, we’re talking about politics and civic life — should be oriented around the good news of the gospel of God’s Kingdom and the light the Scriptures show on the reality of the world that we know. We all would benefit by reading Sire, or something along these lines as we need “renewed minds” (Romans 12: 1-2 ) so we can “take every thought/ theory captive” (1 Corinthians 10:5.)

Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World Andrew DeCort (IVP Academic) $32.99 //  OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

Little did Andrew DeCort know I was working on this very column when I had reason to cross paths with him recently, but I am delighted to now call him more than a Facebook friend. He’s even more energetic and passionate and lovely than I realized, even though I’ve touted this book here and there over recent months. Hooray.

I have mentioned it in a previous BookNotes and find it hard to describe easily. It is, simply put, a serious, semi-scholarly, detailed study of the implications of living by the so-called Golden Rule. It is an exploration of what theologians sometimes call “the Love Command” which is, of course, central to all that Christians (not to mention Jews and Muslims and most Buddhists) are called to embody. Loving others (without exception!) Is at the heart of the Jesus way, and by exploring everybody from Bonhoeffer to Romero to Mother Teresa, Andrew invites us all to care better for our neighbors.

Neighbor love, of course, is not only the heart of the Jesus way but can be a key to unlocking movements of nonviolent social change, authentic change.

David Gushee says that this is “one of those exceedingly rare ‘big books’ in Christian ethics that traces a crucial concept historically while advancing the normative discussion for today.”  Which is to say this shows us where this principle of love of neighbor comes from and where it has been lost. It is historical and constructive. It offers a diagnosis of our problem and offers a Christ-centered cure.

I name this for two big reasons: when thinking about how we arrange our public lives and what we think of Christian voices in politics and offer systemic civic reforms we have to be guided by love. Justice, some have said, is love gone public, how we love our neighbors, politically. But further, we must be guided by love even when offering critique to neighbors with whom we profoundly disagree. Can we resist those who we think are dragging the name of Jesus through the mud of right-wing hatred? How to do love those who think sharing stages with neo-Nazis is okay? How do we love those who suggest women ought not have the right to vote? Can we refuse to “other” them and learn to live by love, in our politics and policy initiatives, and in our discourse and conversation and debate? Reviving the Golden Rule and its study of this ancient ethic is hefty and complex and a major work you could work through this summer and beyond. Highly recommended.

The Justice of Jesus: Reimagining Your Church’s Life Together to Pursue Liberation and Wholeness Joash P. Thomas (Brazos Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

There are many more books about a Biblical view of justice these days than there used to be and we are grateful. Like other key notions in the Bible — sabbath, prayerfulness, church — we should read a book perhaps every year to remind us anew. From Ron Sider’s classic (must-read) Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger to the amazing personal favorite, The Justice Calling by Bethany Hoang  & Kristen Johnson to the remarkable Just Discipleship by Michael Rhodes, there are so many foundational books equipping us to know well the Biblical basis for justice ministry. This recent one is simply one of the very best in recent years, full of Biblical passion and pastoral care.

Filled with truth an grace, The Justice of Jesus invites Western Christians to rethink what it is that God requires of us.… It is theologically grounded and refreshingly practical. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez,  author of Jesus and John Wayne

Light for the Way: Seeking Simplicity, Connection, and Repair in a Broken World Sojourners (Broadleaf Books) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

Forty some years ago we brought to the shop our first author for an in-store event the founder of Sojourners magazine (and pastor, then, of an intentional community formed in urban DC), Jim Wallis. I have read Sojo since its founding and this marvelous recent book is a celebration of their best pieces from the last fifty years. There are old, old pieces here, some which I nearly know by heart, and others from their more middle years, and many from the last view years. It offers a progressive sort of ecumenical faith that takes following Jesus seriously and relates a broad and generous faith perspective to all manner of issues the day. From serving the poor to eco-theology, from advocating for Christian feminist to bold anti-racism, Light for the Way has it all.

With pastorally sensitive writers like Henri Nouwen, Richard Rohr, Walter Brueggemann, and Barbara Brown Taylor, there are soul-strengthening encouragements here. Highly recommended for those wanting to flesh out a broader Christian worldview as it relates to public theology or for those brand new to the orientation of Sojo. One need not agree with every piece in their vast anthology but you will be glad for the stimulation and even refreshment found within.

At the moment, I cannot think of a better tonic for the spirit than this new collection from Sojourners, which has been in the business of encouragement for as long as some of us have been alive. Whether you are ready for refreshment from some of your favorite authors or on the lookout for new sources of inspiration, you will find them here.  — Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark

In a world teetering on the edge of division, injustice, and despair, Light for the Way is the kind of book we need now more than ever–a guide and companion on the journey toward repair, renewal, and a justice revival. In these pages, you will find not just theological reflection but a morally rooted call to action, inviting us to practice as we preach and to learn as we lead. Light for the Way is for all those looking to cultivate a faith that is both deeply personal and powerfully collective, for the sake of the world and the flourishing of all God’s people. — Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, author of We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor

Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies N.T. Wright & Michael F. Bird (Zondervan) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Wright, of course, is a British Biblical scholar and Bird is an Aussie, similar keen on Biblical study and theology. Yet, they know that one cannot read the Bible without hearing implications for socio-political visions and that there are at least two big theme to grapple with, Biblically-speaking. The Bible speaks of ideologies that go haywire and seem to be taken over by evil, perhaps demons, maybe Death turned institutional. Sometimes these are called “the powers” and we are told, secondly, that they have been exposed and defeated by the risen and ascended Lord of the universe.

In what ways has Jesus defeated the powers? In what ways might institutional evil still be loose in the world? What is the role of the church, and of Christian citizens, to work against the dysfunctions of our political spaces?

What does the theme of the Kingdom of God have to do with the realities of political upheaval (even globally) in our day?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (author of the must-read Jesus and John Wayne) says that readers from across religious and political spectrums will benefit from it, calling it a “sharply written text.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff (author of the classic Until Justice and Peace Embrace) says, “I know of no other book that comes even close to locating, so insightfully and in such rich detail, Christian political activity within the context of God’s coming Kingdom.”

“I know of no other book that comes even close to locating, so insightfully and in such rich detail, Christian political activity within the context of God’s coming Kingdom.” — Nicholas Wolterstorff

Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies David Koyzis (IVP Academic) $36.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $29.59

I have mentioned this so often some of you may be tired of hearing this but Dr. Koyzis’s book is practically one-of-a-kind. He studies, explains, and critiques the deepest guiding presuppositions of the right and the left, conservatives and progressives and noting how neither “camp” or ideology is consistent with a distinctive and deep Biblical worldview. In other words, we need to have some intellectual (dare I say, spiritual) distance between us and the standard ideologies shaping most Republicans and Democrats these days.

Koyzis’s more practical guide to how to live responsibly in this world of distorted ideologies (Citizenship Without Illusions: A Christian Guide to Political Engagement (IVP Academic; $19.99 // $15.99) gets us part way towards faithful citizenship, and his principled but realist approach, non-aligned as it is, informs my heart. I think Political Visions & Illusions is a must read. I’m not sure his moderate, academic tone is adequate for confronting the idols of the age these days, but it is a foundational book and you should read it.

Please read these interesting, informative endorsements carefully as they explain well why this book is so rare and needed.

Political nostrums fly thick and fast in contemporary life — from print, radio, TV, pulpits and (perhaps most of all) casual conversation. David Koyzis’s welcome effort uses wise biblical reasoning as well as the hard-won experience of Dutch Calvinists to winnow through the modern world’s blizzard of competing political claims. Koyzis’s analysis is both an effective survey of the world’s contemporary political options and an encouraging Christian word on how to discern the critical differences. This book’s combination of readable theory and wise Christian thinking is a first-order contribution to Christian political thought in its own right. — Mark A. Noll, Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, author The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

This second edition of David’s great book is a gem. The brighter light he now shines on his assessment of modern ideologies comes from an in-depth assessment of the story each tells and the idolatry exhibited in each one. This also pushes Christians to examine the extent to which we may be compromising our dedication to God by bowing (even unconsciously) to other gods for political guidance. In this day of heightening nationalism, racism, terrorism, and sheer ignorance, the message of this book could not be more urgent or important. Read and discuss it carefully even if it takes weeks to do so. The multiple forces at work in our homelands and around the world will not be thwarted or redirected by one election or one major event. Christian love of God and neighbor demands responsible civic service and that requires the kind of understanding provided by Political Visions and Illusions. — James W. Skillen, found of the Center for Public Justice; author of The Good of Politics

Faithful Politics: Ten Approaches to Christian Citizenship and Why It Matters Miranda Zapor Cruz (IVP Academic) $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.39

I have for years suggested that all Christian citizens get under their belts a few solid reflections on faith and citizenship. I’ve been disappointed when loud-mouthed advocates or politically-involved pastors (not to mention Christian candidates or those working in public service) couldn’t name a single solid theological book that guided them. I’ve promoted the impeccable Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement by Ron Sider, for instance, that guides us through a process of thinking Christianly and Biblically about society, politics, and policy issues with a humility that is lovely. This recent one, Faithful Politics by Miranda Cruz, is now a go-to to understand and live out various themes and strengths of a handful of different approaches. Two approaches she describes are not acceptable, she warns (so-called Christian dominionism and Christian nationalism) and those chapters are themselves nearly worth the price of the book.

The most comprehensive understanding of the role of the Christian believer in national politics from a biblical, theological, and historical perspective to date. A classic for generations. Research in Faithful Politics is extensive yet reads with ease. This is an essential book for leaders in all walks of life to have depth of understanding in public morals and social concerns impacting decision-making of the same. — Jo Anne Lyon, general superintendent emerita of The Wesleyan Church

The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor Kaitlyn Schiess (IVP) $20.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79

I highlight this small work about spiritual formation and our public lives almost any time I can as it is wise and smart and broad-thinking — a really great read. I can’t say enough about it. It is about how we form the political values that we do, and what might be appropriate for Christians. (For starters, we should not primarily be fed by Fox News of CNN, right?)   Can our faith be nurtured in ways that speak to our political context? Can we become so deeply shaped by the gospel that we naturally reject cultural and partisan conformity? What really shapes our civic imaginations? The Liturgy of Politics explains so much and will give you ways to share these concerns with others.

This is a clear-eyed look at the forces of spiritual formation inside and outside of church–and the political discipleship that American Christians too often accept without thinking about it. Schiess offers a powerful call to examine hidden assumptions and false idols, and to explore the whole two thousand years of Christian tradition in order to breathe new life into twenty-first-century evangelicalism. — Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Apostles of Reason and Spellbound

This is a powerful challenge from a young heart and a mature mind. Schiess seems to touch every unexamined habit of Christian thought, work, leisure, and worship. With a wide sweep of life’s liturgies and church liturgies, of spiritual formation and political responsibility, of Bible reading and communication with others, Schiess goes straight for the heart in relaxed conversation that packs a prophetic punch about our complacency, ignorance of Scripture, cultural conformity, and more. Her urgent message is for communities of Christian faith to repent and turn ourselves over entirely to God, as disciples of Jesus Christ have always been called to do. It is hard to imagine how this young woman has been able to read so widely and think so profoundly about so much of life. Here you’ll find fresh insight and compelling hope that will renew your labors for the coming of God’s kingdom. Young people, old folks like me, and everyone in between, read this book now! — James W. Skillen, author of The Good of Politics, former president of the Center for Public Justice

Kingdom and Country: Following Jesus in the Land That You Love edited by Angie Ward (NavPress) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

What to be challenged to think deeply with an inspiring collection of essays, lovely pieces helping us learn to enter better conversations about what it means to “follow Jesus in the land that you love.” What does it mean that we are firstly loyal to God’s (international) Kingdom? What might a truly Christian view of patriotism look like and how does that shape our role as citizens and public activists? Many of the ten chapters here are by people of color and their unique contributions are so, so helpful.  I love the series of “Kingdom Conversations” of which this book is a part done in collaboration with Missio Alliance. And I really appreciate Angie Ward’s good curation of great chapters (and the evocative discussion questions) by these thoughtful Christian folks, pushing us further along in this vital conversation.

PRE-ORDER NOW Reimagining Biblical Politics: What Scripture Says About Public Life and Why It Matters Michael J. Rhodes (Baker Academic) $26.99 // OUR PRE-ORDERED SALE PRICE = $21.59 – due June 23, 2026

I have been wanting to see this as much as a few others who have pre-ordered it but I’ve not seen anything on it yet. But I can assure you — from the reputation of the author and the amazing endorsing blurbs on the back — it is going to be a tremendous resource. You really should get on the waiting list. Hopefully, we’ll have it a bit early — mid June, at least.

This lively and timely book fills out in wonderful biblical detail what I sketched in broad and aspirational strokes in my chapter ‘Politics and the Nations’ in Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, but does it much better than I could, not least by decisively demolishing the idea that Jesus and the New Testament had nothing to say about ‘politics.’ The breadth of biblical sources and the subtlety of how they are used are richly enlightening and challenging. Rhodes rightly does not tell us what or who should get our political support, but he invites and excites us to find the Bible showing us, far more than we imagined, how we should think and act in the political sphere in ways that embody God’s own priorities and the way of Christ, the world’s true King.  — Christopher J. H. Wright, Langham Partnership, author of Here Are Your Gods: Faithful Discipleship in Idolatrous Times and The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission 

Scripture declares, ‘God reigns’ and ‘Jesus is Lord’ — political language from Genesis to Revelation. But what do such claims mean and not mean? In readable, perceptive (and provocative) prose, with real-life examples and practical guidance, Michael Rhodes invites us to reimagine the Bible’s varied political texts as manifestations of ‘outpost politics’ and ‘pilgrim politics.’ This is a timely and much-needed book as political division and even political idolatry pervade countries and churches. — Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical and Theological Studies, St. Mary’s Seminary & University, author of Reading Revelation Responsibly and Life Transfigured: A Contemporary Pauline Theology

This is the book I have been looking — and praying — for! Rhodes blends rich biblical exegesis with robust theological insight and practical wisdom. I will personally reach for Reimagining Biblical Politics often, and I will recommend it to pastors, small groups, and any Christian seeking biblical wisdom for political life. — Kaitlyn Schiess, author of The Ballot and the Bible and The Liturgy of Politics

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12 VITAL BOOKS TO HELP US LIVE IN THIS CURRENT AGE OF RELIGIOUS SUPPORT FOR THE DRIFT TOWARDS FAR-RIGHT AUTHORITARIANISM

I cannot easily express how important I think these sorts of titles are. You should review a post we did on books about Christian Nationalism two years ago which are certainly still urgent and quite timely. SEE HERE.  In a way these new twelve add more to that analysis, deepening it.  I find these titles compelling.

Rather than naming more titles offering critiques of Christian Nationalism as such, these (mostly) recent titles bring new nuances, historical data, urgent and eye-opening reporting about the shift away from the rule of law and towards authoritarianism. Some of these books were years in the making and are very well done.  A few are page-turning memoirs or journalistic encounters, others more scholarly. I will say which ones are a bit more academic and which are more spritely written, captivating, even.

I know the term fascism is a bit complicated — I learned that years ago reading the entertaining, if confounding, and nearly brilliant (if often wrong-headed) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change by Jonah Goldberg (Forum Books; $27.00 // $21.60.) Even Goldberg’s conservative publisher called his thesis “startling” and the book “contentious.”

So, yes, these topics are complicated and the discussion must be adequately nuanced. We ought not call those with whom we disagree “brownshirts” or “jackbooted stormtroopers.” Unless, of course, like the jacked up, masked and booted ICE agents illegally kidnapping some of our fellow citizens, they are, in fact, jackbooted stormtroopers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History Warren Throckmorton (Broadleaf) $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

This is a hefty hardback and you’ll be glad for its strong binding because it is the sort of book that will have you paging around, looking at the footnotes and appendices, quoting stuff for friends, copying paragraphs. It is eminently readable and quotable. There’s almost too-much to quote. You will be underlining a lot.

I would like to do a longer review of this showing chapter by chapter the good stuff he explains about how the past as portrayed by many in the right-wing and Christian nationalist movements is simply wrong. Erroneous. Sometimes blatantly so. But for now, I’ll try to summarize.

He tells of his long-standing debunking campaign, looking up the full quotes and stories of Washington or Jefferson or Franklin, taking up the layperson’s task of fact-checking history. (Dr. Throckmorton was until his recent retirement, a psychology prof at the conservative Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, not a historian.) Those of us that have followed and appreciated his yeoman efforts to skewer those misquoting or half-quoting American leaders have applauded when he documents how conservative Christian leaders — James Dobson’s  American Family Association, for instance, on the guys in the news this week in DC — talk about America as if it was clearly a Christian nation. It was not. He proves it.

What started out as Facebook posts and fact-checking speakers and websites and right-wing rallies, has slowly matured into a well-organized book. And what a chock-full book it is.

What’s often maddening is when he tells of correspondence with leaders of the religious right showing how they misquote the founders and how they do or do not alter their publications. (A few have moderately clarified a few of their errors while some simply deny the facts and keep preaching a false “history that wasn’t” as Throckmorton puts it.) And to think these are culture warriors who fretted so loudly against truth being eroded by postmodernism and the relativism that secular humanists were bringing to our land. They are, as Throckmorton shows, guilty of fabrication and dishonesty, over and over and over. It’s sad.

The Christian Past That Wasn’t is not a thorough, scholarly history text on the question of the ways in which the Christian worldview may have influenced our 18th century Founding Fathers. For that, he cites (among others) the award winning, impeccably balanced classic by Dr. John Fea (Was America Founded as a Christian Nation 2nd edition) and the older chestnut The Search of a Christian America by the then-young, now retired and esteemed, triumvirate of evangelical historians, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch.

Warren is righteously repulsed by how civil religionists and white nationalists nowadays still try to minimize the horror of the colonialist’s land-grabbing and mass murder of indigenous peoples and the sin of chattel slavery in which many of the Founders were involved — the founding ethos and era of our America surely can’t be considered Jesus-like knowing what little we know about the non-stop brutalities perpetrated by many of the colonialists. But he is not writing a broadside against the virtues of Founding era. His project is more simple and specific. He is debunking dishonest stuff the Christian nationalist movement keeps saying that just isn’t true.

One could list example after example and if you care about history at all, or the ethics of public discourse these very days (or the new patriotic book from Fox News staff) but I must restrain myself. I promise you that you’ll be turning the pages over and over to get the facts, documented impeccably, solid and clear, bit by bit. And it really is interesting. You can tell he’s a good teacher.

Randall Balmer says the book is written “with prodigious research and surgical precision” and that Throckmorton “dismantles the misrepresentations, falsehoods, and outright fabrications perpetrated by Christian nationalists.”  Exactly.

(As an aside, I’ll note, again, that Throckmorton isn’t a trained historian, but he has allowed this calling on his heart in recent years to nearly take over his life. For years, now, he has been tenacious in going to libraries and historical archives, searching academic history websites, looking for original documents, finding real copies of the stuff that the likes of David Barton show and tell, sometimes with literal slight of hand. Warren co-wrote a book that was so damning with evidence against the errors of Barton (and Glenn Beck who wrote the foreword) that Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies was pulled from publication. I don’t know if Thomas Nelson’s editorial team wasn’t used to doing academic fact-checking but it was a huge embarrassment to Christian publishing that it took a couple of amateur historians a couple of weeks to expose the multitudinous errors. Yet Barton continues to speak at MAGA events and the religious right leaders seems to not care that he is nearly a charlatan. Throckmorton’s co-written critique of Barton and books like The Jefferson Lies first came out in 2012, then called Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson.)

In The Christian Past That Wasn’t a handful of key conceits are exposed. Some are fairly well known topics but he goes into the weeds to explain historical facts, court documents decisions, and more. For instance, can we really say American was founded as a Christian country because they early on endorsed a state church? (His brief study of disestablishment is excellent, citing Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, the definitive collection of state-by-state histories edited by Carl Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hartog.) Did the Founders really create a Christian government? What’s with that “oath” we hear about? Are the charter documents based on the Bible? Should we promote Christianity in public schools — and is that what the earliest leaders wanted? Do America’s virtues somehow justify our sins? Were most of the Founders orthodox Christian?

Some of this is, as I said, maddening. He shows Charlie Kirk’s errors of historical fact and debunks Kenneth Copeland’s often repeated errors about George Washington’s 1789 Oath. He critiques Donald Trump’s executive order that history education must be “patriotic” and “ennobling.” The shallow Christian mind (and a lack of integrity) seems sadly evident and while I’m not sure Throckmorton is altogether gracious about it, he is not mean-spirited as he takes on this nonsense. Some of the book has some wit and sarcasm and it makes for a good, engaging read.

Other parts of this, though, are tackling admittedly thorny matters, unanswered questions, even, about the shape of pluralism and what it looks like to have “freedom from and freedom for” religion in these United States. The State’s debates about the “no religious test” clause is fascinating and detailed. His exploration of how the Constitution mandated education to be done by states and local governments and shows how the role of the Bible or prayers in schools varied, historically as the nation expanded. It was great reading, even if briefly, about what nonsectarian schooling meant in say the 1840s in New York or Boston or Baltimore. Did you know there were riots in May of 1844 that killed at least fourteen people in Philadelphia when some states mandated KJV Bible reading? Catholics didn’t go for it.

Separation of church and state has a complicated history (and the famous “wall of separation” is not from a binding founding document.) But it is one of the great innovations of the brilliant Founding thinkers and framers. Will this book help us keep our Republic free? I think it could.

Of course it must be said — and Warren does say it, although maybe not clearly enough — that many who fall for these “Christian America” cliches that are, in fact, inaccurate, are fine earnest folks. They are told by people they trust about this prayer or that oath or they hear a (half) quote and hear charming speakers like Eric Metaxas, say something seemingly inspiring, and then they repeat what they’ve heard. Preachers quote other pseudo-scholars and citizen activists who are well intended read devotionals with these inaccurate stores reprinted. We shouldn’t treat too harshly those who have fallen for this shoddy exaggeration of America’s religious founding. And to insist that gospel Christians speak the truth is in no way is a criticism of evangelical faith. We need not pile on, bashing conservatism as such, or traditional faith. as sicj. But we do have to help counter the false myths that lead us to an inappropriate view of our beloved country.

While it may not be a formal and knowing disinformation campaign but here in May of 2026, the “history that wasn’t” has been preached so brazenly that we really need this book now more than ever. Can we use it gently to correct our friends and neighbors?  Will you help learn the truth of American history and set the record straight?

To defang the idols of Christian nationalism we have to debunk these myths that undergird that wrong-headed ideology. This book brings — with “scholarship and panache”, as Katherine Stewart put it — facts to the table, helping those who have been misinformed by those who preach dishonest history.

In The Christian Past That Wasn’t, Throckmorton takes on the whole project of Christian nationalist mythmaking. From exploring why mythic narratives are appealing to showing how damaging they are to democracy, this book couldn’t be timelier. — Julie Ingersoll, author of Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction

With a clarity of purpose and pen, Throckmorton unveils how the most pernicious lies that perpetuate the myths of Christian nationalism are just that: lies. I know I will refer to this book time and again to quickly and easily remind myself of our collective truth–America’s heritage is one of religious liberty, tolerance, and pluralism. — Andrew Whitehead, author of American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right Laura K. Field (Princeton University Press) $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

This is one of the more academic books I’ve read lately and it will reward your diligence if you give it a serious try. Furious Minds is a very thorough and complex exploration of the philosophical background and scholarly influences of some of the various camps and movements that have embraced (and often provided support for) Trumpian policies. From the heavyweights who studied under Leo Strauss — trust me, he is important! — and the Claremont school to the intellectual architects of the Heritage Foundation (you’ve heard of Project 2025; you know, the detailed policy document candidate Trump said he never heard of even as he promptly appointed many of it’s key writers weeks later) she explains their theories and tells about their movement.

If you have the fiesty expose When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How American Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (fabulously written by John Ganz) this will resonate, but offer more substantial intellectual underpinnings. If you’ve read another I’ve recommended, the great book The Right: The Hundred-year War for American Conservatism by (conservative) writer Matthew Continetti, you will know how, for instance, William Buckley fought to keep anti-semitism and rowdy right-wingers like the John Birchers out of the broader conservative movement. Those two books (one by a liberal writer the other a conservative) offered big and splendid social history of so much of the various streams and factions (and funders) of conventional conservatism. Furious Minds, in a way, picks up where those leaves off, studying the wild-eyed visionaries and revolutionary spirit of the very far right. It’s stellar.

Laura Field was herself involved in some of these scholarly debates there in the deep end of that ideological pool. She is careful as a reporter but also can be colorful as she tells of her observation of conversations and speeches and back room meetings. She studied with first-generation Straussians and was often with the exceedingly important thinker and formative leader Harry Jaffa, for crying out loud. (Jaffa, we learn, was widely read and compelling on political philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas to Lincoln. He wrote the famous line of Goldwater’s in 1964 that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”) Furious Minds is both a memoir-like story of on the ground investigative journalism and a scholarly discussion of the ideas and debates on the recent far right ecosystem.

Much of this discusses the context of what is called post liberalism and she tells about Sohrab Ahmari, for instance. There are those who call themselves National Conservatives and she writes a lot about Michal Anton (connected to Bannon, by the way, but also the likes of the famous online “Bronze Age Pervert.”) She looks at the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt and (as I noted) Harry Jaffa. She tells of the shift from what she calls “Alt-right to Hard Right.” She explains the America First movement (which is anti-war, generally) and explores those “laying siege to the institutions” and the virtues and demerits of “common good constitutionalism.” She looks at Yoram Hazony and the likes of Gladden Pappin, a “Catholic integralist.” There’s a chapter on the evangelical-ish Christian Nationalists and Pentecostal notions of revival — Mike Johnson, of course, comes up, as does Stephen Wolfe. It’s miles apart but she looks at the thoughtful Catholic thinker Robby George and guys from Hillsdale.

One reviewer says “there is no Ivory Tower tall enough or corner of the internet dark enough to escape Field’s critical eye.” Yep the cast of characters ranges from brilliant and classy to dangerously weird, from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom and Robert George and Patrick Deneen and R.R. Reno to creeps like “Raw Egg Nationalist” Charles Cornish-Dale  and Peter Thiel and Curtis Marvin and the “Bronze Age Mindset” movement. This is the scholarly survey of the intellectual sub-flooring and money and energy of far right populism.

This may seem arcane (and some of it is, I suppose) but it is much of what drives the second Trump administration. These fanatical characters have access to the corridors of power (and many are, in fact Trump or Vance’s advisors.) As Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan notes “Readers should be rushing to this book to understand how and why conservative elites embraced extremism.”

By the way, not surprisingly, some, like the current head of the Claremont Institute, have told people not to take her book seriously. Are you kidding me? Read the 325 dense pages and then the 55+ pages of footnotes and her first hand accounts and you tell me if she is worth taking seriously.

Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good Omer Aziz (Broadleaf Books) $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

I realize I could be presuming on your valuable time and I do not mean to say too much about these books but I want you to know about them and discern if they are important for you or anybody you know. This is another I could write much about — I’ve cut a lot out of my first draft review — but I want to say just a few important things about this very impressive study. Award winning journalist Bob Woodward says it is “comprehensive” relating fascism and American democracy. Another reviewer called it “unflinching.”

Shadows is a fascinating history of fascism, what it is, how it works, and what might be driving the up-tick in authoritarian governments around the globe. Aziz notes, too, that “fascism is not coming to America; it has been here for a long time.” Gulp.

The back cover says, “with astringent clarity, Omer Aziz traces the flaring up of fascist ideas in both American history and our current moment.”

Author Stephen King, who has a rave blurb on the back, notes that this is “a book that should be an alarm bell announcing that the American house is on fire.” He’s not wrong.

His exploration of fascism in the US was eye-opening to me. Learning vividly about the pro-Nazi rallies at Madison Square Gardens, 22,000 strong, for instance, is nearly worth the price of the book. Learning about the ways in which Hitler admired Mussolini, and how they both inspired many Americans is frightening. His deft teaching about how fascist ideas emerged here and there over time and place is important and helpful.

I hate to say this — I am not much an alarmist, I don’t think — but I think this is going to be a topic we are going to be called to understand, perhaps in the not to distant future. Now is the time to start reading and this is the place to start.

Mr. Aziz, by the way, grew up in a working-class immigrant family and went to Yale Law School and has been admired for his work and writing. He got a MPhil degree in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. His own story is threaded throughout the pages (if only just a bit) and it is inspiring. He cares about democracy, the rule of law, a decent world, and the scourges of racism and antisemitism and such. Authoritarian rule is often related to anti-semitism and it is ungodly to think religious people would not cry out against neo-Nazis and pushy authoritarianism that often is linked to fascism. But here we are.

Is there a difference between Italian fascism and the National Socialism of Hitler’s Germany? Of course. Have either of these been ascendent in American culture? Certainly. We have to know our history, Aziz notes often. But knowing the dangers is only part of our moral imperative — we have to defeat the fascists intellectually and “in narrative terms” as he puts it. People are drawn to fascist and authoritarian regimes for a reason. He argues for economy solidarity and concern for ordinary folks, but, first, we need to “tell a better story than the fascists” and elect those who can “govern in an ethical way such that people can again believe democracy can get big things done.”

We seems to suggest that we need to guard our Republic with a vibrant (and big tent) pro-democracy movement. He doesn’t say this, but in this year of civic education and underscored patriotism, now is the time to speak together about the spread of  support for authoritarianism. Knowing how fascism is seen in the far right of say, India, or Hungary, is urgent.

Aziz dreaming of how to make a difference is not that unusual and is a fine shot in the arm. But the strength of Shadows of the Republic is this detailed study of fascism and its current appeal in too many quarters. It is creepy and offensive that our President insults admirable Americans yet praises the likes of Vladimir Putin. It should give us all pause that he, and many in his administration, admire the likes of Viktor Orbán. We have to understand this, and, Aziz is right: we have to tell a better story, one that rejects anything resembling fascism. This book is urgent and will help.

Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping A Democracy Joyce Vance (Penguin) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I read this pretty quickly over two days and I’m not going to lie. It isn’t colorful or sexy or fun. I enjoyed it as much as any good civics lecture or handful of great TED talks — informative and mildly inspiring. At times it seemed almost tedious.

So why suggest it here – besides the great title? Because it is a shot in the arm full of facts, lots of facts, about little known court cases and judiciary stuff. Because she is a patriot who cares about the rule of law. Because she documents the shenanigans and insists we ought not tolerate them. This is a call to arms and I think it will appeal not only to those geeky folks who read jurisprudence or like legal briefs, but for anyone who loves knowing how the balance of powers really works. This. Is It.

The lovely author was a heroic former Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama (an office she held during the Obama administration.) She served for twenty-five years as a career federal prosecutor. She puts away bad guys and has stories of how law works. Now she is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. My hat is off. She reminds us, over and over, that we are a country designed to have no kings. We believe in the rule of law, the U.S.Constitution. Oddly, the right-wing talkers who claim to believe in the Constitution have allowed things to go really hay-wire and don’t protest when our current President has said he may not listen to court rulings he doesn’t like.

If I were his boss he’d be fired for saying such a thing. Nobody, in my view, who gives the approving nod to Trump’s often-spoken suggestions that he will disobey the law is a bad American (and certainly not being faithful to Christ in that moment.) But don’t take my opinion for it — read the court cases learn about how democracy works for us, study how “the Founding Fathers did believe in a strong executive branch, even as they emphasized that the president but be accountable.” Vance is a fan of the Federalist Papers and she quotes them a lot. Given Up Is Unforgivable is a “manual” drawn from the likes of Hamilton and others. She’s big on understanding the origins of the constitution, which she says is “essential.”

It’’s admittedly a little bit nerdy, but she has a popular Substack called “Civil Discourse.” You should know it but it is no substitute for the book, “a Manuel for Keeping Democracy.”

Professor Vance also draws on some great stuff from the civil rights era, talking with leaders who were on the bridge in Selma in 1965. She cares about voting rights, about civil rights, about American rights. She’s a bit geeky, glowing about Law Day (and she quotes former President Reagan on how to keep American freedoms alive by being persistent. Nice!

Presidents, by the way, cannot amend the Constitution. Just saying. Perhaps we need to remind some of our MAGA leaders of that since they never cry out when our President suggests as much. Her final “Postscript” tells about the 2025 Supreme Court “ending its term with a bang. One of its final decisions, Trump v CASA, stalled the use of nationwide injunctions.” If you don’t know what that means or why it matters, Giving Up Is Unforgivable may be for you. I know I needed it. Come on.

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age Ibram X. Kendi (One World) $35.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.79

I admit I haven’t read much of this yet. I think Stamped from the Beginning was grueling and I respect his How to Be an Antiracists and the Four Hundred Souls collection. Even if some reactionaries hate him, and even if thoughtful evangelicals have some concerns, there is no doubt he is a formidable public intellectual. He won the National Book Award and teaches history at Howard. (He is also, importantly, is the inaugural director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, “an interdisciplinary research enterprise examining global racism.”)

This is hefty stuff, and it’s a big, sturdy volume, a long-awaited one.

The gist is that there has been an authoritarian strain of American thinking and practice — uh, yeah, slavery is hard to miss, even though so many do — and the fascism that we worry about has been seeded here since the beginning. This “chain of ideas” is vital, it seems to me, to appreciate. Which means we have to take up this book and do the hard work connecting the dots. I don’t want to, but I’m going to. Maybe you should get some good-hearted, sturdy friends and tackle the thing, all 550 pages.

One of the primary organizing principles of this book is an exploration of that chant from Charlottesville, “You will not replace us.” The string of mass shootings across the globe that followed — Oslo Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, Pittsburgh — have this in common. The murderers (and sometimes their supporters) said their crimes were a defense again “White genocide.”

Oh my. This is no coincidence — Kendi documents how business leaders and media figures “cultivated anxiety and furor over demographic change.”

He claims that “popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change.” It is not exactly the same thing, but related, that our current President, long before his first campaign, became known as a “birther” offering wacky and cruel conspiracy theories about Barak Obama.

Did you know that the term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by “shadowy elites to replace the White population”?

This train of thought is unsettling but an indispensable global history of how this weird theory evolved and how it is now adding fuel to the racist sand even fascist fires, and how we can resist this — freeing ourselves from this bondage, he might say. Chain of Ideas is an important contribution to our thinking of why things are happening — from Indonesia to Potsdam to  Ukraine to Madagascar to your home town.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Timothy Snyder (Crown) $14.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.20

Some of our good customers follow the excellent Substack of Kristen Du Mez. Her Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation is a critical must-read to understand evangelicalism’s ethos of masculinity which, as she shows, shaped some of its connection to conservative politics and the rise of what used to be called the New Right and then the religious right. (We are taking pre-orders, too, for her forthcoming Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made due this mid-September.) Anyway, she and some other friends at Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies convened an online study group using this little book, On Tyranny. We were delighted to get a few orders last summer (and at least one webinar discussing it can be found at the ICS YouTube channel.) This is just to say that reasonable Christian folks that I admire are fond of it and are doing their part of help people learn how to have good conversations around its punchy points.

On Tyranny is pocket-sized, and could be read in one sitting. Each chapter has larger-than usual font size on the first page of the chapter to make the point (and some of the chapters are only a few pages.) It’s a set of propositions and action plans, helping us discern what tyranny looks like, the dangers of authoritarian leaders eroding the rule of law, and what ordinary citizens can do in their efforts to offer wise civic engagement. One of the chapters, by the way, invites us to “make eye contact and engage in small talk” and another reminds us of the joy of reading.

Snyder is a historian so he covers (ever so quickly) some of the stuff discussed in the above-mentioned Aziz book, even noting (as does Furious Minds) the influence today of thinkers who were important in the rise of twentieth century fascisms. I get why Du Mez, herself a historian, appreciates this. Further, her reformational worldview certainly would approve of Snyder’s chapters “Defend Institutions” and “Take Responsibility for the Face of the World.” He has a good chapter on professional ethics and I cheered when he wrote about “standing out.”  Not unlike Marilyn McIntyre’s lovely and vital Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Snyder says to “be kind to our language” and has another bit on “listen for dangerous words.”

We simply have to, in this era, be on guard against totalitarian, the very sort that the Founding Fathers tried to protect us from.  In accessing threats, Snyder notes,

“We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging Noelle Cook (Broadleaf Books) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

In a matter of hours yesterday I saw a car loaded with Bigfoot stickers (and we wondered if it was a joke or was the driver a true aficionado) and then had a customer order an outlandish book full of conspiracies about the alleged bad guys behind Covid, and then we heard a nutty, accusatory story I needn’t go into. Across my Facebook feed came Eric Metaxas insisting that Christian truths from American history are being systematically erased — erased! — by, I guess, a cabal of bad historians and progressive Christians. Then we saw an interview with Stephen Spielberg about his new flick assuming, in the story, that there are conspiracies to cover up UFO sitings.

Why do folks go off the deep end in falling for bizarre theories? Sure, from nutritional advice to geo-politics to the evaluation of the meaning of history, good folks can make reasonable arguments for alternative perspectives (and, in fact, it seems that thoughtful Christians should be attentive to views other than the most mainstream.) But when a President routinely says that ordinary journalists are “the enemy of the people” (even using degrading language used by Hitler’s propaganda ministers) we ought to be worried. At what point does legitimate interest and curiosity turn into dysfunctional speculation and being caught up in stuff like Q-Anon?

I read this book recently about a new kind of conspiracy thinking that I didn’t know about.  Although this book (written by a social psychologist) is interested rather generally about how it is that ordinary women become extremists (and how to “reach across the conspiratorial divide?”) the two women she ends up tracking from her research have both gone off the deep end of mystical new age conspiracy stuff.

Noelle Cook is an ethnographer, documentarian, and an adequate writer who tells these stories with zest. She struggles a bit about professional journalistic ethics as she comes to befriend these two women (both of whom attacked the US Capitol on January 6th.) As she gets involved in their lives — one went to a Pennsylvania jail after her conviction for her crimes during the J6 riot — she learns their back stories, their family contexts (of poverty, abuse, drug addictions, mental health issues and more) and offers genuine empathy and support. It becomes a remarkable story as Cook offers not only what one scholar called “this eye-opening account of the vulnerabilities and vitriol that have dragged so many women into unimaginable beliefs” but of ordinary Trump followers who are not what you’d expect. How representative are these women of the MAGA base? I’d think not very. But this book makes a case.

Here is the important thing to realize: the two women are part of a movement (which, through Cooks deep reporting and research we learn is more widespread than we may care to realize) that is called conspirituality. It is an embrace of J6 and Trumpian authoritarianism because New Age and the extremes of online wellness culture (laced with racism and all manner of conspiracy theories) believe that we are heading into a spiritual awakening which they call the “fifth dimension.” From “quantum healing” to stuff about “starseeds” — yep, starseeds — these former evangelicals have bought into the wildest faith in new age weirdness and have staked their fortunes and lives on these words from Pleiadeans, Luerians, and Ascended Masters. Have you heard of Kryon of the Magnetic Service? The health benefits of colloidal silver? Shape-shifting reptilians?

Two quick comments. First, I don’t like the cover and I do not think that the author means any disrespect with that creepy mask; she is truly trying to understand these women as she explores why they would get wrapped up first in Q-Anon conspiracies, then attack the Capitol, and then fall away from Christian faith and move into hyper New Age conspirituality.

Secondly, and this is not a concern of the book, but is my own concern — as I am sure it will be with most BookNotes readers — what sort of Christian formation can not only give way to MAGA violence like we saw on January 6th and then leaving their church homes so angrily and then adopting such eccentric views that seem so far away from the gospel of Christ and his grace? What are we in so many churches doing wrong? Years ago Dallas Willard wrote a book called The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teaching on Discipleship and that “omission” should weigh heavy upon any in conventional church leadership: what can we do to help congregants build their lives upon the rock and be shaped for a mature “long obedience in the same direction”? The women in The Conspiracies are one slice of those leaving traditional Christian faith but it is emblematic. Read it not only to appreciate something of the vibe of the restless right and those drawn to extremism. But read it, too, as a cautionary tale of how church folks can lose their way.

Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis Jared Stacy (HarperOne) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

If The Conspiracists is sort of an ethnography and first-hand account of a few women involved in nearly cult-like conspiracy stuff, Reality in Ruins is a sobering study of how conspiracy thinking as been part of the American evangelical experience and has helped cultivate a tendency towards outlandish speculation, which tended to feed the current experience of culture wars and conspiracy thinking. Stacy is a sharp young scholar with a PhD in moral theology from the University Aberdeen; he has pastored evangelical congregations and now specializes in the study of this stuff — dare I say he’s gone down a rabbit hole about rabbit holes. And it has paid off. This book is passionate but not mean-spirited. Publishers Weekly rightly says it is “empathic” as he shows the inner workings of some of the evangelical subculture.

Karen Swallow Prior, who I trust immensely, says it is “an eminently trustworthy voice… and urgently needed.” Mako Fujimura says it is a “must-read book for our times.”

Again, the question haunts: how do people come to adopt such fearful and twisted views of things. How are evangelicals, of all people, often drawn to such odd stuff?

The book is studious and careful. It is not outlandish — Prior is right to say he is trustworthy as a heartfelt guide to this subculture, a world and a worldview.  Stacy shows how some of this disposition started during the Great Awakening. He looks carefully at D.L. Moody. He looks at the Scopes trial. He shows how some fundamentalist Christians bought into the ugly and fraudulent “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (published in 1903, prior to the Russian Revolution.) Of course he works his way into Cold War conspiracy, from John Birch on down to Carl McIntyre, who I have had a run-in with face-to-face.

And you know he’s going to explore the social implications of the Left Behind novels, based on Timothy LaHaye’s explicitly conspiratorial theology, which Jared calls a “prototype” for “the suspicion that so dominates our current moment.” I hope you know of the awful, vicious, The Clinton Chronicles VHS that Jerry Falwell sold on his Old Time Gospel Hour show.

Do you know what the Council for National Policy, or CNP, is and its connection to Christian radio like Salem Media or American Family Radio? Did you know the unhinged Sidney Powell spoke to them and other such outlandish conspiracists?

Much of this is stuff I’ve heard before but, to be honest, it was eye-opening and even jolting. Some have called the contribution of Reality in Ruins groundbreaking.

The book starts nicely enough, almost too carefully, as he explores the ways in which story shapes truth-telling. One doesn’t need to read Alasdair MacIntyre to know this, but the notion that all facts are only understood in the context of a story is significant to his particular excavation of the notion of conspiracy. I liked “The Power of Story” chapter which set the stage for the amazing chapter called “An Untold Story.” He is building his case, bit by bit, and then starts talking about “the plot devices of holy paranoia.” Wow.

Dr. Stacy links it to the Matrix movie’s “red pill” notion in a chapter called “Red-Pilled Evangelicalism” and it is not far-fetched. Perhaps you are aware that this “take the red pill” lingo is all over the far right internet and the dark web where racists and conspiracists and weird fundraisers for MAGA happen. (See Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve for some dreadfully creepy stuff about far right actors on the dark web.) This sort of tone and content draws people to Q-Anon type radicalism with that exact Matrix metaphor: the “red pill.”

If we are to be people claimed by the truest truths of the universe, revealed to us in the Scriptures that point us to Jesus the Christ, who said He was, in fact, the Truth, what do we do with this scandal of untruth, leading to a breakdown of a common reality? How do we calm down the people who are fed theologies of end time zeal and fearful antagonism against “them”? What can we do to dislodge “end times fascism”?

Stacy does not cite the new Jamie Smith book (Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark) that I so love but he does have a little section on certainty and uncertainty at the heart of things. He brings a bit of a philosopher’s mindset to this helpful section near the end. We can subvert the “holy paranoia” by telling a better story, not merely countering with facts and figures and data. There are harmful things going on and it hurts people and damages our witness in the world and actually provides cover and motivation for extremist action that hurts the civil society and culture. But, “can we resist Christianities that promote harm over healing,” he asks. Can we learn how to do wise truth-telling in a world where reality really is in ruins?  Buy Jared Stacy’s Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis.

On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right: A Personal History Josiah Hesse (Pantheon) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

If one wants a personal glimpse at how fear and zeal and spiritual extremism can shape a community, and damage a soul, this memoir is riveting, heartbreaking, and bitter. From the first page with his vivid telling of a charismatic church camp and youthful experiences of what is obviously heavy-handed, manipulative, weird, religious compulsion, we know this is going to be one heck of a read.

Hesse now resents so much of his church experience — he was part of that movement that had spectacular “Hell Houses” that scared people with grotesque religiosity on par with the most secular haunted house extravaganzas. I know some fundamentalists and Pentecostals make a big deal out of Hell and the fear of God but, man, I don’t know if I know anybody who went through the constant haranguing as the exploitive churches and ministries that so shaped Hesse. And the obsession with the so-called rapture and end times leads to certain sorts of apocalyptic fears, setting the stage for the sorts of right-wing culture wars that have given us populistic authoritarianism. It a person memoir and it is a culture history. I feel sorry that he was stuck in such a repugnant sort of religion.

On Fire… is one of the most potent memoirs I’ve read about brutal religion, and not because it told of direct, physical abuse. (Those memoirs are horrific in a different way.) Much of the point, though, is not just his own story of fundamentalism and his emerging away from the trauma he experienced, but the way in which all of this “ensnared a generation and reshaped America’s political landscape” as one critic put it.

Yes, this toxic, odd religiosity has caused too much truly awful anxiety among so many (not least of which are LGTBQ kids) and in gripping prose Joshiah Hesse offers chapters on end times fears, pyramid schemes and false promises of wealth, anti-gay phobia, fear of demons, and other quirky aspects of his sort of Iowa Pentecostalism. We feel first hand how this is more than strict religion but a recruiting ground for extremism. As Frank Schaeffer notes, “We are living in a world shaped by voters who are themselves shaped by the apocalyptic theology and culture Hess lived through and documents, chapter and verse.”

The exceptional Frances Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer prize winner for her now dated study of evangelicals. She writes:

“Hesse is a wonderful writer, who narrates his own life with wit, intelligence, and sophistication, making what could have been an almost unbearable story something exceptional. Of all the books I’ve read about young people devastated by the fundamentalist religion they’ve grown up with, this one stands out.”­

End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America Chris Jennings (Little, Brown) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Forgive me for being crass, but holy shit. Man, this book was riveting, a page turner. It explores some truly unholy awful stuff, and is the best thing written about the evangelical backstory of an awful episode in American history. It reports on the radicalization of Randy Weaver and his families leadership in exceptionally perverse right wing extremism, starting reasonably enough in Iowa and ending up in rural Idaho hanging with Nazi-militias and cultists.

Younger readers may not recall the couple of years in the early 1990s that were already fraught with domestic terrorists of a Christian-ish far-right movement. Everyone surely recalls when a right wing racist blew up a downtown office building in Oklahoma City killing nearly 170 people. Others in those xenophobic circles — they hated immigrants, Jews, liberalism, democracy, even, and were clearly connected to neo-Nazi types of white supremacists — did battle with the IRS insisting they wouldn’t submit to what now Trumpians call “the deep state.” Randy Weaver was enamored with notions of the rapture and was convinced the end times were coming soon. Which lead him to disdain the US government, eventually locking arms with outlandish rebels who viewed themselves as patriots. That white supremacist anti-government ideology increasingly crowded out any sense of conventional Christian faith.

Ruby Ridge was that place in Idaho where apocalypse-ready Randy and Vickie Weaver and their children and another friend took matters into their own hands to help agitate for the end. Again, these are folks who have been radicalized to unspeakably evil things but who started out as the sorts of Christians described in On Fire for God. Soon enough they attracted attention of the Feds (Randy had sold a saw-off shotgun illegally to undercover agents) and in August of 1992 while trying to serve arrest warrants at their (well-armed) home, FBI agents inexcusably shot a child of the Weaver family. The subsequent battle and fearful stand-off was national news for weeks (until an even worse government overreach happened a few months later when the FBI and ATF under Janet Reno (of the Clinton administration) caused a tear-gas fire at the compound of a cult-leader in Waco, Texas, killing 76 members of the Branch Davidians.

End of Days deserves to be on this list of fire-alarm books because it pre-shadows the dangerous extremists populating around the MAGA movement now, including some indicted for J6. From brilliant but often racist intellectuals (as describe in Furious Minds) to those leaning towards fascism (as described in Shadows of the Republic) to those engaged in what might seem to many unsensational conspiracy thinking as described in Reality in Ruins) we live among dangerous movements, ideologues preaching against democracy and affirming violent uprisings, often tainted with the sins of racism and antisemitism. Much is based, importantly, on myths about America and The Christian Past That Wasn’t (described above) is a key resource  help us expose the ideological roots of disordered patriotism.

I am not at all suggesting that citizens who appreciate some of Trump’s policies are in league with the likes of the Weavers or that anyone with a dispensational theology will end up as fearful “doomsday preppers” but as this End of Days story so movingly shows, the Weavers started out as fairly ordinary evangelicals that talked about Jesus, read Hal Lindsey books about the end times, and increasingly became obsessed with cryptic speculation about the end times and only supported odd churches that only focused on that. This stuff doesn’t always lead to right wing weirdness but it often does and a story like this helps us see those possible connections.

It’s a long and complicated and well-told story and it brings to my mind a question I asked in my comments on The Conspiracists (above.) How are people discipled, mentored, spiritually directed, pastored, formed (use the phrase you want) to be shaped in ways that can allow them to deepen in Christ-like compassion and Godly virtues and Holy Spirted fruits? Can people be wildly in love with Christ and fully dedicated to His Kingdom without getting weird and going off the rails? How can we encourage a robust and vibrant faith that doesn’t get unhealthy, let alone toxic? How can we encourage social and political engagement without it turning ugly? How did the Weaver’s evolution from being evangelical fundamentalists to eccentric house church religious prophets to self-appointed leaders of an armed network that associated with thugs and neo-Nazis and the cult of the Christian Identity? Read it and weep.

As our President pardons some of these exact sort of people from January 6th, this, sadly, is as relevant to read now as when it happen in the earlier days of the movement we call the religious right.

Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town Michael Edison Hayden (Bold Type Books) $30.00 // $24.00

I could write about this for hours as I enjoyed it immensely even as I pondered and second-guessed the author and his passionate story that unfolds over a few years. And what a drama it is, full of adventure and scary stuff and a whole lot of relational drama. Michael Edison Hayden is a good reporter and throughout the book he not only focuses on his exposé of a far-right millionaire with racist connections (and virulent anti-immigration zeal and a very combative presence on social media) who buys a famous landmark castle in a tourist town in West Virginia but also tells about the toll he pays travelling from his home in New York to this town being torn apart by those opposing the mysterious outfit that is now headquartered in said Berkeley Springs castle. So the book reads like a couple years-in-the-life of this brave but broken journalist and researcher.

Hayden is no slouch on these things and worked for years for the Southern Poverty Law Center researching mostly neo-Nazi types, true hate groups, and others who have dark money funding and connection to extremists, some who might be considered domestic terrorists. He doesn’t say all that he used to do but I am sure it was noble, if dangerous work.

He did some public facing work, too, talk shows and columns and sharing his research and reports.

As has been in the news this very month, SPLC has been accused of mismanagement of funds for a now discontinued multi-year project of using spy-show-like undercover agents to infiltrate these dangerous hate groups. (Some of you may recall my breathy review  a year or two ago of a thriller of a book called The Hate Next Door by Mason Browning, this exact kind of a deep-cover investigator.) Anyway, Michael Hayden worked for the complicated SPLC and had subsequently gotten regular death threats — regular death threats! —at his home address and on his email and social media and on his private cell phone with the most evil (often sexual) threats against his wife and children. To say he was stressed and that his family paid a severe price for his line of work researching far-right extremists is putting it mildly. Fighting such evil takes a toll.

We learn about Hayden’s mental health breakdown and his hospitalization (in the middle of researching the new owners of the castle in Berkley Springs) and we learn a bit about his pending divorce. He is candid and writes with admirable vulnerability. We learn about his advocating for change within the terribly mismanaged and unhealthy but important SPLC, although that is only a small sub-plot. He was getting it from all sides, and yet kept driving to Appalachia to hang out with people on various sides of the polarization that came to the fore when the Brimelow family and their controversial white nationalist organization moved there.

Hayden made friends with decent MAGA folks who held pro-American rallies (that turned ugly with supportive nasty Confederates and Nazis.) He became close to progressives in the town who paid a price for flying a PRIDE flag. He loved the local business owners who wanted to work on local development projects and keep the town a nice destination for tourists and guests — even as they fought among themselves. As the Brimelow’s infamous VDARE group becomes more vocal in the community and the castle hosts some white power type events and those who thought this was bad for the town protested, more drama ensued. The subtitle of the book is putting it mildly.

There is a whole genre of books these days about how such extreme polarization is damaging small town school boards and libraries and churches and, not unlike Berkley Springs, W.V., there are good people on various sides. And some pretty bad people. There seem to be some who favor pluralism and civil dialogue and there are those (on both sides) who do not. For understandable reasons, too. Can we even have civil discourse with people who send texts saying they are going to rape your children or burn your house down? Should decent conservative folks attend meetings where they know they are gong to be called Nazis or worse? I get that this is complicated and Strange People on the Hill doesn’t offer much evaluation of the way out of this mess. But it is one heck of a story.

I admire Michael Edison Hayden and wish him well. He grew to like many of the people in Berkeley Springs and he tells the story earnestly. Readers of BookNotes might be interested in knowing what sort of church presence there was in the town and what sort of contribution gospel-centered voices might have made in this contested community. Apparently not much, unless Hayden was just tone deaf. He mentions an active United Methodist clergy-person who sides with those resisting the influence of the Brimelow’s VDARE organization and their propaganda in the community, but there is no sense there was a faith element to his work or any unique motivation other than basic human decency and a desire to keep his town safe. I wished there had been more exploration of the deeper motivation of those on either side. Maybe when you’re in the trenches that deeply it is clear: one favors far-right white nationalism or one doesn’t. In any case, Strange People on the Hill is a powerful read and another cautionary tale.

Between Two Gileads: Christian Nationalism, Fundamentalism, Romans 13:7, and the Future of Political Theology Henry Walter Spaulding III (Cascade) $33.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.40

I will end with this one as it is brand new and I have only read the excellent introduction by the great Rodney Clapp (who is as enthused about this as I think I’ve ever seen him in his often thoughtful endorsements) and the first chapter by Spaulding. It looks to be nothing short of a major work and many of our customers should be aware of it. I’m excited, even if I can’t say much yet.

I can say this much in three quick points.

First, Hank Spaulding is a friend who visits our store sometimes and orders on-line on occasion. He travels east from Ohio to scholarly confabs on the theology of Karl Barth at Princeton Seminary where he is involved and respected — not bad for a young Nazarene guy, from a small Christian college and a smaller country church, eh? His father has been a leader in Christian higher education so he gets his wide reading and serious learning not far from the tree. Henry has written several other books on Christology and sex trafficking and justice issues and co-wrote a book with his father (Henry Walter Spaulding II) called The Rhythm of Grace: A Broad Vision for Wesleyan-Holiness Theology. He is an author you should keep an eye on, and we are honored to call him a friend. And with this new one — man! This is serious. Even Andrew Root says he is a scholar to watch.

Secondly, Between Two Gileads plays with a great idea, a brilliant literary contrast — why didn’t anyone else think of this sooner? It compares and contrasts the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale — written by Margaret Atwood in 1983 when she worried it seemed too extreme — and the Gilead of the lovely Marilyn Robinson novels.

As Clapp puts it, after observing that the American church desperately needs an intervention:

Hank Spaulding in these pages offers exactly the sort of intervention so desperately needed. He immerses himself and his readers in Atwood’s dark and frightening Gilead. But he sees and hope in another fictional Golden — the small, Iowa town of Marilynn Robinson’s novelistic quadrilogy. In Robinson’s vision, the Christian faith encompasses complicated, patient and impatient, sometimes broken people. They attempt not to lord it over one another, but to live together amid their imperfections.

He continues,

To great effect, Spaulding juxtaposes these two fictional Gileads, both of which have much to suggest about our real world today.

Like I say, brilliant!

Thirdly, that is the heart of the book, it seems, but to get there he has a chapter on the rise of white Christian nationalism that, he argues, is based in a certain sort of story, an ideology of facts and data inspired by a unique and particular view of the strict inerrancy of the Bible. This forms in fundamentalists, and conservative evangelicals, too, a certain sort of worldview and a certain hermeneutic (yes, he uses a lot of fancy words — it is semi-scholarly, so get ready.) This reductionistic and scientistic (my words, I suppose) sort of hermeneutic yields a misreading of the Bible, often, and, in particular, of the likes of Romans 13.

(Aside: that Hank doesn’t quote the marvelous Romans Disarmed by Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh is an unfortunate omission. That is one heck of an urgent book!)

In Between Two Gileads, Spaulding tells the story of the day a Trump-appointed (and then fired, I believe— it’s hard to keep up) Attorney General (Jeffrey Sessions) foolishly insisted quite publicly on a wooden reading of Romans 13 to persuade citizens — to demand that citizens— not resist the Trumpian policy on immigration. I took to video live that very night, standing in our store’s side room that holds Bible commentaries, and named a handful of studies on Romans 13, showing that even conservative readings of the text would not support the manipulations of the guy in power, implying he knew his Bible and we had to do what he said. Anyway, I was thrilled to see Hank discuss this more carefully and with better scholarship than my quick video. He asks questions— it seems like maybe in Barthian fashion — about the words of the Bible, the Word of God, and the “primal narrative of Scripture.” I get that.

The popular brainiac and churchman Andrew Root says, ”This is a book we all need.” He also says, “Hank Spaulding is one of my favorite up-and-coming theologians; not only are this thoughts always rich and extensive, but his ideas are always moving.”

William Cavanaugh (a fabulous and important Catholic scholar at DePaul) is right on when he says that “Hank Spaulding argues that the simultaneous rise of fundamentalist readings of Scripture and Christian nationalism in American is not a coincidence.” Exactly. I think Cavanaugh might sound rather Barthian as he reads Hank in saying, “both subordinate God to a particular cultural vision of control of social space.”

Between Two Gileads: Christian Nationalism, Fundamentalism, Romans 13:7, and the Future of Political Theology by Henry Walter Spaulding III isn’t simplistic and breezy. But it is worth wading through, I am certain.  We’ve got it at 20% off, now. Thanks for caring.

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BookNotes

Don’t miss the offer for a free book, embedded part way down this long review. While supplies last, friends.

In the first line of the forthcoming Art Is How God Loves: The Sacred Beauty of Created Things (Broadleaf Books; due July 2026) oboist and writer Meredith Hite Estevez begins telling of her advanced voice class at Juilliard in an opening piece on Frederic Chopin saying, “The melody cracked open a door I thought would be closed forever.” I was hooked.

Also, importantly, she has an epigram to start the book from abstract artist Makoto Fujimura: “God creates out of love, not necessity.”

“God creates out of love, not necessity.” — Makoto Fujimura

I would like to amble in to a discussion of Mr. Fujimura’s books, and the brand new one which we have already celebrated here, Beauty x Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage co-written very nicely with his wife Haejin Fujimura. (Brazos Press.) Call it a survey of his written work or a readers guide to Mako & Haejin’s books.

BUT FIRST.

I can remember the first time I met Calvin Seerveld, in the mid-1970s. His book A Christian Critique of Art and Literature was out, soon to be followed by his legendary Rainbows for the Fallen World and so many more. I think it was the second time I heard him, at a workshop at one of the early Jubilee conferences in Pittsburgh, when I dared to speak to him, bearing my soul by asking what I hoped would not insult him. I wanted to know something about how we can value art in a world where tens of thousands of children die every single day of preventable hunger. I wanted to know why I should care about aesthetics in a world of injustice and war. I was not asking lightly and he answered me with an honest passion and Biblical unction I have rarely encountered. I later told friends that I felt like I was in the presence of an Old Testament prophet, someone who knew God and His ways in the world. Seerveld became somewhat of a hero to me, and eventually a friend, a person who would both weep earnest tears over the poor and oppressed and take delight in everyday, suggestion-rich, glorious nods towards aesthetic obedience. Both/and, not either/or. Interior design, clothing, puns and jokes, rich reading, art reviews, sports, games, coffee, it all matters in God’s good world.

My old college friend Dr. Bill Romanowski got Cal interested in pop culture and soon he had an appreciation for the history of rock music, video games, and the joys of both high cinema and popular movies. All were considered manifestations of the arts, a human response to the way God made the world to be and to be taken seriously, if also playfully. (This is not uncommon now, thinking critically about pop culture, but in those years it was pioneering; Romanowski’s magisterial Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life remains unsurpassed. And wouldn’t you know what this massively researched history shows? American evangelicals distrusted popular entertainments in the early 1900s in part because they were identified with immigrants and people of color.)

Many others have written wisely (and not so wisely) about beauty and art, about aesthetics, and, yes, about the relationship between aesthetics and social change, about art and justice. Can we honor and maybe even make art that has a vision of new creation justice without it becoming what Cal called propaganda? Can art help us understand injustices without being too on the nose? Ham-fisted, not imaginatively allusive enough to be fully artful, such ideologically-driven work fails the aesthetic norms even if it is righteous in its zeal for a better world. It’s a tough needle to thread.

Cal Seerveld’s deep insights about these very themes as a Biblically-rooted scholar of the philosophy of aesthetics were sometimes above my head, but he, like no other, assured me of an overall affirmation of the arts, even in a broken world. His landmark Rainbows for a Fallen World suggests as much and the excellent Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves, again, hints at hope. Art matters but does so even as we are called to be peacemakers when sabers are rattling and bomb falling. Art matters but it should lead us to have care for the marginalized and hurting. Art matters even as we know our world is on fire.

When Dordt College Press released a multi-volume set of Cal’s various and sundry writings, one volume was a collection of pieces around the theme of Redemptive Art in Society. It was one of my great honors to have a blurb put on the back, another task above my pay grade, I’m afraid, but Cal knew I cared about this essential question: what do the arts have to say in a world of torture and starvation, in a world where corporate pirates enrich Presidents who slash the budgets for the poor? Does justice have any need for beauty?

There have been good Christian writers who hint at these questions.

It would be a good project to collect chapters from here and there, from the important scholarly work of Seerveld’s heady former student Lambert Zuidervaart to the always wise Bruce Herman, from a splendid chapter on justice in Terry Glaspey’s Discovering God Through the Arts to bits in Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt Is In the Wind and Van Gogh Had a Broken Heart. We must include the short treatise by Princeton political philosopher Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, and the lovely Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creators by Mitali Perkins. I think of black writers like Sho Baraka and Propaganda and Jonathan Walton (who recently released Beauty + Resistance Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair.) I of course think of Brian Walsh on Bruce Cockburn. I think of the magisterial work of Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Many of the pieces in the amazing The Art of New Creation: Trajectories in Theology and the Arts edited by Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Train and W. David Taylor are stunningly bold but I’d also draw your attention to the great interview with Black art maker Steve Prince in that same volume. Wow. And we’d want to suggest chapters from Charlie Peacock & Andi Ashworth’s Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt; read back-to-back their chapters “On Becoming a Light in the City” and “The Artists Role in the World.”

I’m not sure which letters / chapters I’d pick but such a gathering of pieces should include something excerpted from Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian, real correspondance by Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman, published nicely not long ago.

Although it is spiritually deep and written by a philosopher, Jamie Smith’s magnificent tour de force about art and mysticism (Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing) yields some germane insights about this very topic; “…the best artworks make room for the messiness of the world around us,” he notes, before listing examples.

More practically, J. Scot McElroy released just last summer a one-of-a-kind book on faith-based perspectives on art as therapy called How To Care: Crisis-Trauma-Mental Health Ministry with the Arts which is yet another part of this story of redemptive art in society. For less of a guide and manual and more of a meditation see the brand new, truly beautiful Church Beautiful: Sacred Art & Spiritual Healing by Katie Kresser. Artist Bruce Herman calls it ‘brilliant” and writer and professor Justin Ariel Bailey says it is “luminous.”

In such an anthology about the arts and beauty we’d have to include David Dark. All his bookwork is über-creative, confoundingly so, at times (a good sign for artistic types, eh?) We should at least know his Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World. And for a good foundation, see Mary McCampbell’s amazingly rich Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy well done by Fortress Press.

We have described all of these titles at BookNotes at one point or another and you might find my reviews of them and our sale prices by using the search box at our BookNotes page at our store’s website. 

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I write all this to set the stage — I wanted make a big stage — for the exceedingly important work of Makoto Fujimura, a working artist and writer who has captured my attention (and has the admiration of many, many others) because he has, from his very first writing, indicated something of this same concern and same vision that Seerveld taught me years ago; art can make a difference. Art is not just for arts sake. In a hurting world, art plays a unique and particular redemptive role an our mission to offer repair to the world.

Seerveld’s friend Hans Rookmaaker insisted that “art needs no justification” and we are proud to still stock the reprint of that splendid little book, Art Needs No Justification. Mako would not disagree. Art need not be “relevant” or classical or transgressive or Bible-based nor must it directly engage social concerns. Full stop. But, somehow, without devolving into propaganda or reductive efforts to have it “speak” to issues, good art draws us into the quest for a new world a-coming, as Seerveld might have said, which is laden with shalom. The artistic signposts pointing towards such new creation bears, again from Seerveld’s book, “fresh olive leaves” gratuitously brought back to the ark — there is land and there is hope. Back to Esteves’s opening epigram: God does God’s creative work, says Makoto, out of love. Art emerges from generosity, from abundance. He does not mean to conjure notions of the well-heeled and upper-class wealthy when he talks about extravagance.

Perhaps Mako gets this so well, that there must been engagement with the suffering of the world, because his faith journey was somewhat formed among the survivors of the atomic blast in Nagasaki, Japan. Maybe it was because of his literal proximity to the trauma of Ground Zero on September 11th. God has given him extraordinary gifts of creative expression but also a keen mind to ponder the questions that arise when we wonder about the goodness of God in a violent world. And God has blessed him with also with a tender heart towards the suffering. You should know his art and you should know his books.

And you should know Haejin Shim Fujimura. Born in South Korea (with their wariness towards the Japanese) and now a lawyer running a global justice ministry, she has understood her own life-long yearning for justice as a deeper longing for beauty, and has helped Mako clarify his long longing for justice. She writes in their co-authored book, Beauty and Justice, that their cross-cultural marriage “represents beauty born out of the fractures of sister nations.” They pray each morning that they “steward Jesus in each other” as they are “carried into the new creation.” What a pair!

Beauty x Justice: Creation a Life of Abundance and Courage Haejin Shim Fujimura & Makoto Fujimura (Brazos Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I raved about this in a previous BookNotes trying to gather some pre-orders and we were happy to send them out a bit early to friends and customers. I described it pretty well from my first skimming of the advanced manuscript but now that I’ve got the real book in my hand and have been studying it more carefully, it is, I must say, with as much energy as I can muster, a splendid, splendid book.

Those who appreciate Mako know of his world-renowned (mostly) abstract art using an ancient Japanese style that includes pulverizing precious metals that, over time, glitter and glimmer on the canvas or paper; he was the first student who was not native Japanese to train in this prestigious Japanese art school. As he has written elsewhere, his time living as an adult in Japan (he was born in Boston) was formative spiritually as he found an almost mystical relationship with the Risen Christ. His aesthetics are mature, his insights profound, his writing, while not academic, is sophisticated. I want to say this delicately because I so love his books, even when they meander a bit, or may seem abstract. (I say that with great respect and intend to honor him by saying that his many books are written by a real artist with an artist’s temperament and deep worldview, so of course they are at times allusive or a tad mysterious.)

Beauty x Justice, however, as I’ve said, is a collaborative project with his wife, a clear-headed, sharp-thinking, professional attorney, well-trained and well-practiced in making a logical case, building an apologetic, declaring points. As one nurtured in a more conventional evangelical background — South Korean style, too — Haejin’s writing about her faith is wonderfully pious in the most healthy of ways. I think what I’m trying to say is that Haejin’s gifts are on full display making this book the clearest and most readable of any that Mako has done. I don’t mean to say she is a better writer, but her storytelling style and Biblical studies and passion for social justice make this book sing with an urgency and clarity and joy that the others may not, quite. Mako is a fine writer and he makes stuff glimmer and refract on canvas; Haejin makes it happen clearly on the page. Together they have crafted — in the writing, the collaborative styles, the different voices, and different sorts of stories — one of the best books of the year.

Mako, by the way, would not disagree. It is more than charming but a true joy to see how they refer to each other in such complimentary ways in the book, often. For instance:

“When I (Mako) hear Haejin’s stories, I see her acts of compassion as the creation of beauty. Her inner compass as a justice advocate naturally points her toward the most vulnerable, and the needs are overwhelming Yet, what makes Haejin’s work so extraordinary is not just her commitment to justice — it is her ability to live in gratitude.”

As I’ve noted in the opening of this column, and as you’ve surmised thus far, this new book provides a particular and vital aspect of the broader conversation about faith and the arts (the often abstract discourse about a Christian approach to aesthetics, seen in the myriad of fabulous books about the spirituality of creativity and such.) Their contribution here is just not talked about as much or as consistently so this new book is very important. Yes, a few have noted the social responsibility of redemptive artists and a few have addressed topics of justice as it shapes the heart of the artist. But no one has addressed this in an entire book and no one has done so in such an impeccable and inspiring manner. Beauty x Justice has just catapulted to one of the most important books in this genre in our lifetime.

Beauty x Justice has just catapulted to one of the most important books in this genre in our lifetime.

Despite my bold assertion of the importance of this rather rare study, please know it is a blast to read. A joy. You will find lovely reflections on whole-life discipleship and solid Bible ruminations. There is wise counsel about spirituality (and some amazing stories!) They are solid on inviting us to think about our careers and callings, whatever vocations we have. Obviously there is plenty — from the both of them — about the role of beauty in our lives and the ways in which art can capture our hearts and shape our vision. There are stories about Haejin’s work as a human rights attorney and they both tell tales about what they call a multigenerational approach to fighting human trafficking and child slavery. Gut-wrenching as a few of the stories are (about visiting brothels in India, say) they are not demoralizing. These chapters really are theologically wise and utterly captivating; as a reader you will experience all that (most of us) want in a book like this. It is heart-breaking and powerful and informative and inspiring, a page-turner and, maybe, for you, in any number of possible ways, a game-changer.

You’ll enjoy the part where they tell about meeting the Pope who exhorted them to keep on making beauty. You’ll be moved to hear about the founding of Embers International, their anti-trafficking work in India. You’ll smile when you hear about Mako’s first spray paint project and be glad to hear about the youth whose art was used in the cover design. You will be touched by learning more intimately about their personal lives, their first meeting, their romance — it is beyond charming and a sweet sign of God’s abundant, amazing grace. (It may sound a little odd but they even have as an appendix the sermon preached at their wedding, surprisingly based on Isaiah 61. Speaking of beauty and justice, eh? Nice!)

The eight chapters seem to be nearly experiential; that is, they invite us into their own stories of experiencing beauty, of discovering justice, of creating the good and the beautiful. Reflective as it is, it is still loaded with action. One chapter called “Grit” is on “fostering the courage to do the slow work of justice.” I loved the chapter on generosity, long a theme in Mako’s work, brought to fresh levels in Haejin’s stories from India, as they write about “living by trusting in God’s abundance.”

There is a chapter on gratitude that I think breaks new ground amidst a dozen other books on the subject. The subtitle of that chapter is “Practicing the Discipline of Thanks Amid Suffering.” I am not there yet, grateful even in suffering, and I suspect I need to read this chapter again. Maybe you, too?

As I interrogated Seerveld so many years ago, I was hot on the question of the ethics of luxury in the face of poverty, enjoying art in the face of war and corruption, beauty and the reality suffering. Their chapter (again) on “generational stewardship” uses the line “creating beauty out of ashes.” Oh my. Oh my. Other authors dare to use this line but they have earned the right to use it with devasting integrity; they have seen some of the most hellish places on Earth.

(Haejin, I think it could be said, is not unlike her friend and mentor Gary Haugen, the now-famous founder of IJM (the International Justice Mission), the world-class anti-trafficking agency. Gary is a man of deep prayer his writings seem gritty and yet full of hope and something seemingly close to joy. Imagine! He notes, by the way, that their reflections “have brought deep refreshment to my soul.”)

I trembled when I read the section on new wineskins that ends the book, inviting us to become “vessels made more beautiful because of their scars.” They write of Mako’s painting process, calling it “mysterious and daring.” They look at the Road to Emmaus story (by way of Georges Rouault’s painting which is reproduced.) They briefly dive deep to recover gems of insights from a few other Biblical texts that might make your heart burn within you, too. They draw on N.T. Wright and his big picture of a transformed new creation to frame the role of both art and justice work.

I loved this readable, wise book full of new insights and fresh stories and very important stuff.

I hope Beauty x Justice becomes a volume that becomes well-known and is often discussed and studied. It not only is about the callings of two delightful individuals, both wonderfully thoughtful leaders, but it is book about their work together. More, it is a book that integrates in a profound, Biblically-informed way, the too-often separated aspects of God’s redemptive work in the work. Bringing together justice and beauty, beauty and justice, is urgent and right. Three cheers to all who joined this pioneering effort, reconciling things that should never have been separated in the first place. And may it not be the last book moving in this direction, helping us all embrace God’s ambitious call to shalom.

For more information about Embers International, please visit their great webpage (and contribute to) Embers International. ( https://www.embersinternational.org/ )

Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture Makoto Fujimura (NavPress) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This was Mako’s first book and I adored the well-designed paperback as was first released by NavPress. Fifteen years later the artist was renowned as painter and writer and they did a tremendous commemorative hardback re-issued edition with a few new essays. The cover shimmers with gold that brings to mind his best work.

Refractions is a collections of amazingly good essays and reflections. Refractions are, if I may simplify, what Mako called writing pieces he was developing as a young writer trying to make sense of the horror of 9-11. He lived and worked very near Ground Zero and he was part of an effort by artists in the immediately smoky aftermath to create safe places for people in lower Manhattan to use artistic expression to heal from the loss, to find some stability amidst the disorientation. Most of his refractions, published in this wonderful collection, are not directly about loss and lament, but some are. Again — see above — I resonated with this, perhaps even more than other great volumes about creativity and the arts, about aesthetics and questions under the rubric of beauty.

Mako’s writing had gritty impact as he linked the power of the arts to God’s vision of shalom. He talked gently about the vocation of doing redemptive work in the world. He cared about culture, about justice, about health and wholeness, about those dislocated. This was an artist speaking out of the belly of the beast and it remains one of my favorite books. This is a must if you care about the arts and society and is a must if you are following Mr. Fujimura’s career. Kudos to those who did this handsome new, expanded edition.

Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering Makoto Fujimura (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Oh my, this book on a Japanese novel called Silence took me by surprise, but I soon realized it made very good sense. Mako was making a name for himself using this rare and ancient technic of slow painting, nihonga, using ground minerals as he learned in Japan. (He uses the word pulverized in telling about his slow process of preparing the paint.) He had written a bunch of reflections. The Lancaster-based Square Halo Books was touting his writing with chapters in more than one book. He told much of his faith journey and his story of being a Japanese-America (born in Boston, raised for a while in Japan and then Denmark, graduating from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania) who travelled as a young man to study Japanese culture and art where he ended up in Nagasaki.

Nagasaki was the heart of Japanese (Catholic) Christian culture and was known for spiritual leaders and authors, a huge convent (which was the chief target for the second atomic bomb dropped in August of 1945.) It was there that Mako became familiar with the agonizingly painful and beautiful story, an award winning novel simply called Silence. Written in 1966 by Shūsaku Endō, it tells the story of 17th century Japanese Christians who were forced to renounce their faith and deface a framed icon/relief of Jesus. Mako beheld one of these fum-i plaques, worn down from so many who stomped on it and it contributed to his conversion to evangelical faith. (As did a poem by William Blake, which is also described here.)

Years later, as he told this story of his conversion, called to faith by this horrific episode of Japanese imperial repression and the apparent silence of God, the world-famous filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, reached out to Mako, who became (one might say) a spiritual advisor of sorts, a consultant on the making of Scorsese’s masterpiece film version of Silence. Fujimura tells all this in this amazing book.

One learns in Silence and Beauty much about Japanese culture (including the often misunderstood and incredibly powerful tea ceremonies.) One learns about his own faith journey, his art, his appreciation for literature, especially Endo’s Silence. On one hand, Fujimura’s Silence and Beauty is the best book of which I know that examines the themes of Endo and his novel. It is worth getting for that very reason, a deeply sensitive study by a thoughtful Christian on one of the great works of classic literature. Book club anyone?

https://vimeo.com/161220152?fl=pl&fe=sh

But, in Silence and Beauty, as you can see, we also have here a deepening of the themes evoked in Refractions, even the subtle connection between the immoral bombing of citizens in cities, connecting — for those readers who are paying attention — the grief of Nagasaki from August 9th and the horror of Manhattan’s 9-11. Yes, good art can name and evoke and help process life — the good, the bad, and the ugly, as they say. Endo does this and in Mako’s hands, the novel becomes that much more urgent, even in the midst of our own War on Terror. Can art speak to the silence? Can peace and justice be evoked by literature and paintings? This is a learned and wonderfully meandering book, covering so much. But it is existential for Fujimura and it is simply a must-read volume to understand his deep commitment to art and to beauty.

WHILE SUPPLIES LAST WE WILL GIVE A FREE COPY OF SILENCE AND BEAUTY TO ANYONE WHO PURCHASES ONE. BOGO, y’all. While supplies last.

 

Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life Makoto Fujimura (IVP) $23.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19

We’ve established that Fujimura is a renowned painter. But also a cultural critic, a thinker, a writer. He tells us about novels and poetry, about other artworks and painters, about the history of other lands, about trends in the high art world. (I’ve heard him say, for instance, as he writes in one book) that it was simply unheard of in Manhattan when he was showing his work at important galleries and shows, to have an artist speak of his or her work. (And, obviously, it would have been even worse if one talked about one’s Christian faith when saying even a few words about an art piece or installation.) He was reviewed in art journals by serious art reporters as one who should be taken seriously, even as he broke the rules about speaking about one’s creative processes and art pieces. Wow.

He connected with other artists around the world and organized networks in New York under the rubric of his organization, the International Arts Movement (IAM.) From indie folk-rock bands to prestigious poets like Christian Wiman to classical dancers and film-makers, he cross-pollinated artists of all sorts. IAM was growing and this book — on creating a culture where human values and the arts are honored and embodied — became what I’ve thought of as a manifesto. He had a short booklet for a while about being generative and he was picked to serve (by President Bush) on the national commission on the humanities and the arts., the National Council on the Arts that advised the National Endowment for the Arts. He was increasingly vocal about what we might want to call the arts and a national cultural policy. He called it “culture care.’

I love this book which came into the world in 2017. It is about society and culture and values and pluralism and the arts. How can we avoid the lingo of “culture wars” and move beyond that sort of nastiness, moving to stewarding notions of goodness and beauty? To affirming generative approaches?  “Tell ‘em about the dream,” Mahalia Jackson said to King when he was floundering before the “I Had a Dream” speech took off. That’s it!

From Biblical roots to fabulous stories to strategic calls to apply generative thinking to help heal the “soul” of culture, this book offers insights into the nature of flourishing, personally and communally and institutionally. Readers will learn quite a bit about Fujimura’s slow art, notions of healing and hope that the arts can offer, and he relates amazing stories about social transformation through artists.

In his generous and inspiring work Culture Care, artist Mako Fujimura suggests that our common culture is not a territory to be captured, but a garden to be cultivated, needing the nourishment of creativity, community, connection, and the generation of beauty. It is a grace-filled call to beat swords into plowshares and take up the work of tilling our common garden. —Cherie Harder, president, The Trinity Forum

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making Makoto Fujimura (Yale University Press) $17.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

So much could be said about this one, but I will be brief. The fabulous introduction by N.T. Wright might give a hint, but this is exactly what the subtitle promises: a theology of making. Now out in paperback (we can still get the hardcover, though) this serious work from Yale University Press should be considered one of the essentials in a library on faith and the arts. There are serious theologians writing (Jeremy Begbie comes to mind, although he is a trained classical musician and composer) about the arts and there are a lot of good scholars, but this is done by a working painter.

(For rigorous works done by thinkers, scholars, and some artists, too, see the great series from IVP, Studies in Theology and the Art. We’ve got ’em all at 20% off. )

Art + Faith is less an academic study as a from-the-heart testimonial from the studio. This is Mako explaining the best he can what he does and why he does it. Although it has come up in other books, he explores with great care the “new newness” of kintsugi. (In other writings, including his acceptance of the Abraham Kuyper Prize last year, and in a lauded commencement address, he referred to “Kintsugi Grace.” Some say it is his most serious book, a writerly masterpiece.

Here a world-class painter and cultural critic reinterprets both the creative act and the nature of Christian faith in a way that should interest anyone concerned with the indispensable role of the creative imagination in human flourishing. — Ellen Davis, Duke Divinity School, author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible and Preaching the Luminous Word: Biblical Sermons and Homiletical Essays

Makoto Fujimura’s art and writings have been a true inspiration to me. In this luminous book, he addresses the question of art and faith and their reconciliation with a quiet and moving eloquence. — Martin Scorsese

In a time of polarization and culture wars, Makoto Fujimura takes broken pieces and makes beauty through his art. I’m delighted that he has put his lived theology in written form so that we can emulate his example! — David M. Bailey, CEO of Arrabon and founder of Urban Doxology

Art Is: A Journey Into the Light Makoto Fujimura (Yale University Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

If the wonderful and inspiring Beauty x Justice [see above] co-written with attorney and human rights activist Haejin Fujimura came out just this Spring, Art Is: A Journey into the Light was Mako’s most recent  solo volume that appeared to great acclaim in Fall of 2025. It was a good seller for us here at the shop — we’d recommend it as a Christmas gift for those who might enjoy such a thing and named it as one of the Best Books of 2025 in our January 2026 BookNotes lists. I love the tough, craft dust-jacket with dapples of gold. There is full-color art on quality paper, too, and yet it is not stuffy. It feels great to hold, brings joy to browse through and offers some of Mako’s most personal writing content yet. If the medium is the message, this is a winner, and if you’re a lover of great, even whimsical prose, Art Is creatively takes us on a journey. A journey, as he insists, towards the light.

And there you go: even this most tender of reflections, this further step deeper in, the lovely images of light suppose, of course, darkness. Art, he suggests, is awareness, and, it seems, this includes an awareness of virtue and goodness but also of our social location, our context, the pains of the wounded world. It is so fitting that (as I mentioned at the outset) that he penned the moving foreword to Steve Garber’s Hints of Hope which grapples with the conjoined nature of beauty and brokenness.

Fujimura is a deeply Christian painter by which I mean he is informed by the Spirit of the compassionate Christ and shaped by the Biblical story of cosmic redemption. This is good, good news, indeed, and constrains him from idealism or romanticism. He knows the really real, as they say. What is that redemptive story, what Newbigin, from India, called “the true story the whole world?” Makoto doesn’t precisely spell it out — he’s an artist not a theological scholar — but it is surely the four-act drama of Scripture itself: creation, fall, redemption, and future restoration. We live in a good, real world, broken and ugly and wounded as it is, but it has been redeemed in the death and resurrection of the true King. In Jesus’s resurrection and ascension and the subsequent gifting of the Holy Spirit to form the people of God anew, we have hope; hope for, as their friend NT Wright puts it in his new book, “God’s Homecoming”and the restoration of a marred creation.

Mako and Haejin were both shaped by the neo-Kuyperian worldview of Tim Keller and others during their years at Redeemer in NYC and it seems no accident that his example, here, of his integreation of faith and vocation, worship and work, liturgy and labor, is embodied — intregal — without hardly saying so. There is no longer a fake dualism between the sacred and the secular. He is alive to life, awake, heartfelt, as a professor at the Pratt Institute put it. Indeed.

Art Is is asking what sort of light our aesthetic experiences can lead us to and in this good but broken world, in the power of Christ’s redemption, it apparantly leads to some very exciting places, indeed. Mako writes gloriously, here, telling of the color of the flowers (and the bees) by his barn / studio. The politics of tea and Sen no Rikyú. The thresholds and soliloquies and “interdependence of colors” — oh, this is richly textured, luminous stuff.  Art Is is a gloriously rich and diverse and even rambling survey of all sorts of stuff, an awakening and a testimony. This is what it looks like when we live out a “theology of making.” As such, it is a wonderful continuation of his previous Yale book. Art Is certainly is a joy and you will be grateful to own it.

Hear this:  “My art is a portal into a New Creation.”  Art Is reflects, as only a practicing artist can, on what this may mean, enigmatic as it may be.. For some, it will be their favorite yet of his many books.

When reading Makoto Fujimura’s Art Is, I hear song sparrows, bluebirds, and a goldfinch deliver an impossible peace with his paintings. Like William Blake’s, his faith is a door to his imagination. Working to the rhythm of slow art practice, Makoto Fujimura is a master painter very much in the present. — Susie Ibarra, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, percussionist, sound artist

With his stunning visual art and his lyrical writing, Mako shows us that art is a journey toward beauty as a revelation of hope: for abundance emerging through scarcity; for love replacing transaction; for truth-telling subverting injustice; for light shining through darkness in both human history and human hearts. From its most fragile expressions to its powerful convergence of science, spirituality, and creativity, he plumbs beauty’s depths of meaning in this masterpiece for mind, body, and soul. — Ian Morgan Cron, author of The Road Back to You

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BOOKS TO WHICH MAKO FUJIMURA CONTRIBUTED

PRE-ORDER ESV The Four Holy Gospels with artwork by Makoto Fujimura (Crossway) $49.99 // OUR PRE-ORDER SALE PRICE = $39.99 – due September 3, 2026

This forthcoming new edition is a somewhat smaller (and a lot less expensive) version of the famous 2011 edition and this revised Four Holy Gospels will come this fall; we are taking pre-orders. The first edition came out in 2011 commemorating the 400th anniversary of the momentous publishing of the King James Version of the Bible. While the ESV is a very different translation than the KJV, it attempted to deliver both elegance and accuracy and remains a favorite of many church leaders and Bible readers. The earlier (now out of print) ESV Four Holy Gospels was expensive and quite large and was very well manufactured. There were five full-page reproductions of Mr. Fujimura’s Japanese-style nihonga paintings (done with gold and other metallic elements in the paint, created with rare brushes on certain sorts of handmade paper) and several other, small abstract compositions throughout.

I suppose some bought this as a Bible to read although it was large; I know of more than one church who uses it liturgically, to read the weekly gospel lesson from in church. I have a hunch many customers just bought it for the lovely setting of Mako’s work. It was a book of great art reproduced in a hefty volume alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This new one is the same (textured cloth over board and the handsome typography of the ESV) but somewhat smaller and less expensive so more affordable. Coming in September 2026.

It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God edited by Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE – $19.99

I list this rather ceremoniously — okay, not like the learned and serious Japanese tea ceremonies Mako often writes about — because, well, as far as I know, it is his first bit of writing published in a real book. (He first read him, I think, in the amazingly good and too-short lived Re:Generation Quarterly.) It Was Good has a bunch of very sharp authors, and this was Mako’s first time getting his name on a book and his writing in a collection. Hooray and three cheers! Omedetou Gozaimasu, as I am told they say in Japan.

It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God is, in fact, a glorious book, an anchor of the artful, boutique publishing house, Square Halo. It has many full-color artworks and illustrations, and original pieces by so many of the best leaders or writers in the faith/art movement, such as Adrian Chaplin, Ed Knippers, Sandra Bowden, Mary McCleary, Charlie Peacock, Greg Wolfe, and Timothy Keller (a pastor to artists) before he was known. Mako’s piece in here is remarkable and any fan should have this book. His chapter is entitled “That Final Dance” and, by way of the notion of wabi-sabi, tells of his art-making amidst suffering. I told you that Beauty x Justice is the fruit of many years of his thinking about this.

Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity Michael Card (IVP) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I often come back to this, dipping in, re-reading bits just for the sheer joy of knowing what a very fine thinker and writer this singer-songwriter is. He’s known as a Bible scholar and an artful poet / writer.  We’ve hosted Card here and love his work, and this (perhaps not his best known) is an excellent little volume, ideal for both those starting the journey towards thinking well about creativity and the arts, or those wanting to forge more deeply into how the Bible can inform our thinking about all of this. Always a delightful read, Scribbling in the Sand has a very special bonus. Inspired by Hans Rookmaaker’s then-famous “Letter to a Young Christian Artist” Michael recruited four or five important artists or writers to share their contemporary “what would you say in one letter” piece for those seeking to step into or double-down on their vocation in the arts. Harold Best, Calvin Seerveld, and others are here, as is an amazing little piece by Mako. Take up and read!

Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe edited and designed by Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books) $45.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $36.79

One of the great Christian artists from 20th century Japan is Sadao Watanabe. Watanabe did textile art and his prints of Bible scenes are in famous locations all over the world (including the headquarters of the World Council of Churches and the Vatican Museum.) They grace homes and churches and book covers and more. He was a very important (and beloved) Protestant artist and this rare collection of his work — a slightly oversized coffee table work — is one of the most esteemed of Square Halo titles. I love it.

This slightly revised second edition still includes fabulous essays by several key critics and church leaders and a splendid piece by Makoto. His tender and interesting (if brief) piece (in which he introduces us to the Japanese art style known as mingei) is called “My Journey with an Artist I Never Met.” Nicely done.

Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith edited with interviews by James Romaine (Square Halo Books) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is a fabulous, square-sized, full-color paperback that (in the early 2000s) placed Square Halo Books as a small press doing serious work promoting contemporary Christian artists. James Romaine, with a serious degree in art history and a good eye for edgy contemporary stuff, too, created this amazing book of interviews with a curated selection of amazing practicing artists. From Joel Sheesley to Mary McCleary to Tim Rollins and K.O.S. to Albert Pedulla (and more) there is a fascinating array of those focusing on the intersection of faith and art-making. It is a fabulous book, a title that anyone interested in the thinking of contemporary artists will enjoy (and benefit from!) Lot’s of vivid color and excellent design, showing off the work alongside the interviews. No one in this pioneering collection became quite as well-known or as published as Mako Fujimura. There are good visual examples of his early work, too, making this a real treasure for fans and collectors.

Faith + Vision: Twenty Years of Christians in the Visual Arts edited by Cameron J. Anderson & Sandra Bowden (Square Halo Books) $49.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $39.99

We have quite a lot of art books, coffee-table sized or small, all lovely collections of excellent artists and their good work. This big one is a favorite and it is not just because of Mako’s presence (or the great introduction by Nicholas Wolterstorff and other good essays) Faith +Vision commemorates CIVA, an organization we held in high esteem and with whom we had the privilege of serving sometimes by doing small book displays at their annual conferences. This breathtaking hardback is jam-packed with fabulous contemporary art by artists making their mark at the end of the 20th century and into the early new millennium, all with some connection to the now greatly-missed CIVA. There are over 200 images that “showcase the work of CIVA’s most accomplished artists and highlight the quality and breadth of its many traveling exhibitions, conferences, directories, and publications.” And, yep, Mako was part of this. It’s a very good book in its own right, but for those looking for even small contributions made by Fujimura, this should not be missed.

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FOREWORDS or INTRODUCTIONS BY MAKO FUJIMURA

Mako has written several good introductions or forewords to important books. They are not quickly dashed off and show more of his attentiveness and artful writing style and are, themselves, well worth reading.

Collectors should stay tuned for others, but, at least, all should know about his excellent wordsmithing and encouragement for books such as Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate by Steven Garber, the exquiste hardcover The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty by German luthier Martin Schleske, the singular Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian and Preacher by Jeffrey Monroe, the popular Rembrandt Is In the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith by Russ Ramsey, Doorway to Artistry: Attuning Your Philosophy to Enhance Your Creativity by philosopher Esther Meek, and The Problem with the Dot: A Holistic Approach to Christians’ Care and Cultivation of Global Culture Through the Theatrical Ecosystem by Bruce Long. In the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters in human history, artist and musician Roger Lowther wrote Aroma of Beauty in the Wake of the 2011 Tsunami  in Japan and, naturally, Mako wrote a very moving foreword.

The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community by neurologist and psychotherapist Dr. Curt Thompson is a special favorite as Thompson uses the arts in his therapy and besides the good foreword, some of Mako’s art is shown on full-color inserts on glossy paper. Order any of these from us and we’ll extend the 20% OFF. Read on!

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Visit www.makofujimura.com to see some of his limited edition collections of books that accompanied showings, and things only available there. It’s well worth your time, but do please come back to Hearts & Minds and place order. It would be our delight to serve you further.

And don’t forget the thrilling work of Embers International. 

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BookNotes

SIX BOOKS FOR COLLEGE GRADS

We know you want to honor some college grads in your life and while there are dozens of great books that are ideal for this big step into adult life (or for anyone wanting to renew their commitment to Christian faith at a key time in their life) we want to highlight just five; okay six.

These are the best choices. They really are.

And three or four we’ve been recommending for years as there has been nothing more germane. That I edited one of them, well, makes it sort of special — okay, I’m real biased — but, really, these three have been essentials for the post-college transition.

And now, just this season, we have a new fifth suggestion, a very handsome prayer book custom made for young adults which is classy enough to be a very special gift.

(Frankly, it is useful for almost anyone even if it is subtitled as “Rites of Passage.” And then we’ll add another recent book useful for any and everyone, but that seems perfect for a collegiate or as a graduation gift.)

I’ll try not to go on and on about these although each one is dear to my heart. I’ve got personal connections of one sort or another with all six so it will be truly a joy to get to send a few out. We are here to serve you and based on our pretty wide awareness of the publishing world, we are confident that these books are very appropriate for gift-giving to young adults this time of year. You search is over. We’ve got you covered. I’ll keep it succinct.  ALL ARE 20% OFF, too.

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

Yep, this is my baby, a book I’m proud that we put together a decade ago, mostly out of sheer necessity. I felt like there just wasn’t a good small gift made to honor graduates, especially that would remind church-going grads that God cares about their transition into the world of work and that underscores the sense that they are called by God into whole-life discipleship, in every zone of life, including their future jobs.

It’s a collection of fabulous graduation speeches by women and men we admire (and one by me) each given at Christian colleges or universities. Believe me, each one is inspiring, some actually brilliant. Whether your grad went to a faith-based or church affiliated college or not, these addresses call one and all to learn how to live well in a new stage of young adult life. It is bold and captivating and pretty practical. We think it has held up well over the last years and we highly recommend it.

A few years ago I wrote a long “back story” of why I feel so strongly about this little volume and I’ll share that link below if you’re curious. I hope you enjoy reading about our store’s mission, my graduation speech about being sons and daughters of Issachar at Geneva College in Western Pennsylvania, and the great authors I pulled together to publish this project. From the always wise Richard Mouw to the visionary Amy Sherman to the late, great John Perkins, and several more, Serious Dreams: Bold Ideas… offers upbeat commencement addresses, motivational, full of inspiration and guidance. Each one is stellar and repays repeated readings (even, I might add, for those not commencing to a new place or job.)

They each hold up a big vision of dreaming God’s dreams, especially about making a difference in one’s vocation or career field. Most offer ways to imagine how God is going to meet the young adult in his or her job search and personal issues and each chapter will remind them (in different ways) to care deeply about the ways in which they serve God in the marketplaces of life. You’ll love Nicholas Wolterstorff’s tender story about seeing with “two eyes.” You’ll love Claudia Beversluis’s use of a Wendell Berry poem. And if you are a Steven Garber fan, he’s got a rare piece in here.

There are nice reflection questions after each chapter and a hefty introductory essay that I wrote that is said to be pretty touching, encouraging, and practical. (You can read it in a link I share below if you care to.) The final epilogue is by Erica Young Reitz, now a well-respected expert in the personal struggles many grads experience in their transitions out of college and author of her own book, After College.

Here is the big backstory of some of what inspired us to create Serious Dreams. And, a nice, short introduction to each chapter.  

Here is a wordy overview of the book, a thank you to our first customers, and a reprint of the whole first chapter. The print is a bit small, but if you can manage, it’s a fun read.

 

After College: Navigating Transitions, Relationships, and Faith (revised edition) Erica Young Reitz (IVP) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

When Erica worked in campus ministry at Penn State University she learned that there was a lot of stress and anxiety — only growing worse after Covid and the rise of the ubiquitousness of cell phones — among college seniors. Sure they were excited about graduating and if they had been mentored well by robust leaders and good churches, they maybe had not only a healthy personal faith but a vision for their lives; many want to be of use in the world, serving God by taking up their careers with Christian distinction. Maybe they had what some might call a Christian world and life view, helping them integrate the various sectors of their lives into one beautiful life (or maybe not.) Still, the famous Mary Oliver line resonates.

And maybe that is part of the problem: many students want to live well but are nervous about finding a job, keeping friends, worrying about everything from finances to sexuality. Stuff I wrote about in the introduction to Serious Dreams — moving home, finding a church, forming friendships, not expecting to cause heroic social transformation in an entry level job — plagues young adults. Excited, sure. Maybe even visionary. But many were hurting inside, full of anxiety that surprised even the most caring campus mentors.

So Erica started a program, offering a semester full of classes and mentoring sessions focused on the upcoming transitions out of college and into new jobs and cities and habits. She loved these kids well as they were becoming young adults and her passion for this project led to her writing this one-of-a-kind book. She went on and got a Master’s degree in the philosophy of higher education doing original research on this topic, interviewing hundreds of college seniors and those in their post-college years. She has become a recognized expert on the topic and has appeared on podcasts and as a conference speaker.

A new edition of the After College book came out, adding more insight that she has developed and making the book that much more interesting and practical for twenty-something readers. It isn’t academic but it isn’t simplistic, either.

You can read more of what I said about this wonderful resource here: 

And it’s fun to think that Erica got her publishing debut contributing her clear and charming afterword to Serious Dreams. It brought some needed practical guidance to that motivational and inspirational book. Now she has her own good book and we very highly recommend it. Give it to any college grad (or, for that matter, even better, any college student approaching their senior year.) They will appreciate it.

Every Moment Holy: Rites of Passage Douglas McKelvey, illustrated by Ned Bustard (Rabbit Room Press) $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

I hope you know the three volumes of Every Moment Holy (each of the first three done in larger sized leather-bound hardbacks and personal sized, compact, soft flexible leather ones.) Now comes volume four and it carries the subtitle, Rites of Passage. It is created for young adults and college grads. What a marvelously designed and beautifully rendered collection of prayers to consecrate the ordinary experiences of many young adults (among others.) It has been called “a companion for young adulthood.”

As I have written before, there are more than 150 prayers and liturgies for quotidian uses, for classes, graduations, dating, anxiety, job interviews, seasons of doubt, travel, cooking, and more. There are over 30 b/w linocut illustrations by Ned Bustard. It is so handsomely designed.

The size is just a little different from the previous three EMH editions. It is a leather-covered hardback, like the larger editions of the first three, but just a bit more trim in size, and a bit thinner. It’s a fabulous size, really, in a rich tan leather with a Bustard linocut on the front. Not as small and chunky as the smaller editions but not as large as the bigger hardback editions, it feels just right. It has well-made, quality paper, tasteful, two color ink and a ribbon marker. It makes a truly great gift.

I said just a bit more about it here.

Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good Steven Garber (IVP) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Those who follow BookNotes know that Garber is one of my favorite writers, always eloquent, always wise, never simplistic, often profound. He weaves stories from his life with film and literature, news events and history as he tells about how he walks through the world, learning as he goes, always nurturing a Christian imagination that can inspire and sober us. He wants us to learn to love well, in what he calls “the landscapes of our lives” but that means caring for the world as it is. It means being implicated, being responsible. (Not a bad charge for young ones soon to be called bona fide adults.)

You may know he has developed that theme of knowing the world as it really is in his respected and serious Habits of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate. (I wrote a bit about it here.) I’d like to say that is an ideal book for an inspired and eager, young culture-maker and history-maker but, alas, it may be a bit much for some young adults. If you give Hints of Hope tell them to be sure to dig it out ten years from now (or sooner, if they grow weary) when it could save their faith or their very life.

For now, though, it seems a deep reflection of what keeps us going — namely, a sense of vocation — is ideal and this thoughtful book will inspire those given to careful reading. Visions of Vocation is a truly wonderful book, a bit deep, well-crafted, and truly one of the best books of our lifetime. I’ve suggested it as an ideal gift for thoughtful grads often before. One reviewer noted how it helps us work through the tough dilemmas of this oh-so-beautiful and yet sadly broken world and I am sure that young adults today are deeply aware of the wounds of the world and the struggle to keep going. This artful writing will touch them deeply, if they are open. The Van Gogh cover is beautiful, too, isn’t it?

Visions of Vocation by Steven Garber seems to help the graduate take what they learned in college — much of it abstract “head knowledge” — and learn to apply it, so to speak, allowing what we most deeply know to get embodied in the very habits of our hearts and the ways we live.

I’ve highlighted it often and written a bit about it before. Take a look here; I hope you know it, and can now ponder if it would be a good option for young adults you want to honor with a substantial read. .

The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work Steven Garber (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

For those perhaps not ready to dive into Garber’s detailed Visions of Vocation, I highly recommend the compact sized Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship & Work, which is, again, a personal favorite. It is a nicely done paperback with full color photographs for each chapter. A tapestry it is! I’ve given numbers of them away (and we have a lot of good books to chose from here when we want to offer a little gift, believe me.)

Steve’s Seamless essays are extended chapters that, although somewhat random, are delightfully arranged, with great pieces with him sharing personal stories of his parents and his past, his growth as a young adult, his studies, movie reviews, and memorable adventures, and much about his passion for helping others integrate faith and work. As he insists, we must relate worship and work, bringing together our curiosities and passions about the world with a robust and profound faith. His storytelling in Seamless is charming and mature. These short essays make a great little gift and could be life-changing. I’m a fan.

You can read or reread my early celebration of it here: 

To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times Alan Noble (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’ve written about this before (here) and at the time it was brand new. As I’ve worked with it more, enjoyed Dr. Noble’s good lines and fine writing (and his ever current interest in popular culture and the ethos of our times) I’ve come to believe this would make a great, great gift to commemorate a college graduation. As Gospel Coalition author Tim Challies puts it, To Live Well is “philosophical yet practical, profound yet understandable, and always deeply Biblical.” I would add that it is serious and yet playful, sober yet enthusiastic.

He knows it is hard to live well. He gets it that virtues demand a life structured around deep personal growth and interior transformation. He knows that character formation doesn’t come easy. He knows that the lives of most of us are already too demanding and we are oversaturated. (It is interesting that his first book was about bearing witness in a distracted and digital age; another was about coping with deperession.)

Noble is clear about God’s grace being the foundation for any development in virtue and that living well is itself a gift. Maybe that’s the thing: realizing (as his previous book put it) “we are not our own.” Life is a gift. Can God’s abundance and gift-giving nature be the foundation for a life well lived? Can we make some personal choices and nurture habits that facilitate the best sort of human flourishing?

Noble is an energetic college prof and he knows how to speak to young adults. He invites them here to choose decisively, act justly, suffer steadfastly, live moderately, believe soundly, hope resolutely, and love rightly. That sounds like quite a book, eh?

Get a few and give them away. You are planting seeds that will last, even in these chaotic, fragmented times.

The first phrase on the flyleaf of this nice hardback offers a line that I’m sure will resonate with those who recently sat through commencement speeches: “You were told to live a meaningful life, but no one ever told you how.” This book will help and I hope you have somebody in your life you can comfortably give it to.

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BookNotes

We’ve been busy lately doing several off-site events. Struggling to know what to box up and lug and set up is taxing mentally and physically (most have no idea how complicated it all is) but the joy of seeing eager shoppers at our pop-up book displays is almost overwhelming. We thank God for this change to serve.

Being with authors as they present to gathered groups is a treat. We recently got to be with Andy Crouch for an evening in Baltimore, to sell books of Tara Isabella Burton at an Episcopalian event (thanks Chris and Ben) and was delighted to spend time with former Houghton College President Dr. Shirley Mullen (author of Claiming the Courageous Middle) during an event with long-time friends of the United Church of Christ in the Keystone Conference. Tonight Beth and I will be with Haejin & Mako Fujimura as they speak in Lancaster about their co-authored book Beauty & Justice which will be nothing short of wonderful.

This week in BookNotes, however, we want to give a big shout out to those involved in a thrilling event held last Saturday right here in central Pennsylvania, the annual Racial Justice Summit hosted at the First Church of the Brethren in the Allison Hill neighborhood of Harrisburg. Nicely organized by a team led by Dr. Drew Hart of Messiah University, this year the Summit had three stellar saints sharing from the main stage. All three were authors whose books we stock and it was a privilege to meet all three. Not to mention Drew’s three books. I’ve mentioned most of these before, but because we have some left over (I often over-order for events) we are doing a one week sale with some extra savings for you.

30% OFF (one week only)

All of these books will get a 30% off discount UNTIL MAY 8th 2026.  After that they return to our normal BookNotes 20% off.

Got that? For one week, through next Friday, you can get 30% off any of these vital titles. While supplies last. Tell your friends!

BOOKS BY SHEILA WISE ROWE

Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience Sheila Wise Rowe (IVP) $19.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.99

Dr. Rowe is known throughout the world (she and her husband lived in South Africa for a decade) as a keen observer of not only racist systems and cultural injustices, but how that perversely generates what can sometimes be called trauma among those impacted by ongoing mistreatment. Of course it isn’t just gross racism that wears down people of color but the micro-aggressions, the memory, the need to be on-guard. White readers of a certain age learned this with the extraordinary and influential (for a time) memoir called Black Like Me in the mid-1960s or from classic black literature from that era; think of The Invisible Man, say.

Sheila Rowe in this book has given us just about the best overview of this personal consequence of living in a racist culture and I recommend it (very heartily) not only for people of color (the main audience) but for anyone who wants to understand what it is like to feel the weight of this sort of harm. White counselor and theologian Dan Allender calls it “a magisterial gift for those who have suffered harm as persons of color and a revelation for those whose whiteness has served as a pair of blinders from racial trauma.” He calls it a “must-read for al who hunger for righteousness.”

Each chapter tells a of an interview / case study of a certain sort of experience and throughout she not only offers Biblically-informed, wise counsel, but also her own stories and experiences.  Whether you like memoir-like storytelling, social science, history, Bible teaching or hope-filled practical application Healing Racial Trauma is a very impressive read. Buy a few and start a book group!

Seeds of Racial Healing: 52 Devotions for Navigating Through Trauma Sheila Wise Rowe (IVP) $21.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $15.39

This is a compact sized devotional that can be used once a week for a year, or daily, if you’d like, for almost two months. Or just read it straight through! Although there are some exercises and prayers that invite a slower more intentional reading, so you’ll want to be attentive to the deeper things you are feeling as you ponder this content.

Seeds of Racial Healing are for those of any ethnicity who has experienced some sort of racial trauma or who resonate with the need to spend some gentle time prayerfully considering one’s hurts and needs. The world is packed with discrimination and even racially motivated violence and all of have (to some degree or another) carried the weight of the world in ways that may not be healthy. We must come to terms with the wounds of this world and we can do so with the help of the pastoral guide, a trained and trauma-informed professional (with an advanced degree from Cambridge, no less.) As black writer and advocate for the poor Terence Lester has written, ”This book offers space to breathe, to be honest with God, and believe that healing is still possible.”  I’ve dipped in and read through a number of these and they are really top-notch.

Young, Gifted and Black: A Journey of Lament and Celebration Sheila Wise Rowe (IVP) $18.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.29

I recall enjoying giving a little description of this when it was brand new a year or so ago in front of thousands of college students at the Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh. I noted that I think anyone can and should read a book like this, and it is fascinating, for sure, but it is designed to affirm the lives of those who are black youth. She did an incredible amount of research and has stores galore in here.

The title of the book, it is cool to know, is from a famous1969 song by Nina Simone which was later covered by Aretha Franklin; the late Chadwick Boseman referenced it in an acceptance speech at the Screen Actor’s Guild award (while being honored for his role in Black Panther.) Rowe’s great opening quote and story doesn’t attribute the playwright Lorraine Hansberry but she knows all about that, too. It’s a great legacy for her to be standing on as she brings the affirmation to young women and men of our cultural moments.

The interviews here are life-affirming and inspirational but it does not cover up the pain; the subtitle reminds us of the journey of lament we must voice.  Rowe invites readers to engage with embodied practices that “become like life preservers on uncharted waters” (as author and pastor Juanita Rasmus puts it.) This is a tribute to both black excellence, the sorrows of so many emerging adults, and a celebration of all who model resilience and flourishing.

Healing Leadership Trauma: Finding Emotional Health and Helping Others Flourish Nicholas Rowe and Sheila Wise Rowe (IVP) $19.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.99

Although Sheila Wise Rowe was presenting at the excited Racial Justice Summit in Harrisburg last weekend, her esteemed husband was with her and it was an honor and delight to meet him. He has worked in higher education (and now teaches at Gordon Conwell near Boston, Massachusetts.) He and Sheila (a professional powerhouse couple and a lovely pair) worked on this book for years, making it, again, a truly rare find. There are a lot of books on leadership but few that are about the emotional life of the leader and that is informed by trauma-sensitive psychology.  And written by two black evangelicals leaders. Pastors should know this, for sure, but it isn’t primarily about pastoral leadership but more general about anyone who serves, does ministry, offers influence, mentors others, and thinks about leadership regardless of the space. In which they find themselves.

I mentioned that it is for those who think about leadership; there is quite a cottage industry of books about leadership capacities and practices. This is a must. However, I’d also say it is for anyone, maybe especially for those who don’t think about leadership much.

There’s a lot of dysfunction in churches and the corporate world and the nonprofit sector. I know some of you reading this feel isolated and maybe confused. The five themes of Healing Leadership Trauma — invitation, attachment, remembrance, healing, and reconnection.  — will be a breath of fresh air. Highly recommended.

BOOKS BY DOMINIQUE DUBOIS GILLIARD

Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores Dominique Dubois Gilliard (IVP) $18.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.29

One of the things I value about InterVarsity Press show they so often offer uniquely Christian perspectives on various career areas and callings, helping Christians relate faith to work and their various vocations. (Heck, they just did one on hobbies.) They also have lots of solid, Biblically-shaped books about all manner of social issue, from sexual abuse to creation care, gun violence and the abortion questions.  This extraordinary book is an example of IVP offering us all a resource for any and all who care about our civic life, about crime and punishment, about police and law and prisons and such. It should go without saying that it is a must-have for anyone who works in law enforcement, criminal justice, the prison system or in the judiciary.

But more than a righteous book for good folks in law enforcement or criminal justice careers, it is for any of us who need reminding how structural injustice works. For anyone who thinks that something as harmful as racism is merely a matter of personal prejudice or that speaking of white privilege is somehow unnecessary. In this case, Gilliard — the director of the racial righteousness program of the Evangelical Covenant Church and an ordained ministry — explores why it might be that the US has more people locked in jails and prisons than any other country in the history of the word. He offers a Christian lens through which we can study what has come to be called mass incarceration (and how it has become a lucrative industry.) He unpacked what some call the school-to-prison pipelines in some under resourced schools and proposes some ways “authentic rehabilitation, lasting transformation, and healthy reintegration”  can happen within this broken system.

I suppose most BookNotes readers know of the groundbreaking 2010 book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It documented the facts about inequitable punishments faced by Blacks and is still often discussed. Publishers Weekly gave Gilliard’s Rethinking Incarceration a starred review, saying it is “an outstanding addition to this incredibly important conversation.” Indeed.

Subversive Witness: Scriptures Call to Leverage Privilege Dominique Dubois Gilliard (IVP) $24.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $17.49

In the riveting presentation done by Rev. Gilliard at the Harrisburg Church of the Brethren Summit, the theologically and racially and generationally diverse folks rose to their feet (and to the book table), searching for the book that further shared his many compelling points. Much of his talk about justice and reconciliation and boldness and fidelity in the face of a dangerous Empire, came from this great book. It is, I am happy to say, rooted in Bible stories, freshly proclaimed and interpreted with surprising relevance. From Pharaoh’s daughter we learn about leveraging privilege to resist systemic sin. He has a chapter (based on Esther) about standing in solidarity (and three cheers for his preaching about Vashti, too.) Moses births liberation and Paul and Silas come in the picture, as well. Of course, he has chapter of Jesus’s own incarnational model of “abandoning and leveraging privilege to proclaim good news.”) Too few books explore Zacchaeus as well as Dominique does here. He boldly has a whole chapter on the call to repentance, and the final chapter of Subversive Witness is “producing fruit in keeping with repentance.”

If anybody who bad-mouths being “woke” or dismisses out of hand every bit of critical race theory they should read this fabulous book that offers a radical critique of privilege and power all the while drawing on classic Bible characters and their redemptive stories. God is at work in the world and as we learn from Scripture, we can be empowered by God’s own Spirit to resist the tragedies of injustice and help bring repair to this broken world. From his wonderful allusions to Isaiah 58 to his exploration of Luke 4 and on and on, Dominique Dubois Gilliard here give us a book that many of us should study. Hooray.

“This book is an absolute gift that can shakes out of our discontent…” —Jenny Yang, co-author of Welcome the Stranger

BOOK BY ISAAC SAMUEL VILLEGAS

Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice Isaac Samuel Villegas (Eerdmans) $22.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $16.09

Villegas’s presentation at the Harrisburg Summit focused on work he does as a Mennonite minister around issues of immigration justice. The book is one of dozens we stock on this hot topic and it is recent and up to date. One of the great features of his lecture — I won’t say it was a pleasure, exactly, as some of it moved us to tears, but it was an excellently crafted talk! — was that it deftly combined data and research with stories and testimony. Yes, we had graphs and charts and gruesome maps documenting deaths of migrants in Arizona and yes there was data enough to convince even skeptics that our nation is not going about our adjudication of migrating people (made in God’s image) in a good or decent manner.

But Villegas was engaging as a speaker with stories about artists who commemorate the deceased out of simply decency, about meals eaten with immigrants (and Christmas tamales made by hand in detention centers when anything from the commissary is vastly overpriced.) About active resistance as ICE brutes kidnap fellow citizens or those seeking legal asylum. After soberly listing the names of the individuals who have died (usually under suspicious circumstances) while in US detention just this year we cried out after each name (in the fashion of those bearing witness to those disappeared by right wing death squads in Central America during their most terrible war years) “Presente!”

Migrant God is applied theology, shared with very good writing, with stories and Scripture. The analysis and information of each chapter starts with episodes “on the ground.” (Perhaps you have read some of Villegas’s stories in The Christian Century or Anabaptist World.) From the humanity found in migrant shelters to nonviolent direct action protests, Isaac takes us to the sites of the good work many are doing to resist dehumanization and injustice. As the back cover puts it, it is “a stirring read for anyone who wants to shift the conversations about immigration toward a more holistic Christian vision of life lived in solidarity with migrants.” As Isaac pointed out, the Bible really is, after all, a story of migration…

Isaac Villegas’s Migrant God isn’t just a book full of powerful, often overwhelming, stories. It is certainly that. But it is also a book that serves as a powerful, often overwhelming, political ‘vision of belonging’ — reminding us that amidst the darkness of what nations do daily to God’s migrant people, a light overwhelms the darkness, and the darkness has neither overcome nor comprehended it. — Jonathan Tran, associate dean for faculty and associate professor of theology in Great Texts, Baylor University; author of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

BOOKS BY DREW G.I. HART

In the latest “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” I am interviewed by a CCO friend about these three Drew Hart books; watch the half hour impromptu conversation at YouTube or listen in, true podcast style, at Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way theChurch Views Racism Drew G.I.Hart (Herald Press) $16.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.89

I do not have to belabor this — I’ve written about all three of Drew’s good books before — but Hart is an important voice for a variety of reasons. Not least, he is a a Pennsylvania Anabaptist (raised Brethren-in-Christ and now a member of First Church of the Brethren in Harrisburg.) While he is not alone, the historic Anabaptist movement has been largely white. (Speaking of mostly white denominations, Hart got his PhD at a Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia; ya can’t blame him since he’s often seen sporting a Phillies cap.) So he has navigated some things and has a ton of savvy insight from his lived experience within his minority denomination. He is now a beloved prof at Messiah University here in central PA.

I’ve often suggested to people that Trouble I’ve Seen is one of the best introductions to a vivid, Christian prophetic denunciation of racism that moves us to action.  As Efrem Smith puts it, “you won’t be comfortable with this read, but you will be led into the deep waters of the social dilemma and reality of the race matrix.” In the end, he says,”the church can be a bridge over these troubled waters.” The book is bracing but is practical, too, as he makes suggestions for exactly how churches can take steps to live in greater solidarity with the oppressed.

The book is energetic and captivating, too. You’ll learn a lot about the Bible and a bit about hip-hop; about Bonhoeffer, too. You’ll hear his stories of being at a largely white, evangelical Christian college and about a trip to Kenya, and his encounters on the urban streets of a mid-sized US city. It’s a very worthy read.

Who Will Be a Witness? Igniting Activism for God’s Justice, Love, and Deliverance Drew G. I. Hart (Herald Press) $18.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.59

If Trouble I’ve Seen was passionate and poignant and powerful as an introduction to the Biblical call to be anti-racist, Who Will Be a Witness? is more so. It is a thicker, more thorough book, its scope is broader, and it is even more laden with stories and Biblical and theological studies. It seems wrong to say it is entertaining, but it is engaging, as they say these days, captivating as a bona-fide page-turner. Again, we are fans of this book and have highlighted it before. I am grateful for its big picture vision of Kingdom activism and how Hart draws so many themes together in calling us to a spiritual awakening of the sort that would resist political and social injustice and struggled against the principalities and powers.

One can sense how his vision in this book is a bit broader (or at least articulated and framed around God’s desires beyond racial matters) and how even though it is a popular level read, he’s rooted in serious learning. The great Otis Moss III writes on the back:

Drew Hart is a brilliant public intellectual, preacher, and cultural critic… Do yourself a favor and purchase this book.

Richard Hughes — a peacemaker par excellence (especially around polarizations in higher education) — says that it is “brimming over with moral urgency.” And these days, that is a good thing.

The best-selling album of 1973 (before Drew’s time — I’m dating myself) was 1972s The World Is a Ghetto by the horn-driven, funky, samba-influenced Black band War. It seemed to almost draw gospel themes and black power critique and hints at global concerns. I just happen to be listening to it again these days, and it dawns on me that maybe that’s what Who Will Be a Witness? does — moves the liberating power explored by the likes of James Cone, say, into the global vision a radical church in language ordinary people can get.. Can we inspire our people for this kind of good work? This book will help.

Making It Plain: Why We Need Anabaptism and the Black Church Drew G.I. Hart (Herald Press) $21.99 // OUR 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $17.59

I raved about this when I first reviewed it briefly at a previous BookNotes and while I know it’s a bit hard to sell — Anabaptism? The Black Church? — I think at this price you can’t go wrong.

Look: we often speak, sometimes loudly, about being ecumenical and reading widely. One of the small things that seems to be appreciated by many of our Hearts & Minds customers and friends is that we invite folks to read outside their comfort zones. Maybe conservative political thinking for progressives? Maybe mainline Protestant theologians for evangelicals? Maybe some Russian Orthodox spirituality for Mennonites? And who doesn’t love Henri Nouwen and Mother Teresa, just two of the hundreds and hundreds of Catholic authors we stock. We are all made richer as we expose ourselves (sometimes carefully) to new authors and fresh ideas. Right?

And so, a book about two minority and historically persecuted churches, together? Win-win!

Dr. Hart is a partisan, as a scholar of the black church standing within the Anabaptist tradition. But this book is an informative and valuable read even if you don’t buy his thesis that these two faith traditions are, in a way, the answer to the obvious problems of generic, evangelical, mega-church spirituality. Not to mention the often bland mainline Protestant practice. If (and these are my words, not his) mainline, ecumenical Protestant theology has the tendency to erode Biblical truth and lose a gospel centeredness ending up leaning towards a milquetoast accommodation to whatever, and zealous evangelicalism goes off the rails towards a legalistic fundamentalism, then (unless one becomes Catholic or Orthodox) how do we regain a beautiful and socially relevant mere Christianity? Maybe to keep us honest (whether we are liberal Protestants or conservative evangelicals or something else yet again) we need the witness of our brothers and sisters in the historic black church and our brothers and sisters in the historic peace churches.

Making It Plain has that agenda, making a vibrant and sensible case that these traditions, insofar as they haven’t bowed the knee to cultural idols and the political zeitgeist, have healing waters from which we can all drink. Hart shows how their unique tendencies and postures and lifestyles is in some ways more faithful and helpful than bland Protestantism or fiery but overly personal evangelicalism. He’s on to something, ya know.

Part of what drives this insightful story — I hardly have to say it — is that corroding the Biblical vision of his previous two books (racial justice, say, and shalom-building liberation activism) are the blights of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. If these idols and ideologies have been centuries in the making, maybe we need equally ancient ways to provide a counter to them. Maybe the black church and the Anabaptist tradition, both who were shaped by their being on the margins, have something to offer to counter the domination and violence, even the colonialism and power-mongering that exists today. I very highly recommend this book as a creative and even exciting little thought experiment, as an example of humility in learning. Stretch yourself, learning about the spiritual impulses of these two faith traditions — faith traditions that are known, at least, for taking Jesus seriously. That’s a good start, eh?

Latasha Morrison (author of Be the Bridge) is a black Christian leader who notes that “Hart doesn’t just critique the church. He equips us to live the gospel with courage and clarity.”

 

And one of his good friends (and his podcast partner) Jarrod McKenna, calls this “an incendiary invitation to Anablacktivism” and says it shows “the fire of radical discipleship that our Lord wishes were already ablaze.”

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In my latest “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast I am interviewed by a CCO friend about these three Drew Hart books; watch the half hour impromptu conversation at YouTube or listen in, true podcast style, at Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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BookNotes

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIFTEEN BOOKS ABOUT STORY, WRITING & LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how the publisher describes this project:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the flyleaf notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BookNotes

I know last week’s big book list about living as “resurrectionaries” had enough good stuff to keep our bookworms busy for months there is one more aspect of a resurrectionary life that I want to highlight and that is nurturing a redeemed and lively imagination. I’ll name a good handful that will be very helpful here (including a few on poetry) which will lead into our reader’s guide to the work of poet-priest-literary scholar, the Reverend Malcolm Guite. We’ve been a fan and promoter of his poetry for maybe fifteen years; I think the first collection we discovered was Sounding the Seasons (and one of our very first buyers may have been the late Leslie Bustard of Square Halo Books.) Guite’s brand new first volume of his Merlin’s Isle four part “Arthuriad” is called Galahad and the Grail and it is getting rave reviews. We have autographed copies. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You see, to live in the power of the resurrection surely means more than ginning up enthusiasm for dedicated discipleship; sure we need commitment and zeal but it seems that if Jesus’s defeat of Death means anything, it means that we are in a whole new world or “new creation” as 2 Corinthians 5:17 puts it. We need to be able to imagine what it looks like for Christ’s regime to break into human history. I’m convinced we need to learn to see through Godly lenses which means we need to reboot our imaginations. They need “baptized” as C.S. Lewis famously put it. Hence, the practice of reading, including fiction and poetry and literary memoir.

(And this really is the premise of all of Guite’s remarkable books, that we must “lift the veil” to discover a sacramental world being renewed by and in and for the Risen Christ.)

I have highlighted here before a stunning book called Discipling the Diseased Imagination: Spiritual Formation and the Healing of Our Hearts by Dordt College professor Justin Ariel Bailey (Baker Academic; $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99.) I wish it had explored a bit more of the essentially aesthetic aspect of this, but, nonetheless, is is a rich and deep study of praying well, deeply, for the transformation of the “eyes of our heart.” As Alex Sosler puts it on the back cover, “the imagination is the center of our discipleship” and this book helps us reimagine in a way that offers “the moral imperative of possibility.”  Highly recommended.

Discipling the Diseased Imagination will help readers understand just how powerful and formative the imagination is to mind, heart, and spirit. This book will inspire readers to refill and reform the imagination in everyday ways that will restore it to its glorious, God-given purpose. — Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

The modern sickness of the soul runs deeper than most diagnoses are able to reach. Discipling the Diseased Imagination is the treatment plan the church sorely needs. With a rare blend of intellectual depth, pastoral care, and elegant prose, Bailey prescribes a vision for the Christian life that is honest, humane, and hopeful. — Joshua Chatraw, Beeson Divinity School and Samford University, author of Telling a Better Story: How to Talk about God in a Skeptical Age   

Another book that might be in a similar wheelhouse is the wonderful Becoming By Beholding: The Power of Imagination in Spiritual Formation by Lana Davis (Baker Academic; $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39.) Davis got her PhD from Baylor and teaches at Indiana Wesleyan University. This is a very rich and deeply thoughtful book.

Listen up:

Becoming by Beholding is a work to behold. Not only is this book a study in beauty, imagination, and spiritual formation; it also models the very practices it preaches. To read it is to witness beauty and imagination at work and thus to leave its pages better formed and more ready to be formed by all the goodness the world has to offer. — Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

Becoming by Beholding ushers us into a rich, strange, and beautiful art gallery that unveils our own hearts and minds. Davis’s engaging tour draws deeply from the Christian tradition of spiritual masters to show how the architecture of Chartres Cathedral, iconic imagery of Jesus, Station Island’s stations of the cross, and the literary genius of Dante teem with spiritual insights that reveal Christ and his life in us. — Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Calvin University; author of Glittering Vices

Do you think nonfiction is more serious, grown-up, and useful than moving stories, beautiful buildings, and pretty pictures? Let Davis guide you through the Christian artists and makers who testify across the centuries that the stories and images we behold indelibly shape our souls. — Jeffrey Bilbro, Grove City College; editor-in-chief, Front Porch Republic, author of Reading the Times

Beauty and Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage by Haejin Shim Fujimura and Makoto Fujimura (Brazos Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99. I have written about this already, inviting folks to pre-order it (and it is one of our personal favorites this season, now out) but it deserves to be named here as we think about how new creation theology brought in by the power of resurrection might play out in our culture. Beauty and Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage by Haejin and Mako Fujimura  is a perfect book to help us think and be inspired to care not only about aesthetics, the arts, creativity, and our holy imaginations but how that might be informed by the Biblical call to do justice. In a world of tragic hurt and war do we have time for beauty? Give the virtues of beauty, though, can we harness goodness to fight injustice? Written by a thoughtful lawyer /activist and world-class visual artist — both very good writers, too! — this certainly reminds us of the glories of living after the resurrection with “abundance and courage.” Wow. I am in awe.

Maybe my favorite way into thinking about the redemptive role of a redeemed imagination for ordinary Christian resurrectionaries is the lovely, delightful, must-read guide to reading widely, the wonderful World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading by Jeff Crosby (Paraclete; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19.) I named it a favorite book of 2025 and started the new year off with a fun online webinar with Jeff chatting about the book and the nature of the reading life. (You can watch or re-watch that HERE.) I suppose I ought not overstate this but I am sure it is nearly an axiom for many of us: the very best models of faith, the most noble people we know, the prophets and mystics and leaders and quiet servants are all readers. I can hardly imagine growing as a person of faith without books as tools for spiritual formation and the reformation of my  desires. So, yes, buying and reading books matters, especially if we have a wide diet to exercise the mind and widen the heart. World of Wonders will inspire and guide you.

There is a chapter in World of Wonders that is tremendously important, and I suspect one that is under appreciated among us. It is the chapter called “The Power of Paying Attention: Reading Poetry” (with a closing reflection by Luci Shaw.) The previous chapter (“The Power of Story: Reading Fiction”) is really, really good, but my hunch is that nobody skipped that chapter. But the poetry one? Come on, you can admit it…

Re-visit those two chapters and you will better understand what I mean here when I talk about allowing God to give us a renewed mind and a transformed imagination. Deeply rooted in the aesthetic dimension of life — perhaps as discussed so colorfully in the famous Rainbows for the Fallen World by Calvin Seerveld — the art of reading poetry can help.

After that chapter of Jeff Crosby’s in World of Wonders if you want a serious dive into how to appreciate poetry as part of your spiritual formation and Christian life, I highly recommend Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church by Abram Van Engen (Eerdmans; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59.) Jamie Smith calls it “a master class and love letter.” It really is the best comprehensive argument for why people of faith need to pay attention to poetry. It does inspire church folks to use poetry in worship and such but it really isn’t as much about the church, as such, but just how all of God’s children need the art of poetry.

What to know how some poets describe their work as a way of helping others see and imagine and feel and live differently?

You will love dipping into the many interviews found it the wonderful Rabbit Room project An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Conversations with Poets About What Matters Most by Ben Palpate (Rabbit Room Press; $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40.) I’ve reviewed this before (noting how interestingly it is written, bringing you into the conversations with colorful description of the meetings) but wanted to suggest it again as it would be so good for anyone wanting to deepen their imaginative capacities. And, yes, there is a great interview with Malcolm Guite. This really is a fun book and highly recommended.

 

Speaking of great conversations with poets, Baylor University Press just released a remarkable work pulled together by two professors and working poets, George David Clark of Washington & Jefferson University in Western Pennsylvania and L.S. Klatt (a good, long-time friend) formerly of Pittsburgh and for many years, now, a beloved prof at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. It is called Playing with Fire: Christian Poets Reflect on Faith and Practice (Baylor University Press; $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE =$26.39.) While I am positive this serious book will be of interest — that’s putting it blandly; it may be very exciting! — for ordinary readers, it is a must for poets and writers and English teachers.  It is so new I haven’t seen it yet, but it is shipping any day now. I trust the many rave reviews it has already gotten. Here are two you can trust that explain this smart work a bit.

These lively reflections on how faith and poetry intersect cover a surprising range. The writers’ deep appreciation of poets who preceded them infuses their essays with edifying gratitude. Poems, personal stories, and threads of theory offer readers rich food for thought, incentives to return to beloved poets, introductions to new ones, and ample reason to rejoice. — Marilyn McEntyre, author of When Poets Pray, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, and Start with a Word

This book is a symphony of words and a chorus of voices from which emerges a song about poetry. Hearing the singular Word echoing in the song of the Muses, these poets reflect on what it means to faithfully answer the call to create. Wonderfully oblique, bringing their poetic verve to prose, these essays are moving testimonies (the first paragraph of George David Clark’s contribution made me weep). Wander in their words and rekindle-or find-a devotion to poetry. — James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin University, author of Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Nature Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets More Great Poetry Julian Peters (Plough Publishing) $29.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

Speaking of poetry and the imagination, one of the brand new and nothing-short-of-brilliant examples of a marvelously creative way to exercise our imaginations is to behold the amazing, new collection by Julian Peters who uses a variety of graphic novel / adult comic stylings to illustrate classic and contemporary poems. Like his previous (and equally amazing) Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry, the ever-interesting Plough Publishing invited Peters to re-interpret visually almost 25 poems of nature. In a variety of illustrative styles he does everything from “Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening” to Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur” to “Daybreak in Alabama” by Langston Hughes. From Emily Dickinson to Joy Harjo to Gwendolyn Brooks to Dylan Thomas to Wordsworth and Rossetti  and more — including some Asian writers of haiku, Nature Poems to See By is fabulous beyond words.

THE WORK OF MALCOLM GUITE

For a variety of reasons for this BookNotes column I want to highlight the work of Malcolm Guite. As you know from a previous BookNotes, we have been touting his new Galahad and the Grail which was so very handsomely produced by Rabbit Room Press. It released about a week ago. He’s an important literary figure, an ally and mentor in helping people of faith think deeply and nurture a sanctified imagination; he’s a working poet and writer at the top of his craft. Here are the books of his that you should know.

For what it is worth, my next “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast (which you can watch on YouTube or listen to at Apple Podcasts or at Spotify) is a conversation with yours truly and my always energetic pal from the CCO, Phil Schiavoni, talking this time about Malcolm Guite. Google it in a few days and or watch our Hearts & Minds Facebook page where I always post the links. Enjoy!

Galahad and the Grail: Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts (Rabbit Room Press) $34.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99

The accolades are building up, from the visionary sense of Guite’s project (the last person to do an large, epic poem of the Arthurian cycles was Tennyson over a century ago) to the sturdy and excellent craftsmanship of the book itself (kudos to Stephen Crotts for the amazing illustrations) to the poetically vivid storytelling. The award winning novelist (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Piranesi) Susanna Clarke writes in the foreword that this is “an astonishing achievement, a ballad that picks you up and sweeps you onward into adventure, solemn magic, and beauty.”

The good folks at Rabbit Room note that Guite is in the epic footsteps of Spenser, Milton, Dante, and Tennyson “and is a story to be enjoyed by young and old alike, a story to be read aloud among friends and family, a story to be cherished for generations to come.” Will you take up the tale?

Our autographed copies are offered while supplies last.

Watch this beautifully filmed trailer for the book to see if it might inspire you. (It has some wonderful footage of a very, very old and exceptionally rare manuscript which you don’t want to miss.)

We are taking pre-orders for volume two in the Merlin’s Isle series, coming early November  2026, The Coming of Arthur, also illustrated by the exceptionally talented Stephen Crotts. (Rabbit Room Press) $34.95 // OUR PRE-ORDER PRICE = $27.99

Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God Malcolm Guite (Square Halo Books) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I know I described this in my last BookNotes, thinking that reading about imagination would be a key aspect of discipleship informed by resurrection. I wrote that, for resurrectionaries needing a short but weighty reminder or some guidance about a faithful use of our imaginations, the four talks in Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God might be good for you.

The chapters are, “Imagination and the Kingdom of God”, “Christ and the Artistic Imagination”, “Christ and the Moral Imagination”, and “Christ and the Prophetic Imagination.”

In an epilogue Malcolm cites a Blake poem and reminds us that “all prophetic art is intended to arouse us and stir us to action. How do we awake from the deadly sleep?” This is the resurrectionary question — how wake up, how do we lift the veil?  Pondering this book is part of the answer.

The Word Within the Words Malcolm Guite (Fortress Press) $14.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.20

This little volume is in the fascinating “My Theology” series of short, compact-sized testimonials by aa vast array of contemporary thinkers, theologians, and scholars. I love this so much as it is a succinct introduction to the good insight that Christ Himself is the Word and therefore speech and language — words! — matter.  In Guite’s lovely prose he invites us to think how poetry itself (and, more widely, the poetic imagination) can help us (as it helps him) understand and interpret our faith.

There are short chapters on Scripture, liturgy, and sacraments, lots of Bible reflection, some theology and history and all kind of a sort of poetry, which after all, can help us stand in wonder at the Logos that “underlies all things.” As Guite nicely asserts, poetry is “capable of transfiguring our vision and transforming our lives.”

Mariner: A Theological Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge Malcolm Guite (IVP Academic) $42.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $34.39

This is in the great Studies in Theology and the Arts series that IVP Academic does (oh, they are all so good!) This may be Guite’s most academic study, a serious look at Coleridge and his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Guite shows that Coleridge’s own life paralleled the experience in his famous poem. As the publisher notes, “On this theological voyage, Guite draws out the continuing relevance of this work and the ability of poetry to communicate the truths of humanity’s fallenness, our need for grace, and the possibility of redemption.”

Malcolm Guite has established himself as one of the leading Christian poets of our time. This positions him to offer a distinctive reading of a poetic giant of the past, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As expected, Mariner is exceptionally rich, penetrating, and absorbing. — Jeremy Begbie, professor of theology, director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, Duke Divinity School, Duke University

Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination Malcolm Guides (Routledge) $62.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $50.39

If Mariner is one of the more magisterial gems of Guite’s scholarly work, this is certainly his crowing achievement in this genre. It is his breathtakingly vital poetics, a major contribution to theological reflection on the poetry and more. It is in the prestigious “Routledge Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts” line, for which serious students can rejoice.

Malcolm Guite, in this wide-ranging and original study, helps us see how poetry is — if we let ourselves be drawn in and shaped by it — a means of making connections with the fundamental way things are, and so too a way of connecting with a God who is himself a pattern of ‘connection’ as Trinity, open to share the divine reality with created life. Here are materials for a profound theology of the imagination, developed in dialogue with writers both familiar and unfamiliar, beautifully combining close reading with wide horizons. — Rowan Williams, author of A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for Searching the Heart and Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

• In Every Corner Sing: A Poet’s Corner Collection (Canterbury Press) $23.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19
• Heaven in Ordinary: A Poet’s Corner Collection (Canterbury Press) $23.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19
• Sounding Heaven & Earth: A Poet’s Corner Collection (Canterbury Press) $20.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79

These three lovely volumes are each collections of Guite’s beloved back page columns from the UK The Church Times. Most of us here in the States don’t get to see these short essays but they are wonderul. It is said he offers acute observations, drawing together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred.

On summary of one notes that it offers “more than seventy reflections that create momentary pauses in the bustle of life to take soundings, to savor an experience and hold it for a moment to the light before it slips away and ask, ‘Are there some hidden depths here?’”

Some of these “soundings delighting sound itself: in words, in sic, in bells and birdsong.” This is sweet, thoughtful, rich and reflective. No one is better, but each is a lovely collection.

POETRY

Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for Christian Year  Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80

One of his most popular this offers lovely, useful poems in the sonnet form for the liturgical calendar. This is a somewhat expanded edition and his best-selling collection. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

The Singing Bowl: Collected Poems Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

This includes some of his earliest published work (from two out of print chap books.) It got a rave review in the importnt New Directions journal and has a blurb by Holly Ordway who says “we need Christian writers who can speak about both the dark and the light.”  Very good.

 

 

 

Parable and Paradox: Sonnets on the Sayings of Jesus and Other Poems Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

In a way, this is a return to the form of Sound the Seasons and while not exactly a sequel, does offer exceptional poems inspired by gospel texts. Hooray.

There are 50 sonnets that focus on many passages in the Gospels: the Beatitudes, parables and miracles, teachings on the Kingdom, and the ‘hard sayings’ – Jesus’ challenging demands with which we wrestle.

And, as it says on the back, “A sequence of five sonnets on ‘The Wilderness’, exploring mysterious stories of divine encounter such as Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, poetic reflections on music, hospitality and ecology.” There are seven short poems celebrating the days of creation. Nicely, there’s a biblical index pairing the poems with scripture readings for use in worship.

Love Remember: 40 Poems of Loss, Lament and Hope Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80

Reflecting on the Holly Ordway quote, above, we are glad for this blend of works on loss and lament, and a grace-filled, sober hope. I wasn’t sure if I should list this here as it isn’t mostly his work but his selections, curation, and discussion of these forty amazing pieces. Some you will know, some you may not; there are lots of classic poets and some fresh voices.  This is a really, really valuable resource and I do suggest it..

 

After Prayer: New Sonnets and Other Poems Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

This is an extraordinary bit of work. Brit-lit geeks (and, well all of us, really) might enjoy knowing that the title sequence (as the book jacket explains) “is written in response to George Herbert’s beautiful and well-loved poem ‘Prayer’,and comprises twenty-seven sonnets which discover behind the poem’s quick succesion of dazzling images for prayer a deeper soul-story and a spiritual journey that reflects the heights and depths of human experience and mirrors the poet’s own journey.”

He’s up to something important here, standing on the shoulders of the elders, entering the conversation within the canon, even, but, at the end one realizes these are just lovely, even inspiring poems. Very nicely done.

David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80

Oh my, this fairly recent collection is all inspired by the Psalms. It may be the one we’ve sold the most of and is well-loved by both seasoned poetry aficionados and newbies. There are 150 poems each one inspired by one of the Psalms.

As the publisher notes: “A corona is a crown, the pearly glow around the sun in certain astronomical conditions and a poetic form where interlinking lines connect a sequence. It is the perfect name therefore for this new collection of 150 poems by the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite, each one written in response to the Bible’s 150 psalms.”

Some of these are provocative, many are exquiste. The idea of a crown is cool  I’m not a fan of the cover, but the book is truly excellent.

Give it a try — and if it gets you more engaged in reading the Psalter, all the better, eh?

Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80

This is, in format, somewhat like the above-listed Love, Loss in that it is a devotional based on poems by others. He chooses a Lenten themed poem and reflects on it. Very good stuff, for sure. From Saint John of the Cross to Dante to Seamus Heaney to Czelaw Milosz to several of his own, this is fabulous.

If you get this now you may not be able to wait until next Lent, as so much of this is so rich and meaningful. Yes!

 

Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

This, too, is, like the one above for Lent and Eastertide, is a set of reflections inspired by poems, far flung from across time and space, as they say. Most are British but there are others, some are quite contemporary.

As above, there is an expert and often moving poem selected, then reflected upon. I hesitate to say it is “explained” as that isn’t quite it, but he ruminates bringing Advent waiting ad hope showing how these artful poems help us live into this season of the church calandar. There are pieces about Advent, yes, but some are classic Christmasy and on into Epiphany.

Nice choices, thoughtful stuff. I don’t know what I like better, his literary chops as a major critic or his priestly and pastoral work as a caring Christian leader. Bless the Lord, my friends!

Stations of the Resurrection: Encounters with the Risen Christ Malcolm Guite & Guli Francis-Dehqani, illustrated by Iain McKillop (Church House Publications) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Stations of the Resurrection offers reflections on each of the resurrection appearances described in the gospels from the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite and the much admired writer and bishop, Guli Francis-Dehqani, accompanied by color illustrations from the priest-artist Iain McKillop. Bishop Guli draws on her first hand knowledge of Middle Eastern culture to explore these stories and Malcolm Guite offers a sonnet in response to each of them – many published here for the first time – with reflections on the texts that inspired them. This imaginative and inspirational resource also includes the complete Stations of the Resurrection liturgies from Common Worship Times and Seasons that commemorate each of the nineteen events, allowing the book to be used for both personal devotional use and liturgical celebration.

…AND MORE

Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings  Malcolm Guite, Julia Golding, and Simon Horobin (Canterbury Press) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80

Yes, this is a Lenten reader, a daily devotional with a full third of the pieces written by Guite. The whole book, though, exudes a fabulous familiarity with the Inklings and friends, with short, inspiring reading on Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, etcetera, etcetera. The title is fabulous, isn’t it? This is a must for fans!

Thank you, Malcolm Guite, for your Inkling-ish willingness to collaborate.

 

The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad edited by Jennifer Trafton, illustrated by Ned Bustard (Rabbit Room Press) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

There is only one chapter here by Guite but as we now know he has been living in these Arthurian tales for a long time. This is a delightful and actually remarkable book — leather-covered with illustrations by Bustard, cleverly reported as recently found memoranda — with a handful of creative authors each offering an imagined new chapter of the Galahad stories. By turns whimsical and curious, spiritual and exciting, these are from the likes of Jonathan Rogers (a YA fiction wrier and Flannery O’Connor scholar, no less), Junius Johnson, Andrew Peterson, Doug McKelvey (famous for Every Moment Holy), Mark Bertram, Annie Nardone, and, of course, the 400-line ballad by Malcolm Guite. I had to list it here, eh?

Ordinary Saints: Living Everyday Life to the Glory of God edited by Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

There’s a bit of a story here that’s fun and perhaps important. As you may know this is a big collection of inspiring (short) essays about how doing ordinary things can glorify God. Leaning into a spirituality of the mundane (and, I might add, the priesthood of all believers) common but Godly folks write about everything from gardening to making playlists to making love, from raising chickens to working in retail (by yours truly.) Some pieces are a bit serious (grand-parenting, mourning, Calvin Seerveld on knowing, Curt Thompson on being present) but one of the standouts is Malcolm Guite’s entertaining piece on smoking his pipe. In fact he created three poems about it, too (and explains why) so you not only get this rare essay by Guite on glorifying God through this relaxing practice but get three poems not published elsewhere.

And here, then, is the story: designer Ned Bustard used a great piece by Stephen Crotts of Guite smoking a pipe to illustrate that chapter and, or so I’ve heard, Guite liked it so much he ended up asking Stephen to the UK where they hiked around dreaming up the design for Guite’s Galahad. Everybody loves the Crotts’s black and white linocut and wood engraving in Galahad and the Grail (not to mention the cover design) and we might suggest this is where their collaboration began. That linocut first done for Ordinary Saints now graces the back flyleaf of the cover of Galahad the Grail. Hooray.

Every Moment Holy Volume III: The Work of the People compiled and edited by Doug McKelvey & Ned Bustard (Rabbit Room Press) 

standard edition – larger-sized leather-bound hardback $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00 OR personal edition –  smaller-size leather-bound soft, flexible $25.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00

Please remember to tell us which size you want.

Many know and love the four Every Moment Holy editions. The first three volumes are done in two editions or versions, the larger hardback or the smaller flexible compact one. Volumes I and II are both by McKelvey & Bustard but Volume III is a bit different. The art is by various illustrators using their own styles of woodcuts, linocuts and other black & white prints. And the prayers are by a variety of authors, writing out lovely litanies for ordinary life and daily things. What a way to sanctify the mundane, to liturgically offer prayer for real world episodes. Some of the prayers are older, classic, even, and some are crafted by modern writers. And yes, Malcolm Guite has more than one offering here. It’s a big book laden with lovely words and mature praying, but figured we should alert you that Guite is a contributor. So is Stephen Crotts. Thanks be to God.

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BookNotes

RESURRECTIONARY LIVING

Okay, I’ll admit. Maybe it’s hokey word.

I know it hasn’t caught on since I last used it here.

(Look back at some of the archived post-Easter BookNotes columns if you’d like; I’ve done a few on this very theme.)

I do kinda like the contrast with the over-used “revolutionary” word. (With apologies to N.T. Wright, whose book The Day the Revolution Began on the new-creation implications of the cross I truly, truly love.) I’m no political philosopher but I think Abraham Kuyper, the early 20th century pastor turned public theologian who became the Prime Minister of Holland, was on to something when he called his Christian political party the anti-revolutionary party. They were protesting the ugly “throw the baby out with the bathwater” overturning everything zeal of the French Revolutionaries, with their secularizing ideologies and guillotines. So Kuyper wanted reformation, not revolution. One doesn’t need to read Edmund Burke to see the wisdom of that.

But yet there is something pretty dramatic — in a way, revolutionary — about the claim that God came to Earth in a real human body, died, and was risen as a foretaste of the restoration of creation project God is all about. What Jesus called His Kingdom. What Wright calls, in his brand new one, God’s Homecoming. With Christ the crucified as risen King — “you can trust at God with scars” says Jared Ayers in his book by that name — we are, the Bible says, swept up in the movement, participants in the regime change, fueled by the Holy Spirit power that rose Christ out of the grave.

Here are a handful of books that come to mind that would help you double down on this essential truth. I know you’ll be told on Easter Sunday that the resurrection is everything. Maybe these books will help explore more of what that means and help you live it out.

You may know I love the old Rob Bell video simply called Resurrection. It is so spot on. There’s a line part way through when he stops amidst the visual sizzle and dramatic words about all of life being redeemed and he looks at the camera and asks Do. You. Believe. This?

As you’ve entered the story of God’s passion in these weeks we call Lent and especially when you experience the services of Holy Week and feel the horror of it all anew — for some of us it is reassuring that we are not alone in our suffering and the Holy Week church services are so very meaningful — you will then be primed for the mystery of Holy Saturday and the glories of Easter. It’s too early to say it now, but you know what we will shout on Sunday morning.

So if He is risen (indeed) then, so what?

Here are two handfuls of titles that could help connect some dots or inspire you anew. Some are for those who want sophisticated reading and others are a bit more basic; there is something for everyone. I won’t say as much about them as I could. Order them now and you’ll be glad next week to have some hefty help in being a resurrectionary.

ALL BOOKS 20% OFF

12 about the cross and resurrection

Resurrection: 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us Derek Vreeland (NavPress) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

“Never again will death have the last word.” This is large on the back of this “God in the Neighborhood” Bible study, a really fine and creatively done group study perhaps inspired by the Eugene Peterson paraphrase (from The Message) of John 1 where Christ “moves into the neighborhood.” The first excellent study in this series was Incarnation, followed by Crucifixion, and then this recent Resurrection which leads us through the Easter story where — as they put it — “God joins us in life anew.”

Life anew. I like that. Sounds resurrectionary. Or maybe like that line from the old Anglican and Lutheran liturgy (from Romans 8:4) about “walking in newness of life.”

I’m a fan of Vreeland’s books. He has a degree from Asbury and works with Brian Zahn at Word of Life Church in Missouri. I so appreciated his book Centering Jesus which reminds us that Christian discipleship is about conforming our ways to Jesus, becoming Christ-like. Anyway, he’s a good thinker and fine writer and in this 8-session study we explore the Easter story and how it leads to new life. Part of this newness, this study shows, is our own restoration to wholeness, with and in God.

There’s a small bit of reading and a closing prayer so even if you don’t have a group with whom to study this, you can use it devotionally or in your own bit of quiet time. The Message paraphrase of the Biblical texts keeps this fresh and applicable.

Journey into Joy: Stations of the Resurrection Andrew Walker (Paulist Press) $21.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.56

We only have a few of these in stock but it is a wonderful book — full color art on sturdy, glossy paper — that adapts the classic Roman Catholic “Stations of the Cross” with a set of studies that follow Jesus and his disciples after the resurrection. It’s designed for the 40 days between the Resurrection and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, highlighting the different places and ways in which Christ appears.

Not only is this richly illustrated with classic art, graphic quotes, and good design, there are Scripture reflections, poetry and prayer to help “lead the reader into an experience of the profound and transforming joy found in our risen Lord.”

Of the many paintings you’ll find pieces from Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, El Greco, Grunewald and more. Walker’s own good words are enhanced with lines from Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Maya Angelou, and the powerful poem by Latin American poet and activist Julia Esquivel, “Threatened with Resurrection.” Very nice.

The Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Justin W. Bass (Lexham Press) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I could say a lot about this short (under 225 trim-sized pages) and punchy book, but suffice it to say it is a really solid argument explaining the evidence for and reliability of the historical information about the death and resurrection of Christ, the very bedrock of faith.  Bass is a good scholar (he’s been in friendly debates with everybody from Bart Ehrman to Mufti Hussain Kamani) and teaches New Testament at in Amman, Jordan.

This is an excellent succinct look at the historical data about Jesus, including a clear summary of what we know about the cruxificition, the resurrection, and the eye-witnesses who encountered him in his new body. The last big chapter is called “The Rise of the Nazarenes” and its a fabulous look at the influence of the followers of Jesus, including brief shou-outs to the great art, literature, music, and social reforms created by followers of Jesus or those in the wake of those living as resurrectionaries down through history. This is informative and useful for anyone, believer or not.

Living the Resurrection: The Risen Christ in Everyday Life Eugene Peterson (NavPress) $9.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

Speaking of brother Eugene. This little book by Peterson has three short chapters opening up the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Resurrection wonder,  resurrection meals, and resurrection friends. There’s a truly memorable introduction by his son Eric Peterson.  Blurbs include lovely comments by Orthodox writer Frederica Matthews-Green, evangelical spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton, Catholic spiritual writer Susan Muto, Methodist preacher William Willimon, and more.

Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus Wesley Hill (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’ve talked about the Fullness of Time series endlessly but for those who have missed it, they are a set of seven small, compact hardbacks (curated and edited by Esau McCaulley) reflecting on the history of one season of the church calendar. Done by different folks of a generally Anglican bent, they offers insights about Biblical teaching informing the season and how that shapes the liturgy, habits practices, and spirituality for those who enter into those phases of Christian living. They are not daily devotionals but they are concise and really, really inspiriting. From Advent to Christmas to Epiphany, from Lent and now to Easter, they are all fabulous. The Pentecost one — to be read anytime, of course, but we celebrate the “day of power for all people” in May — by Fr. Emilio Alvarez is good and the most recent — Ordinary Time: The Season of Growth by Amy Peeler is fantastic.

Anyway, if you want a reminder of the Biblical, theological, and spiritual basis of a resurrectionary lifestyle inspired by rituals and habits experienced at church — and why Easter is a full season, not just a single day — I can’t say enough about this wise and celebratory reflection by the great Wes Hill. Order it today.

Wes is an Episcopal priest and energetic professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan.

Living Easter: 50 Days to Practice Resurrection Laura Kelly Fanucci (Ave Maria Press) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

She starts with the words of St. John Paul II, who said, “We are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our song!”

What a great idea from this beloved Roman Catholic writer, speaker, and blogger (her Substack is The Holy Labor.) She has been on many Catholic media outlets as well as NPR’s Morning Edition, On Being, and The Kelly Clarkson Show. She is upbeat and down to Earth (and funny; her Substack on surviving cancer is called Not a Caring Bridge But a Compassionate Brigade.)

This is her new book which is a simple but clear-headed, wise set of Biblical reflections on the post-resurrection accounts of Jesus, each arranged with a reflection, a invitation to pray, and an (almost always very practical, do-able) action suggestion. There is brightly colored ink in the headlines and nice paper and a few colorful super graphics. Living Easter captures the spirit of living Easter. She has dual degrees from Notre Dame and an advanced MDiv but keeps this plainspoken and inspirational.

This book is not only thoughtful but also profoundly practical, offering ways to make Easter a daily reality. I recommend it to anyone who longs to carry the light of Easter into every corner of life. — Fr. Patrick Mary Briscoe, OP, cohost of the Gosdplaining podcast

The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross Brian Zahnd (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I have written a bit about this before, always saying how beautiful it is, how it includes full color art, that it draws in history and literature and Dylan, of course. (Zahnd is a famous preacher and writer and he knows his Dylan.)  He explains that theologians and anyone who speaks about God must do so at the foot of the cross, that in this singular event, all that we need to know about God is present. I’ve suggested this for Lent, of course, but I think it would be wise to visit it any time. The penultimate chapter is about resurrection  — “The Lamb Upon the Throne”— and the final piece is resurrectionary, a reflection on Christ holding all things together as it says so poetically in Colossians 1.

To the apostolic witnesses, the cross of Christ was never a theory to be solved by theologizing, as if the calculative mind could solve its mysteries through abstraction. The cross can only be narrated, beheld, and shared as a transforming testimony–proclaimed in sermons, symbols, and parables, in the poetry and hymns of lives it has rebirthed. For over four decades, Brian Zahnd has been a poet-preacher-prophet of the cross. I daresay he’s an eyewitness theologian who kneels at its foot. This book is his revelation of who he has seen there. — Bradley Jersak, St. Stephen’s University, New Brunswick,  author of A More Christlike Word

The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Towards a More Compassionate Christology Richard Mouw & Douglas Sweeney (Baker Academic) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This short, older book is accessible if on a deep topic. It is asking how it is that the Christ who made all things — include his fellow humans — also suffers with them. That is, it is that “you can trust a God with scars” thing, again. Yes, it is about the cross, but it is also about who Christ is (that’s the “Christology” word in the subtitle) and how Christ’s suffering is part of His glory. And it is about his victory.

What are the lived implications (they have a chapter on “application”) of the idea that the victorious Christ is also the Christ who suffers? Shouldn’t any resurrectionary project or missional sort of discipleship be shaped by the very ways in which Christ is victorious?

Here’s the thing: they get at this bit of “divine empathy” by exploring African American images and the spiritual insights of people of color. They look at Japanese Christians and black theology and listen to the pain of the oppressed. There is an excellent afterword by one of the most astute thinkers about race, Willie James Jennings.

Arise: A 50-Day Journey into the Mystery of the Resurrection Laura Bedingfeld (Sophia Institute Press) $18.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.16

I have not looked at this big volume much but Bedingfeld’s biblical spirituality has been informed by years of Lectio Divina and careful, prayer and study. She is a dedicated Roman Catholic laywoman (in London) who has written widely about contemplative spirituality and living with theological understanding.

Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame says, “This book promises a depth of understanding that we can translate into concrete resolutions for the daily living out of our role as witnesses of the Resurrection.” Gayle Somers (author of Whispers of Mary: What Twelve Old Testament Women Teach Us About Mary) says it is so wonderfully done that “it will fill your heart with joy and exaltation.”

Resurrection and Renewal: Jesus and the Transformation of Creation Murray A. Rae (Baker Academic) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

Murray Rae, with a PhD from the University of London, is a professor of theology and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church Aotearoa, New Zealand. He’s written a lot, and this new one on the renewal wrought by the resurrection is (according to Joel Green) “both learned and theologically formative, even edifying.” Lucy Peppiatt of the Westminster Theological Center says it is “beautifully written, biblically-rooted, and theological rich.” It is heady, but insists that the bodily resurrection truly changes everything.

Allan Torrance (emeritus at University of St. Andrews) says it is “the most important and, indeed, exciting book on the resurrection to have emerged in half a century.”  Wow.

Whispers of Revolution: Jesus and the Coming of God as King Michael Bird (Baker Academic) $39.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99

There’s that revolutionary word, again, but I trust Bird so very much I’ll give him a pass. He certainly doesn’t imply we are sweeping away all of history; Bird explore’s how Jesus’s work is a fulfillment of ancient prophecy and that He is Israel’s savior. For him, this Kingdom “revolution” will be a restoration of all creation — not a demolishing but a healing. This is not as spicy and applicable as some of the stuff has done with N.T. Wright — think of Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies — but it shows his academic writing as a historical theologian.  It is said he “forges a path through the tangle of” theories and scholarly debates about the historical Christ to propose the compelling idea that “Jesus was driven by the conviction that through his words and work, his mission and message, God was unveiling his kingdom in a way that would rescue Israel and eventually restore the whole world.”

He studies and explains the relevance of archaeology and Judean history and apocalypticism and “scrutinizes the sayings of Jesus” to show how this man, crucified by the Romans, “became the catalyst for a movement that would defy and then consume the Roman Empire.”

Liberated at the Cross: Peace and Reconciliation in God’s Kingdom Kristel Acevedo (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

 I said something like this a while ago when I commended this as a Lenten study. But, just as much, it is ideal for your group to study together to learn to be cross-centered resurrectionaries. Listen:

I am telling you, I have never seen such a rich and thoughtful small group Bible study on the topic of the cross and the social implications of a theology of atonement for peace and public justice. Okay, I’ve never seen any kind of Bible study on this (although there is a huge body of often academic literature showing how the cross brings both personal justification and cosmic reconciliation, how Christ’s death defeats the principalities and powers, how the victory of Christ in resurrection leads to a Kingdom of healing and restoration, etc. etc. etc.)

If you know that vast literature — whether its the teaching about the cross from John Stott or Ron Sider or James Cone or Jorgen Moltmann or Brian Zahnd or Sylvia Keesmaat or NT Wright or others with their unique contributions — you may have longed for their full-orbed visions of the transformative power of the cross to be offered in accessible Bible study formats. This is it and I am excited and grateful to Kristel Acevedo and to IVP for daring to do such a helpful, radical, faithful resource. Get a bunch and spread the word. This helps unpack what we should have known all along (but usually missed) about the resurrectionary implications of this climax of the Biblical story.

Each section is enhanced with bold super-graphics and bright headlines and cool, colorful design and each week has QR codes that have amazing videos to watch; this is not your father or mother’s fill-in-the-blank Bible study booklet. Nope, this is chock-full of ideas and activities and good, good conversation starters to help you be rooted in the cross and dream for a better world. The best part, of course, is the solid Biblical study you’ll do for six or more sessions. There are review pieces, “self-check” notes, closing prayers and more. Kristel, by the way, is discipleship director at Transformation Church a multiethnic community (pastored by Derwin Gray, author most recently of Lit by Love) near Charlotte NC. Highly recommended.

12 that could be useful for resurrectionary living

A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance Diana Butler Bass (St. Martin’s Essentials) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t believe it, but I believe that thinking about time in a truly Biblically way, cultivating a deeply theologically and spiritually-imbued sense of our calendar is a key to living full of resurrectionary vigor. Hope isn’t a thing that is time-less, abstractly future, but something we live into anticipating the new creation that has actually begun. Now but not yet, we say. To think well about time we need philosophers like Jamie Smith (and his 2022 treasure, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully in the Now) or studies of the church calendar like, say, Sr. Joan Chittister’s The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Advent of the Spirit Life. But for the most immediate way into thinking about time in a renewed way, to have your vision of your year shaped by the liturgical seasons, Bass’s A Beautiful Year is a can’t miss, fabulously written, oh-so-relevant set of reflections about just this. Yes, it starts in Advent but you can dip in anywhere, starting now in her excellent session about Holy Week and then Eastertide. These are very good.

This has been one of our biggest selling books of late last year and early this year, and I am very proud to call Diana a friend and supporter of our work here. I’m biased, true, but I think this book of weekly reflections is a great resource for anyone wanting to live wisely and fruitfully in these days.

In a blurb on the back cover, ecologist and activist Bill McKibben notes that in our cultural moment “many can’t summon the energy or hope required.” That’s why this book is important and how it can help. As Mariann Edgar Budde says, Bass is, “at once a teacher and fellow pilgrim” and “a wondrous guide.”

God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal N.T. Wright (HarperOne) $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39

I won’t say much more about this as I’ve highlighted it a few times. It could be seen as a more thorough, deeply Biblical, sequel to his game-changing Surprised By Hope. The vivid and important subtitle of that one explains this new one, too, it seems: “Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.” You see, this bit about God’s offering future renewal — the very good news of a very wonderful second coming — is central. As it says on the back cover of God’s Homecoming: “Everything changes when you begin to believe God’s plan has never been to leave the world secreted and loves, but to dwell with us.”

Of course the cosmic (that is, creation-wide) restoration of all good stuff is shouted at loudly in bodily resurrection. We’re not waiting around until we die to get to heaven, we are living as new creatures now, full of grace with hints of glory.

I jumped ahead to peek at chapter 14 entitled “Life Beyond Death and the Calling of the Church.” What are we waiting for? We’re going to have to switch up the script a bit (as he notes in chapter 8) and learn to re-read texts more faithfully. We need to think about God, the Bible, and the human vocation in fresh ways. His chapter on worship, evangelism and pray gives plenty to chew on. His chapter on sacraments points towards a deeper understanding of a sacramental universe.  What a book!

What If Jesus Was Serious About Heaven? A Visual Guide to Experiencing God’s Kingdom Among Us Skye Jethani (Brazos Press) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I’ve described these cartoony, multicolored, cleverly illustrated field guides to Christian living before. He did What If Jesus Was Serious which was about the Sermon on the Mount and follow that up with What if Jesus Was Serious About Church and What If Jesus Was Serious About Prayer, all wonderful little books falloff resurrectionary zip and clever teaching. Teens would even get a kick out of them, I’d think. Eventually  he did one called What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice which, again, is fun and illustrated, a real visual guide, as he puts to what the Bible demands on us.

The one, What If Jesus Was Serious About Heaven is brilliant. It is about the theme of the Kingdom of God and how our final destination is not living as disembodied souls in heaven, but in the return of God to create the new city, a restored culture in a renewed world. This “new heavens and new Earth” is straight Bible, but new to many. To live out of the resurrection experience — as resurrectionaries, as I put it — we must embrace a Kingdom vision. We have to admit that we’ve missed much Jesus’s own teaching about His inauguration of the reign of God.

It may not be exactly right to say this, and I have no idea if Jethani would agree, but in a way, this book is N.T. Wright’s eschatology for beginners. Surprised by Hope and now God’s Homecoming are extraordinary books, accessible and yet a bit demanding. What If Jesus Was Serious About Heaven — that is, what he really said and meant — could be your quick introduction tooth’s big picture stuff. It exalts Christ and helps us (especially visual learners) with cartoons and arrows and illustrations and charts. So fun! Let’s go!

Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People Nicholas G. Piotrowski (Crossway) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

This is another in a series which we’ve sometimes highlighted, Crossway’s “Short Studies in Biblical Theology.” This one explores themes of exile and homecoming, the restoring grace shown to God’s people in several instances in Scripture as the plot unfolds towards the fulfillment of the promises of God. Humankind’s separation from God begins with Adam and Eve exiled from Eden and then “echoes in the events throughout the Bible.” From various characters and even the imagery of tabernacle and temple, there is a promise of return and hope of restoration.

As it says on the back cover, “All of this climaxes in Jesus as he restores his people from exile into the joyful exception of the coming renewal of all things.” In fact, one chapters is called “Jesus into and out of the tomb.”

This little gem of meaty thinking can offer at least one big metaphor for living in these resurrectionary times. Maybe we can start thinking of ourselves (as Walsh & Bouma-Predigar suggest in Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement) as stewards of renewed homes in restored places, anticipating cosmic homecoming from our displacement. The themes in Piotrowski’s little book of Biblical scholarship can fund insightful considerations of new ways to live into this central theme of return and renewal and restoration.

The Last Supper: Conversations That Led to the Cross Will Willimon (Abingdon) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

If I’d been more on top of things I would have realized this came out a few months ago, in time for a perfect Lenten read. Some of you (if your preachers follow the lectionary) were hearing sermons about the parables this season.  And if not, if you are a church-goer, or a Bible reader, you know a bit about the parables, right?

Willimon calls some of the riddles. Every page a blast. His moving introductory chapter I’ve read twice already, it is so rich. He offers these curious reflections on the parables (many quite brilliant) in the context of the time in Jesus’s life when he was heading to Jerusalem. He was heading towards the last supper. It is remarkable how this seasoned preacher and Bible exegete weaves the conversations Jesus was having with his disciples into the very actions of the last supper.

These “conversations that led to the cross” are so good, they are not to be missed. So what if you just did a sermon series of parables — all the better for this fresh take. So what if we’re in the season of Eastertide, living into the power of the resurrection. Part of resurrectionary living is always being grounded by our fundamental story, which certainly climaxes in what we now call Holy Week. So bring it on, anytime. I’ve read a lot of Will Willimon, and this is one of his best in a very long time.

If you journey with Jesus as he heads toward his last meal you’ll have to put up with his riddles.

What kind of Son of God, Prince of Peace, Savior of the World, would end up at super, the night before his death, with a cluster of losers, promising them a place at the table in his coming Kingdom?

This book is your answer.

Living Toward a Vision: Biblical Reflections on Shalom (revised edition) Walter Brueggemann (Santos Books) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This was one of the earliest books by the great Walter Brueggemann, written for his UCC community in 1972 (that is, before his ground-breaking Prophetic Imagination or The Land.) It went through a reprint, and, then, a different publisher (Chalice) put it out under the title Peace (in their “Understanding Biblical Themes” series.) Now, Brueggemann’s late-in-life good friend, Conrad Kanagy, put it out in an expended, updated edition that has a new foreword by Walter. I wonder if it was the last major thing he wrote before his death last year.

I was deeply influenced by this book; most of my peace studies were by New Testament scholars and evangelical peaceniks. Brueggemann was not Anabaptist and a vibrant Old Testament guy. His words were life-changing for me, and I am delighted that Conrad got permission from Brueggemann to re-do this book with a fresh reprint.

It seems to me that for anyone who is living in the power of Christ’s resurrection, rooted in His reconciling work through His death on the cross, must work out what they think about being a peacemaker, working for shalom in this fracturedworld. Such peacemakers will help us resist the dangerous idols of Mammon and Mars, will “hunger and thirst” for the righteous of God which, in a word, can easily be summed up as shalom. If we don’t know the many usages of this in Scripture (and the contexts, often military and strategic) we will be ill-prepared to faithfully bear witness to the restoration of creation that God promises.

The Bible attests, writes Brueggemann in his new foreword, “that God is willing and able to tame, domesticate, and finally defeat the power of chaos…” Later, after naming the current threats of chaos, he proclaims that “the gospel is a summons and an empowerment to an alternative.” That’s resurrectionary! Get this book!!

To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times Alan Noble (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

We had highlighted this earlier as one to pre-order and it has now arrived (and we sent out copies to those who pre-ordered it.) Skip back a week or two if you’d like to see more of my initial comments. But trust me, Noble is a wise and good writer, somebody you will enjoy reading and appreciate for his clarity and insight. He’s culturally savvy, deeply Biblical, a bit of a philosopher — he’s a literature professor, actually — and yet deeply practical. His previous book was about emotional health and psychic and moral resilience, called On Getting Out of Bed, which I myself found reassuring and helpful.

This new one is fantastic, direct and no-nonsense, a study of virtue. If we are going to be resurrectionaries, pushing for God’s reform in all areas of life — honoring our place in history, making peace with the proximate, alive to the Spirit’s dreams — we are simply going to have to be deeper, better people. We have to live well.

One of the marketing pieces from the publisher said, “You were told to live a meaningful life but n one ever told you how.”  We are exhausted from the competing messages, with little clarity about what really matters and how to embody coherent values. In To Live Well you’ll be helped with explanations of our fragmented culture (and the mixed messages we get and the battering of our attention.) He writes about our moral imagination and true, human flourishing.

I love the simple structure of this with titles about renewed habits and conscientious practices. (That Justin Whitmel Earley wrote the foreword says something of the practical edge to this.) The chapters are Choosing Decisively, Acting Justly, Suffering Steadfastly, Living Moderately, Believing Soundly, Hoping Resolutely,  and Loving Rightly.

Near the end he writes, “As society continues to spin away from any sort of central moral standard, and as norms continue to shift, we will continue to feel an aching anxiety about what it means to live as a full human person.”  This means we need community, we need to be aware of our own failures embracing a God-based perseverance; we need grace.

Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life MaryAnn McKibben Dana (Eerdmans) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If the carefully-written, sober book by Alan Noble (a Baptist university professor) seems a bit heavy, then this one— written by a mainline denominational pastor and stand up comic — might be more your speed. I love her assumption in this brand new release that “normal is a myth — and recognizing that truth can free us all.” If the world is obsessed with fitting in, Better Than Normal gives us a better image, a better way, a vision of knowingly not fitting in. (Didn’t the Bible say something about being “non conformed.”) Think of MLK’s call to be righteously “maladjusted.”

I was captivated by Dana’s first book, a fun memoir called Sabbath in the Suburbs and really enjoyed her book called God, Improv, and the Art of Living. A few years ago she did Hope: A User’s Manuel. She is an associate pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, VA, a generous PC(USA) church that underscores the essential dignity of all. It seems to be a “better than normal” community.

In Better Than Normal McKibben Dana shares a bit about the mental health struggles in her family and critiques how society shapes our understanding of worthiness and belonging. As it says on the back (I haven’t read it yet as it just came a day ago) “Her expansive vision encompasses anyone living outside society’s narrow bounds: neurodivergent individuals, LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities, those with disabilities and more. And she demonstrates that liberation comes not from adjusting to dominant culture, but from creating spaces where all people can thrive authentically.”

Here’s are the chapters, three in each of two sections.

• Part 1: Individual Values
• 1. From Certainty to Curiosity
• 2. From Comfort to Courage
• 3. From Productivity to Presence
• Part 2: Communal Values
• 4. From Artifice to Authenticity
• 5. From Blandness to Beauty
• 6. From Competition to Community
• Perhaps we could describe this as an upbeat guide to “the collective work of transformation.”

Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God Malcolm Guite (Square Halo Books) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Oh my, surely we know that a part of bearing witness to the newness Christ is bringing to His fallen world is a renewed focus on goodness and beauty. We simply must have the renewed mind (as Romans 12:2 calls it) and more generally, must work to place ourselves under the influence of those who will stoke our imaginations in life-giving ways. There are so many books these days about the arts and creativity, about renewing our efforts to promote the allusive gifts of imagination and play. Not all of us are artists, of course, but we all are call to steward and cultivate the imaginative sides of our lives. We need novels and paintings, poets and singers, potters and playwrights. You get the picture.

Malcolm Guite is a world-class poet from the UK (we stock all of his poetry volumes) who has also given considerable time pondering a Christian aesthetic. He wonders about the imagination and seems to be on a quest. (Some think he may actually be some sort of hobbit.) His work, here, now in this lovely short book, was originally given as dynamic lectures at Regent College in British Columbia; these presentations have been handsomely compiled and illustrated with all kinds of great art — old etchings by Blake and modern charcoal by Wayne Forte and handsome woodcuts by Stephen Cross and a famous illustration of The Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, and more. He gives rightful kudos to Square Halo Books for releasing this important contribution, sort of a foundation for his poetic work.

You may recall that I invited folks to pre-order Guite’s now brand new Galahad and the Grail, so very handsomely done by Rabbit Room Press ($34.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99.) It is the first time in over a century that a poet has done an epic ballad telling the whole Knights of the Roundtable, Guinevere, Lancelot and King Arthur stories. We heard him lecture on this last week and it fired our imaginations greatly. We have some autographed copies left, if anybody wants to order them at our 20% off. Galahad, by the way, is the first of a projected four volume set that will come out over the next two years. This first one is one of the most handsome and well-made books I’ve seen this year.

Anyway, for resurrectionaries needing a short but weighty reminder or some guidance about a faithful use of our imaginations, the four talks in Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God by Malcolm Guite might be good for you. The chapters are, “Imagination and the Kingdom of God”, “Christ and the Artistic Imagination”, “Christ and the Moral Imagination”, and “Christ and the Prophetic Imagination.”

In an epilogue Malcolm cites a Blake poem and reminds us that “all prophetic art is intended to arouse us and stir us to action. How do we awake from the deadly sleep?” This is the resurrectionary question — how do we lift the veil?  Pondering this book is part of the answer.

Made to Belong: Five Practices for Cultivating Community in a Disconnected World David Kim (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I suppose sometime I should do a whole BookNotes column about living in community, about relationships transformed and healed, about church life and such. From the classic Life Together by Bonhoeffer to the treasure Living Into Community by the late Christine Pohl, there are so, so many good ones. Just yesterday we got The Way Back to One Another: How to Live as People Created for Community by Jeff Galley & Phillip N. Smith (IVP; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19. One of the authors is a central Pennsylvania guy and it looks really good.)

For this list, I want to list something for resurrectionaries who want to make a difference in their lives, living well for God’s Kingdom without falling into quietude and personalism on one hand or zealous revolutionary idealism on the other. How do we keep our spirits up in these crazy times? How do we discern what is ours to do? How do we continue on in spiritual practices that are hard (even if life-giving and transformative in the long haul.) Where can we find healing from our wounds and brokenness? How do we really become resurrectionaries in practice?

One part of the answer is that we simple have to have a band of friends around us to help us on the Christian journey. As every such books insists, we cannot go it alone. The Christian life is by definition a matter of being enfolded intern alternative community, a fellowship of friends, a support network, a life-shaped tribe. Each and every one of us needs supportive community.

David Kim’s book is one of the best we’ve seen on this question about how community can help shape our deepened discipleship. Sure, we have the felt need of a “great ache of loneliness” and community is the antidote to that. (Justin Earley’s Made for People: Why We Drift Into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship [$19.99 // $15.99] is a great resource on that — highly recommended. )

Made To Belong is ideal for reading alone or in a group, and it seems to me to have an air of resurrection about it. That is, you can do this! It is positive. These are practices taken up by those who believe God is at work in the world and want to participate in Christ’s redemptive mission. Kim draws from Biblical wisdom and has plenty of personal stories. It’s a good read. He has experience in pastoral ministry and he knows how to guide us into how to get involved with others, on how to really belong. From research about best practices to theology and spiritual formation to practical guidance, Made to Belong shares plenty.

He offers five simple, powerful practices for creating a meaningful and transformative community. I am sure that this book will help you deepen your relationship with others and you relationship with God.

Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate Steven Garber (Paraclete Press) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

I quipped a previous time I highlighted Steve’s important and altogether lovely recent book that I was going to keep telling folks about it, over and over, if needs be. I really do think, in ways perhaps to complicated to explain here, that it is a very rare books, unique in it’s impact and extraordinary for the ways in which those who love it become very humble but devoted fans of Steve and his work. Part of it is that Steve evokes a seriousness of relationships on line and in his rigorous speaking schedule. If somebody wants to take ideas serious, if someone is seeking coherent and meaning and stamina for living meaningfully in our time, in their own ways and places, he will talk. He will stay in touch. He will recommend books and articles. (He will send them to us, sometimes, so we can be their personal bookseller.) He wants quite earnestly to be of service so the words he labored over come to life in the lives of readers.

The heart of this book seems resurrectionary to me. That is, he is asking, even if we are alive in the power of the Spirit, shaped by vibrant worship, aligned with the risen Lord, there is, for most of us, the very tough question of how we sustain what Peterson’s famous book calls us to: a long obedience in the same direction. How do we keep on keeping on, knowing what we know about the brokenness of the world. Can our story be sustained by framing it by the bigger Story of all stories?

The lovely cover hints at a story early in the book about Steve’s love of seashells. He’s eloquent in showing how beauty shines through the brokenness of each one. Drawing on great literature and film he draws us in, over and over, to visions that can sustain us for the long haul. He tells wonderful stories from around the world, many which are woven together in such as way that they would resonate deeply with each other. He will write of an urban doctor who cares for the homeless or a fabulous vignette about his hero John Perkins or a window into the lives of those working in the Telos Group who labors for peacemaking among Israeli’s and Palestinians, brave folks who offer goodness day and night, and then he’ll highlight the Japanese art form using broken pottery called kintsugi, as told by Mako Fujimura. The book covers so much — it meanders a bit, in the best way — but hangs together to help readers deeply understand and cultivate this way of seeing.

A chapter called “Love in the Ruins” (swiping from Walker Percy) maybe says it best.

The book looks hard at this sad world but it is — get this! — not bleak. It is full of hope and invites us to habits of hopefulness that will endure. His key is “making peace with the proximate” and you’ll have to read the book to get all the nuances and wisdom of that.

Can we continue on in hope of the coming restoration by living into the resurrection now, bit by bit, honoring the deepest realities of life? With gladness of heart, even, yes, indeed.  Without simplistic formulas or more to-do lists, Hints of Hope is a book to live with in this season of joy.

Resurrection & Contemporary Spirituality: Navigating Faith in an Uncertain World edited by David Ponta & Amanda Avila Kaminski (Paulist Press) $32.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.36

This is an academic book for serious scholars of theology and spirituality, maybe what might seem a tad arcane, but the title makes it too good not to share in this list. The overarching question in this anthology of 13 chapters (and a fine epilogue by Philip Sheldrake) is what the relationship is between the facts and creedal affirmation of the resurrection of Christ and our own spiritual lives in the “the secular age.” In the heady but captivating preface they suggest the book is seeking “A Resurrection Spirituality: An Easter Imagination for Everyday Life.” See what I mean! So apropos and so exciting.

The book Resurrection and Contemporary Spirituality offers a wide-ranging and appreciative conversation  with Sandra Schneiders,

The first major chapter is, in fact, by the world class scholar Sandra Schneiders, a nun with degrees in philosophy, patristics, New Testament, and spirituality from prominent Catholic institutions like Institute Catholique in Paris and the Gregorian in Rome who taught at an important Jesuit school in Santa Clara, California.  Her opening piece is called “Christian Spirituality in an Age of Uncertainty” which sets the stage. The next chapter is a response to Schneiders (by Bernard McGinn of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago) called “Insights from the Easter Sermons of Three Mystics” (which briefly looks at Easter messages from Augustine, Gregory, and Eckart.)

More substantive is “The Transfigurative Hermeneutics of Sandra Schneiders: A Strategy for Transformative Knowing in an Age of Deconstruction and Despair” by Amanda Avila Kaminski (who notes that trauma is “the zeitgeist of a generation” which calls forth “the theopoetics of possibility.” In her hands the Transfiguration becomes a metaphor for “seeing and unseeing.” Kaminski, like Schneiders, is attuned to the suffering of this world and yet says “her work is a tour de force in the theopoetics of hope, one not passively awaiting for further eschatological glory or triumphalistically proclaiming political power or economic might. She asks: if we cannot see here camped in the midst of misery then where?”

There are other good, academical pieces, laden with the strengths and weaknesses of this genre of writing. But a few are clear and delightful.  Lauren Winner has a wonderful chapter on resurrection and prayer. Her vignettes are super smart — as always she weaves together insights from her wide reading — and colorful. She prays in graveyards and art museums.

+++

BookNotes

We love selling books this time of year as folks think about children’s books to give as Easter gifts; we even hear about Easter baskets and books given out at egg hunts and more. What fun

I trust you saw last week’s listing of eight excellent books to pre-order (some of which, like the new James KA Smith (Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark), The Pastor as Gardener (by Matthew Erickson) and Mako and Haijin Fujimura’s Beauty & Justice have already arrived. Others on that list include the forthcoming Kate Bowler, Michael Gorman, Malcolm Guite, Alan Noble, and Tish Harrison Warren.

For now, here are a few newer Easter books for children. Did I hear something about Easter baskets??

By the way, I’ve written about children’s books for this time of year HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE (among other times.) The discounts on these remains 20% off even if the older prices may have changed…

(MOSTLY) NEW EASTER BOOKS

God’s Colorful Easter: The Good News Is for Everyone Esau McCaulley, illustrated by Rogeria Colho (Tyndale Kids) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I hope you recall my enthusiastic highlighting of a handful of recent children’s Bibles (see HERE) in which we celebrated Rev. Esau McCaulley’s God’s Colorful Kingdom Storybook Bible which not only has multi-racial characters (as most kids books do these days) but draws out the multi-ethnic themes and trajectories in the Bible itself. From the very beginning, the back cover says, “God’s plan has been for a beautifully diverse family.” This new Easter edition has new content and a newly designed set of great illustrations from the bigger Bible. This engaging re-telling doesn’t start with Holy Week, but with Simon and the death of Jesus. Of course it explains the resurrection, the reaction of His followers, has a page on the Great Commission and a final page about how we are Christians today because somebody spread the good news. The story starts by pointing out that Simon, who helped Jesus carry his cross, had traveled from Northern Africa.The last pages ask kids if they remember that part of the story, recalling that Christ’s followers are all different colors from every continent! Yay.

The Great Waking Up: The Story of Easter Sarah Shin, illustrated by Shin Maeng (Waterbrook) $15.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

I love so many children’s Bible stories and appreciate so many great Easter tales. I listed some of our favorites in previous columns (see the links above.) Yet, I sometimes wonder how to communicate to little ones the remarkable news that Jesus came back to life, resurrected, after his death. Saying the tomb was empty may not make sense. New life can become a metaphor detached from Christ’s bodily resurrection and defeat of Death. This new one might be one of my all-time favorites.

Sarah Shin (author of the excellent Beyond Colorblind, by the way) did her previous children’s book about Christmas called The Deliverer Has Come. With Shin Maeng’s Korean art and Shin’s storytelling chops, this new one brings the Jewish girl Anastasia back as she tells about her favorite dream, which she calls “The Great Waking Up” (the day when there will be no more death.)

This amazing little book tells movingly about stories that should help us anticipate the resurrection and which informed Anastasia’s dream, namely  Ezekiel’s dream of dead bones coming to life, of the healing of Jairus’s daughter, and of the healing of Jesus’s friend, Lazarus. This girl knows the stories of hope from her Scriptures and friends but when Jesus is killed she is bereft. But, wait? Jesus is alive?? Is this the beginning of the “great waking up”? This nice book explains the big picture dream of dreams and how it comes true in Jesus’s resurrection. As a bonus there are a handful other Scripture’s she offers at the end, inviting kids to study more. And don’t miss the symbolism and special scenes embedded in the outfits and landscapes. This book is amazing.

Jesus’s Easter Journey: A Resurrection Story Carine MacKenzie, illustrated by Daniele Fabbri (Christian Focus) $13.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.19

This Scottish Bible teacher has done dozens and dozens of often small paperback children’s books, usually Bible stories, inexpensive and solid. As a conservative Reformed thinker, she is impeccable about being true to the text and yet has a charming storytelling style. Nothing clever or made up, just a re-telling of Scriptural stories. We appreciate her style and found this one to be pretty unique. It has the “cleansing of the temple” during Jesus’s last week, a goo description and explanation of the last supper, and other vivid scenes (the prayer in Gethsemane, is moving, the betrayal by Peter isn’t often told.) It’s a marvelous, accurate story with tremendously artful but pretty realistic art stylings.

Here is one unique feature and I hope this doesn’t turn you off; this publishing house, or at least this pair of writer and illustrator, don’t believe we should speculate on the look of Jesus. If we are Trinitarian and take the gospels and Christian theology serious, Jesus is God. And we dare not make images, they insist, so there are no illustrations of Jesus in these excellent, allusive renderings. The text is thorough but advisable and the artwork is good. Agree or not with their conscience on the prohibition of painting pictures Jesus, this book is very nicely done, and will make for nice conversations with children as you read it to them.

Sparrow’s Easter Garden Roger Hutchison, illustrated by Ag Jatkowska (Beaming) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I’m not going to lie — I wasn’t sure about this one. Roger Hutchison has done some excellent books on depression, some about using the arts, allusive and thoughtful. He has another really great book for children called Sparrow’s Prayer (where other animals teach him ways to pray when he can’t quite work up the energy to sing or be grateful.) In this new one, Sparrow is eager to get the garden spruced up for Easter. They’ve got 40 days and every animal helps. (Kids will love seeing Buck, the deer, using his antlers to dig up the ground for seeds.) But on Good Friday, a storm blows in and all the creatures are scared. Will the garden even survive? It’s seems like the end of their dream. They’ve got work to do, but on “Holy Saturday they rest.”

As you might guess there is a moral to the story with the rain and wind helping to cultivate the ground causing the seeds to blossom just in time for an Easter celebration. The animal friends “gasp in joy.” “After forty days of tilling the soil, planting seeds, and waiting with hope, new life blooms in the morning light.” And what a happy, colorful scene it is.

The last spread has these words:

They share stories and bless their food, and the hardworking friends enjoy the gift of the garden with their neighbors.

Quietly at first, Sparrow begins singing. One by one, the others join in, their hallelujah’s filing the morning sky.

Twas the Morning of Easter Glenys Nellist, illustrated by Elena Selivanova (Zonderkidz) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is not brand new, like most I’ve listed here, but I had to share it. It came out in 2021 and yet somehow many don’t know it. It is richly illustrated — I love the style and respect the Russian illustrator very much — and it follows the cadence of the classic “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It is not overly forced and it is not cheesy. But it does have that clever play on the famous piece by Clement Clark Moore. I hope you enjoy hearing about it here.

I was happy to previously highlight Nellist and Selivanova’s Twas the Season of Advent: Devotions and Stories for the Christmas Season and her most recent, The Season of Lent: Devotions and Stories for the Lenten and Easter Seasons.

You may know her tremendous “Love Letters from God” series of books that have little letters from God to the children tipped into a little envelope. They are so nice! Try the updated Easter Love Letters from God Bible Stories illustrated very nicely by Sophie Allsopp (Zonderkids; $16.99 // $13.59.)

Perfect Peace Child Steve Richardson, illustrated by Sarah Nunnally (William Carey LIbrary – Mission Kids) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

Do you know the true story of how God used the Sawi people’s own tradition — giving a baby to make peace with an enemy people — to show them that Jesus is God’s peace child? Set in New Guinea this tells this famous missionary story which, as they say on the back, “invites children to see how God’s love brings deep-down-forever peace anywhere in the world.”

I love how this story offers a creative way to understand the nature of Jesus’s reconciling work. Plus, there’s a little lizard on every page.

Jesus, Our True Friend: Stories to Fill Your Heart With Joy Sally Lloyd-Jones, illustrated by Jago (Zonderkidz) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

The last chapter of this lovely, recently released book from the beloved creators of The Jesus Storybook Bible (“where every chapter whispers his name”) is about the post-resurrection story about Jesus making breakfast on the beach for his disciples. It offers several other well told gospel stories and ends with this marvelous event.

Hooray for children’s writer Sally Lloyd-Jones (she has done over 40 books!) and the very creative designer and artist, Jago who has worked with her on The Jesus Storybook Bible.  As you can tell from the title, it is a more limited telling of a few stories about Jesus. And I’d say it is for younger children maybe 4 – 8 or so.

Jesus Our True Friend is slightly larger than most children’s picture books and the colors are vivid and while not exactly whimsical, certainly done with verve. Like the writing, which is bright and conversational, theologically informed, and utterly charming. It starts with a creative paraphrase of parts of John 1.  I love this.

As it says on the back,

The Bible tells the wonderful story of how God loves His children and comes to rescue them. And at the heart of that story is a young hero — the Great Rescuer, Jesus, God’s own Son. He stepped out of Heaven and came to live with us and show us what love is really like.

Stories include The Party That Went Wrong, Our True Friend, The Two Sisters Jesus Loved, Jesus and the Stone Throwers, Jesus and the Deadly Storm, Our True Older Brother, and Breakfast on the Beach.

As she notes in the beginning — on a wonderful page written to “children and their grown-ups” — these are seven Good News stories. “They come from the time when Jesus was on Earth. They start with a party and end with breakfast!” Then she says, earnestly, “I hope they fill your hearts with joy.”

We do too.

Keep Us This Day: A Morning Prayer for All God’s Children / Keep Us This Night: An Evening Prayer for All God’s Children Todd R. Hains, illustrated by Natasha Kennedy (Lexham Press) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Here is what we wrote when we first announced this “Fat Cat” book:

This is one of these great flip books that can be read first one way, and then you turn it over and upside down and the second half is read, also front to back. A delight, no matter which end you start with!

Keep Us This Day / Night is one of the handful of FatCat books that we regularly promote and we’re glad for this gently liturgical resource, offering the rhythms of morning prayer and evening prayer for the child, her energetic family, siblings and, of course, the hidden cat on every page spread.

One need not be Lutheran to appreciate this, but the twin prayers in this book are drawn from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, published in 1529. The simple phrases are drawn from Psalm 31:5, Psalm 91:11 and Psalm 121.  Hooray.

Another neat part of this book is that the family in the story is Korean, so there is some Korean language print besides the English type, and you will notice it in the home-life scenes. A fabulous book in so many ways, mature, if simple! Kudos.

The Art of Holy Week & Easter: Meditations on the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Sister Wendy Beckett (SPCK / IVP) $17.99  // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39ß

While this obviously is not a children’s book you may know older kids or teens who enjoy good art. This is a devotional rich in color, different styles of vital art pieces, with expert commentary by the late, great art historian, Sister Wendy. I hope you know the someone thicker The Art of Lent…

 

CHILDREN’S STORYBOOK BIBLES? Want a fresh new children’s Bible with great art and thoughtful re-telling of the Bible stories? Check out this column we did not too long ago. If you want a real, full Bible with study notes for kids, reach out to us on our inquiry page or shoot me an email at read@heartsandmindsbooks.com. Knowing what translation you prefer is a good start… we’re happy to help, eager to serve.

 

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BookNotes

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

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

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

Use the order tab below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps even shalom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You, too?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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