All books mentioned can of course easily be ordered by using the secure order form page button at the end of this column. Or call. We love hearing from customers and friends.

This edition of BookNotes is one I’m really enthused about. It is inspired by a podcast on which I was a guest.

Let me explain.

Slant Books is a small but important independent publisher of serious literature, poetry, and some theology and philosophy. Slant was founded by Gregory Wolfe — himself an esteemed author and founder of the Image Journal that since 1989 has championed faith-inspired conversations about the arts, aesthetics, and literature; he is also the founding director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing program. The significance of Image (now under other leadership after a season of being captained by James K.A. Smith) is for another day, but Greg has a long history of caring deeply about books and culture. That he would fund and curate a boutique publishing house in the Pacific Northwest, releasing books that make there way even into the cluttered shelves of Hearts & Minds here in Dallastown, PA, is pretty darn cool.

And what a publishing venture it is. Slant, for instance, acquired a book of plays by Rowan Williams (Shakeshaft & Other Plays), released a collection of short stories by the University of Notre Dame English professor Valerie Sayers, offers books by the fascinating Bethel College philosopher (and novelist) Daniel Taylor and a memoir of sorts by the novelist Ron Hansen. And lots of lesser known and debut writers who need to be known.

The official podcast of Slant Books is called Slantcast and, like our own “Three Books from Hearts & Minds”, can be watched on YouTube on their “Slant” channel or listened to, podcast style, wherever you get your podcasts.

I was asked to join a conversation discussing the role of the indie bookstore in the ecosystem of the publishing and book business with two other very smart and passionate bookstore managers. Joining host Gregory Wolfe was Joshua Alan Sturgill representing the legendary Eighth Day Books in Wichita (founded by the late Warren Farha, to whom this podcast conversation was dedicated) and David Kern of Goldberry Books in Concord NC. Both of those cool gents were influenced, even mentored, by Warren and he inspired them both to the vocation of bookselling. It was such a privilege to join this conversation that I wanted to share it with you. You can watch it here, or listen here.

Gregory’s opening few minutes will warm the heart of any bookstore lover. Don’t miss it.

(And don’t miss the announcement at the end from Slant’s brilliant Managing Editor, Emily Kwilinski; what a sharp and pleasant advocate she is to the Slant projects.)

Listening to these guys and their love for books as they discuss the art of principled, indie bookselling is so rich that I wanted you to have a chance to take it in. I tell a bit about our own small business origin story as do the other two colleagues in the indie bookstore world. You might even enjoy sharing it with folks you know who might want a glimpse into what we do.

For what it is worth, each of us are pretty unique (as the most interesting bookstores usually are) each embodying and curating a store with some kind of individual taste and values and priorities. The other two guys have stores that are a bit more sophisticated than our own, it seems, (and, curiously, both of them have a small publishing venture as well.) The conversation really encouraged Beth and me to continue to be ourselves, to continue to offer the sort of bookish vision that (as David put it) indicates something of who we are; our tastes and convictions.

We are so grateful for our customers and appreciate your loyalty to us (we really do) but you should join us in celebrating these other fine, speciality booksellers. I admire them immensely.

Unique, niche bookstores are increasingly a thing, it seems, and we are delighted knowing of new shops opening around the country with focuses on specialities as diverse as kids books, mystery and true crime titles, black studies, travel books, LGBTQ resources, cookbook stores, metaphysical shops. Lots of new stores seem to be opening (even in small towns) but they are often speciality places. Curiously, within the Christian book industry — which is still huge, if less than it used to be — there seems to be fewer theologically sophisticated and literary bookstores; like Eighth Day, say. Too many family owned shops remain in the rather less bookish style of Christian retailers (and are not primarily booksellers.) We give thanks to God for the stores described in this podcast (Eighth Day Books and Goldberry Books.) There are other great Christian bookstores around but we are not at groundswell…

A CAVEAT

I’ll say a quick two-part thing that I wish I could have said in the podcast conversation.

The first thing I should have said is something like this: I do not want to romanticize or overstate the goodness or beauty of all indie publishers, nor demean the big presses and the big authors.There are bad indie publishers and there are great authors on big publishing houses. Most of our very favorite authors are on the medium-sized or bigger houses, actually. And there are bunches of small presses that are just awful.

Further, there are big, corporate types who are very good to work with and are able to offer us discounts and free shipping options and there are smaller presses that are so tight with their own budgets that they make ordering from them nearly impossible. Some establishment, corporate guys are generous and some small businesses are as greedy as the proverbial big business titans.

I loved that Gregory said that he hopes to publish “exquisitely crafted literature that is operating at the highest capacity of the imagination” (and that we can persuade ordinary readers that such fine writing is “not as scary and weird and difficult as they may think.”) Well-done books are a joy to behold and can provide lots of good entertainment so we want to make available really good stuff that is well made, surprising, captivating, aesthetically-rich, and we like championing lesser known authors from smaller presses. But that is not to say that the independent voices are in fact always the best and that the corporate publishers are just churning out cheap stuff. Not at all.

The other booksellers in this conversation are wonderfully interesting and Gregory himself offers fantastic insights; it’s a good conversation which I think you’ll enjoy. I hope you watch or listen and remember that you are part of this story, too. Your support of our family business and your willingness to sometimes buy titles you haven’t heard of shows that you are a real part of the action. You’re keeping books alive in the too-often mindless, digital age. Thank you.

In the spirit of this Slantcast podcast, then, I’d like to tell you about some of the titles in Slant’s catalogue. A month or so ago you may recall I did a list of books by authors who had mostly self-published their books and who each had some connection to us. That self-publishing thing is a whole other topic but they were friends of the store and deserved that shout-out.

But independently owned small or medium sizes presses are often glorious. I think of classic literary outfits like Milkweed Editions or Tin House or Graywolf or (in the faith-oriented space) publishers like Square Halo Books or Plough or UMI (Urban Ministries Inc) or Rabbit Room or Falls City Press or Leonard Sweet’s new Salish Sea Press or Reformed Journal Books, not to mention Eighth Day Press and Goldenberry Books. They are often artful, always fascinating, and worthy of your consideration.

So, a few from Slant that we happily carry. ALL ARE 20% OFF.

Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land Bret Lott (Slant Books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $ 16.00

Bret Lott is not well known enough in our view — he has written mainstream fiction (like Jewel, which was an Oprah Book Club selection) and has had books on the major evangelical publishers. He has written about faith and fiction and he has a book about writing. It isn’t every day that a literary figure from an evangelical background offers a book about peacemaking in the Middle East by way of offering a hopeful look at “the solidarity of sharing a meal.” Lott has lived and taught in Jerusalem and here he offers intimate portraits of “the people, the food, and the hope for peace to be found in a region ravaged by war and conflict.” Faith and food writing and peace? You bet!

These are meditation-like reflections on his journalistic reports of places like a non-kosher butcher shop in a very kosher part of Israel or an olive oil cooperative run by Palestinian and Israeli women. Did you know there is a nighttime harvesting of olives by Bedouins? Have you ever read eloquent prose on a traditional Shabbat dinner? Gather the Olives offers wonderful writing that is what one critic called “a very capricious table.”

Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America’s Lost Landscape Howard Schaap (Slant Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

I gave a quick shout out to this in our conversation at the podcast, telling Greg that we loved this book (Beth stole it from me after I had told her I was in the middle of it, and she finished it before I did.)  The author is a professor at Dordt College and he tells here about his depressed father who lost a farm years ago. The sturdy Dutch Calvinist worldview is often helpful give us a visionary (almost sacramental) orientation to God’s good world but sometimes it ends up stern and insular. Schaap’s upbringing was as violent as Arthur Boer’s (as described in his hard, exquiste Eerdmans book Shattered) but it seemed a touch similar. Schaap becomes a fisherman and finds solace on those waters in the driftless region of mid-America.

What a story this is, bringing to mind that chestnut slogan about the universal in the particular. It is his unique story but, man, it sheds light on so much of what has become of our troubled times. There is “stark beauty and haunting isolation” in growing up in this part of the Upper Midwest, the”lost landscape” of the subtitle. Highly recommended.

God’s Liar: A Novel Thom Satterlee (Slant Books) $15.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

None of us have started this yet, but Beth loved Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (and just watched the film version of the novel Hamnet, which she also read) so this may been her list next. It is set in 1665 (during theme of what is called the Restoration) and a blind, politically and religious marginalized write (somewhat associated with Olver Cromwell) appears. His name is John Milton (and he has not yet written paradise Lost) Of course there is the plague and Milton and his wife have fled to the countryside where they are befriend by a local curate.

But it is not just about Milton, but could be said to be about a writer writing about another writer. It is about the power of language and, as Linda Mannheim says, “about being human.”

I greatly appreciate a Christian college literature prof and writer, Paul Willis. Among the many other rave reviews, Willis says:

This deeply satisfying historical novel will keep you reading — and keep you examine your own conscience for the lies, big and small, that we tell. Thom Satterlee’s subtle exploration the memories of a seventeenth-century Anglican minister who came under the influence ofJohn Milton brings to mid the reflective rhythms of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. This is a tale full of surprises, told by an insightful craftsman

Sing Me a Song, She Said: Poems Paul Mariani (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

Mariani is a retired, esteemed English prof (he taught at Boston College) and has published literary biographies (on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.) We very much appreciate his hefty The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity published by Paraclete Press. He has thought a lifetime about literature and poetry and poets and his own poetry volumes have been in our poetry section for decades.

This brand new one, we are told, has as its central section a verse drama about growing up in a fractured family back in the 1950s. “Finally the poet tries to sing a song for his family and especially his mother, long gone, now, who asked him to sing for her all those years ago.” Although he drew up in the tenements of New York’s East Side, these poems about “the erosion of his family on Long Island” and about his many years along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts, sing with a sense of place. The great Ron Hansen says”Paul Mariani’s poetry has always been alert to the sacredness of life and the quiet, abiding presence of Mystery even in the quotidian.”

I do not know if this book, filled with poems of wonder and regret and memory and loss will resonate with young readers; maybe. I am sure it will resonate with me. You, too, perhaps?

Against Certainty: Poems Scott Cairns (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

This brand new collection arrived a few days ago and it seemed like a holy moment. I have only met Cairns a few times and he is a delightful fellow — funny, the assumptions we make about intense poets or those who write about the mysticism of their Orthodox tradition (Scott does both.) I am not sure why I’d assume otherwise, but he is a good, good guy, and a remarkable writer. Slant says that “Against Certainty is the culmination of forty years of literary pilgrimage, resounding evidence that Scott Cairns has produce not only a richly layered body of work but also a poetics that restores the craft to its ancient, enduring purpose.” I suspect he didn’t write that, as he knows the virtues humility. But I can add a hearty Amen to this assessment. You should read anything he does.

The publisher offers this serious exploration of his new work:

What makes words arranged on a page serve as a poem? Over the centuries, poets and critics have spoken of poetry as prospective (as opposed to retrospective), as generating openness, suggestiveness, connotative implication, ambiguity, and-as poet Scott Cairns has said-recognizing the poem as a scene of meaning-making, rather than merely a document of meaning made.

In each of these attempts to name the poetic operation of language, one common disposition obtains: a genuine poem is never finished in its effort to lead a reader into further meaning-making. One might say that the poem is a place-a semantic field-where a recombination of old things can give rise to a new thing.

The poems offered in Against Certainty have been crafted to open up possibilities not only for the reader, but also for the poet himself. As Cairns notes, both the form and the substance of these poems are “the results of my writing to see what I didn’t know to see, to say what I didn’t know to say.” A poem invites the reader to come to terms in order to appreciate them as the approachable terminus of new departure.

Thirst: A Novel A. G. Mojtabai (Slant Books) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

I picked this short book up a few years ago for a few reasons — I mostly like Gregory’s taste and appreciate his brave project publishing literary fiction. And I was curious: years before I read a truly remarkable nonfiction book by this author called Blessed Assurance about the people who work in a plant making nuclear weapons in Amarillo, Texas. The Catholic Bishop there (in the very late 1970s, as I recall) declared that it was a sin to work there. Anyway, I knew the authors name and that part of her writing.

I was also intrigued that the very form of this short novel seemed like a prayer book. And that cover!

Here is how they describe it at the fascinating Slant website:

As A.G. Mojtabai’s Thirst opens, Lena has been summoned to the bedside of her ailing “brother” Theo, an aging country priest who has started to refuse food and drink. What Lena faces is complicated by the fact that she left the faith long ago.

First cousins and closest childhood friends, Theo and Lena were raised in a small Catholic farming community in Texas, named for the village their parents left behind in Germany, a place where all questions—asked and unasked—were answered for all time. The known world was bounded by the iron fence of the parish cemetery containing nearly all their dead. Beyond it, lurked disorder, the dragons of unbelief.

Now faced with the mysteries of mortality and loss, both are struggling to come to terms with the choices that have defined them.

Thirst is a book hard to classify—a novella, certainly, but it is also in part a tone poem, a contemporary book of hours, and a meditation engaging issues of faith and doubt, death and healing.

Roger Rosenblatt has said of A.G. Mojtabai: “It is rare to find a gorgeous stylist and a writer of substance yoked in the same artist. Her work shows heart and unsentimental kindness that leaves the reader enlightened and wiser.”

Miller Cane: A True and Exact History Samuel Ligon (Slant Books) $21.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80 releasing soon

Okay, just when you might be thinking that the literary style of most Slant books is a tad highbrow, aesthete, exceedingly literary (whatever that means) and heavy, I will tell you about this forthcoming novel, a very contemporary read that I finished a few nights ago. It is a wild ride, an unusual book that I may never forget.

The plot is energetic and fun, the wild writing is engaging (except maybe when one of the characters goes on yet another long written rant, which are increasingly unhinged) and the upshot of the story is something that is utterly contemporary and compelling. Among other things it is about school shootings and other civilian massacres.

It isn’t a morose book nor is it disrespectful. But it does have a crazy plot: Miller Cane, a former history teacher, has developed something like a scam offering odd comfort to those who are the victims of massacres; bereaved parents, mostly. He sadly knows something about this first hand, as you will learn. He shows up when there is mass shooting and makes money by offering certain services which may or may not be fully honest or truly helpful. A guy who thinks he and his bereaved wife were not helped by Miller is off the rails and out to expose his scammer worse. So Miller is on the run in his motor home trying to stay one step ahead of this angry stalker with a gun.

Meanwhile, the heart of the story tells of a young girl, Carleen — the precocious daughter of Miller Cane’s former lover, now jailed — who he has taken into his custody at the request of said former lover because her ex — an angry man even worse than that other guy out to get them — is planning to kidnap Carleen who he thinks is his daughter. A will is involved and money is at stake. Miller takes the girl on a exhilarating roadtrip teaching her American history (often about massacres of indigenous peoples, or the various places in Little House on the Prairie) trying to keep her in the dark about both of the men out to find them.

On top of this, Miller is under contract to write side-bars of American villains/heros (or hero/villains) to spice up a high school history textbook that is in the works. His editor is not pleased with his weird essays that make Hunter Thompson’s rants look calm and reasonable. He looks with zeal at the good, the bad, and the ugly of the American psyche (and I was left googling stuff to see if that was even really true or not.) This is weirdo satire at its finest.

Listen to these two reviewers who get it:

Buckle up, gentle reader, Sam Ligon is about to take you on an outrageous road trip across American history and hysteria. It will be tempting to see your fictional guide on this journey, the massacre-counselor and unhinged textbook author Miller Cane, as an unreliable narrator, but it’s the American myth that’s unreliable in Sam Ligon’s razor-sharp satire. Oh, and there’s a chase. And a cat. And it’s hilarious. —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Miller Cane is a jolt of straight-up, adrenalized American greed and violence. Sam Ligon’s prose is an elemental force —fierce and funny, profane and sacred — and his vision of the country’s past and present is as engrossing as it is unsparing. —Shawn Vestal, author of Godforsaken Idaho

The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Novel  Tom Noyes (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

A year ago Beth and I watched a very moving Netflix show about Charles Guiteau who had been in the mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, free-love “Christian” utopian commune. The Oneidians were not the only odd cult in this spiritually ablaze era of American history but it is true that Guiteau — who was the assignee who killed President James Garfield — spent time there. As the plot of Death by Lightning miniseries unfolded, I thought that it surely was based on The Substance of Things Hoped For which is a novel exactly on this utopian community and Guiteau’s odd role there.

Alas, the film-makers did not reference this novel but said it was based on a nonfiction work by Candice Millar called Destiny of the Republic. Well, I knew a bit about this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction plot line because I couldn’t put down the fictional work by Tom Noyes. It has won some acclaim in some circles, but, again, quality works like this ought be better known.

I might have highlighted this novel several years back when I first read it and I suspect that I mentioned that, oddly, author Tom Noyes is, in fact, a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes who founded the Oneida community.

The good folks at Slant described the novel like this:

Joining Noyes and Guiteau in their parallel narratives are a chorus of other characters—family members, lovers, rivals, notable historical figures — whose haunting voices complement, undermine, complicate, and enhance Noyes’s and Guiteau’s versions of events, while also homing in on the novel’s most pressing questions, including those related to revelation, delusion, loyalty, and love.

A Land Without Sin Paula Huston (Slant Books) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

This may be the first Slant release that we championed and I reviewed A Land Without Sin in BookNotes maybe in 2013 or so. We still have some hardbacks and it is a revelation of a book. It is set in Southern Mexico in the 1990s; in those years people knew from the news something about the Zapatista revolution there. It is literary and entertaining, laden with drama and struggle and politics and faith. And the famous Mayan pyramids. Huston has only grown in her reputation as a fine writer over the years (her most recent is The Hermits of Big Sur on Liturgical Press, about a contemplative monastery started in the 1960s at the urging of Thomas Merton.)

I so enjoy the excellent descriptions of the books on the Slant website which captures Slant’s passion for books and their articulate care for their authors. Here’s what they say about A Land Without Sin.

As revolutionary forces gather in the Lacandon jungle of southern Mexico in the fall of 1993, an idealistic American priest vanishes from his post in San Cristobal de Las Casas. The church, immersed in trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the escalating conflict between wealthy landowners and poverty-stricken indigenas, remains strangely silent in the face of his disappearance.

When his sister, only thirty-four but already a hardened battlefield photojournalist, finds out what is going on, she flies to Central America to find him, applying for a job assisting a taciturn Dutch Mayanist in order to provide herself with a cover story. But as it turns out, he, too, is on a secret quest.

From the great pyramids of Tikal to the graceful palaces of Palenque to the shadowy guerrilla camps of the vast Lacandon, A Land Without Sin is a modern-day journey into the heart of darkness.

Huston has said (on a video at the Slant website) that she hopes that readers will come away with “an increased sense of hope” even though this mystery read is mostly about facing the reality of evil even though God is good. Can love win out over evil? That’s one of the biggest question of all, eh?

Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith Jeanne Murray Walker (Slant Books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I don’t know if you know the wonderful poetry of Jeanne Murray Walker or have come across her articles or talks at various literary festivals or faith and the arts events over the years. She is a retired literature prof with an earnest dedicated following; she is so respected and loved by others in her obit, and almost in the circles of Luci Shaw and Madeline L’Engle. Her books works as a memoir but it is also a salute to reading. Anyway, her story is a moving one, a tale about overcoming a strict sort of fundamentalism and embracing the reality that good reading and writing is an open window to the world. Perhaps not as heavy (but as beautiful as) the breakaway in, say, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? or Tara Westerover’s Educated, but if you appreciated those, this is a memoir that will break you open and give you hope. I adored it.

An ode to reading and writing, lurking inside an account of questing faith — or perhaps the other way around. Why read spiritually-minded prose by a poet? Because the poet tells us that Alice Munro’s short stories have been, for her, a means of grace. Because she tells us that reading is a sacrament. That we might “quarry our own lives for images instead of buying. . .ready-made ones.” I feel lucky to be Jeanne Murray Walker’s friend. I feel even luckier to be her reader. — Lauren Winner, author Girl Meets God

Light in the Canyon Darran Cools (Slant Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

Showing their stylistic diversity and love of great writing, again, they just released a YA novel. Yep, a youth book!  I’ve listened to some of it being read by the author at their podcasted book release event. What an intelligent launch with Gregory and Emily and  Darran chatting and him reading. I’ll admit, the discussion was a bit more brainy than I’d expect at a book launch for a kids book, but there it is: these are seroius book lovers and joyfully serious people. And the book, I gather, lives up to their high standards.

I have not read it, yet, but I can say Cools is, well, cool. And even if I distrust publishers who liken their young authors to Madeline L’Engle, but there are some home-made science experiements (“something about black holes”) and Gregory knew her, so if he says it, I’m trusting the suggestion.

They say it is is “by turns chilling, tender, and profound. A story of loss and courage, Light in the Canyon explores how change can help us discover who we’re truly meant to be.”

Booklist is usally a very reliable and respected reviewer of YA books. They write,

Time and the Temple: God and Man Luigi Giussani (Slant Books) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

Greg was first known as the legendary literary leader of Image Journal and now, as distance has grown from his role in that past work, on the strength of his growing reputation as a bone fide indie publisher (and, I hope, from the ripple effect of their fascinating Slantcast podcast as one who continues to the public conversation about books, humanism, and the moral imagination.) Slant is becoming know as a very fine small press, or House as we used to say. They do more than poetry and fiction; they have a number of memoirs and a number of nonfiction pieces.

Time and Temple is one of a handful of books by Giussani published by Slant (alongside one called Living the Liturgy, another on hospitality, one on classical music, and more.) Those who renewal movements within the global Catholic community may know Monsignor Giussani (who died in 2005) as the founder of the Italian lay movement Communion and Liberation which grew into a worldwide movement and Fraternity. This book is a collection of meditations given by Father Giussani in the mid-1990s, two given to Catholic lay communities and the third (“Recognizing Christ”) given to a university group.  Various sermons and talks and chapters have been translated into over twenty different languages so it is a special grace to see Slant in Seattle doing Giussani’s work.

Slant tells us that this book really is a “concise and illumination synthesis of what Fr. Giussani wanted to communicate” — especially to young adults. At the heart of these reflections is the theme of vocation.

There is a bit about discernment in Time and Temple, about paying attention to place and time. Can every moment of life be “an offering”? Can every instant of life be lived for the glory of Christ? Memoir Domini

Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations of Art, Faith, and Mystery Gregory Wolfe (Square Halo Books) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

In my little paragraph above naming some reputable, boutique publishers that are so good these days, I mentioned Square Halo Books. Square Halo published a collection of Gregory Wolfe’s short essays in maybe 2003 or so, a collection of his excellent columns in Image Journal which he then edited and for whom he wrote. They were, if I’m being honest, often my favorite part of the literary journal. Later, Ned Bustard (polishing up his own square halo) edited a bigger, expanded collection and redisgned and reissued it. It is a wonder. If you listened to any of Gregory’s good comments on the podcast, you know how articulate and often charming he is. He is full of insight about things that matter much, and I wanted to highly recommend this good glimpse of his fruitful mind and pen. Support another independent press and buy this fabulous reader from us today. 20% off.

 

 

I don’t know if you care for podcasts much, but my dear friend Phil Schiavoni, who works for the CCO (the campus ministry organization Beth and I serve) is my conversation partner every other week in our “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast. For a while a year ago we did three random books that I wanted to tell about but these days we usually do a themed approach. We’ve done podcast conversations on books about play and hobbies, about racial justice, about reading the Bible well, about living in our bodies; we’ve done a few episdoes listing three books by or about an important author (for instance not long ago we did an episode on the books of Malcolm Guite and another on Dallas Willard.) It’s been fun and and few folks have said they love listening in.

We have two primary audiences — one group is those CCO staff who find keeping up with books I’m recommending to be a simple bit of professional development for their work with young adults. The other is more general — those who find us via Hearts & Minds, which is a broader reading community. Like many podcasters, we do it over Zoom so you can watch us chit-chat on YouTube (and see me hold up the books) or you can just listen by finding the “Three Books…” pod at Apple or Spotify.

On the most recent “Three Books…” we focused on three titles about the church. CCO is unique among campus ministry organizations in part because they partner with local congregations whenever they can, finding theologically conventional churches near campuses who hire CCO-trained folks to do evangelism and disciple-making at that near-by college. Even though they study ecclesiology and really value faith communities that can enfold seeking young adults (not every church has that capacity) I thought it would be fun to give  shout-out to three sort of specialized books about certain parts of church life. This BookNotes expands on that.

THREE BOOKS FROM HEARTS & MINDS PODCAST

You can find this “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” episode and my enthusiastic promotion of Strip Mine Jesus by Charles Cotherman, the delightful novel about a small church,  Love Big Be Well by Winn Collier, and the heavy Baal and the Gods of More by Andrew Root HERE (watching on YouTube), HERE (listening on Apple), or HERE (listening on Spotify.)

I want to circle back to those three in this BookNotes for those who didn’t listen and might appreciate the more conventional, written book review format here. I’ll add some others about the church to make this a pretty useful post for almost all of our readers. So here ya go, a Baker’s dozen of mostly recent books about the church, the spaces where congregations exist, the liturgical year, worship, and a few recent ones on pastoring. Don’t miss the last two — one on children’s ministry and on the aging population in our churches.

Please order these from us by clicking on the secure order link at the end of the post. We appreciate your support.

Strip Mine Jesus: Hope for the Rural Church, Small Towns, and Overlooked Places Charles E. Cotherman (Baker) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I yapped about this at the podcast, but it is one of my favorite books of 2026 so I have to write about it here, now, too. Brand new, it is the result of years of work that the author did as director of the Center for Rural Ministry (located on the campus of Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania.) Charlie has helped do both sociological research about and spiritual formation for pastors of small congregations and has deepened his awareness of the nature of various sort of small churches in various sorts of places. This book is both about rural and small town life and about doing church well in this “overlooked places.”

Which is to say, whether you are in a rustbelt town or a rural location, whether you find yourself in a deteriorating suburb or a struggling church in a typical small town or village, God cares. Jesus sees you and is glad for your work. Christ reigns over his whole creation and my, my, a whole lot of spaces in America (not to mention around the globe) that may be hurting, are God’s territory. And His own body — the church — is often struggling in those places. Again, Christ has not given up on His people. The zippy megachurches may or may not be doing well, but they serve a minority of God’s people: most churches are, in fact, not large. Ordinary churches often serving in less than exciting locations, are the norm.

There are a great handful of books about small churches and we have most of them. And there are (thank goodness) more books lately about the rural church as well. Of course we have books (even secular ones) about rural and small town life, about the heartland and the fringe places, and Cotherman’s great new book covers it all. He does indeed look at the smaller church and he is exceptionally aware of the context, the setting, whether that is rural spaces or small towns, country or rustbelt or whatever.

Charlie has been an important figure, oddly enough, in another aspect of our interests, because his first book was a study of the rise of Christian study center ministries at elite and research-oriented universities. In To Think Christianly he documents the expansion of a vision influenced by the likes of early Francis Schaefer and James Houston of British Columbia’s innovative Regent College into what is now the Consortium of Christian Study Centers. Charlie cares about the mind, about bearing witness with a sharp Christian presence in major universities and, interestingly, he cares about the roughshod places like his own Western Pennsylvania town (of Oil City, PA, where he pastors a small Vineyard congregation.) He also edited a book about church planting (Sent to Flourish) which is yet another area of expertise this renaissance man exhibits.

Strip Mine Jesus does, as I’ve hinted, two really important things. First, it explores the geographical terrain of “forgotten places” that may be overlooked (or romanticized) in the popular imagination. Whether it is the rural places explored in a book like Brad Roth’s excellent Flyover Church or the locations explored in The God of Small Places — a Rural Church Institute Resource edited by Glenn Daman & Jeffrey Clark or even the lovely little book (also set in Western Pennsylvania, I think) by Ronnie Martin & Donnie Griggs, Pastoring Small Towns: Help and Hope for Those Ministering in Smaller Places, Cotherman has read widely and studied diligently and writes fabulously. His book is simply not one to miss, almost no matter where are. Unless maybe your life and ministry is in Hollywood, Manhattan, or Palm Beach, almost all our BookNotes friends would benefit from this. You will appreciate his incisive teaching about cultural idols and how it is that our social imaginations are deformed by assumption in our modern Western society.

Secondly, I want to be careful how I say this as Charlie does not use this language himself, exactly, but I almost want to call this a liberation theology of the forgotten places. At least insofar as he insists that God has some special heart for the discouraged and neglected. At least insofar as he insists that Christ’s Kingdom comes in surprising ways — “not by power, not by might” says Zechariah, right? God is bringing God’s own healing and transformative influences to restore the broken, bring liberty to the captives, hope to the dispossessed, with gospel-rooted churches embodying real care, justice, and a passion for the common good. It is no accident that the back cover of Strip Mine Jesus uses the word “exploited” as that sort of extractive influence is exactly what has happened in many places. Just read the latest Wendell Berry novel, Marce Catlett to see one way that played out in Appalachia. (Or, for that matter, pre-order his late October forthcoming release, Dispatches from Rural America: Sixteen Essays.)

Cotherman does, this, though, this embodying a liberative vision for the ignored and even exploited geographies, by showing how a flourishing community can bring a new verve to isolated places. Most books on small church renewal celebrate the unique way many smaller churches are more personable (“where everybody knows your name”) than bigger institutions, but he wisely takes that a bit further. He uses as a case study the L’Abri community of Edith and Francis Schaffer in a small village in Switzerland, which was very nicely done. Charley knows a bit about what we sometimes call “intentional community”and has a really fun section telling of his first visit to inner city Camden NJ and the Simple Way community (led by Shane Claiborne, long before most knew who he was.)

There are three core chapters here, in a way the heart of the book: The Beauty of Community, The Goodness of Stability, and The Truth of our Identity. Linking community, stability, and identity to beauty goodness and truth is simply brilliant. Applying them to the “suffering and hope in small-town America” is spectacular.  Not bad for a kid who (he tells us) grew up wanting big things — bigger dreams, bigger places, bigger impact. I suppose it is hard, even now, for young adults to escape the metaphor of saying “he will really go far” as if to make something of oneself necessarily means to go away. Anyway, Charlie gets that, has lived that. And now he knows that God words in extraordinary ways even among the mundane and ordinary. Hooray!

His concluding chapter? It’s called “Living Toward Hope That Lasts.” He invites us to “attentive expectation.” Drawing on country Mennonite writer Brad Roth and urban Reformed thinker Tim Keller and a lovely line from the singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson, he pushes us to a hope of creation renewed and what it looks like to pay attention. I was cheering by the end, believe me.

In this now-burning world, we all live in “strip mined” places. And there is hope for us all, as creation groans, as our churches forge real fellowship and we embody a new way of seeing and a new way of being, right where we are. Start by applying some of the ideas of this great book.  You will discover a “simple goodness” in what Cotherman calls “the Great Horizon.”

HAVE YOU HEARD OF WEE KIRK?

{By the way, for those interested in a gathering for those in small congregations please know that we are involved in the Northeast Wee Kirk Conference, this year held in October 12-14 at a great camp and retreat center in the moutains a bit east of Pittsburgh. Here’s a little facebook video I did inviting folks to come. It’s low-key and a lovely time. And we take a lot of books!}

Love Big Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church Winn Collier (Eerdmans) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I mentioned this short novel in the Three Books podcast even though it isn’t brand new. Most of what we highlight here tends to be newer books, and when this was new (in 2017) I raved about it. I keep taking it to conferences and events and mention it when I can. There are a few literary memoirs about small town pastors (everybody should know A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry Garrett Keizer) and a few novels (Incorporation by Will Willimon is a fictional account of a big church in a small town, and is quite the take-town of the underside of megachurches.) I think the best story of church life I’ve ever read is this lovely little epistolary novel by a great writer, the authorized biographer of Eugene Peterson, Winn Collier. (Collier wrote the book about Peterson called A Burning in My Bones, some of which nicely unfolds in a small congregation in the suburbs of growing Baltimore.)

Love Big is about a less than stellar small town church looking for a pastor who calls a less than upbeat retired guy who wants to pare down the church and become more focused on just loving each other by worshiping God. In the drama that unfolds — and there is plenty that we learn through this pastor’s monthly church letters — we fine an honest story of a real church “trying to figure out how to live faithfully in the particular, everyday places of our lives.”

The great writer Robert Benson says “Collier writes strong and true, happy and sad, funny and wise, heavy and light.  I never fail to read anything that he writes. If you are a lover of words and wisdom on the printed page, you should read him too.” Seth Collier (author of the recovery memory Coming Clean) says “There are some stories that are so well-written, so layered with meaning, so humble and true, that they should be read, reread, and reread again. Winn Collier has written that kind of story.”

Pastor Pete himself, by the way, called it a “tour de force” which is a powerful phrase for a quiet little book. Eugene continues, saying Love Big Be Well is “an angle on understanding the life of both congregation and pastor that exceeds anything I have ever read.”

“Love Big Be Well is an angle on understanding the life of both congregation and pastor that exceeds anything I have ever read.” — Eugene Peterson

Traumatized Church: What Paul’s Relationship with the Corinthian Church Teaches Us About Helping Those Who Are Hurting Scot McKnight and Adrienne Gibson (Zondervan Reflective) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Our staff chuckle and sometimes debate where a book should be shelved and a few years ago we had this quandary when Brazos Press released Scot McKnight’s Pastor Paul: Nurturing a Culture of Christoformity in the Church. McKnight is a Biblical scholar who also writes good books about ordinary discipleship and about church life. For instance, his two lovely books on building safe, trusting, healthy congregational cultures — A Church Called Tov and Pivot — we put under church life, obviously.) But Pastor Paul? It’s a fairly scholarly study of pastoral passions to help others become Christlike as found in a close reading of Paul’s epistles. Does it go under New Testament studies or under being a pastor? Well, this brand new one is similar. It is a careful reading of Paul’s letters to the deeply troubled folk in Corinth. But yet, co-written with a therapist, it seems a very exceptional blend of NT explication and practical counsel. As one reviewer put it, it is “compelling and complex portrait of the agony and angst Paul went through when he was dealing with the Corinthian church.” Lynn Cohick, a distinguished New Testament prof and scholar says “We meet St. Paul as we’ve never seen him: as a traumatized apostle.”

Adam Hamilton writes,

If you’ve known pain in your church or in your ministry, or if you’ve struggled with Paul, you will find this book a remarkable gift.

I love the work of Chuck DeGroat and he says, “Traumatized Church reminds us that holiness has never required superhuman strength — only honesty, humility, and hope.”

If you want to understand trauma, especially as it has manifested in the church, and if you want to promote safer conversations among congregants, and if your hoping to heal harm and embrace restoration (not add to further trauma) this book ought to be in your hands. It asks “is your church a place of healing or hurt?”

It is deeply engaged with the story of Paul and the pain in Corinth. Some of it reminds me a bit of Pastor Paul and that serious work on Christoformity. But this really is less a first century cultural survey or Biblical study as suc but is an up-to-day and poignant exploration of what it means to (as they put it) realize, recognize, respond, and resist the ugly stuff of fractured relationships and navigate the wounds within the local church.

When Hurting People Come to Church: How People of Faith Can Help Solve the Mental Health Crisis Shaunti Feldhahn & James Sells (Tyndale Refresh) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Speaking of which— although we have good, serious help from the above mentioned Biblical scholar McKnight and the trauma counselor Gibson, this recent release might be ore practical for some readers. Feldhahn is a popular evangelical writer and James Sells is a psychologist, counseling prof and scholar of mental health from Regent University in Virginia.

The easiest way to explain this upbeat and clear-headed book is to quote this from the publisher’s marketing explanation, noting that people “are hurting on a scale we’ve never seen. They’re dealing with an onslaught of issues like anxiety, grief, mental health illness, family troubles and hopelessness.” I think we all know this is true. Can this book help?

Some say that congregations that work to become known for understanding and caring about the anxiety of members and guests will be stepping up to a great opportunity. Maybe we need to help our members become more savvy about what people are going through and a faith-based, gracious response.

Here is what they say they offer:

When Hurting People Come to Church will share how this works, and equip you as a busy leader to:

• understand the mental health crisis in your community
• raise up motivated lay people within the church to help address the spiritual and emotional needs of the hurting
• partner with counselors and other mental health professionals most effectively
• organize the church’s time and resources to reach the most people, while freeing you to step in where you are most needed
• grow your outreach to your community

Whether this is a “church growth” strategy or not remains to be seen and it should be obvious that we care about people because we care about people. And we care because of God’s love. Helping others with their deepest hurts and fears isn’t a strategy for something else, or a means to our own ends. Having said that, they aren’t wrong that people want to belong to places that truly care and have some clue about their concerns. This book can help get that conversation started.

Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry Andrew Root (Baker Academic) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Well, speaking of church growth — as the ad copy on the otherwise fine book above suggests — this new Andrew Root project is one of the most dense I’ve read in a while (and I am not finished) but, man, is it provocative and rewarding. As we’ve come to expect from Andrew Root he brings incredible insight into a truly Biblically-shaped form of ministry and church life — radically rejecting the ethos of our time and the attitudes and techniques that have emerged from the church drawing too unquestioningly from the culture’s ways — and offering us a exhilarating journey into the social sciences and cultural critics who give us eyes to see what we’ve too uncritically absorbed. The new one does that brilliantly.

Since it is a critique of church growth (helping us reform our understandings of the nature of growth and ethos of progress / growth motif) he has to look at the long-lasting, but mostly 20 and 21st century understanding of economics. Capitalism reduces things to the metrics of numbers, of quanity over quanity. He has to draw on thinkers like, oh, say, Hernando de Soto and Robert J. Gordon and Max Weber (of course.) When he shows how this faith in growth combines with techno-optimists he draws on the work of Manuel Castells. Did I say that Root is brilliant? I hear his podcasts are a blast, which is fun, having such a friendly guy who is so learned.

(Speaking of podcasts which I don’t listen to much, I had to hear [after I wrote this] the Holy Post interview with Andrew Root. In the introduction Skye Jethani says that in this book Root shows how “capitalism over the past 150 years has deeply shaped the church to mimic the efficiency of a machine rather than the relationality of a family.” Well put. That Holy Post interview can be found here, about 30 minutes in. Be sure to come back and read the rest of BookNotes, friends!)

Although he has always been theologically deep and often surprising — think of his captivating 2014 book Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker — his super-sophisticated approach began in earnest in 2017 with the “Ministry in a Secular Age” series which put deep theological considerations about church life in conversations with the complex theories of philosopher Charles Taylor (first in Faith Formation in a Secular Age: Responding the the Church’s Obsession with Youthfulness and then in 2019’s The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God, and then in The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time Against the Speed of Modern Life.) In subsequent, perhaps even more dense works, Root draws heavily on thinkers Hartmut Rosa and Byung-Chul Han. Whew!

(I have joked that I wonder if he is on the board of the major academic publisher, Polity Press as he cites all of their authors, over and over. Maybe he gets free ones or something, but, man, he does know his stuff, with long footnotes delving deep into questions and conversations about nuances of critique. The word enchantment comes up, as it does.)

And so, as I tried to say on the “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast this new one, while intellectually demanding, is brilliant. And his study of 1 Kings and the Elijah narratives is spectacular — a bit Brueggemann-esque, I might say — as he draws on the prophets denunciation with the gross syncretism between Baal (a god of fertility — the sexual bits of the clay statues he shows in the chapter “Memes and Museums” are not meant as erotic, but practical. Baal produced the goods, more fruit) versus Yahweh, the true God who meets the people in the desert with just enough Manna. We think we need growth, more tricks and techniques and miracles to bring more people to our church— crassly measured with butts in the pews and funds in the offering plates — when, in fact, we need a humility and sober trust. He has a picture of a clay idol of another such fetility idol, like Baal, but of Artimas (one of those famous ones seen in some Bible dictionaries) with dozens of breasts and he contrasts that with a famous icon of Mary and Jesus. Does the church have a Baal problem?

Do economics and stabilization and anxiety about survival and escalation/growth — deep in our worldviewish imagination — show up between the lines, the real idolatry in our congregational lives? Is there a relationship between the bull (a Baal-like symbol of ancient fertility cults) and our modern Wall Street symbol of bullish markets. You will be amazed by his original and brilliant insights about the Jezebel spirit, which is deeply economic.

In a way, this brilliant study of the ways we tend to prefer the gods of Baal rather than the suffering son held by the grieving mother Mary, picks up themes in his previous book called Evangelism in an Age of  Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness which offers a “theology of consolation” can shape how we think about evangelism and hope and the community of Jesus into which we are inviting folks.

Like Evangelism… and a few others, Baal and the Gods of More not only has rigorous social analysis and deep Biblical study, it has delightful fictional bits. (They are in italics and although he swears they are capturing more or less real conversations he’s had with real people they are a fictional device.) This playful bit of imagined characters and case studies makes the book lively just when it is getting too dense.

I am not sure that all of the congregations I know of, especially not some of the mainline ones, are, in fact, frantic in their fixation on growth; although the back cover shouts “the endless pursuit of ‘more’ won’t save the church” I am not sure that most of us directly have relentless commitment to bigger and better. Small churches are often happy for their size. Mainline folks often reject the mega-church “bigger is better” tone. But yet, why are we exhausted all the time, grumbling and fearful. Maybe late modern capitalism has seeped into our souls as the assumptions of growth like air we breathe and we aren’t even aware of our ”transactional” imaginations. Maybe we are more seduced by Baal than we even know.

If Root is even only half right about the Baal fertility gods and the modern equlivents, this book is urgent. God offers us a better way. Andrew’s invitation to the life of Mary is instructive and inspiring. We will never find a more vibrant and authentic faith until we disentangle ourselves from our fascination with modern idols of growth and data. Baal and the gods of More will help, if we take the time to study it. The preface and first chapter are priceless.

Ordinary Time: The Season of Growth Amy Peeler (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

In Root’s pivotal engagement with philosopher and social critic Charles Taylor, one of the ideas he ponders in The Congregation in a Secular Age is that “in the wilderness of high modernity” we need to reform our social imaginations, our ways, particularly in our view of time. He invites us to “keep sacred time against the speed of modernity.” I don’t recall if he cites the marvelously rich book by Taylor-esque philosopher James K.A. Smith called How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now but I sure recommend it.

Which is my plug not only for the deep Root volume, and the serious but wonderful Smith volume, but any books that help us capture a sense of time in a new and different way. What could Root mean by “sacred” time?

Certainly one of the ways we can think about and embody and imagine time differently is at least by paying some attention to what is called the church calendar. This is not all to the story — which is why I so value Jamie Smiths How to Inhabit Time — but it is a great compliment, an aid along the way. Arranging our lives through Advent into Christmastime and Lent and then Easter into Pentecost, will help us focus on the life of Jesus, writ big. As Diana Butler Bass explores in a one year batch of 52 meaty devotionals around the church calendar (A Joyful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perserverane) keeping the seasons intentionally and learning a bit about feasts and fasts and living well into the seasons can help counter the increasing secularization of our sense of time. It’s countercultural and a meaningful prop to family life and our experience of church and worship.

Enter this new volume on what is called Ordinary Time, which is typically understood as about half the year, the slow slog through the time after Pentecost (in the late Spring) into Advent in December. Ordinary Time? What’s the big deal about ordinariness? As some pundits put it, compared with the drama of Advent or the glory of Christmas or the intensity of Lent and Easter and Pentecost, not much happens. Exactly.

Black scholar, professor, writer and Anglican priest Esau McCaulley has edited and curated a small series of books on each of the major seasons of the church year. He was not raised in a liturgical church so it was sort of new to him, and as he became increasingly shaped by this rather unique view of time itself, he wanted to spread the news. He developed this “Fullness of Time” series with a short hardback on each of the main seasons. I have told you about all of them and have raved about them all. Now, a few months ago, the latest small volume released and it is Ordinary Time: The Season of Growth by Wheaton College (and Anglican priest) Amy Peeler.

If you know this series you surely will want to have this one to finish the collection. I adored the Advent one (by Tish Warren) and really loved the Christmas one (by Emily McGowin). Wes Hill did a fantastic job on the Easter one; the famously eloquent and hard-hitting Fleming Rutledge did the great Epiphany one, one of the best. Now we have this understated season. I hope you don’t miss it.

Ordinary time is a time of growth. I’ll say this, in case anybody wonders — the sort of growth Peeler means is not at all the same as the fascination with the idols of “more” that Andrew Root writes about (above.) The sort of “growth” he means, is not at all what Peeler tells us about in this little volume. This call to experience God in the ordinary times of Ordinary Time is to grow spiritually, to mature, deepen, grow in quality to speak, not quantity. She doesn’t at all talk about “church growth” or the metrics of measurement of the life of faith (as if one even could.) No, her invitation it so a spirituality of the commonplace, pulling us gently towards a quiet sort of season that is about maturity in Christ. Depth in the doldrums, as I’ve sometimes put it.

Diana Butler Bass, in the aforementioned A Joyful Year, notes something I never quite pieced together, that the first half of the church calendar is based on the life of Jesus (yes, obviously) but the second half is our response. That is, it is somewhat about us, our response, our call to discipleship, our, as Peeler puts it, “true colors” and “true freedom.” As Peeler tells us a bit of interesting stuff about the history and significance of Ordinary Time she reminds us that it is a season of spiritual formation.

She explains about some of the most common readings in the lectionary (“Propers”) and the season’s prayers and collects. The book is loaded with Biblical exploration, too. I had no idea this time when not much happens could be so rich. Even for those who sort of know this, it is important for me to be reminded. Ordinary Time is about the “fullness of time” as well, especially as we lean into daily faithfulness. She notes that deep trust, even in the face of death, “becomes our new ordinary.”

Why We Worship: Experiencing Heaven on Earth at Church Adriel Sanchez (IVP) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

This isn’t the place to air my grievances about Sunday worship but I’m sure you, too, have sins to confess about Sunday morning grumpiness or lackluster attitude in the sanctuary. I think this book will help (and might be a good resource for an adult ed class or small group or, if you are that kind of church, for your worship team to study together.) Let’s at least hope your worship team leaders or liturgists or officiants or whatever you call them, know this kind of stuff. Why We Worship is brand new and looks warm and wonderful.

I actually like heady books about serious worship. I was recently re-skimming Brazo Press’s Grand Entrance: Worship on Earth as in Heaven by the great Presbyterian turned Orthodox scholar, Edith Humphrey. (I told a friend that I smiled when I see that the back cover has blurbs from a Catholic scholar, an Orthodox participant, a non-Reformed evangelical, a CRC Reformed leader, and another Catholic.)  I’ve been dipping into Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology by David W. Fagerberg (published by Hillenbrand Books, a scholarly imprint of the upbeat Catholic LTP.) I’ve written before about the thoughtful “Dynamics of Christian Worship” series done by IVP Academic, especially Worship in An Age of Anxiety: How Churches Can Create Space for Healing by J. Michael Jordan, an ordained Wesleyan pastor who is now the Dean of the Chapel at Houghton University. There are a lot of good books on worship — we have hundreds!

Do you remember when I told you about the very interesting and useful How to Worship for All Its Worth: A Guide for Pastors, Worship Leaders, and Students by Steven Felix-Jäger (Zondervan Academic; $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39)? I explained how it offers a handful of principles about good worship; for instance, he explains why even contemporary worship services should be biblically faithful; aesthetically rich yet appropriate; theologically sound and robust; and pastorally sensitive but challenging. Then the second half of the book takes you on a lively visit to several different worship services which serve as case studies to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of these various worshipping communities. He looks at what we can learn from “Evangelical Worship”( Park Avenue Baptist Church, Titusville, FL),  creative Reformed Worship (Pillar Church, in Holland, MI), Pentecostal Worship by way of a visit to Life Church in Lancaster, CA,  Black Gospel Worship at an AME Church and, uniquely, a parish which offers a charismatic Catholic mass.

Well, anyway, all of that is too bring me to the brand new Why We Worship and my hearty recommendation for it. It presents a strong theological summons but seems very warm and inspiring; it helps us remember, as Justin Holcomb puts it, “that worship is an ascent into the presence of the Holy Trinity, entering another world, to worship the living God rattan than chasing religious inspiration. This is timely, gracious, and bracing invitation to be re-formed by the gospel as we gather.”

The book is arranged in three parts (Going to Church: Ascending the Mountain At Church: The Summit, and Descending the Mountain: Back Into the World.) These three sections frame the topic excellently (and the appendix about taking your kids to worship is very good.)

As you might guess, the heart is the middle portion what explores the meaning of things like the Call to Worship, the Confession, the role of musical worship, the sermon and benediction. There’s a good chapter on communion and a great chapter on the benediction. Who know that you needed this?

Listen to the thoughtful, Reformed thinker and writer Joni Eareckson Tada who offers this encouragement to read this book:

“As you wit with each chapter and meditate on its principles, you will understand worship for what it is — a God-centered response to God’s revelation of himself, all of it superintended by his Word and listen high through Jesus Christ.”

There is no doubt that in most of our congregations, our experience of church and our experience of worship is primarily mediated by the pastor. Granted, worship involves much more than what the pastor does and leading worship and preaching is only a small part of what most pastors do. But, let’s face it: the pastor is important in worship and in church. I’m going to name three new books about pastoring, and although I have named them before, they are each exceptional. Get them for your pastor, your pastor/parish relations committee, your search committee if you are looking for new congregational staff. This is the kind of stuff that can energize all of us as we learn to love our pastors well.  I won’t say much, but these are each fantastic and Highly recommend them.

Pastoring for Monday: Help Your Congregation Integrate Faith and Work Matt Austen (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but if your congregation is going to be faithful to its call to send out ordinary folks to “love and serve the Lord” into all areas of life, this book is essential. That ordinary work is not mentioned much in most churches is an indictment of our puny vision and dualisms and dichotomies and such; it is a blindspot we simply have to allow God to correct. Why do so many folks feel a gap between Sunday and Monday, between worship and their work? What can be done? How should a typical clergy person not fall into what one pastoral called “professional malpractice” by missing this core concern? The library of fabulous books on ordinary church people stepping faithfully into their callings in the work-world continues to grow, but most of them are books pastors just aren’t reading.  Maybe they feel ill-trained (since a robust theology of work isn’t taught in most seminaries) or maybe it’s just too huge for them to consider. In any case, for ordinary pastors of any denomination, Pastoring for Monday is a god-send, an answer to your questions about how to lead and preach and pastor as if God cared about your church members work-lives. This book helps pastors see that faith integrated into all of life, including vocations in careers and other callings, as a necessary focus of contemporary ministry, “not an optional add-on.”

Anyway, most readers of BookNotes won’t be surprised when I promote this good one. Spread the word — we have it here at our 20% off.

Armed with Austen’s tool-belt of strategies and practices, clergy will learn how to effectively support and relevantly communicate with their members as they navigate many common work-related struggles.  — Amy Sherman, author or Kingdom Callings and Agents of Flourishing

This truly outstanding book is a remarkable gift to the church and a must-read for every pastor. — Tom Nelson, founder of Made to Flourish and author of Why Your Work Matters

The Pastor as Midwife: Life Giving Leadership for the Healing of the Church Shawn Singer Gaines (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I raved about this about a month ago and I wanted now to circle back and underscore it again. I have long used the midwife metaphor (haven’t you?) when talking about ministry, in or out of the institutional church. We strive to participate with God in union with Christ, empowered by God’s Holy Spirit to get stuff done. To bring life, new life!  Right? I am surprised that there isn’t more written like this, richly plumbing the nuances of the work of a midwife to show how the life of a pastor can be enhanced by keeping in mind these women who catch babies for a living. What a parallel!

I appreciate Shawna Gaines and her vision “life-giving leadership.” I like that she names the pain that many of us and our institutions are in, which, frankly, is part of the whole childbirth thing, right? As it says on the back cover “the church is in pain, but God tells us that pain is pregnant with possibility.”

It is sort of interesting, she suggests, by the way, that the shepherding metaphor worked well when congregations were full and pastors saw clearly where they were headed (and what hazards to steer people away from.” In our different moment, the church needs more than a gentle guide, a pastoral shephard. We need a labor coach.

This book is very wise about the state of pastoring these days. Gaines has her DMin from Lipscomb University and is lead pastor of Trevecca Community Church in Nashville, TN. Like some artists of midwifery I know, she seems calm and grounded, wise for her age. Can we help navigate labor pains of the new world God is bringing in being? She is a lovely writer and this has been called by Scott Daniels, the General Superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene,  “fresh and biblical.. a creative way for pastors to frame within ministry as they participate in the birth a community that reflects new creation.”

Author Shawn Singer Gaines has a nice line in her acknowledgments that reminds us of the good marriage and co-parenting approach she has with her husband (who has labored together with her not only in congregational ministry but in higher education and neighborhood work.) She says to him, “While I was writing this book, you displayed the intuition of a midwife, knowing when to coax me to take a break and breather, and when to press me to push harder.” Exactly.

Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry Matthew Erickson (Eerdmans) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I have highlighted this more than once so will not go on and on here, raving more than I already have. But I will remind you quickly about several thins I love about this fabulous book.

First, it is just so well written, truly lovely, inspiring as the gracious words form into gracious paragraphs, inviting us to ponder and muse. It is one of the nicest professional books for pastors I have read in a very long time. There is no accident that he shares much with Eugene Peterson’s books about pastoral ministry, but he is a better writer.

Secondly, although it is obviously about pastoring, it really will be of interest to anybody who cares about church life.  I’m not kidding.  As my friend Vincent Bacote (a black theologian from Wheaton and a wise scholar of  Abraham Kuyper and other socially-engaged public theologies)  has said, “this insightful, catalytic, and personal book will bring great benefit to all who love Christ and his church.”

Thirdly, the restorative vision underneath the gardening talk really will be of interest to many and, rather like the midwifery metaphor, above, it is a fresh way to frame and approach the work of ministry. Whether you think the slow work of patient tending of the garden or the ways in which it involves us in “partnering with miraculous things” or understanding older ways of doing good work that isn’t primarily shaped by techniques and technology, The Pastor as Gardener is sure to be helpful. And stimulating. Whether you have read deeply in the agrarian worldview of Wendell Berry or not, this urban pastor’s introduction to this sort of metaphor will be generative. I promise.

It’s time for pastors to return to this old agrarian metaphor. It’s time for us to take up our rudimentary tools — our Scriptures and our prayers and our faith — and get back to our fields. This is serious work. This is joyful work. This is loving work.  — Winn Collier, author of Love Big, Be Well

Wet Cement: Inclusive Children’s Ministry That Leaves an Impression Julia Dennis (Friendship Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Okay, this is a fun and fiesty little book that is a pleasure to read and easy to take in. I know some of our readers will be a bit out of their comfort zone with this one, but hear me out. Julia Dennis and her husband are creative types raised in homes where the parents were fiercely supportive of them and who entered church with a fairly mainstream Protestant sort of care for everybody. She was raised United Methodist and we learn early on that her mom did all sorts of good stuff — saving the freezing unhoused in urban Baltimore, standing up against racism and injustice, preaching against war. (And some who didn’t appreciate her not only threatened her physically, but slit her tires. There’s some fine-looking “Christian” response to a liberal pastor, eh?) So as a youth this energetic gal saw it all. When Ms Dennis went away to college she was shocked to meet gay and queer friends whose parents had kicked them out of the house, even renounced them. How can a parent ever be so cruel to their own children? How can churches be so ugly?

Long story short — as she colorfully tells in this upbeat handbook that reads like a memoir — she adopts a progressive and inclusive sort of faith and ends up becoming a UMC children’s ministry, joyfully and boldly teaching children about the Bible’s overarching story about God’s goodness and grace and our radical response in working for social righteousness and public  justice. There are some things I would have wished for, but, mostly, this is a useful resource.

And then there is this: she herself is a bit ADHD, maybe on the spectrum, as some say. One of their own children has autism which inclusive folks now call neurodiversity. Julia Dennis is so compelling about this in Wet Cement because it is very much her own story. In Wet Cement she wants to help congregations be welcoming places for all children and youth and part of this is adjusting our normals to fully include those with what some call disabilities. She wants us to learn from her story so congregations can incarnate the big mercy of God. She wants us to be advocates and allies. Her book is to help us be more intentional about our compassion and our inclusion and our working hard to challenge exclusive systems.

I do like how the publisher explains this, exploring the “wet cement” image:

In Wet Cement, Julia Dennis challenges church leaders, Sunday school teachers, and spiritually curious parents to approach children’s ministry with a view of the lifelong impressions we are leaving on our children’s faith. With honesty, passion, and practical guidance, Dennis reimagines a faith formation that is child-led, radically inclusive, and rooted in the boundless love of Jesus.

Can unusual children be known not problems to manage but gifts to cherish? Can we help them enter into the Biblical narrative in a healthy way, not driven by fear of punishment or a wrathful God? Wet Cement: Inclusive Children’s Ministry That Leaves an Impression was recently released by Friendship Press (the publishing arm of the National Councilor Churches.)

A Vision for the Aging Church: Renewing Our Ministry for and by Seniors James M. Houston & Michael Parker (IVP Academic) $30.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.79

I suppose if I dig into older books that I love about the local church community I’d list a dozens. But for our purposes here, offering a short list of mostly new books for those who love their congregations and pastors, and want thoughtful resources about refreshing our ministries, I just had to put something in about what some call “seniors” or the “aging population.” The elderly.

Not sure what phrase to use that suggests the challenges and opportunities of those in this late season of life but I love this book for several reasons. It came out several years back and isn’t new, but wanted to end this list with it because it is rather rare and pretty unique.

First, A Vision for the Aging Church balances between serious sociological and theological reflection and practical stuff to do, to deepen integral ministry for the older folks in our churches. There are plenty that are more simple — devotionals for those in care facilities or Bible readings about growing older, sure. And there are a few academic studies about the “graying of the church.” This blends mature thinking and som practical insights making it ideal for many Hearts & Minds customers. Yay.

Another thing I like about this is the subtitle: the ministry it explores is both for and by seniors.  A very good point.

Thirdly my hat is always off to one of the great geniuses and behind-the-scenes evangelical leaders of our time, the wide (and quite elderly) founder of Regent College in British Columbia, the mystic and leader James Houston. (I mentioned in our lead book review above that Charlie Cotherman, author of Strip Mine Jesus had an early book on the rise of the Christian Study Center movement, and Jim Houston plays a major role in that well-told book.) Anyway, anything James Houston writes is something we are interested in stocking. His 2019 auto-biography — with some world historical stunning moments — is called Memoirs of a Joyous Exile and a Worldly Christian.

Fourth, there are several appendices that are questions to use in a church survey, some more general for the aging person but a vital one about church life and services. It’s worth the price of the book, almost, for that good list for a useful church survey.

Houston and his colleague Michael Parker did a sequel to this for the individual aging Christian which looks good. (We have a whole bibliography of books on agin faithfully. Send me an email if you want us to share it.) I celebration this one, A Vision for the Aging Church here, though, since it is one of the rare ones about the local congregation and ministry. Highly recommended.

Order any of these books (or anything else) by using the links below. 

 

Thanks to those who read through my last BookNotes, telling about three fast-paced, very well-written books about, among other things, the “fire weather” we are experiencing in our hotter planet. We are still surprised that some are surprised we can get so enthusiastic about books that are not written out of an obviously Christian perspective. Intentionally Biblically-based or not, those three titles are tremendous reads and important. Read about them here if you missed it.  And then send us an order, please. Maybe consider donating them to your public library or some roadside Little Free Library or start up a book club.

In this week’s BookNotes I’m sending out love primarily to two books, one which I’ve highlighted already, the other technically not released yet (but we have them here, now.) I am sure many of our readers will appreciate them as much as I have, and will be glad for this week’s focus on the nature of God and our interior lives. One book reminds us of the Triune God and nicely ponders how knowledge of the Trinity is good for understanding our own belovedness. It’s called Fully Beloved and is wonderfully written by author and pastor Timothy Jones. it is truly a sweet book, thoughtful, wise, captivating. I liked it so much I’m doing my second BookNotes review.

The one I will focus more on, however, is by a friend named Jeremy Sims and I am truly honored that he orders books from us, titles which, I think it is fair to say, show up in the beautiful footnotes in his brand new The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements. I’ll tell you much more about that below.

CS LEWIS

Before I dive into it, though, I wanted to squeeze in an announcement about another brand new title, The Everyday Mysticism of C.S. Lewis: Spirituality for Daily Life by Gary Selby (IVP Academic) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99.) Selby is the masterful writer of another Lewis book that I loved called Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality: C.S. Lewis and Incarnational Faith, also published a few years back by the great IVP Academic. This new one starts off on the back cover issuing a concern that I often have: some of the Christian mystics and great saints and teachers who have had deep encounters with the Divine are sometimes seen to be eccentric (fair enough) and not very down-to-Earth. One can get lost in the interior castles of the medieval mystics and sometimes folks come away from this sort of intense spirituality more interiorly focused than they ought. Selby — who used to direct the Center for Faith & Learning at Pepperdine — is quick to show that, in Lewis’s take, we get from the great older writers an “everyday” sort of mystical encounter. (Remember Lewis’s lovely bit about “patches of Godlight” in his book about prayer, Letters to Malcolm? That’s it!) Lewis read the classic Christian mystics and deeply respected their intense writing about their spiritual experiences and, informed by his Lewis studies, Selby invites us to live out of that kind of faith in more practical and day-to-day ways. Everyday Mysticism sort of seems like a follow up to Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality but you really don’t have to read that one first. Lewis enjoyed the mundane and in this new volume, Selby is pointing us to deeper formation and, more urgently, to union with Christ. As Bonnie Thurston (formerly of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) puts it, the book is “erudite without being snobbish and faithful without being narrow.”

MakeYour Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path to Unknowing James K. A. Smith (Yale University Press) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40. I’ve raved about this one already (as I do all of Jamie Smith’s books) but I’ll say again that some of you should be reading his hefty and serious new one. I want to mention it here, again, as it really is a great piece of work, remarkable in its learnedness and wonderful in its compelling invitation to grapple with “the path to unknowing.”  It is at times searing, so honest and real about his own struggles (abandoned by his father as a boy leading to some serious adult depression at the height of his writing fame) and how an unlikely encounter with the mystics like Saint John of the Cross allowed him to give us the idolatrous search for certainty. Granted, some of it is at times a bit scholarly and academic, dense, even. But well worth the careful reading experience. If you know about his must-read You Are What You Love you can see even in that book his move towards “what’s under the hood”, the need for us to have the Spirit touch the imaginations of our hearts. Nope, we can’t “think our way” out of these messes of the modern world, nor our own inner pains. By allowing the sublime to touch him deeply (whether it is from disruptive modern art and edgy contemporary literature or the deep writings of medieval mystics) Smith finds a way to let go of intellectualism and live out of God’s utter goodness and love in the midst of his calling as a philosopher and public thinker. I suppose it is not for everyone. but Make Your Home… is truly one of the most provocative and vital books of the year.

So whether it is late 20th century touchstone spirituality books like Merton’s deep New Seeds of Contemplation or the fabulous The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster or Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms or the modern masters like, say, Ronald Rolheiser or Martin Laird, or the one’s I’ve mentioned above — Gary Selby’s The Everyday Mysticism of C.S. Lewis or Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark by Jamie Smith — there are so many places to start this encounter with the contemplative ways knowing and being.

We live in an age of so many good books written to appeal to so many different sorts of readers. The following two I’m recommending to almost anyone. They are both among my favorite books of the last several years.

FULLY BELOVED

Fully Beloved: Meeting God in OurHeartaches and Our Hopes Timothy Jones (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I wrote with a lot of enthusiasm for this recent book a few weeks ago. I was maybe two-thirds of the way through and had to get the post done, so I gave it my big thumbs up and packed it in my bag as we headed out of state to sell books for a week. In the weeks following I have savored each and every page, re-reading many sections for the sheer joy of them. Jones has won me over as a fan; he is an exceptional, splendid writer, with a lovely blend of story and theology, earnest faith and superb prose. He can be poignant but it never devolves into being sappy. He is tender, but, again, not mawkish. His restrained prose, crafted with such striking texture and pace, reminds me of the great Robert Benson. His focus on the goodness of God and the grace shown in the death of Christ reminds me of Brennan Manning. Jones is now an Anglican priest and while he has somewhat of a sacramental worldview, it isn’t about that. It’s about the Trinity which ends up being a window into the joy and beauty of the gospel, the very good news that God rescues us out of an abundance of love.

Fully Beloved verges on the edges of a contemplative sort of tone but it not about esoteric encounters, not at all. It is about real stuff like his mother and father abandoning him in his young adult years, about him wondering what it would feel like to be accepted. It is — again, without smarmy prose with TMI (“too much information” as the saying goes) or corny applications like too many Hallmark-lite writers — about the wavering of the human heart and the great need to be known and loved. Sure Henri Nouwen and Parker Palmer and so many others have written about this, but there is something about Jone’s appropriation of the Trinity and the “three personed God” (as John Donne puts) that gives this a gentle bit of heft. I wouldn’t say it is written with gravitas as it is way too charming for that descriptor, but almost. For some, it is going to be life-saving.

As I said in my first write-up, I can hardly say enough about Fully Beloved but I can say this: it keeps getting better and better as the book unfolds.  The first line is “Am I loved? Maybe no question nags at us more. Perhaps no questions matters as much.”  In the last half of the book he offers a pair of chapters on God the Father’s answer to this eternal question, and how Jesus (and his death and resurrection) contribute to the answer, and the last two chapters on the role of the Holy Spirit brings it all home. (You see what he did there, this three-fold structure?) There are some very honest stories and some really good prose and some great citations (footnotes from poets and scholars.) There is some in-depth Bible stuff and some clear-headed guidance about church and family and forgiveness and prayer and…. Well, in a way it is a very good overview of the entire Christian life. It’s an all around great book.

Want a good book about God and you, the hurts of your heart and God’s assistance? Do you yearn for rescue without the insight offered being shallow or formulaic? Do you want a bit of theological meat with your lovely lines about goodness and grace? Can you take some hard stuff, knowing how much brokenness there is in this good but fouled world?

After a lovely and helpful concluding story about Jones finding an old picture of himself playfully tossing his two-year-old son in the air, he wondered about trust and presence and joy.  After that beautiful paragraph he writes:

We’ve caught glimpses of the Trinity as a society of intimate relating and congenial collaborating. Glimmers, too, of a God who is not only personal but who overflows in love for us — for our world. I hope you have seen ways forward for ourself in all this. An invitation to greater intimacy.

After telling about his use of the famous icon by Andrei Rublev (his portrait of the Trinity with a open place at the table, it seems) he notes more of what he sees:

Mystery, yes, but also clarity. Our imaginations get stretched and our awe swells again and again. And most of all, our love for the God of great love kindles and grows more radiant day by day.

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT

The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements Jeremy Sims (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I’m just going to say it: this is one of the very best books on the inner life and deeper spirituality that I have ever read.

“This is one of the very best books on the inner life and deeper spirituality that I have ever read.”

There, I said it. Should I just let it go at that, hoping you will trust me enough and order The Way of the Spirit right away? Or should I tell you what I so loved about this extraordinary book? It deserves a fantastic review (I’m sure others will do it better justice) and there is so much to tell, but I do not want to overdo it. I want you to order it!  As a believer and champion of this new author, I have to say just a bit. Here are three things you should know about the author — mostly what he explains in the book — and some  things about this glorious book itself.

Although we’ve never meet in the flesh, I count Jeremy as a true pal and appreciate the emails he sends (and the orders he’s placed.) We’ve chatted on the phone (and I watched his wedding a number of years back when it was streamed live.) I love this guy. And we hope to do a free webinar so you can enjoy a conversation about the book — stay tuned as plans develop.

So three things about the author:

First, Jeremy has a complex story, and has experienced a more painful portion of life than most of us. You will read how it effected his move into a quieter sort of contemplative experience of faith, but the hard death his first beloved wife (from Huntington’s Disease) rocked his world, as it would anyone. He was an upbeat and beloved youth pastor at the time and had young kids, too, and during those years his longing for a deeper experience and mode of faith was clearly (but not exclusively) driven by the tragic losses during this pivotal season. Had he even read The Dark Night of the Soul? Like most of us, probably not. But he went through a personal devastation and he writes about it with just enough pathos to help you appreciate his journey (but not too much as The Way the Spirit is not a book primarily about grief.) He eventually remarried and entering into that great gift is also part of his story.

And, truth be told, his longing for something (animated by what he calls a restlessness) began before the year their lives began to change. He tells of a pivotal retreat and discovering what became one of his favorite books, Mansions of the Heart by Thomas Ashbrook about the stages of spiritual growth, with a famous forward by Eugene Peterson. It’s amazing what a book can do, sometimes, eh?

Secondly, importantly, Jeremy was raised and remains a Southern Pentecostal. He is so cool that he had a crazy/fun video which he used to audition for the TV show The Amazing Race and he is smart and a great leader and has huge amounts of integrity. So don’t conjure any smarmy Jimmy Swaggert images. But this was and remains his faith tradition. He does teaching, spiritual direction and mentoring of future Assembly of God pastors (and others, okf course) at Southeastern University in Florida. But has a Doctorate of Ministry from Portland Seminary. And hangs out in Catholic retreat centers and knows the great medieval mystics as well as anyone I’ve ever read. More on that in a moment.

I think (and this seems both interesting and important) that Jeremy so longed for a mystical (if quiet) encounter with the Spirit of the risen Christ because he knew both passionate, real, encounters with God and, yet, because he wanted something more (not less) even if he wanted it in a gentle, sublime manner. Throughout the book he cautions about putting on airs or manufacturing sentiment or overdoing emotional expression, and while all of that is wise and helpful (some of it stemming from the early desert fathers and mothers or the monastics of the 15th century) it does seem to emerge from his concerns about the loud and visceral sort of stuff that happens in his own church tradition. For those with eyes to see, some of The Way the Spirit is a gentle plea to his own tradition to go deeper, not seeking the sensational.

Here’s how he starts the book; don’t miss a word:

I am a cradle Pentecostal, the kind who grew up under wooden-beamed ceilings with fans that spun slow above a sweaty sanctuary, where perfume and prayer mingled in the air and no one doubted that God still moved. The music was loud, the faith louder. We sang until the floorboards rattled, prayed until someone shouted, and waited until heaven seemed to lean close enough to touch. I remember the tambourine keeping time with a hallelujah, the worn pews groaning beneath the weight of saints who had learned to hope through hardship. In those moments, I learned to expect the Spirit’s power, but I didn’t yet know how to recognize the Spirit’s quiet. For a long time, I thought intimacy with God had to sound like thunder. It took years to learn that most often the Spirit moves like breath.

Beautiful, no? And then he explains:

Over the last fifteen years, the Spirit has led me on a journey I never expected. I have not walked away from my Pentecostal roots; if anything they have sunk deeper. I still believe in the God who heals bodies and breaks chains and fill sanctuaries with holy fire. But I have also learned to cherish the quiet fire that has burned for centuries in the historic church — the prayers that have been prayed long before my voice entered the chorus, the wisdom of saints who teach us how to wait when the miracle does not come quickly.

I shed tears reading that, and I was hooked.

Which leads me almost too obviously to the third thing you should know about Jeremy Sims. He is an incredible writer. If this is the only book he does (and I hope it is not) we should thank God in awe that there are such wordsmiths who craft such good paragraphs working among us. Jeremy is not only a contemplative Pentecostal, but he is also an artist, a writer of the finest order. Maybe he’s got the spirit of Bezalel from Exodus 31. I know he’s worked hard on this book and it shows.

Don’t you love where this is going, where a sobered and bereaved Pentecostal pastor takes up with a spiritual director and learned to be both fully Pentecostal in his AG tradition and at the same time “grounded in the ancient practices that have sustained the faithful through both drought and abundance.”

“I have found,” he observes, “that encounter and tradition are not rivals.”

One does not have to be a restless and then grieving Pentecostal to want a “deepening into something wider, older, and surprisingly familiar.” Don’t you, too?

Your own heart will leap, at least a bit, when he uses phrases about the “sacred rhythm of ordinary faithfulness” and how he learned as a pastor to feel “the weight of people’s questions” “but also the ache beneath them.” When he writes about coming to realize that there is “sacred ground” as we seek for God amidst our confusions I scribbled in the margins! He writes of the “slow discovery that holiness often hides inside the ordinary” and that what perhaps we most need, or what we’re really talking about, is that matter of attention.

Yes, there was great tragedy in his story, but here is the start of his journey: restlessness and yearning. He wanted to find God and trust that God was at work “even when I couldn’t locate him in the noise of my own life.”

I don’t know if you have experienced this restlessness or what some call spiritual anxiety, or if you sometimes fear exhaustion if not clinical burnout, but I bet you can relate. To hear god over the noise of our own lives?  Jeremy picks up on Brene Brown’s curious phrase emotional granularity and his rumination about that in the full-chapter introduction to the book is worth the price of whole book. It’s that good.

This book is not the first to invite us to “the slow unlearning of hurried faith” — Jamie Smith, above, talks about unlearning, as does Timothy Jones in Fully Beloved, but Jeremy’s invitation to this holy work is exceptional.

A few quick things about the structure The Way of the Spirit.

First, as I’ve said, he is on a journey to find a deeper more ancient sort of faith without leaving his Pentecostal practices or his role in his denomination. But he does push back against what he has seen as perhaps extremes or unhealthy aspects of holy-roller habits. Eugene Peterson, by the way, emerged as such a deep practitioner of the slow work of spiritual disciplines in part because he wanted something more lasting than the splashy sort of holiness shouting he heard growing up. Jeremey remains happily AG and teaches at a legendary Pentecostal school, but he has been shaped and deeply formed now, for much more than a decade, in the company of the medieval mystics and spiritual classics.

The subtitle is helpful in that he is guiding us to discern the movement of God (the sometimes subtle movements of God) and he calls these “waypoints.” The big center of the book offers seven waypoints, each by inviting us to the wisdom a particular saint or writer. This is so, so good, but I’m ahead of myself.

Before the middle “pilgrimage of the Spirit” and the waypoints on that pilgrimage, Sims offers two very important starting points, about the cultivation of attention. There are essential and consequential chapters. He offers in Part 1 two marks, which he describes as “attentive presence” and “spiritual naming.” I do not think this is utterly new but it was fresh and vivid for my heart and mind and rang so true I underlined almost every paragraph. This invitation of a “way of being in the world, a posture of open-hearted presence” is so good.

Sims insists that his book is not offering a new task, but is about unlearning — “unlearning distraction, releasing control, and recovering the ability to truly be here” as he puts it. He is offering not skills or techniques or disciplines but a new lens. It is beautifully written but sensible; it would be good to read alongside Smith’s more daunting Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark. It is an invitation to spiritual space-making. His Biblical reflections helping us see this are rich and lovely.

He says he learned much of this, not incidentally, in his appointments with his spiritual friend/ director.

During the long decade of Tiff’s illness and the grief that followed, there were many seasons when I avoided God. When Scripture felt hollow. When prayer felt impossible. But I showed up to direction, month after month. That is its quite power. It became my anchor, not because it changed my situation but because it tethered me to presence.

I do not want to summarize every section for you, but he does follow this lovely line about being “tethered to presence” with a little bit about Simon Weil and then ends up arguing that “this is the quiet tragedy of inattention: it slowly erodes our capacity for love”

Oh my. Underline that!

Have you ever felt that? Maybe just apathetic and numb? Do you ever host the insight that fast-paced inattention “dulls our hunger for what is real.” Here’s what he means: “ It slowly convinces us that silence is empty, that nothing important is happening here and that we are safest when we are guarded.”

The Spirit will use this small section of this book to help us wake up — it can help you and it  can help me. His invitation to “surrender” and then to “behold” points us to what he calls “the full arc of attentiveness” which is “softened by mercy, trained by slowness, and reformed by grace.”

And the second mark of attention in Part 1 is even better, about the role of naming. Wow – what a chapter.

SEVEN WAYPOINTS

As I said, the middle Part 2 of the book, then, is his explanation of each of seven saints, most who have written a classic text of spirituality. These are the “waypoints” along the journey that he invites to; he says “waypoints are markers on the road. They will tell you where you are and invite you to notice what’s happening in the landscape of your soul. They give shape to your movement. They orient you to when you feel disoriented.”

The first Waypoint, a chapter called “Holy Threshold” is about Mary and it is rich and good, rooted in the Biblical narrative.

The second Waypoint is in the chapter called “Desert Formation” and it is on the famous 3rd-century Egyptian desert fathers and mothers. It is perhaps the best brief explanation of them I have ever read. Geesh, now I might take back some of my old criticisms, fearing they were merely anti-cultural and nearly gnostic. Jeremy’s words resonated so much that I have read that chapter three times.

The next marker on the road is “Repentent Reordering” and while there is much these days written about Ignatius of Loyola and the Ignatian methods, it is, again, very clear, relevant, and moving. Look: he’s not Catholic and surely no Jesuit, but he explains the helpfulness of this as well as anybody. If you are interested in Ignatian spirituality, you’ve got to read this chapter.

Waypoint 4 is directly about the “Inner Journey” and, again, it is about the best summary of Teresa of Avila I have ever read. There is lots on Teresa these days and most of us need as much help as we can get entering her interior castle. Jeremy says some things about Interior Castle that I’ve not noticed or read before and I am grateful. Wow.

Waypoint 5 made me think again of Jamie Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark and Sims’s take on Dark Night of the Soul is appropriately heavy, but, even through lament, it just sings. He tells us that John of the Cross was born in a small village in Spain in 1542 and gives you needed background about what happened when he joined the then-new order, a reformed branch of the Carmelite order (the Discalced, which simply means barefoot.) Jeremy notes that “John’s life was marked by intensity, by prayer, by suffering, and by love.” Did you know he was imprisoned and tortured by his own brothers in Christ? I didn’t realize or remember how persecuted he was (and realize now why Sims related him in passing to Catherine of Sienna and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, too.)  But here’s the thing: we use the phrase “a dark night the soul” to mean almost any depression or doubt but Sims dissects it a bit, explains what all it more specifically means and implies and how to find God in the midst of that sort of particular angst.  He walks readers through a process including “holy dissatisfaction” and “purposed wandering” which can lead to what he calls “infused contemplation.” It is excellent; a real help in taking up and appreciating the famous but often misunderstood text.

“Divine Encounter” is the next section and this 6th Waypoint is guided by Julian of Norwich. We know her line about “all shall be well” but Jeremy really needed this. We all need this. We have so much of Julia in the store (including a book written decades ago called Why Julian Now? asking why in our new postmodern times we need this ancient mystic.) She is beloved for a reason. His description of being on silent retreats and in liturgical settings (not his natural worship habitats, recall) and, like with the other chapters, weaves historical info and spiritual insight and his own story into a very sensible introduction. He has these little pointer charts, too, in each chapter, making these true Waypoints. In this chapter the flow moves from “wounded openness” to “transfigured truth” to joyful oneing” which leads to “steadfast assurance.” This is great stuff, believe me.

I loved the final Waypoint, Waypoint 7, which is on the “sacred ordinary” teaching of Brother Lawrence. Who doesn’t love the “God of pots and pans” described in his classic Practicing the Presence of God. I could say much about this chapter — I thought I knew most of what was to know about Lawrence and about putting into practice his prayerful openness of the Spirit’s presence in the mundane. But I felt like a novice, joyful and enthused to learn this afresh. I pondered Jeremy’s good teaching about liminality and about liturgy. His flow in this chapter (and in the title chart) is too good to mention — you’ll have to order the book and read how he gets from “subversive sanctification” to through several other lovely steps to “expanded wonder” and eventually to “deepening gratitude.” Again, one doesn’t have to be Pentecostal to need the advice: “In the sacred ordinary the Spirit does not dazzles with spectacle. Instead the Spirit teaches us to see again, not with naive eyes, but with renewed ones.”

None of this is about escape for the world or being overly concerned about our interior lives (always a caution when moving in these circles) but about being transformed into Christlikeness and to bearing the fruit of “cultivated attentiveness.” The book’s first part comes together in the final two chapters, among the most stunning of all. His two “Marks of Granularity” in the Part 3 are “Shared Recognition” and “Sustained Attention.” I could write a review just on these two amazing chapters and they are worth reading again and again.

Two final words. At the end of each chapter there is a one page sort of summary, take-away, and exercise. It is prayerful and experiential and a good thing to do to begin to inhabit the points along the way. As these guides and their books that Jeremy teaches about come to life, to practice their insight with these excellent experiences is good. It’s one more feature of The Way the Spirit that illustrates the author’s hope that it truly helps God’s people along the way.

Secondly, there are also discussion questions at the end, making this even more useful to process and explore, and, importantly, to consider using with a small group. If you do spiritual direction, tell your director about it. If you are a pastor, hand a few out to the spiritually hungry in you congregation. If you are a fan of spiritual classics, you’ll love this. If you are not familiar with the contemplative tradition this really is a moving and clear introduction (and more!)  Find some friends and start a book group. These questions will help it take hold. There is lots to reflect on, lots to enjoy, things to learn about “spiritual granularity.” Skip the spectacle. Read (slowly) The Way of the Spirit.

As the great A.J. Swoboda says in his foreword:

My encouragement to you: read slowly. Take in the movements that Jeremy has given voice to. Don’t rush past the burning bush that is this book. Stop. Watch. Listen. Talk. Respond. And mull.

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TO ORDER, PLEASE USE THE LINK AT THE END OF THIS BOOKNOTES.

There is an excellent new book about spirituality coming soon that I want to tell you about next time — linking it to two other great ones. Stay tuned for that. I actually wanted to do this BookNotes later in the summer, but after a creepy seven-hour long drive back from Ohio through smoky smog and days of dangerous AQI readings from the tragic wildfires, I have to tell you about these riveting books now. Thanks to those valiant CCO friends who helped us load the book boxes back into the van through that serious heat and haze. We hope you got home safely.

Here in the mid-Atlantic (and beyond) the smoke from wildfires to our North descended upon us hard, making it difficult to breathe well outdoors. Even inside, the smoke came through the cracks in doorways and windows. For those of us with illnesses (just for instance, Beth’s breast cancer, and my less serious but still cancerous diagnosis) and anyone with asthma or other health issues, this is more than an inconvenience. It has been scary.

We are fortunate not to face the immediacy of horrific flames as those around our continent have, time and again, and our prayers go out, again and again and once again. The whole creation groans (Romans 8:22) and we along with it. Heaven help us.

Yet, thoughts and prayers (as our friends who have lost loved ones in mass shootings have reminded us) are not enough. We must understand the problem and do something. We must study up. As good neighbors and faithful citizens we must advocate for policies that might serve the common good, this time regarding the pressing problems from pollution. My dear friend Steve Garber’s book, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate (Paraclete Press; $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99) reminds us that in this fallen world we cannot do it all, we cannot change the world in anything close to ultimate ways, but we can do something, providing some healing — maybe a bit shy of what Schaeffer suggested in True Spirituality as “substantial healing” — but real, offering tangible hope. I thought a lot about that book this week.

One of the joys and obligations of my vocation is to find books that are not only informative and helpful but that are inspiring, maybe even fun to read. We listed novels in our last BookNotes (and there are plenty more where that list came from) but we tend to specialize here in nonfiction. Sometimes authors we suggest are writing directly from a Christian perspective, other times not. In any case, we recommend books that we think you ought to read, that are helpful and important. Here, with a smoky smell I can’t yet wash away, are three that feel existentially vital. And, believe me, they are rip-roaring, amazing reads.

Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World John Vaillant (Vintage) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

Perhaps if you’ve seen me on any of our every-other-week podcasts you’ve noticed some books stacked up — I’ll admit, somewhat staged — on the desk, over my shoulder. One of the books there has been nominated for a prestigious Pulitzer Prize and also nominated for the almost always impeccable American Book Award. I put that hardback copy of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather there in honor of customers of ours who have lost much in tragic fires. I’ve been wanting to describe it here at BookNotes and I am sorry I am only now, with Canadian smoke in my nose, even through a mask when outdoors, telling you about it. It is now in paperback and it has been for me one of the most interesting and compelling books of the year.

Mr. Vaillant’s meticulous style is clear and detailed, the book arranged in three major sections. It is not quite as personal as the two that follow (they feature real-time glimpses of life in communities effected with first-hand journalistic verve and humane storytelling.) Fire Weather is a tad more scholarly, telling of an event that happened a decade ago, but even at its most detailed, it isn’t dense or plodding. I found it a page-turner, full of interesting facts and brilliant descriptions and touching episodes. One reviewer said it is “astonishing on every page.” Agreed.

The opening intro is breathtaking in its brief retelling of one of the worst disasters, and the costliest, in Canadian history, the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray in the far northwestern part of Alberta, Canada, not that far from the rugged Saskatchewan border. It is, as you may surmise, a book about forest fires and how climate change —  aggravated by our polluting the atmosphere so terribly — has made such fires more common and more severe. And that riveting introduction to the horror of the inferno in the boreal forest and the oil refinery town in the middle of the tar sands region in the otherwise very rural region heading towards the Arctic circle, sets the stage; wow!

As the good writer he is (he has previously published significant fiction and nonfiction) Vaillant has to do the background, setting the historical context of what in the world is going on in the near arctic regions of northern Alberta. The first three chapters, surprisingly, are worth the price of the book. In vivid prose he writes about how isolated and rural and expansive the geography of Alberta is. He describes the (rare) weathered buildings, the long, long roads, the Boreal forest, the animals — deer giving way to moose, crows giving way to ravens, coyotes to wolves, with the wild bison and 100 pound trout in huge lakes and big sky landscapes. Almost every page I noted something to quote for you, and after pages of post-it notes and so much stimulating writing, I realized I couldn’t retype paragraph after paragraph, pages of quotable writing. It’s fascinating, all of it.

He has to look at the history of this region — it hangs together as the dots slowly are connected — including telling the gruesome history of the Hudson Bay Company. A Scotsman named MacKenzie was the first European to traverse to the West Coast of Canada (years before Lewis & Clark did so in the US) and the Hudson Bay Company became more rapacious and profitable and extractive than their counterpart in the south, The East India Company, about which Edmund Burke said it was “a merchant masquerading as a State.” Vaillant studies the discovery of what we now call the Tar Sands region and a bit about the history of the oil and gas industry (including the discoveries in Titusville, Pennsylvania.) There’s even an old photo of derricks in Venango County, which many Pennsylvanians will recognize as south of Erie. That whole chapter is very important, as you will see.

(By the way, those who follow BookNotes who knew the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and the Canadian Citizen’s for Justice & Liberty (CJL) in the late 1970s will recall John Olthius and Gerald Vandezande then leading faith-based activism against the MacKenzie Valley oil Pipelines that would only add to our dangerous oil addictions and commitments to the false gods of economic growth and hurt the indigenous First Native peoples, who declared “Our Land Is Not for Sale.” Yes, it is that MacKenzie whose name is seared into my memory from those heroic Christian lawsuits against big oil and in solidarity with the Dene so many years ago. By the way, earlier this year, the University of Toronto Press published a major work by Olthius telling of his life’s calling to bring legal action around Native people’s claims. It is called Dismantling Settler Colonialism: An Insider’s Perspective on Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples (University of Toronto Press; $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00.)

Vaillant’s bit about J. Howard Pew (founder Sun Oil / Sunoco and funder of Grove City College and Christianity Today and other groups that blended his freedom-loving entrepreneurial spirit with capitalism and Christianity) is not just illuminating but vital to understand. Even in his old age in 1967, Pew threw a huge celebration about “man developing the Earth” in the seemingly forsaken region of Alberta, as they invested millions into the development of the tar sands industrial sites. Vaillant notes how many clergy were among the invited dignitaries commemorating this new stage of development at Fort Mac. How faith in progress, nominally driven by evangelical religion, justified all manner of polluting inventions — he talks about some of the largest machines in the world, some of the tallest industrial structures for thousands of miles around — is haunting.

I am a bit embarrassed about how I have not much considered the ways in which industrialization was linked to the early oil and gas industry, starting in part in Western Pennsylvania and eventually spread throughout the Americas. The amount of stuff under the ground in Alberta is truly vast, but not usable as the crude in, say, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Oklahoma, or Texas. A whole, expensive lot has to be done to the oily gunk in the Alberta tar sands — using Canada’s natural gas and creating lakes of stored industrial wastewater and huge piles of tailings like sulphur — to make it sellable.

Some of you may recall those of us who protested just a few years ago the pipelines criss-crossing the US to sell this gross and inefficient bitumen; religious nuns here in our area (in Lancaster, PA) went to jail rather than concede land and lend complicity to this unstewardly project. Anyway, this Fire Weather book has these great chapters about the origin stories (as he calls them) of the famously notorious project at Fort McMurray that is something like gigantic strip mining and mountainous, sloppy refineries, in a place that frankly sounds like working on the harsh landscape of the moon.

Vaillant has a chapter in Fire Nation about the processing of turning the gunky sand tar into something that is almost sellable in the global oil market, and, believe me, I was so intrigued I read much of it out loud to Beth, who also leaned in. (I was interrupting her reading a Madeline L’Engle novel, but this bit kept us both wondering how Vaillant learned so much about this secretive process and place.) In a region that otherwise seems like the Russian steppes of Siberia, 90,000 people live in Fort McMurray, many who describe it like Tolkien’s Mordor. Working dangerously for long, long hours in brutal temperatures ruins a man — they are mostly men — and the stories of workers there are worthy of a whole book. From the strip clubs to the church planters to the drug pushers to the truck dealers to the civil servants and industrial leaders, the info on this oddest place in North America is really fascinating. Even the complex chemistry of transforming this sludge was fascinating. He likened the process to something akin to putting molasses in a giant sandbox and trying to make rum out of it.

Some of the big Caterpillar vehicles used at the Suncor and Suncrude plants there have tires that sell for more than $8000 each and can explode like a bomb when the friction from the hundred-ton loads causes sparks. Things freeze up, too — the huge bulldozers are made for below freezing, but at below -40F even human eyeballs freeze. You can imagine the complexity of the working conditions for machines and people. The writing about all this is spectacular as he describes this center of the worst air pollution in North America and its unfathomable global impact.

I so agreed with a blurb by a writer from Slate who says that “Vaillant writes so vividly that he can make subjects like the mining of bituminous sand fascinating.”

And, slowly, we learn about the horrible scarring of this huge patch of Earth processing bitumen — one of the few things, like the Great Wall of China, that can be seen from outer space — and why it matters to the heat rise of the planet, and, yes, the increase in and severity of out of control wild fires. I do not recall Vaillant using the word ironic, but it is even now ringing in my ears that the place that contributed to global warming ends up being the very sport of one of the modern era’s worst fires.

Vaillant writes that,

The dramatic transformation of Fort McMurray from trading post to petroleum hub has been as rapid and radical as any on the continent, and it has followed the manic-depressive pattern of all petroleum boomtowns before it. Boomtown stories are part and parcel of American lore, but Canada has its share, and some of the most exuberant examples come from Alberta.

Vaillant cites an amazingly breathy report from 1914 of folks clamoring to buy shares of the oilmen’s profits, from a single day of trading where investors drove up the share price of the Calgary Petroleum Products Company by more than 1,600 percent.

He continues that first part of the “origin stories” before the heart of the book about the nature of forest fires, with this reflection on that financial boom.

Explosive growth of this kind mimics that of fire, and humans seem particularly prone to it. Fire is known to physicists as an exothermic reaction — that is, a reaction that unleashes more energy than was required to initiate it. Just as a single match of cigarette can burn down a house or ignite a landscape, a handful of men with novel trade goods, a drilling rig, or an IPO can set off a commercial explosion of buying and selling. Each of these events has the power to change the fortunes of a region and its inhabitants overnight.

The first 70 pages are surprising and captivating and important. Knowing the historical backstory is critical, believe me. And you’ve only just begun. Part Two (before the final, shorter third portion called “Reckoning”) is the hot heart of Fire Weather. Chapter Six starts with a haunting Seamus Heaney poem, “Mycenae Lookout.”

Buckle up, gentle readers, buckle up.

The story of how the historic fire at Fort McMurray developed and how the leaders there — the highest paid firefighters on the continent, trained, oddly not for boreal fires coming at you like a tsunami, but as typical urban firefighters — mishandled some of the early days of the terrifying battle, is, again riveting. I don’t usually read books that are thrillers or laden with action, and this learned and thoughtful study isn’t a cheap ride. But, man, you are on the edge of your seat, wondering, page by page, what they experienced and how it might resolve. More than one reviewer praised the visceral storytelling. There are a dozen more chapters, including a brief study of the explosive 2001 Chisholm fire that was first discovered by US atmospheric experts (some say NORAD) when they saw the exceptional high and energy-laden smoke plume, thinking it had to be an unannounced nuclear test, which it obviously was not. The hottest fire on record, these sorts of fires don’t just destroy, they vaporize nearly everything; the Chisholm burned as ferociously as if exploding multiple nuclear blasts per minute.

The famously huge McMurray fire is tragic — one spoiler I’ll share is that they evacuated almost 88,000 people, using the only road out of the city in the middle of nowhere with its complex of pipelines from the refinery stations — but we learn quickly part of the moral of the story. With climate change the air is hotter, even in the North, and dryer, in even supposedly rainy seasons. Fires are increasingly worse than ever. We simply must (I would say) elect bi-partisan public officials who take climate change very seriously. Ten years ago, when the McMurray inferno happened and this center of this exceptionally well-researched book is set, it was a relatively naive time in climate-change-informed firefighting. It was then an unprecedented episode and much has been learned about the strategies and skills of this kind of extreme firefighting in huge forest areas.

What is the larger lesson?  Fire Weather isn’t preachy or overly didactic, but the lessons are clear. The book could be called Fire/Weather as it explores the relationship between fire and weather. But when weather conditions are ripe — the heat and humidity in rural Alberta Canada mimicking Death Valley Arizona temps and humidity index — the word “fire” becomes an adjective to describe the weather. Either way, fire weather or fire weather you will hear again the pairing of these words, so expertly explored here by Mr. Vaillant. This is a wake-up call.

The original hardback (which we still have with its deckled edges and full color photos) of Fire Weather had the subtitle A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf; $32.50 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.00.) The paperback edition (the price we actually listed above) has the subtitle On the Front Lines of a Burning World. Either way, it is a fantastic read, a report that moves carefully with important historical context and which builds with thrilling narrative momentum, and ends with lots of mature reflection about recovery, science, policy, and citizenship. Highly recommended.

Before It’s Gone: Stories from the From Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America Jonathan Vigliotti (One Signal Publishers / Atria) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I waited for this to come out in paperback before pushing it as I thought with the somewhat lower price more folks might take me up on my invitation to read it. It is a sprawling, vivid report, a book I couldn’t put down. One learns a bit about the realities of climate science but it is mostly a narrative of a TV reporter who specializes in heading to danger zones to report on floods and fires and the like. I mean it: it’s an incredible read. As Publishers Weekly put it, “The prose is transportive, and stirring portraits ground the climate science.” They note that it is thoroughly reported and “disquieting” which is a nice way of saying it is troubling as hell.

Vigliotti is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning CBS News national correspondent; his work has taken him to over forty countries and territories across six continents. He’s been on CBS Sunday Morning, Face the Nation, 48 Hours, etc. I hope his acclaim in the industry (and the way he has put his life on the line to bring us up-to-the-minute live reporting) earns him respect. You really should read this, his only book!

Before I realized his award-winning reputation I picked up this book because of the “small-town America” line in the sub-title. I read another book (see below) about how climate change is effecting real Americans from Alaska to Florida, from Annapolis to California, and this, too, seemed to be the sort of book of immersive journalism that takes us into the locales of ordinary America. And this is done wonderfully well. He flies in — often being awoken in the middle of the night when he fetches his packed “go bag” to catch a plane somewhere — where perhaps after the first immediate report of a tornado or flood, heads to the local diner or main street cafe or grange hall or wherever else he can talk to real locals.

As Jeff Goodell (author of the best-seller, The Heat Will Kill You First) says, it is,

An account of a TV journalist on the climate beat that reads like it was written by Indiana Jones on Red Bull.

Exactly.

Vigliotti may be fearless and wired with Red Bull but he is gracious and kind, wanting to understand the pathos and human drama around the episodes of tragedy. He meets people, using his journalistic charisma and delightful personality, to (usually) get them to open up, even in moments of hardship. Some of it is heartbreaking, some of it infuriating, all of it beautifully told and candid and captivating. (Need to revigorate your prayer life? I dare you to read this book and not bow your head to pray for these real-life folks, and for him, that he could keep going in this valiant work.) Jonathan Vigliotti documents the people, families, communities, fields and landmarks impacted by climate changes of various sorts. For two decades or more he has criss-crossed the land, bringing us first-hand reports, making this book with a bit of his backstory almost feel like his own work-world memoir. Of course the spotlight isn’t really on him, but is about the devastation (and signs of hope and change) in real-world America. The prologue is called “A World Away Hits Close to Home.”

As it says on the back cover:

From massive forest fires in California to hurricanes in Louisiana, receding coastlines in Massachusetts and devastated fisheries in Alaska, we learn that warnings of a future impacted by climate change are no more; the catastrophe is already here.

Before It’s Gone: Stories from the From Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America is arranged around four sections: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. I can’t tell you how interesting all of this is, with little known backgrounder detours into historical matters that are utterly fascinating. (Payments made for white folks to move to Alaska to do permafrost farming; dust-bowl issues among farmers in the midwest and a chapter cleverly called “The Father of Soil” about an early agronomist.) The batch of chapters under the section “Air” is about the rise of both the amount and severity of tornadoes and his time with a twister chaser is breathtaking.  Don’t miss the chapter there called “Coffee, Grits, and Motorcycle Greats.”  Each time, I wondered what could be worse than the infernos or the floods. But that tornado secant — whoa! The land section — as complex as any of them — interviews Wendell Berry, too, as he studies the impact of the bad stewardship of big agribusiness.

As tragic and scary as the flooding chapters are and as tragic as the hurricanes and tornado parts are, it’s the fire section that starts the book that will have you glued to you seat, turning page after page of high-octane prose. The Pulitzer Prize winning Elizabeth Colbert (author of Under a White Sky) says it is “at once vivid and terrifying.”  Indeed it is, but it is the humanizing style of his conversations with fellow citizens, our own neighbors and relatives, even, that makes this such a moving portrait. There is urgency and drama and this personal touch. It is different than Fire Weather in style and, of course, covers more than the wildfires.

I hate it when I hear of people mocking the mainstream media or those who roll their eyes at secular journalists, as if they are all hucksters behind some desk, with some elitist ulterior motives. Jonathan Vigliotti has gulped his Red Bull and found himself in danger zones, just to show us and tell us what is happening in America, here, there, and in places some of us call home. It isn’t a screed about carbon emissions, although there are some side-roads into climate science. But it is mostly about the ways small town Americans are resilient. And need to be.

Again, it is not a screed, but he does make clear what happens when the icebergs start melting and the slight change in the temperature of the ocean effects the wind and weather patterns (starting in Africa, actually. Actually!) What a read.

Friends, this is not going to get better soon, and we simply must know more about what to expect in years to come. Before It’s Gone is a must read to help us understand, plan and prepare, and — please, Lord — work to remove the current administration from Washington who is doing so much to harm those fighting climate change. From cutting the budgets of life-saving climate research to cutting the caring work of FEMA, from rolling back EPA regulations to unleashing fossil fuels, Trump has put us all in danger. There is no debate about the facts of his policies. This good book isn’t about that, but it might inspire you to care and vote for candidates that realize the times and know at least some of what we must do. Whether you care about this topic much or not, this is an amazing book, full of energy and story. Thank you, Mr. Viigliotti.

At Home On An Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth Madeline Ostrander (Holt) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Even before I started Vigliotti’s Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America I thought of this, a book I had read a few years ago and which I’ve raved about often.. At Home on an Unruly Planet has been one of my go-to recommendations for anyone wanting a glimpse into the hard reality of what’s going on in recent years with encroaching changes in climate. It a powerful read and you’ll learn so much, and learn to care about so much.

You know we’ve got theological and Biblical studies on ecology — see, just for instance, anything by Steve Bouma-Predigar, like his delightful Creation Care Discipleship: Why Earthkeeping is an Essential Christian Practice (Baker Academic; $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79) or, say, the fabulous collection of short pieces called Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care edited by David Warners and Matthew Kuperus Heun (Calvin College Press; $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39) — and we have more scientific books documenting carbon output and melting icebergs and changes in weather patterns.

But this one, At Home on an Unruly Plantet, like Vigliotti’s, brings it all home in very readable, even enjoyable, writing. Like Vigliotti, Madeline Ostrander is a brave reporter and a great writer with a good heart and keen insights. Like Vigliotti, she blends historical and scientific data with captivating, on-the-ground, first person accounts of the amazing resilience folks need to display in the aftermath of climate-related tragedies. This is very much about how we can protect our homes and our communities, knowing what is happening, and what will continue to happen, in the months and years ahead. It is a rich, serious book.

I raved about it in a previous BookNotes, and I’ll quote just a bit of what I said then; it explains it’s basic structure well, I think.

The four locations and contexts about which Ostrander writes in luminous detail include the wooded rural areas north of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest (and the crisis of forest fires, seen mostly through the eyes of a forest biologist and smoke jumping firefighter), the East coast of Florida and extraordinary drama of life-changing hurricanes (seen, fascinatingly, through the eyes of a woman who works in historic preservation in the oldest European-settled town in America, St. Augustine), a northern California urban landscape plagued by fossil-fuel disasters, including a toxic explosion (seen mostly through the eyes of a black, urban farmer) and, finally, the sea-rise in Alaska forcing the a village of Yupik people to start a decades long effort of moving to a new location as their land warms and erodes beneath them.

As the At Home on An Unruly Planet book cover says, rightly, “Ostrander pairs deep reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis.” Some may appreciate the essays in between the reporting of these four unfolding dramas, although those major four stories had me up late at night, sweating it out.

Like Vigliotti, Ostrander takes us on a firsthand tour of places, but while his book was places he was sent to because of immediate tragedies on which he was reporting, and goes from there, she traces, with in-depth and longer-term visits, her insights about four key places that have experienced hardship from climate change. As I noted in my above paragraph, she looks at rising water levels in historic Saint Augustine, Florida (and Annapolis, Maryland), she looks at forrest fires in some of the most riveting prose I’ve encountered, in the rural pacific NorthWest, she explains what is happening in an Alaskan village as they must head for higher ground as the permafrost melts under the village. (These Yupic peoples are perhaps the first real climate refugees among our American citizens and it is an amazing tale.) Whether it’s the firefighter who has to rebuild her own town after wildfires or an urban gardener and community activist rebuilding a harshly hit minority neighborhood in the Bay Area of San Francisco after a fossil fuel disaster (that many of us haven’t even heard of) At Home on an Unruly Planet is not only richly reported but includes “lyrical essays on the power of communities to find solutions and resilience.”

There is what one reviewer called “uncommon empathy” in At Home… and there is no doubt we will need more of this in coming seasons. The US citizens complaining this week about Canadian wildfires need some of that empathy, of course, as we all do. We need hints of hope that can encourage us to act responsibly, fully realizing we are in this together. Madeline Ostrander has reflected well on this crisis that is truly global in scope, but she focuses on our fellow citizens and neighbors here in the US. Bill McKibben is right, this book is “marvelous.” And urgent, troubling, and, yet, oddly enriching. It’s a good read, one you will never forget.

Which brings me back to Garber’s serious and profound Hints of Hope. Now would be a good time to get that one if you have not yet.  You know how much in means to many of us. Let us know if we can send one of those, too. We recommend it, now more than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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TO ORDER PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINK AT THE END OF THIS COLUMN

In the last week of patriotic celebration I’ve been inspired by some books and essays and serious Facebook posts about America’s founding, about the 250th and the characteristics of a uniquely Christian approach to our national holiday. Skip the far right hoopla and the overly critical secular left. Look for balanced, wise, thoughtful stuff; there is so much good insight about our times.

I’ve also been outraged by the sheer stupidity of things that are said — one so-called “Christian worldview” site linked to one of the dumbest articles I’ve ever read on this topic from what is supposed to be a heavyweight conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. Hillsdale College put out a piece that was nothing short of idolatrous, quoting a worldly Founder saying that our Declaration was our own Ark of the Covenant. Can you imagine conflating even righteous cultural stuff with God’s own self-revelation in Holy Scripture? His holy presence? Where are the meticulous fundamentalists when you need ‘em? Crass civil religion has deep roots and we must avoid it. For all the vigilance some of these conservative Christian demand of liberal theology they’ve got blind spots so big you could drive a truck through.

Some customers and friends thought it a bit imbalanced but I do hope you saw my large BookNotes reviews of books a month ago about the dangers of political extremism.

Some of the upshot, then: we saw flag-waving, masked neo-Nazis actually showing up in DC (while Trump’s people mostly look the other way and continue to fret about left-wing misdeeds.) We sigh and still celebrate, rejoicing in the good and resisting the evil and praying for discernment through it all. Which is why we’re glad for customers who read BookNotes, wanting to be life-long learners, reading deeply about things that matter.

THINGS THAT MATTER

One of the things that matters — if you can stand the segue — is learning to relax, to play, to enjoy life, to, as Ray Ortlund’s brand new little book title puts it Eat, Drink & Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment (Crossway; $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59.) For many of us, summertime is a season we are able to experience creaturely joys, fun, and relaxation. And this little book makes a conservative Biblical case for just that. It’s very nice.

I bet you can see where this is going in this new BookNotes. Here are a few recommended books on recreation and a fantastic new one on hobbies of various sorts (it’s brilliant) and a whole batch of quick suggestions for entertaining fiction reading. Hooray!

ALL BOOKS MENTIONED ARE SALE PRICED – 20% OFF.  Enjoy. 

The National Parks Inspiration Guide: Your Journey to Connection, Meaning and Discovery Bruce Barkhauer & Brad Lyons (Chalice Press) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Since it is a time of celebration of and for our beautiful land this seems a perfect one to recommend first. This is the third in a series of devotional-like titles about the national parks. A great idea, eh?

This one, The National Parks Inspiration Guide is compact-sized with full color photos and a couple of great points about each park. I love that they resist “travel as consumption” but invite us to something akin to mindfulness — evoking reference and belonging.  The name things to notice.  In fact, these authors hint at things some others might miss, invite participants to slow down and be in the moment. They name a value or virtue for each place.

I’ve only been to a few of these grand places but I really enjoy reading about them. This is a substantially revised and expanded edition of their 2018 America’s Holy Ground. Whether you enjoy traveling or are an armchair one, this little book is an inspired delight.

Created to Play: How Taking Hobbies Seriously Grows Us Spirituality Brianna Lambert (IVP) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Leave it to the always thoughtful IVP to come up with a book like this. It offers a wholesome, gospel-centered theology of the goodness of creation and our human need and capacity for enjoyment, finding delight in ordinary stuff. If we are to serve God in all we do, certainly nothing is frivolous or insignificant. Or maybe I mean to say things that are frivolous are still significant Ha.

So, for starters, this new book grounds our ordinary lives and typical stuff most of us do — gardening, collecting photographs, cooking, watching TV, playing sports (or rooting for teams), dabbling in the arts, fixing up old cars, scrapbooking, exercising, reading — in a solid Christian perspective, pushing us towards a spirituality of the ordinary and a basic theology of play.

But here are three thing that make this approach of Created to Play nearly genius. First, she groups various hobbies (and man, she thinks of a lot of them) under various categories — she has ten chapters on those whose hobbies make them what she calls Beholders, Restorers, Connectors, Nourishers, Makers, Curators, Keepers, Movers, Historians, and Heralds. This helps you understand the value of what our hobbies say about us and how we can appreciate them more. It’s fun seeing where she puts pet lovers or aquarium owners and beekeepers and how she aligns storytellers, joke tellers and social media folks, and how she groups, say, board gamers and crossword puzzlers along with sports fans and RC (electric race care) hobbyists. Whether you’re a rock climber or thrifter, soap maker, film buff or birdwatcher, you will get a kick out of how she names your particular joy and passion.

Second and thirdly, I don’t know if she is inspired by Ignatian spirituality (or maybe Enneagram studies) but she offers a good thing, a virtue, if you will, about each group.  And, she links each, then, with a potential vice — a dark side, if you will, how an obsession or disordered love for your hobby can be harmful. These possible downsides are very thoughtful, I think, and while the book has a playful and winsome style, it shows how God is present and active in shaping us through our interests and passions and how it can lead us inward in unhealthy ways. I dare say that there has never been book done quite like this. Kudos.

The Quiet Resistance: An Invitation to Slow Down and Find a Richer Life Andrea G. Burke (Baker) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

There are dozens of books about slowing down, living unhurried, finding rest. I can name ten great ones, so I skipped this when it first was announced, thinking it was just another bit of nice but typical self-help fare. And then I realized this woman wrote a book we got in from the UK, A Bit of Earth which was a fantastic and sophisticated thinking about a spirituality of gardening. If she wrote this, I needed to see it.

The Quiet Resistance is wonderfully written, and, so far (I’m taking it slowly) a delightful study of many ways we can quietly resist the culture’s temptations (expectations) that we “move faster, work harder, digitize, monetize, and turn our lives into 15-second clips to get clicks, likes, and shares.” Of course, in the meantime we are missing so much, stuff that matters, the patterns and rhythms and textures of a real life. For instance, she discusses “the camaraderie of knowing our neighbors. The fellowship of eating a simple home-cooked meal with our families. God’s goodness and truth, she says,”wait patiently for us to turn off the noise and begin to pay attention.”

I list this book here in books about summer living and delight in less structured time even though it sounds like a scolding or a stressful addition of yet more stuff to do. (Play! Wonder! Resist speed!) Yes, she invites us to these things, but it’s a blast, really, a challenge filled with joy. She promises.

Here are some of the things she writes about, written as happy suggestions — take care of an animal, get your head in the clouds, study history, go to sleep, plant more gardens, eat real food, get around some children, listen to music. Sure, she has a chapter on slowing down and invites us to both “go outside and see the world” and “stay home and be quiet.” She has a section on becoming involved in your local church and tells us to “spend time with real people.” She also reminds us to read, read, read. You’ll also love the chapter “Fill Your Life with Good Stories”

Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing Pete Nunnally (Broadleaf) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I keep waiting for just the right book that explores the deep connection between faith and fishing and the rejuvenation that many who take up the sport feel about it. We have featured books that offer a spirituality of baseball (or playing catch like that splendid read by my friend Ethan Bryan, Playing Catch) and other sports, and have named others about fishing but there is something about fishing, especially fly fishing that makes is natural for spiritual reflection. I have no patience for it, maybe, but many of my favorite pastors and spiritual writers are, it ends up, in love with casting. And this, Catching Hope, may be the best book yet about “the hidden wisdom” of fishing. It is not primarily about fly fishing, either, by the way, as this Episopal priest lives near DC and has fished in lakes and ocean piers and off of deep sea boats. There are very striking pen and ink drawings, too, making this a lovely little read.

My friends Brian McLaren (who is famously an avid fly fishermen) and Derrick Weston both have fabulous blurbs. But catch the beauty of this one from Debra Rienstra (English prof and author of Refugia Faith) who is not a fishing aficionado herself:

No need to be a fishing enthusiast to find this little gem utterly compelling. In vivid prose, and with vulnerable wisdom, Father Pete Nunnally tells his story of coming alive–to waters and winds and fishy creatures with their wily ways, but even more, to God. Currents of memoir and hard-won spiritual insight flow deftly through these chapters, offering spiritual seekers and yearners plenty to celebrate and ponder. — Debra Rienstra, author of Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth

Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America’s Lost Landscape Howard Schaap (Slant Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

I’ve written about this before, saying what a wondrously written memoir it is, how it brings together a sense of place and dysfunctional families and the love of fishing, even as the author. Schaap is a professor of English at Dordt in Iowa (and no relation to his predecessor, the great writer James Schaap.) The Midwest history and stories about the outdoor (and literature) make this a natural for me — I think some of our BookNotes readers will love it. That he is what one reviewer called “searingly honest” about mental health issues and the looming implications of the farm crisis of the 1980s and 90s for a Dutch immigrant family makes this a riveting study, but I name it here because at its center, besides maybe the tall grass prairie landscape prose, is this matter of “brooding upon the waters.” It is a story about the healing power of fishing. There are boats and rods and loons and lakes and walleyes.

If you summers ever including something like fishing in “The Land of 1000 Lakes” you will appreciate Schaap’s writing about it. If you care about small town folks —including those who take ”hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of the tall grass prairie” (which “mirrored his father’s dark moods and darkening theology”) you will love this moving, brooding memoir.

Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World Richard Louv (Algonquin Books) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Louv should be given a Noble Prize or something: his scholarly and yet attractive advocacy for raising kids with some outdoor experience has been hugely significant  (He has, in fact, won the prestigious Audubon Medal, alongside the likes of Rachel Carson and Sir David Attenborough.) His Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorders remains a great paperback classic.

His “new nature movement” is growing and there are others, including people of faith, who have chimed in. This new Noticing volume is said to be his most personal yet. He explores eco-anxiety and the upheaval of our times, searching deeply for his own connection to the natural world. The prose is “quietly beautiful and contemplative.” He lives amidst the California wilderness so the writing includes his own wonderful observations there.

It isn’t just nature writing, though, but, as Linda Akeson McGurk put it, “It’s an invitation to meet the more-than-human world through the senses… A beautiful ode to wonder — and a reminder that our capacity for enchantment is a skill we can relearn.”

Richard Louv would like you to live a beautiful life. He wants you to see how easy, how free, and freeing, this can be. This book is a how-to Manuel for getting back your soul.— Carl Safina, Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice Ragan Sutterfield (Broadleaf Books) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We’ve told you about Sutterfield’s books before, his amazing book about geography and place (Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us), a great introductory book about Wendell Berry, his little Episcopalian resource on creation care. Last year we named The Art of Being a Creature: Meditations on Humus and Humility as one of our favorite books of 2025.

And here, in his most delightful project yet, he turns his writerly attention to another of God’s creatures: birds. Yep — we love it.

We’ve got several other vital memoirs and Christian books about birding. Most recently, see Kevin Burrell’s Considering Sparrows: What Birds Teach Us About Who We Are, Were We’re Going, and the Joy of Following Jesus (Waterbrook; $22.00 //OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60.) Burrell’s is clear-headed and well written, with a forward by the thoughtful, Reformed thinker, Joni Eareckson Tada. It’s good, but a tad didactic; he uses the science of birds to make analogies and teaching points, so he says, his book is “more than birdwatching.”

But Ragan Sutterfield’s Watch and Wonder has a different feel,  not only more allusive and playful and intriguing, but he sees his hobby of birdwatching as a spiritual practice. We’ve long admired Sutterfield’s profound thinking and sense of seeing. This book may be his best, yet, Watch and Wonder.

Listen to how writer and editor Beatty describes Watch and Wonder:

For anyone who has been curious about birdwatching, Ragan Sutterfield’s lyrical love letter to this pastime is a wonderful place to start. Beyond the inherent joy of seeing a flash of brilliant color at the bird-feeder or hearing the mournful hoot of an owl on a forest walk, the birds provide us with a way of paying attention to, and thus loving, the created world. May Watch and Wonder restore our amazement at the variety, beauty, and interdependence of creation–and our commitment to care for it as our home. — Katelyn Beaty, author, editor, and lifelong birdwatcher

I always like blurbs by Jamie Smith, who says of it:

I feel like I have glimpsed something of God in the azure flash of a tiny indigo bunting and the sublime grandeur of a bald eagle’s gaze. In this wise and inviting book, Sutterfield helps us understand the wondrous intersection of Creator and creation in these beings who defy gravity. Read this book to learn how to listen and look for feathered companions who teach us to lift up our hearts. — James K. A. Smith, Calvin University, author of How to Inhabit Time and Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane (Norton) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I want to keep this column brief, but I will say that for those who know Macfarlane (perhaps for his popular, eloquent nonfiction Underland) you know his beautiful prose. John Vailliant (who wrote the stunning Fire Weather) calls him a “once-in-a-generation virtuoso.”

Vaillant continues,

…and I don’t know when his kaleidoscopic language and world-expanding scholarship have been used to more potent effect than in this impassioned, resounding affirmation to the title’s urgent question.

“Read it for pleasure,” says Rebecca Solnit, “read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways.”

I wanted to list something that, while fully nonfiction, has the feel of an escape, becoming enthralled, captivated. Last. year it was the perhaps lighter but weighty in glory, The Place of Tides by James Rebanks.

Is a River Alive? is intellectually serious, gloriously written, with sophisticated prose, and is extraordinary, tender and radical, learned and lovely. It is wide-ranging and the breath-taking prose of the prologue and the frightening reporting about draught in the introduction make the first 30 pages worth the price of admission.

The next three major parts explore three watersheds (or, as he puts it, the book “unfolds across three main landscapes. First, an Ecuadorian cloud-forest named Los Cedros, the ‘Forest of the Cedars’, home to the headwaters of the Río Los Cedros, the ‘River of the Cedars.’ Second, the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the watery city of Chennai in south-east India. And third, the wild interior of Nitassinan, homeland of the Innu people, through which runs the Mutehekau Shipu, also known as The Magpie River, who makes sea-fall at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, six hundred miles north-east of Montreal.”

Did you notice, he uses the word “who” for the Magpie?

We all share a recognition that we live in a polyphonic world, he claims.The waters are not yet silent, even thought they are hurting. Macfarlane’s humane and remarkable voice has been called beautiful, astonishing, breath-taking, and more.

This is one of the most amazing book blurbs I’ve seen in ages:

Is a River Alive? is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time — exciting, brilliantly comprehensive, mind-altering. Any soul going dormant, any citizen going numb, will be revivified and propelled back to their essential cord, where rage, wonder, and imagination intertwine, a powerful hope for the earth arises. A spellbinding, life-changing work. — Jorie Graham, author, To 2040

NOVELS

Three quick comments.

1. These are not necessarily my favorite novels ever, just some recent ones that seemed worthy of a shout-out. Adventure awaits. Beware.
2. We have plenty of books about literature and the Christian benefit of reading widely. At the very least, read the great chapter on fiction in the great World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading by Jeff Crosby (Paraclete Press; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19) a book we hope you have and am sure you’ll love. I hope you recall our describing the handful of great studies of fabulous contemporary novels in All Swirling and Weaving: Reading Fiction and Growing in Faith by Rev. Doug Basler (Wipf & Stock; $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20.) It’s insightful and enjoyable! More deeply, consider the hefty and brilliant The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life by Heidi White (Goldberry Press; $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20.) And while I’m on a roll, here, if you are a parent or grandparent, know that we just got a seriously wise book called Stories Woven in Silver: Pointing Kids to the Gospel Through Children’s Literature by Kathryn Butler & Korrie Johnson (Crossway; $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59.)
3.  If you are interested, know that I put together (for a clergy workshop I was doing a few years ago) a list of 50 novels that we loved; I ought to update it, but I give a one-sentence description of each. (There’s also a list of 50 memoirs.) Check it out here.

ALL 20 NOVELS MENTIONED HERE ARE ON SALE for 20% OFF. Order by using the secure order tab below.  We thank you for your support.

The All-American: A Novel Susie Finkbeiner (Revell) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

I know the world has happily gone soccer crazy this month but, come on, baseball is still a national past-time, right? And who doesn’t love a 1950s-era women’s baseball story. If you loved A League of Their Own (and who doesn’t, seriously?) Finkbeiner here offers a great Christian novel about women’s baseball. Set in 1952 during the era of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, it, simply put, “follows a teenage girl who escapes a family scandal in Detroit to pursue her dream of playing professional baseball.”

Here’s another bit of the plot — Bertha and Flossie (don’t you love those names!) are shocked when their dad is accused of being a member of the Community Party by House Un-American Activities Committee. They move to a suburb of Detroit where Bertha acts on her girlhood dreams of playing baseball with the Workington Sweet Peas.

Susie Finkbeiner, who lives in Western Michigan, is known in the evangelical publishing world, having written poignant novels like Stories That Bind Us, The Nature of Small Birds, and more.

Theo of Golden: A Novel Alan Levi (Atria) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

I know we’ve promoted this several times — back when it was a virtually unknown indie press title and then when it was reissued by Simon & Schuster, becoming quickly last year a million-seller. I name it again because it is really, really wonderful — nearly everybody loves it! — and is such a popular title that you really ought to know about it. It’s a lovely, slow story, meaningful, tender, and nicely done.

Golden is a fictional town in Georgia and Theo, there, buys up pen and ink portaits and tries to deliver them to the respective people. Talk about heartwarming and thrilling! It’s a beautiful tale, full of character (and characters.)

The Prodigal of Leningrad: A Novel Daneil Taylor (Raven) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Taylor taught literature and writing for almost 50 years, often within Christian higher education, and he is known as a deep, generous thinker, a fine philosopher, and a great storyteller.  And he writes mystery novels; I think this is his fourth.

The Prodigal of Leningrad is about the harrowing siege of Leningrad. As it says on the back cover, “While the bombs fall and starvation grips the city, Daniil Aslant continues to lead tours of the Hermitage Museum show empty frames and describe the paints they once held. Although the museum’s masterpieces have been hidden away for safekeeping, their presence lingers in memory and meaning.

Is that not intriguing? Daniil’s grandfather is an Orthodox priest who was exiled to the Gulag and as Daniil’s ponders his grandfathers willingness to embrace suffering as a sacred calling (and as his city is under attack) he ponders anew Rembrandt’s waiting The Return of the Prodigal Son. We are told this amazing read is based on actually historical events. Whether you enjoy art or literature or history (or family and faith) this historical novel will be unforgettable.

The Correspondent Virginia Evans (Crown) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

Beth and I both agree this is one of the most memorable novels we’ve read in ages. As you may have heard (I highlighted it before) the story unfolds as a series of letters, to and from a retired law clerk. The great Ann Patchett says it is “subtly told and finely made.” Florence Knapp of The Names said “I cried more than once as I witnessed this brilliant woman come to understand herself more deeply and risk lowering her defenses. Both serious and uplifting.”

It is about an aging woman and we loved that, but is really is a triumph regardless of the setting or epistolary genre. Very highly recommended.

Whistler: A Novel Ann Patchett (Harper) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Fans and critics alike may argue about what is Ann Patchett’s best novel. Some may say Bel Canto (Beth would not, by the way) and The Dutch House was on a short list for a Pulitzer Prize. Tom Lake, set in Northern Michigan, was a delight. Taft was my first, I think, and Beth liked The Patron Saint of Liars years ago. (I, by the way, am an earnest evangelist for her nonfiction collections, which I love, love, love. Get the collections These Precious Days and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage and you can thank me later.)

Beth finished the very new Whistler quickly and said it was very, very satisfying. Publishers Weekly called it “another perfectly executed and quietly profound family drama” and they say it is one of her best. So there.

Some of the story happens while the main character, Daphne Fuller, bumps into a long-lost step father while in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is flashback to her girlhood in Missouri, a car wreck, and the story of the horse, Whistler.

James: A Novel Percival Everett (Doubleday) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

Speaking of Pulitzers — James, indeed, did win a year ago and was also a winner of the coveted National Book Award. And Beth says it was stunning, breathtakingly good. She was charged up about it in a way she doesn’t often get about books she likes. I suppose you know it is essentially a wise and entertaining (and surprising) story of Huck Finn from the point of view of the African American, Jim. Brilliant, eh? The prolific Percival Everett deserves every award available.

(Speaking of how brilliantly clever he is, did you know his 2020 novel Telephone has three editions, with three different endings — like the game of telephone, you know? There is a very small difference in the cover art that most people don’t even know about and when a customer asked me about it I suggested she was out of her mind; nobody could do three different books with the same ISBN. Ha. She was right and we now have all three. Just saying.)

The Nature of Disappearing Kimi Cunningham Grant (Minotaur Books) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I’m not much for thrillers but for those who like this sort, this one has been called a “mesmerizing mystery” and “nail-bitingly tense.” Yet, there is humanity, and goodness, and what Amy Jo Burns (author of Shiner and Mercury) Calles “electric and wise” (and “the most inspired thriller on my bookshelf.” Wow.  It is beautifully-written, I can tell you that, and when I first opened it up in the middle I came across spectacular prose about the striking Idaho landscape. Wow.

We usually tell you about new books by Ms Cunningham, a central Pennsylvania writer and a friend of a friend. She has studied at Oxford, has a graduate degree from the excellent program at Bucknell, and did her undergrad work near us at Messiah University.

By the way, years ago I read her memoir Silver Like Dust: One Family’s Story of America’s Japanese Internment, about being Japanese American in rural central Pennsylvania, yet being haunted by stories of her grandmothers internment after Pearl Harbor.  Anyway The Nature of Disappearing is her latest and some who like these sorts of literary but blistering reads will be sure to love it.

Through artful prose and dual-time storytelling, Grant reminds us that, sometimes, we have to get lost to find ourselves. — Hannah Morrissey, author of When I’m Dead

Wild Dark Shore: A Novel: Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron Books) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

At the very end of last year I was honored to be on a podcast with two other book loves (at Culture Shift) and both of my other conversation partners raved about this thriller of a book, both of them naming it in their top few reads of last year. It had just come out, then, and it had tons of buzz. I had heard about it, but we never even got it into the store. I promised them both I’d read it, and it is on my summer reading list. I can’t say much, yet, but it offers dazzling prose, a careful story, called “spellbinding” and gripping. It seems to combine the very best of literary fiction with a page-turning edge, a mystery, an ode to the beauty of the world, and, okay, I’ll admit it, a book about the fraught future regarding climate change. It’s set on an island, asking what happens when we risk losing our homes (and neighbors)?

I do not think Wild Dark Shore is merely a wilderness survival story, and it isn’t apocalyptic, really, taut as it may be. The characters are said to be fun, and, as everybody says, the writing is gorgeous. It was a Reese’s Book Club selection. The best selling author, Charlotte McConaghy, is from Australia.

The Inklings Detective Agency John R Kelly (Waterbrook) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

Of course the mark of a fiction writer is, uh, fiction. Making stuff up. Imaginativity, as they say. Well, the creative impulses are on display here — can you imagine? The literary legends known as the Inklings are called upon to help catch a killer. As the back cover puts it, they trade their pens to magnifying glasses.  Ha.

Yep, Lewis and Tolkien and the others realize time is running out in the shadowy streets of 1936 Oxford. And they could be next!

John Kelly, we are told, has studied history and spirituality for most of his life (and he has taught church history, world religions and more.) They say this is “packed with historical details, intrigue” this thrilling whodunit is, they say, “a masterful blend of high-stakes drama.” I’m not sure what it is a blend of but it looks fun.

Which reminds me — we still stock the nearly magical thriller  Looking for the King: An Inklings Novel by David Downing (who I mentioned in the last BookNotes, telling of his editing the letters collection of Lewis called Living the Faith. His Paraclete novel is a blast. Why not buy both mysteries and lose yourself in Oxford?

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt Ben Reeves (Avid Readers Press) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

This just arrived a day ago and it truly has been, as most media outlets have said, one of the most anticpated novels of the season. It is from the point of view of the character Death. Authors I admire raved — Graeme Samson of The Rosie Project said it is “original, riveting, and moving.”  Another said “this is one of the most affecting, original, and unforgettable novels I have ever read. Matthew Quick (of The Silver Linings Playbook and recent memoir, Dad, Love Me) says it is “heartening switch the steady poetry of everyday life. This clever and vivid book make me fall involve with our collective ephemerality. The ending left me speechless.”

This explains it well: “Through the lens of death himself, we confront the highs and lows of the human experience in a way that reminds us how gritty and exquisite it is to live. Ben Reeves has expertly crafted a mortality tale that is both abstract and specific, spiritual and physical, fantastical and as true as it gets. The characters are so vivid that they seem to be sitting beside you, their loves and losses your own. Absolutely breathtaking, with a perfect twist of an ending.” — Sarah Damoff, bestselling author of The Bright Years

Booklist gave it a great review, saying:

Be prepared to reflect on what makes a well-lived life and to shed some tears before sending a copy to a friend. A good suggestion for fans of Matt Haig, Gabrielle Zevin, or Marcus Zusak.

Listen to this:

This novel has all the ingredients of unforgettability: a plot you’ve never seen, characters you want to love, writing that glimmers on the page, and a spectacular ending that will smack you in the face with an aching joy. Days later, I’m still brimming. — Monica Wood, bestselling author of How to Read a Book.

Green Street in Black and White: Chicago Story Dave Larsen (Reformed Journal Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

You may know our affection for the folks behind the new, indie press curated by the classy writers of The Reformed Journal. This is a stellar novel and if the cover evokes a certain early 60s aesthetic, maybe even conjuring A Christmas Story you wouldn’t be far off. This fiction project is based on real life settings in early 1960s Green Street, a “neighborhood brimming with racial change.” Dave Larson takes readers back to “a summer of social upheaval when youthful mischief collided with the weight of adult fears.”

This is not just a nostalgic tales about growing up in a close night Chicago neighborhood. As Marilyn McEntyre writes, it is a “sharply focused challenge to polity fictions we still live by.”

More than one reader has said “this is my story, too” and “Dave raises up characters so realistic that I clearly recognize them from y own neighborhood back in the ‘60s.”

A novelist friend, Hugh Cook, observes that “Green Street explores two powerful and basic themes: a. Young man’s difficult journey from childhood innocence to maturity, Gandhis experience of the damaging results racism, involving fear, hate, loyalty, and destructive allegiances.” Hugh continues, “Larsen conveys these themes with understanding, sensitivity and honesty.

Can a book be both fun and troubling? Can a novel be a really entertaining read and still convict with a powerful punch? Calvin University sociologist and nonfiction author on these very themes (see his amazing academic work Shades of White: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure) says it is “a gripping story about race, ethnicity, and religion in a Chicago neighborhood convulsing with the anxiety and violence of social change.”  Wow.

The Mountains We Call Home: The Book Woman’s Legacy Kim Michele Richardson (Sourcebooks Legacy) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

A few years ago we promoted a marvelous Christian novel calledThe Moonlight School by Suzanne Woods Fisher  that fictionalized the real life Cora Wilson Stewart who started evening reading classes in the early 1900s of Rowan County, Kentucky. Several years later a bestseller appeared by Kim Michele Richardson called The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, with a fictional character named Cussy Carter who was a librarian with the famous (Roosevelt / New Deal sponsored) Kentucky Pack Horse library Project of the 1930s. The books and women are not related but are both great windows into good women doing good work in Appalachia.

We hope you know The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek or its sequel Book Woman’s Daughter.

Now we have a new stand-alone (or a “companion” as they call it) novel about what happens when Cussy returns home, arrested as interracial marriage is considered a crime in 1950s Kentucky. Called “a powerful testament of strength, survival and the magic of the printed word,” The Mountains We Call Home is “wrapped in a vivid portrait Kentucky life” covering everything from incarceration of the poor and powerless to racial questions and the social consequences of fractured family bonds (hints of Wendell Berry, maybe?) It is said to be meticulously researched and a richly detailed look at bustling and complex Louisville. The story starts in 1953.

The Woman of Oak Ridge: A Novel Michelle Shocklee (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Michelle Shocklee has been an important writer in the latest wave of excellent religious fiction and we’re glad to have her books (such as All We Thought We Knew or Appalachian Song.) This latest is compelling on a couple levels and has been called “gripping from the first page to the last.”

In a way, one reviewer summarized it by saying The Women of Oak Ridge is “a fascinating exploration of a secret city, its effects on the entire world, and the people who guarded its mysteries.”

It is about a woman Maebelle Willett who starts her new government job in Oak Ridge Tennessee in 1944, eager to send money home to her impoverished family. Secret as it was, then — employees were not informed that they were doing nuclear work related to the atomic bomb —  we now know the disturbing realities. In the plot, Maebelle’s roommate there on the newly built compound learns of some secret dangers and after talking about it, just disappears.

The plot, however, begins in 1979 with a graduate student in Boston where Laurel Willett is doing a thesis, learning about the history of Oak Ridge and the thousands who worked there unknowingly on the atomic bomb. Laurel goes to visit her aunt Maebelle who worked in the “Secret City” and still refuses to talk about it. It gets stickier as Laurel tries to find other old friends and co-workers of her aunt and, yes, tries to find the missing former roommate. What secrets did she hold?

In a personal note at the end from the author, Ms Shocklee shares that she grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb (code named Trinity) was tested at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945. Shocklee’s own grandmother witnessed the intense flash, fifty miles away. And, yes, many had mixed feelings about the awful destruction their work would unleash. Further, she confirms that there really was KGB infiltration at Oak Ridge.

A note from this reviewer: one of my favorite books and unforgettable reads is a true memoir, a real-world report from Oak Ridge by Dan Zak, Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age. The journalist Zak tells of the 2012 anti-nuclear war protests at the Y-12 National Security Complex — sometimes called The Reservation in Shocklee’s novel — and the peace activists (including then 82-year old Catholic nun, Sister Megan Rice) who did civil disobedience there to bear witness against the evils of this gruesome technology. It is a very different book than The Women of Oak Ridge but might be worth reading later.

Yesteryear: A Novel Caro Claire Burke (Knopf) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Okay, I’ll admit it: I just wasn’t interested in this edgy, contemporary novel about a modern tradwife media influencer who, weirdly, flies back in time — I’m not a fan of those sorts, except the spectacular Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. But here we are, with Yesteryear being very much discussed, with the debut writer on talk shows and sounding fascinating. One reviewer said it was “shot through with humor and yet laced with darkness.” As biting satires often are, I think this is actually pretty dark, about both how social media can spin a lie, but also how the tradwife lifestyle and value stem isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Frighteningly perceptive, they say. Okay

And, it is said to be a wild ride and hard to put down.

“Yesteryear is the novel I didn’t know I needed” says Ashley Audrain, author of The Push. It may be a clever “excavation of motherhood and faith and online fame” but I still am not convinced I care. You might, though, and we have it.

Blue Miles: A Monastic Novel Fr. Thomas Esposito (Ignatius) $18.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.16

Have you ever read a novel written by a Cistercian monk? No, me either. I’m grateful for the serious fictional projects of the conservative Catholic publisher (they do, for instance, the many good novels of Michael O’Brian.) This new one, Blue Miles, is cleverly arranged around the hours and has endorsements from some other thoughtful monastic scholars. (And, so, Michael O’Brien, of Father Elijah and other novels.) He says, “Every line, eery page, of this extraordinary book breathes authenticity, along with the authors profound understanding of the vagaries of human growth — for monks and laypeople alike, in weakness and strength.”

This careful story is set in the Cistercian cloister — starting at the prayer service called Matins at 5:30 am — and is said to be “gently comedic” and “sharply witty.”  The silence of the monastery invites various members to ponder their own interior lives and their relationship with Christ, even in their very real-world suffering.

A-Tumblin’ Down Sarah Hinlicky Wilson (Thornbush Press) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Sometime I ask myself where we find these indie books from indie publishers, and offer a breath of gratitude. Wilson is a fine writer, it seems, a thoughtful writer. That her epigrams that intro each chapter are from (she tells us) John Hector St John’s Letters from an American Farmer written in 1782 might be a hint of her thoughtfulness. In her acknowledgments she thanks a friend who got her a rare copy of an old Rumor Godden book.

The novel is set in rural Shibboleth, New York, in 1988. “The Abney family is settled in at Mt. Moriah Lutheran Church” but it isn’t clear what is going to happen. Pastor Donald is haunted (in part by his sense of a “probing, judging” memory of his revivalist grandfather) and some revelations of family secrets on his wife’s side. There’s an eleven year old daughter and, tragedy.

As it says on the back, A-Tumblin’ Down “topples headlong into grief and explores the strong grace needed to survive. Yet the story is not only sad and serious it’s also funny, joyful, and enchanted.”

Hildegard of Bingen: Lady of the Light, Woman for the World – A Historical Novel Joan Ohanneson (Crossroad) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

This historically accurate medieval novel about the famous 12th century Hildegard got great reviews when it came out in the 1990s; it was reissued a decade ago and we just rediscovered it. Mystics and nuns gave it good blurbs, making this a reliably reading about her story. Hildegard was an artist and chemist, healer and poet, who was eventually named an official Doctor of the Church. This is a rare title, and it might take a bit of time to re-order more. If you like medieval stories, it might be well worth the wait.

The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World Ware II Story Daniel Nayeri (Levine Querido) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This is the most recent YA novel by the greatly appreciated and vivid storyteller, Nayeri; we’ve know him from selling his older books at the Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh years ago (he is speaking there again next year in 2027!) and at an event at Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian years ago but he became globally famous with the huge popularity of Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) a fictional retelling of his life as an Iranian immigrant kid being raised in Oklahoma. Teacher of Nomad Land is a historical fiction work so good NPR said it “isn’t just a book — it’s a prayer, a lament, a master class in storytelling.” The Washington Post says “it pierces the heart with precision” It is set among a Persian boy becoming a “teacher of nomads” helping a Jewish boy on the run from the Nazis who are (along with the Soviets from the other side) bearing down on Iran.

The Many Assassinations of Samir the Seller of Dreams Daniel Nayeri (Lantern) $10.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $8.79

After his fame from Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel wrote this rollicking story of storytellers and it won the Newberry Award in 2023! Now out in paperback, we thought we’d remind you of it. As it says on the back, it is about “mercenaries, merchants, and monks” who “tumble downtime Silk Road in this epic adventure with twists and turns.”

The opening is a young orphan running from his life (which, in a way, is how Teacher of Nomad Lands begins.) Samir is a “portly huckster” liar on the run from a wild array of colorful (dangerous) characters on the young boy involved in this swashbuckling tale. A fun read!

My Beloved: A Mitford Novel Jan Karon (Putnam) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

This came out late last year and was a big item on Christmas lists from Mitford fans everywhere. It is still only in hardcover (although a paperback is coming in October. For now, if you want a sweet and uplifting summer read, any of the Mitford novels are well worth reading. This latest has been called a “heartwarming gift we all need” and is clever and wise and touching. And romantic. It starts when Father Tim writes a very private letter to his beloved wife that becomes less private than they thought and as the story unfolds readers learn of backstories of various town characters (like Hope, the village librarian) and how “a letter can change a life.”

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BookNotes

TO ORDER PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINK AT THE END OF THIS COLUMN

Sometimes we like to do BookNotes columns around a theme. Put the topic you are most interested in — memoir, the arts, work, books about nationalism and extremist religion, prayer, racial justice, church life, mental health, novels — into our search engine box at the BookNotes archives at our website and see what comes up. Even our last post had a theme — indie press or self-published books by authors we know and which we thought you should know about.

And of course our bi-weekly podcast “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” always has a theme. (The last episode mentioned three books on American history, the one before that three books about embodied living, and before that, three about Dallas Willard.)

Sometimes, though, so many good titles come out in a given season and there are so many books I’m dipping into — this one, that one, oh, my, yet another! — that I just have to tell you about them all. Here are twenty random titles, sort of an omnibus BookNotes, highlighting books that came out in the last month or so that I’m excited about. A few are brand spanking new. Get some iced coffee or sweet tea or whatever your go-to summer beverage is, sit down, and discover these new releases. Some you have heard about, maybe even anticpated. And a few I’ll bet you haven’t discovered yet. Here we go. Enjoy.

ALL BOOKS MENTIONED ARE 20% OFF.

Christ and Covenant in Global Politics: A Christian Introduction to International Relations Robert J. Joustra (IVP Academic) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

I’m not going to lie: I wanted to give this a large five star review but never got to it. It arrived when I didn’t have the capacity to do a serious review and, anyway, I soon realized it was, as they say, above my pay grade. Rob is a friend and an immensely talented thinker, scholar, and teacher. He has taught in a lively cohort of reformational scholars — think of Al Wolter’s Creation Regained as a starting point for an intentional inner reformation of the disciplines — at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario. Besides hammering out this rigorous plot line of a “Christian realist” perspective with sharp students for many years, Rob has also contributed to major academic tomes, editing serious volumes including Power, Politics, and Moral Order: Three Generations of Christian Realism – A Reader his own PhD dissertation eventually published to acclaim in 2017 by Routledge (The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom: Why Foreign Policy Needs Political Theology.) For those who are less apt to read such a mighty scholarly text, we continue stock his smashing cowritten book on Eerdmans called How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith & Politics at the End of the World. And I loved the book he and his wife Jessica co-edited, Calvinism for a Secure Age: A Twenty-first Century Reading of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures. In his free time, he edits the impressive Review of Faith and International Affairs. As you can see, he is prolific and serious. He just took a position of the Spoelhof Chair of political science teaching at Calvin University.

To place him further, you might think of the more philosophical writings of Richard Mouw or the “third way” orientation of David Koyzis (Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Critique of Contemporary Ideologies) or perhaps, Nicholas Wolterstorff. He cites bunches of serious political philosophers and historians, not least of which is Daniel Philpott, of Notre Dame, whose Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations remains hugely important, although some of our readers might appreciate his Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation.

Christ and Covenant in Global Politics is a rare book, semi-scholarly but accesible and grappling with major scholars and trends in the field, bringing what he thinks is a uniquely Christian perspective to bear. He draws on classic Augustinian thought and asks what political power ought to look like in a secular age with idolatrous political economies (and nuclear weapons.) It is not lefty pacifist and it is not hawkish, either. The inveterate Paul Marshal pretty much raved about its contribution to the field of global statecraft — at least by offering a fresh, covenantal framework — in Providence.

With the current debate about foreign policy being led by bombastic nationalists like Hegseth, Christians wanting to be well-informed about public theology that might offer substantive answers and not just reactionary sloganeering about peace and justice, need a book like this. As one who leans towards Biblical nonviolence, I admit to not knowing exactly what modern states ought to be or do about gross injustice and I need to learn from the likes of Joustra. From Gaza to Ukraine, the blood cries out. Agree or not, Joustra’s book is a major step towards good thinking and I seriously commend it. Read it through to the end.

Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo XIV (Our Sunday Visitor) $18.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.16

The books about the dangers and benefits of AI keep coming out; just reading reviews of the most thoughtful ones is a big task.  A few years ago I did a big column about Christian perspectives on technology and then on the digital culture and then a few specifically on AI and that is a good place to begin (HERE.)

Some of the new ones are almost too simplistic — as if AI is just a tool we use, rather than waters that engulf us, as several have said. Others are so dense and deep that one wonders who will read them. We still need thoughtful, discerning, and somewhat practical guides (perhaps like the book coming out next month, Human Raised: Nurturing Connections, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in an Age of AI by Dr. Dana Suskind, which comes recommend by her friend Kristin Du Mez, a recommendation we’ll take to the bank.) And we need more foundational books, asking what it means to be human, one of the biggest questions.

Enter Pope Leo of Chicago. This is his first Encyclical Letter so it is a big deal. Even though ti is 165 pages (with notes) it is a relatively quick read, serious without being needlessly dense. We have carried most of the papal encyclicals as they are often very good reading for ecumenical readers — for any readers — and except maybe for the wonderful Laudato Si’ – On Care of Our Common Home on ecology, this has been the most talked about since, oh, maybe Pacem in Terris in 1963.

Far be it from me to try to unpack or explain Magnifica Humanitas but it does at least two things clearly, both a bit of a paradox. It honors the glory [Leo uses the word “grandeur”] of the human person made in God’s image (despite our sinfulness and capacity for great evil) and it affirms that the possibilities of creating technologies is a fundamentally good thing, even though they can be developed in inappropriate ways. It is more sophisticated than saying generative AI is a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill (nobody thoughtful says it that simply since every tool is embedded in a construct, tainted, if you will, and freighted with baggage.)  Leo XIV worries about “new forms of dehumanization” and yet points us to Christ (who was fully human) “the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”  With digitalization and robotics and AI, the Holy See asks, “will we construct a new Tower of Babel or rebuild the walls of Jerusalem?”

It is theologically mature, thoughtful, of course, and well written. Centering the call to wise discernment for the sake of the common good, Pope Leo, it is said, “proceeds a path forward that can safeguard human dignity.”

Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination  Ben Norquist & Brian Miller (IVP Academic) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

I had an early version of this and had wanted to suggest it months ago, as a pre-order, but I just didn’t get to it. Now that it is out I feel like I want to do a longer, serious review, as it certainly warrants it. I is one of the most impressive books I’ve read this season. I hope those with the ability to do a longer review rise to the occasion as this is, I’d say, one of the most important books of the year. Yes!

Every Somewhere Sacred is the sort of book that is certainly in our wheelhouse — contemporary cultural studies in light of a distinctively Biblical worldview, framing our social imaginations by both what ought to be (a sense of place, caring about land and home as God’s beloved creation) and what is (stolen land, careless stewardship, injustices of all sorts, placelessness.) I get excited by the Biblical / theological foundation and the spirituality of the ordinary that reminds us that, as it says on the back cover, “each of us is placed by God in a specific somewhere.”

I love books about a sense of place and can send lists of other key titles that we adore if you ask. (The most meaty, perhaps, is Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today by Craig Bartholomew not to mention Walter Brueggemann’s biblical classic, The Land: Place as Gift, Challenge, and Promise, and the short but potent Race and Place: How Urban Geography Shapes the Journey to Reconciliation by David Leong, all of which they cite alongside everything from studies of the postmodern urban landscape to agrarian stuff by Norman Wirzba and Wendell Berry.)

These two great co-authors do theological studies of land and place — The Home of God : A Brief Story of Everything by Miroslav Von and Ryan McAnnally-Linz naturally comes up, for instance, all considered in light of kinship notions from indigenous theology (see the great Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagine Our Future by Native writer Patty Krawec and, very importantly for their project, work such as Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine by Randy Woodley.) I do not know the exact relationship between their work and their writing, but I know that Ben has spent recent years working for the stellar organization Christians for Middle East Peace which necessarily took him to questions of settler repression, land claims, and stories of place in Palestine, the West Bank, and Gaza. It is set in North America, to be sure, but his experiences with the exiled and dispossessed surely colored his heart and insight.)

From the broad frontier ideologies in the ninetieth century America to modern notions of ministry in unique places — suburbs, say, or rural cultures — this book brings in all kinds of insight, making it a thrill of a read, exciting and educational and informative. If you are a life-long learner, it’s like a Master Class and yoiu will come away informed and enriched. More, though, from the very first places you know (think for a moment) this matters; it matters deeply. Norquist and Miller convey passion and even urgency knowing that people of faith must do better at bringing their deepest convictions to bear upon our culture making and place-keeping, stewarding our gifts of embodiment in space. In fact, one major chapter in assisting us to tell a better story about place offers “four themes for rereading Bible stories about land.” They remind us that “land and place are not an add-on to the relationship between God and people; they are integral aspects of God’s plan throughout history.”

The inner city. Appalachia. Native American reservation. Suburb. The Holly Land. National park. Big city. The South. Flyover country. Vegas. What does your imagination see, hear, taste, feel, and small when you think about these places? What scenes and characters come to mind?

Of course, places can tell stories, but perhaps more to the point, we tell stories about places. Landscape matters for people of faith and for how we tell the story of our faith. It colors our views of ministry and how we live in our ordinary lives. This major volume, a sparkling, lively, thoughtful work, Everywhere Somewhere Sacred is one of the best books in this whole genre yet done.

Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things Brian Zahnd (IVP) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Oh my, I’m not sure how to review this fairly and succinctly. There is so much going on here, so much good prose and so much to think about. I think I’ve read everything by Zahnd and raved about his last few, all nice hardbacks from IVP. I’m eager to sell this one, too, and give it 4 and a half stars! That’s pretty darn good!

Why not five stars? Well, maybe I’m picky or take Colossians 2:8 too particularly, but I want to protest his early chapters — fascinating and largely right, in spirit, at least — about modernity’s disenchantment and secularism’s dead end which he answers with an overt call to a Christian sort of Platonism. I couldn’t believe my eyes when he wrote that Paul was following the footsteps of Plato. What kind of Jew does Zahnd think Paul was? As a Hebrew, my hunch is that he was steeped in a doctrine of creation that was anything but Platonic.

You know the drill, even if you’ve never studied philosophy. Plato promulgated this hard dichotomy between the body and the soul. (See also my little unnecessary rant about that when I reviewed the healthy The Body Teaches the Soul by Justin Early.) That dualism created a split-level worldview that assumed what is “really real” is the invisible stuff (almost like the Christian Science cult that things normal things are an illusion) which then was integrated into conventional Christian theology as a tension between the seemingly secular and the sacred. Theologians call it a dualism between nature and grace. Look, most of us admit to it when we’re honest: there is for most of us a gap between worship and work, between liturgy and life, between Sunday and Monday. The most astute thinkers, I believe, blame our vacillating between world-flight eschatology (waiting for the rapture to whisk us away from this corrupt world which is destined to burn) and crassly idolatrous accommodation to the culture around us on the early church accommodation to the dualisms inherited by Plato, and, later, Aristotle.

Still, I agree with where Zahnd is going with Unseen Existences and he isn’t wrong, even if he didn’t have to quote Plotinus for crying out loud. Or C.S. Lewis, which is where this gets even more interesting.

Zahnd is right to call the famous Anglican apologist and novelist a Christian Platonist, and even though this is debated in some of the academic books about Lewis, it is refreshing to see it stated so boldly and backed up with fabulous quotes from his essays and from Narnia. I disapprove of this in Lewis and disapprove of Zahnd’s affirmation of it, but, dag, it still brought tears to my eyes reading his quotes from The Last Battle. Zahn’s use of Lewis clarifies for me why I’m irritated by the dualism that pops up in C.S. I want to say we are not made for some other place and our longing for home is not for some other creation. It is not even for some unseen aspects of the creation.

A properly Biblical view of creation that includes what we typically call the supernatural is needed, and I’m afraid Zahnd doesn’t quite bring it. At least we should start with Richard Middleton’s powerhouse A New Heaven and New Earth and maybe something like God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation by Jonathan R. Wilson or Dennis Hollinger’s Creation and Christian Ethics: Understanding God’s Designs for Humanity and the World. Or Alexander Schmemann’s’s For the Life of the World with that first potent line, “we are what we eat.” Zahnd writes a bit about Bulgakov, who taught Schmemann when they were exiled from Russia in Paris and he admits that Bulgakov’s dense work “pushes the synthesis of Platonic philosophy and Christian theology to it’s utmost, but I do find it fascinating.”

So do I. And I applaud this amazing exploration of the unseen things of the Christian life, the really, real life. Like I said, I give it four and a half stars.

The titles of each of the chapters are incredibly allusive and hint at a robust creation theology: into the wonder, on the road, under the oaks, under the fig tree, under the stars and the like. He gets to this, finally, by a beautiful study of the “tears of Jesus” which is as incarnational as it gets, almost. Further up and Further In, indeed.

Much has been written lately about how the old adage that some are “so heavily minded they are no earthly good” is self-defeating, that to indeed be truly of earthly good we need a fully Biblical view of heaven. Brian Zahn has helpfully pushed back against escapist theology and has no interest in a “pie-in-the-sky, I’ll-fly-away-when-I- die, in the sweet-by-and-by theology” as he puts it, even on the back cover. He’s stands with others these days inviting us to remember heaven, to “embrace the divine mystery of the spiritual realm.” I like his use of the language of pilgrimage. He says a journey towards home “fosters in us a love for both the heavenly and the earthly.” I hope he’s right and that readers who ponder this impressive work grow not into pagan Platonists obsessed with mystery but to wonder-filled followers of the Risen King of a creation regained.

Letters on Living the Faith C.S. Lewis (HarperOne) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Despite what I said above about Lewis being inadequately critical of Plato’s negative influences, I am truly delighted to share this incredibly useful and wonderful new edition of the “best of” Lewis’s big three volume set of letters (and more.) Those volumes of letters (which he viewed as part of his ministry) are over 3500 pages! Chosen and edited by the wonderful David Downing (on of our very best contemporary Lewis scholars), this selects letters that are both distinctively Lewis — my, he had a style, a voice, a tone, didn’t he, not to mention a knack for metaphor — and arranged to make it especially useful as a guide for faithful Christian thinking and living.

Letters on Living the Faith is a trim sized paperback and has those neat “French fold” covers — flaps that give the impression of a hardback’s dust-jacket — and a rich green and gold design. It would make a lovely little gift — fancy, but not too much, loaded with content, but, again, not too much. The opening intro by Downing is called “Mentor by Mail” which is perfect.

Downing, by the way, edited the compact Lewis compilation The Reading Life and On Writing (and Writers.) This collection of his personal correspondance is the third from Downing and we should be glad.

There are long and short letters, some very short. You’ll find his opinions on prayer and spirituality, on love and the Bible. He has a section on psychology, on Christian formation, and “putting faith into practice.” There are a few about Roman Catholics and confessions of his own struggles. You’l love the few questions he answers about Narnia, and, of course, his letters about consolidation and grief.

A few of these letters will catch the attention of Lewis-lovers; there is correspondance with Sheldon Vanauken and  Walter Hooper, Dom Bede Griffiths and his brother Warnie, Arthur Greeves and that famous “American Lady.”

Here is a lovely lecture given by Downing at the Wade Center highlighting his work selecting these letters and reading a bunch. David is casual and funny and really knows so much. You might enjoy it.

Fully Beloved: Meeting God in our Heartaches and our Hopes Timothy Jones (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is not the only book on this list that I might have passed over if a very dear and well-read, reliable friend had not told me about it. We have carried Timothy Jones books before — years ago we loved his lovely Awake My Soul: Practical Spirituality for Busy People and The Art of Prayer — but how many books on being loved by God do we need? We have hundreds! But then I recalled what a fine writer he is, and how we haven’t seen anything new in ages. Jeff Crosby assured me it was excellent, and I am so, so glad I have it a change. Fully Beloved touched me so deeply it is hard to explain. And I am not one with a weak ego, I don’t think. I know I am loved by God and by many who are dear to me. But, man, I needed this.

The subtitle is important — it is nothing short of eloquent in describing in lovely prose just how hurting many of us are (and, yet, somehow, still have hopes and dreams.) Can God be there for us? What if we do not sense God’s presence? (Or as the back cover puts it, “Would God ever ghost you?”) Do we really know God’s love?

This perennial question is one of the most urgent we can ask, and Jones is an expert and generous guide. He doesn’t force the questions, but tells stories that evoke our own grieves and longings, wrestlings-with-God. Maybe you’ll get banged up, like Jacob, but these struggles are worth facing.

And here is what else makes this book unique (besides the careful, beautiful writing.) The book is, without saying it, about the Trinity. It is the Triune God that loves us, and even though it is full of stories (and the stories of those who have gone before us, from Augustine to Julian of Norwich, to Emily Dickinson) Fully Beloved is a primer on the Trinity.

Please don’t think that its topic makes it impenetrable or obscure. Nothing could be further from the truth — trust me on this! Jones has a lovely touch, offering a compelling book about the deepest matters of the human heart. And even as he shows how God is committed to redeeming our pain and brokenness (in part through our own engagement via ancient Christian practices), he teaches us well about love. He learned, even as a pastor, that “Love is the startling invitation of the Trinity and the extravagant answer to the most pressing questions” of his life. And maybe of yours.

On the back it says this: Fully Beloved is a beautifully evocative, pastoral look at our soul’s sacred thirst, leading us to a truth so full that it reaches deep into our hearts losses and transforms them into a stubborn, breathless, abundant joy that knows what it means to be fully beloved.”

Solidarity: The Work of Recognition Rowan Williams (Bloomsbury) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I have not read this yet, but the blurbs on the back are striking: Slavoj Žižek says it is a “magisterial vision of true comradeship.” A.N. Wilson says it is “a treasure trove of wisdom and insight” Another reviews says it is a better vision “again cynics and opportunists.”

Solidarity is asking what it means that we have shared burdens and hopes. This is what makes human solidarity possible, something I think I first heard reflected well years ago from Richard Mouw. This is said to have similar “quiet optimism” and should have lots to offer those seeking “a new form of communion, tracing the fragile path between innermost and out worlds.”

It seems that he may also be saying that our common humanity — our shared burdens and hopes — is “less a choice than a predicament” Hmmm. I suppose that suggests it can be done well or less well. What does it look like to be people who recognize the dignity of others? Are we really in this together? What does it mean to be an ally of others on the road to public justice?

From the table of contents we realize Williams is in his rather scholarly mode, interacting with public intellectuals (include Eastern European political philosophers) with some help from others naming what we mean by human rights, what paradoxes come with empathy (towards strangers, even) and a theology of complicity a la Bonhoeffer. Just over 300 pages.

Pastoring for Monday:  Help Your Congregation Integrate Faith and Work Matt Austen (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

You may know how we’ve promoted Matthew Kaemingk’s hefty and splendid Worship and Work and the more practical follow-up, Worship for Workers. Both offered resources for worship planners, liturgists, and pastors to help insinuate into worship notions of serving God in the work world. Praying for workers, singing hymns about the vocation of work, offering liturgies for butchers, makers, and candlestick makers, is essential if we want to spiritually empower ordinary folks to serve God with some distinction in their workaday lives. I’ve expressed before how grateful we are that some congregational leaders are taking up this challenge. I suppose I needn’t say that most are pretty silent. As business people, my wife and  don’t get prayed for at my church even on Labor Day.

Maybe this will help, backing up from the unique questions of the relationship of liturgy and life in the world, but asking how pastors can allow their own calling as pastors to shape their congregants in ways that empower them to live out a Kingdom vision of vocations. With warmth and grace, this book (in the words of Joran Raynor who wrote The Sacredness of Secular Work) “affirms the sacredness of seemingly secular vocations and equips church leaders with practical tools to disciple believers where they spend most of their time — at work.”

There is no doubt this book is savvy (attending to the vocational restlessness and anxiety many feel) ad invites folks who are unsure how their faith can guide them in their workplaces. But, mostly, it offers concrete pathways, almost like a toolkit, full of fresh ideas and strategies to hep congregants live out their faith in their jobs and various callings. Highly recommended.

The Pastor as Midwife: Life-giving Leadership for the Healing of the Church Shawna Singer Gaines (IVP) $24.99  // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Do you recall a couple of months ago I raved about a book that I insisted was one of my favorite titles on pastoral work I’ve ever read? It was called The Pastor as Gardener and it brought not only a hobbyist appreciation for back yard gardening but also a radical agrarian vision (a la Wendell Berry and Norma Wirzba, say) to bear on the slow, patient work of being a steadfast pastor. Oh how I loved that book. Well, here is one almost to match, a thrilled, evocative, and wonderful read, another great book of clergy that brings a fresh and generative metaphor to the art of pastoring. Male or female, this book is, yep, about the practice of midwifery and how that translates into caring pastoral ministry.

Shawn Singer Gaines suggests that the pastor as shepherd model is less useful than it once was (as a metaphor it worked “in a world when congregations were full, pastors saw clearly where they were headed, and hazards were preventable.” But now, it is obvious, “we find ourselves in a different moment, one in which the church is in great pain: congregations are dwindling, denominations are fracturing, and church scandals have become all too common.” We need a new imagination, the back cover of this book insists, one which “captures the hopefulness of God birthing something new in the midst of the pain of the old creation.”

Yep. Who among us hasn’t used that metaphor — God birthing something new over which we are called to be midwives of sorts? I know I have.

This book has this lovely, fascinating connection to actual midwifery practice but also is rich with Biblical insight.  (I might add that it starts with a rich theological anthropology rooted in Genesis 1.) God makes us in love, call us “very good.” Can pastors get into that, helping by using this word-picture to live into this idea. Gaines reminds us that “pain is pregnant with possibility.”

And is written with what Andrew Root says is “beautiful writing and deep insight”

Shawn Singer Gaines is a seminary trained pastor, but is not a midwife, although she birthed two children with their help. And she loves Call the Midwives, so there’s that. I’m sure she feels like she knows a bit about the topic. And as a big epilogue to her second section she reprints Drew Jackson’s memorable poem based on Luke 1, “God Speaks Through Wombs.”

I like that this book centers God’s love, the goodness of our creaturely bodies, and that —like a trained midwife — a pastor is called to some art and science of what she calls “being  somewhere between mastery and powerlessness.” We trust the Spirit at work, using us to help bring new things to life.

You will be impressed with her rigor and the breadth of her good citations (from Peter Steinke to Ruth Haley Barton; from Eugene Peterson to Brené Brown, from William James Jennings to Robin Wall Kimminer.)

Wise and tender, Shawna Singer Gaines recovers a biblical metaphor deeply needed — Beth Felker Jones, Practicing Christian Doctrine

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and The American Dream Machine Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This book had arrived in hardcover and I feel badly I didn’t highlight it then. It just came out in paperback and it is a perfect time to pick it up. It is a great read, an engaging bit of cultural commentary and social history by way of looking at the life and work of Joan Didion. Some of us know her for her incredibly popular journalism writing — magazines, journals, memoirs, studies and reviews, not to mention several award winning, best-selling novels — during mostly the end of the 20th century or the early 21st. I thought she was a New Yorker, and she was. Anybody interested in the literati of recently passed decades knows her name and many love her journalism and books.

But I didn’t know she was also a California girl. She moved to Hollywood — enamored with John Wayne of all people — and took it upon herself to write screenplays in the late 60s. She lived in LA from the mid-60s to the mid-80s when she returned to the East Coast. Where have I been to not know that. And John Wayne?

Heather Clark has an amazing blurb on the back of We Tell Ourselves Stories calling it a “gripping cultural history of Joan Didion’s relationship with Hollywood, politics, and America itself…”

She continues that Didion’s spare prose,

“…captured the disillusion of a generation. Alissa Wilkinson expertly conjures that time and place I this smart, moving, and lyrical account of Didion’s California dreams.”

Didion wrote about LA, about the beaches (she lived in Malibu) and was deeply involved in Hollywood. She loved the movies and she understood their role. She understood “the rhythms of American movie-making” and while this book is about more than this, it particularly explores how Hollywood shapes the American imagination.

Another reviewer (Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir) says it is more than “an essential contribution to the Didion canon,” but, more, “it delves into the evolution of American consciousness with dizzying intelligence and insight,”

Alissa, you may know, is a former Kings College film studies prof, a cultural and film writer for Christianity Today, a correspondent for Vox, who now is a premier critic for the New York Times. Funny, I mentioned her above noting that she co-wrote a lively book on apocalyptic pop culture and politics with Rob Joustra. Her previous work was the utterly charming Broadleaf book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking and Living from Revolutionary Women.

The Gospel and My Black Skin: Confronting the Past, Reclaiming the Future Dr. JP Foster (Zondervan) $22.99 //OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

The joys of seeing what God is doing in someones life — testimony! — are deep and the stories endlessly fascinating. Also, as most memoir readers know, the stories of human brokenness and sin are also endless. JP Foster has written a book both documenting the sin and evil of historic and contemporary racism (also as he has experienced it) and testifies to what God is doing, alive and well, working for wholeness and justice for all. The Gospel and My Black Skin is more than a memoir, but accompanied by such good storytelling and vulnerable testimony that it reads almost like one.

We have hundreds of books on racism here on our shelves — old and new, secular and deeply religious, academic and simple. I almost skipped this one as I figured we just don’t need more on topic, urgent as it is. And hardly anybody buys these books from us, anyway.

And then my well-read and utterly reliable friend, Bible prof and scholar / author Carmen Joy Imes, gave me an early heads up. She said it was one of her all time favorite reads and simply a must.  Wow. I promised her we’d check it out and be sure to stock a few. (Carmen has subsequently mentioned this book more than once in her own blog and popular videos.)

She was right. Foster has a way with words, tells an amazing story, and is both prophetic and candid about naming racism in our culture but, also, show how the gospel got under his black skin. We wondered (and he is not the first nor the last) if he could trust a faith that has been used to hurt people who look like him.

In case we need reminded, the back cover copy starts like this:

As Christian nationalism rises, history is distorted, and churches remain silent in the face of injustice, a growing number of Black Christians are questioning the faith they inherited, while others have already walked away from it.

Dr. Foster — now a pastor of one of the largest African American churches in Los Angeles and an adjunct affiliate teacher at Biola University — is an up-and-coming national treasure on spiritual formation, church life, Biblical studies and ministries.  (Interestingly, he came up as a student through Biola.) Her offers powerful lessons we all need reminded of and, as Dr. Imes put it, “will challenge readers of any race to rethink their ideas about where Christianity came from and who shaped it to become what it is today.” She says it is both a healing balm and an urgent message.

I’m very excited about this new book and am convinced it brings some stuff to our attention that goes behind the important (if not uncommon) Biblical teaching on multi-ethnic ministry, racial reconciliation and social justice. It reminds us that the earliest days of the Christian movement had African roots and that we must “reclaim the original Christian message of liberation, justice, dignity, and oneness.”

There is a solid foreword by the impeccable Lisa Victoria Fields, CEO of the Jude 3 Project (and author of When Faith Disappoints.)

Churn: The Tensions That Divides Us and How to Overcome It Claude Steele (Liveright) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

This is not brand, brand new, but came out a few months ago. I’m embarrassed I’m only telling you about it now as it has been (by me, at least) long-awaited. It is a follow-up to his widely respected and fascinating book Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. Dr. Steele is a social psychologist and researched who has served in what only can be called prestigious ways in higher education. including Provost of Columbia University, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UC Berkeley, and Dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. His theories about how people cope with stereotype threats and maintain self-worth even amidst internal and social tension have been widely discussed. His books have been said to have “Malcolm Gladwell-like clarity.

To help place him if you are unfamiliar, think of the NPR show and podcast Hidden Brain with the lovely Shankar Vedantam; Steele (I googled it) has been on Hidden Brain and I can’t wait to listen to that older episode. I hope he is on again talking about churn, his brilliant word about the inner tensions experienced — it is more than a feeling — when people face stereotype threat. In a real sense, Churn is the next step after his groundbreaking Whistling Vivaldi, and, I might suggest, even better.

Steele opens the book with a succinct but very helpful description of an imagined episode: two black parents are coming in to meet their son’s white teacher. Imagine what they worry about: the teacher may not have much racial sensitive, but, on the other hand, might be a gifted educator for their son. They know well the stereotypes and assumptions out there; the white teacher may subconsciously hold some of those nasty prejudices. Or maybe not. Similarly, the white educator knows well the racial attitudes that some black parents fear white teachers hold. Are these parents suspicious of her? Will any criticism of their sons classroom performance be seen as racist? Maybe. Maybe not. They both are churning.

By the way, Steele and some of his colleagues in higher education set out to find out how — through designed experiments — a white professor can give critical feedback to a Black students and have that feedback be trusted. You’ll read about that in the chapter called “Being Wise, Not Color-Blind” and, as you might guess, I loved that chapter about being wise about these things.

The great second chapter asks “Where Does Church Come From?” It is worth the price of the book to be introduced to Henri Tajfel (who was a Jewish POW in World War II) and his experiment about personal and group identity based on the arbitrary “dot estimator” experiment.

The book is loaded with more examples, stories, and episodes — some true, some illustrative — that bring home the churning funk of our times. (Okay, he doesn’t use the word funk, and who knows if he knows the old James Taylor song.) His stories are so helpful, but what is even more compelling are the social science research project he described. It is edge of your seat stuff, documenting — sadly, tragically — the racist assumptions baked into the cake of our times.

Much of this is about our sense of identity. This is human stuff; any person who wants a calmer world should care, but Christian people, especially, know deeply how identities can be de-formed and distorted. Do we know what we are (creatures made in the image of God) and who we are (beloved children of God, messed up but loved redemptively?)  We care about fighting stereotypes since the New Testament over and over resists them. So when Steele writes about identify formation and the churn that goes on in our heads due to feared stereotyping, man, this is stuff we care about. Right?

And, as he goes on to show as the book carefully unfolds, trust is the issue, the “critical ingredient of successful diversity in many of the everyday settings and relationships of our lives; that wiseness — seeing full humanity in human difference — was a mindset for winning trust between people of otherwise wary identities.” We have to create opportunities for people to tell you about their values, their needs, and their own agendas. Conveying faith in the other party’s potential” is a way to build trust and he has a chapter on it called “Trust in the Face of Power.”  Later, he has a chapter on how we can make institutions wise. I know some of our BookNotes readers need this book. Am I right?

Of course, churn isn’t only about African American and white interactions. LGTBQ, Muslim, Asian-American, disabled, and other subgrouping live daily life shrouded by a sense that the majority culture (and sometimes other minorities) may or may not hold assumptions and prejudices about them. Early on he tells a story about a large, Black woman who was a serious hiker on the Appalachian Trail; my goodness, the stereotypes she faced about endurance athletics and wilderness hiking and the rudeness of strangers towards her! Apart from the structural questions built into systems, the daily churn is costly and must be relieved. In a society increasingly diverse, it behooves us all to know what to do. Certainly if your church is theologically, culturally, ethnically, or economically, diverse, you’ve got to get more skills to deal with the social tensions that lurk. More diversity causes more churn. Claude Steele’s Churn: The Tensions That Divide Us and How to Overcome It can help. It’s a good read. Highly recommended.

Churn is the most hopeful book I’ve read in a long time. Grounded in social psychological research yet remarkably jargon-free, this book makes clear why we often feel anxious in our daily interactions, especially in diverse settings, and what it takes to reduce that anxiety and build trust between people, even those with whom we disagree — Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times

Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting From Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship Graham Joseph Hill (IVP) $20.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79

There are a lot of fine books on following Jesus — we have shelves of them. Some even uses the language of “the Jesus way” (not least, Eugene Peterson’s one.)  I noticed that this one talks about “movements” of the way, so it didn’t sound formulaic, but, still, we’ve got too many calls to follow, guides to discipleship, pointers towards Christian living. I know a lot ofvery good, missional, ecumenically-minded evangelicals are writing out of Australia, but still.

And then I noted an intriguing blurb by Jack Sara, an evangelical leader who grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem, got involved with the holistic and multi-cultural vision of Lausanne and is not president of Bethlehem Bible College in the West Bank of Palestine. If he likes it, that means a lot. Another early endorsement was from Grace Ji-Sun Kim, a professor from Earlham who is prolific and radical. She noted Hill’s storytelling and how his practical wisdom “invites readers into a lifelong journey that requires intention, practice, and courageous reimagining of how we live.” I got an early manuscript and was immediately hooked.

These ten movements are compelling, offering critique of worldly idols and religious accommodation. It is hard, but hopeful, moving us from one way of being to another. For instance, the first chapter is “Moving from Material Success to Spiritual Riches.”  The next is “From Power to Servanthood” And on we go, moving from indifference to justice and moving from legalism to grace and moving from expressive individualism to community. The last — I impatiently jumped ahead, laughing at myself after I realized the irony — is called “Moving From Frenetic Activity to Slow Discipleship.”

What is the cost, the call, and the joy of counter-cultural discipleship in these days. Listen to graham Jospeh Hill from down under. He fully gets our cultural moment of polarization and consumerism and inequality and the like. We can embrace the inclusive love of Jesus and bear witness to a better way. Join the movement!

Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love with Scripture Meredith Miller (Worthy) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Our parenting section continues to grow with tons of older books and lots of new resources. Many look very good and a few seem rare with insight. (For instance, I’m excited about the new one by Mary Van Geffen called Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide for Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid. (Revell; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59.) Oh how I wished we’d had that twenty-five years ago. One of the endorsements on it is by a woman named Meredith Miller, a pastor (of Pomona Valley Church) who wrote the absolutely excellent Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From.

And that Meredith Miller’s recent one is a large size, hefty hardback just jam packed with open-ended and generously imaginative Bible study with the sub-title “A Grown-Up Guide to Exploring the Bible with Children.” I love the tone and useful size of Wonder and I trust the author. Her undergrad degree was from Westmont and her advanced studies were at Fuller where she was a curriculum consultant for the esteemed Fuller Youth Institute. The book is arranged into 52 sections and equips grown-ups to talk about the stories intelligently with children.  It’s sort of a Biblical overview, a reference tool, and a family devotional wrapped in one.

God of All Promises: A Poetic Pilgrimage Through Genesis Walter Brueggemann (WJK) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

It seems like there is a never-ending fount of Brueggemann essay collections, books compiled of his amazing blog posts, collections of his prayers, even older books being reissued. We stock them all, anything Brueggey related. But this. This might be the last bona-fide new book of his that he did before his death a year or so ago.  And it is stunning in more ways than one.

It was over forty years ago that the published his famous Interpreters commentary on Genesis. Now, so many decades later, with so much learning and insight under the bridge, he sets out to pray back the Bible to God, turning each chapter of Genesis into a prayer. A poem that functions like a prayer. It is both insightful and devotional. It’s a remarkable way to end a career known for deep scholarship and passionate activism in the church and world. I am touched by the very poignancy of this, even though if you were ever with him you know that he was always poetic and prayerful.

Listen, please, to these lovely tributes:

These ‘prayers and probes’ have been inspired by one last reading through the book of Genesis by a master exegete, who, as it turns out, is also a master poet. How appropriate! This little book is a treasure, left to us unexpectedly by one who has taught us much. And in this last contribution, he continues teaching. One can almost hear his voice when reading these prayers, like one following Brueggemann on a poetic pilgrimage one last time through the text he loved so well.  — Bill T. Arnold, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, Asbury Theological Seminary

This rich collection testifies to Brueggemann’s abiding love of the Hebrew Scriptures and his wisdom about spiritual formation. His expositions of Genesis texts are saturated with poetic drama, theological depth, and ethical honesty. This book is beautifully suited for Bible studies, devotional reading, and discussion groups eager to link biblical theology with contemporary issues. — Carolyn J. Sharp, Professor of Homiletics, Yale Divinity School

Brueggemann’s God of All Promises provides a devotional lens to explore the book of beginnings. Intentionally theological, these reflections model a way for us to, in his words, ‘pray back’ to the text. Moreover, the poetic form of each entry reminds us of the ways in which the Bible is inherently poetic, dialogical, and invitational, calling us into a space where we can be challenged, surprised, delighted, sometimes troubled, but always transformed. This is a great resource for individual and group study.  — Judy Fentress-Williams,  Professor of Biblical Interpretation, Virginia Theological Seminary

Paul for the World: A Ground Vision of Finding Meaning in This Life — Not Just the Next Nijay K. Gupta (Brazos Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE – $15.99

Any time there is a new book by the profile and important New Testament scholar, Nijay Gupta, it is worth celebrating. This one I am especially jazzed about for a couple of reasons. You can tell from the subtitle that it picks up on themes I often share (not least in my concerns about a small part of the otherwise great book by Brian Zahn, above.) In a nutshell, the old gospel song “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through” is just wrong. And (as NT Wright has been helpful in explaining) the Rabbi Apostle Paul would offer important grounding for life on the ground. Paul’s vision for vibrant discipleship starts right here, right now.

Besides taking this dumb idea to the woodshed one more time, insisting that the Apostle’s letters are about transformed living amidst a pagan culture, Gupta offers a compelling and coherent Pauline theology to undergird our real-world concerns.  The first section of this volume (3 chapters) are under the heading of “holy worldliness.” (I first heard that phrase in a long-out of print book from Fortress by Richard Mouw.) That’s it!!

More to the point, Paul for the World is very much a sequel to the previous (very informative) book by Gupta called Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling. This question of how the first century Christians resisted the Empire of Rome is a hot topic these days and there is much to learn and Gupta not only knows the historical and theological stuff, he’s an energetic and upbeat writer, more fun than most.  (Just think of Nadia Williams’s Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan; $26.99) or The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider (Baker Academic; $32.99) or Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World Like the Early Church by Stephen Presley (Eerdmans; $24.99) or the older, but powerful Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World by Larry Hurtado (Baylor University Press; $19.95.) And while we’re at it, you know I often give a shout out to Romans Disarmed: Doing Justice / Resisting Empire by Sylvia Keesmaat & Brian Walsh  (Brazos Press; $34.00.)

Anyway, Gupta’s Paul for the World is a follow up to his first-century study, Strange Religion. He notes at the outset that while that book allowed us to enter that first-century world and learn about our early church siblings, it was less prescriptive about how we, today, should be “weird, dangerous, and compelling.”  It seems this new one on Paul offers more direction, showing the details of what live out the implications of Romans 12: 1-2 might look like.

Paul really did address the issues of their day, if only we have the eyes to see. He has impressive chapters on here and now justice, ethnic equality, economics, work, friendship, athletics, wellness, and the arts. Wow. You’ve got to see this, believe me.

I love the concluding final chapter, “A Resurrection Revolution for This World.” It is centered around some points in Moltmann’s A Theology of Hope and his “on the ground” eschatology.

This is a beautiful book. Beautiful, challenging, reorienting. With his scriptural wisdom and deft writing, Gupta calls us to see Paul through new eyes and find the hope of Christ not just in the world to come but in how we live our lives right now. Gupta reminds us that what we do matters, because Paul’s vision of a world made new is a hope worth fighting for. Get this book to renew your heart and give you the courage to act more like Jesus. — Beth Allison Barr, professor, Baylor University; author of Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.

The Essential Herman Bavinck: A Reader and Commentary edited and with commentary  by Gayle E. Doornbos & N. Gray Sutanto (Baker Academic) $59.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $47.99

At over 550 pages this is the biggest book on our June list, and one of the bigger books of the year.  And yet it is manageable with excellent introductory comments in front of each major section; Jessica Joustra, formerly of Redeemer University and now at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, nicely calls it “orienting” and says it is a “gift to all theology enthusiasts.” Serious Reformed readers probably know about the large, multi-volume series on dogmatics done in recent years of the early 1900s neo-Calvinist and this one volume work brings together some of his best systematic, Biblical, and public theology in one large volume. Let’s call it a greatest hits collection from his earliest writing to his mature years.

More than the most popular, this “essential” volume brings together the most significant (or  seminal and suggestive) work done by Herman B, work that set the wide-as-life redemptive vision for Kuyper and, a century later, some of my own heros who founded the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. That Kuyper and Bavinck became known as founders of a movement of Dutch Reformed “neo-Calvinism” is important to know; that their concerns about everything from science to the arts to political pluralism to common grace have significantly shaped some quarters of generous Reformed thinking is undeniable. For those wanting to go to the source and read the dense professor Bavinck first hand, this is undoubtedly the go-to work.

Dangerous Songs: The Psalms and a Gloriously Disrupted Life Richard Bruxoort Collegian (Broadleaf Books) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

I have followed Richard Bruxvoort Colligan on and off for years, it seems. He is a Lutheran, I think, an indie-rock folkie musician who has done bunches of liturgical and earnest church music. He holds an MA in theology and the arts from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, and a DMin in grief work from Eden Seminary. He is director of spiritual formation at Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Rochester, Minnesota and — no surprise — is a study of the Psalms. And this is his long-awaited book.

Blurbs on the back might give you a feel if you think this might be for you. Christine Valters paintner, an expansive spiritual writer — her latest include Give Me A Word and Breath Prayer — says “I so love this book!” Brian McLaren raves. Marcias McFee — creator of the Worship Design Judie and author of Purveyors of Awe: Elements for Curating a Life of Spiritual Depth says it gift us “turns of phrase that delight and widen our perspective what is happening around us and inside us.”

She continues:

“His enthusiasm for a deep dive into the whoops and hollers, groans and teeth-gnashing, as well as the quietude and contemplation of the spiritual journey, is like being transplanted to a spot all our own near a stream of living water. Soak it up, friends.”

Some of our friends know the UCC author and musician Bryan Sirchio, director of the Convergence music Project. He simply says that Colligan “has brought the Psalms to life for me as never before.”

Dangerous Songs is a dangerous book. It might rock your world, calling you to rethink the very notion of Scriptural engagement, wondering if a real-world reflection might be more transformative than a dogmatic commentary. Hearing how a modern musician and artist grapples with these ancient songs must might scare you. Maybe you’ll roll your eyes. Or, maybe you, too, will find that, as McLaren put it, “these Psalms can guide you into a life of thriving, even in grief, despair, fury, and bewilderment.”

If Only We Could See: Reimagine Creativity, Compassion, and Calling Through the Extraordinary Life of Lilias Trotter Jennifer Trafton (B+H) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

There is so much that could be said about this luminous, hefty hardback, but I want to be brief. I’ll say just this: If Only We Could See is a major biography of a late nineteen century missionary from London who gave up artistic fame to move to the deserts of North Africa. We have followed books about her (there have not been many) and have corresponded with her foundation (The Lilias Trotter Legacy.) For a while we had some books about her, and discovered a documentary film made about her called Many Beautiful Things directed by Laura Waters Hinson. (You can watch it for free online visit liliastrotter.com/watch) I gather that the wonderful creative and artful writer Jennifer Trafton was drawn to Trotter by this film as well.

Trotter, as I noted, was on the cusp of what might have been world-wide fame when she moved to a very poor part of London, following her deep Christian faith and desire to share the gospel with others. If Only We Could See explores some of her dramatic conversion and life and her call to Africa. In this sense, it is a moving missionary biography. There have not been that many truly inspiring mission biograhies lately so this is a particular stand out.

However, Lilias continued to pain while in Algeria. And it is here that Trafton draws out even more than interesting missionary storytelling. There are full color reproductions of some of her watercolors (one for each chapter, at least) and she explores the relationship between creativity and compassion. How Trotter’s own love of her place poured out in her exquiste paintings.

Granted, “turning away from worldly recognition and social convention” and forging her own path is itself inspiring. But, as Trafton puts it “her artistic and spiritual journeys intertwined as she expanded the many-colored canvas of her creativity to embrace not only the sweeping vistas of the Sahara, but also the lives of the Arab people she loved.”

You may know the biographer Trafton from her work with The Rabbit Room (she is in, with Malcolm Guite and others, the fantastic collection The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad and contributed to Every Moment Holy Volume III. She was even in that final Wingfeather collection. Oh, and had a piece in the Square Halo anthology Tolkien and the Arts: A Theology of Subcreation. It is an honor to get to tell you about her latest labor of love.

B+H notes on the back cover that if Only We Could See is more than the story of one remarkable woman, but “an invitation to experience the beauty of creation with fresh wonder, to look at our neighbors through new lenses, and to discover what “beautiful possible life awaits each of us as we follow the call of the Divine Artist.” It’s a beautiful project and a stellar volume.

The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land Aziz Abu Sarah & Maoz Inon (Crown) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

This is not brand, brand new but recent, and has gotten remarkable acclaim. We had a few customer eager for it. It is gorgeously written, humane, honest, and, as you might suppose, written by a Muslim and a Jew. Maoz is a peace activist whose parents were killed in the October 7 Hamas attack. When Abu Sarah was young, his broth­er was killed by Israeli forces after being beat­en in prison for throw­ing rocks.  Both are involved in peace building tourism and know well the understandable fears and resentments held by various stakeholders, Muslim, Christian, and secular Arabs and Israelis of different sorts. As one Jewish book reviewer put it, it is “filled with pain and promise.”

As the authors themselves say, “There is a mirror between Israel and Palestine, each of us reflecting our own rage back at ourselves. We must break this mirror and look one another in the eye to humanize the other side, but even more important, to recognize our own humanity.”

 The Future Is Peace is a remarkable book that brilliantly captures Martin Luther King’s ‘inescapable network of mutuality.’ It’s a passionate book, carefully constructed and heartbreakingly true. The message is both simple and immense: We are all helixed together by our humanity. As a guide to the torn heart, it also allows a vision of repair. — Colum McCann, Apeirogon: A Novel and American Mother

Poverty Abolitionists: Faith, Activism, and Hope for Difficult Times David Beckman (Bloomsbury Academic ) $27.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

I don’t know anything about how important writers end up on the publishing houses that they do, but David Beckman — former World Bank economist, former director of Bread for the World, the Christian lobbying group founded by Lutheran pastor Art Simon — deserves to be on this world class press. It’s notable, and he has now given us a work that is as urgent as it is         strategic. And the forward by world-class travel writer and TV host, Rick Steves! What a blast.

(Steves has long been an anti-hunger activist and has been especially active with BFW, or Bread as it is sometimes called. Hooray.)

Beckman brings to us in Poverty Abolitionists what other BFW executives have done (Art Simon before him, and Eugene Cho after him) and which he has done before — speaking in a tone that is deeply faith based and yet inviting; ecumenical and gracious as can be, and, alongside the generous piety and Biblical inspiration, loaded with both policy advocacy and lots of data and facts about poverty, hunger, and food programs. It connects faith and facts, vision and down-to-earth proposals. It is not only inspiring and convicting, but it gives you tools to get to work.

He learned lessons while heading Bread and here he shares stuff about learning, about ecumenical alliances, about translating faith in to realistic civic activism. How do we get other people (especially in our churches) to care about The Farm Bill on funding SNAP or USAID? And how do we get them not just to care but to join in specific citizen advocacy?  This book explains how.

Much of this is about organizing, about enticing others to care, about warming the conversation and building a bigger table to get folks involved. He does explain facts about how we are able to stop poverty and reduce hunger but, more, he shows how getting involved makes people feel (there is even a bit of neuroscience) and how we can enhance efforts to work together. How do we act, now in this crisis moment? What do we do about those who push back; what about MAGA? Can we act now to work in democratic ways, given the challenges? What about getting younger folks involved? How do we make room for fresh leadership?

The always charming Steves is right; “we need this book now!”

David Beckmann always connects facts to faith. He tracks the reduction of poverty in recent decades and directly relates it to the moving of a loving God in history. He documents how the US government is now making life harder and even deadly for poor and hungry people; and hears a call from God to push back. David Beckmann’s book will help people move from discouragement to becoming faithful poverty abolitionists. — Jim Wallis, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy

Bad Religion Good News: An Honest Guide for the Spiritually Disappointed Scott Bessenecker (Herald Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

There are so many books inviting readers to a more progressive edge of Christian practice, throwing in our lot with the poor, rejecting legalism and strict dogmatism, celebrating common grace and wonder, moving from theological certainty towards mystery and wonder. Some who write like this are enchanting but end up — if I may gently say — throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. Legitimate concerns devolve into wholesale deconstruction. Some people rave against rules they hardly understand. The pain and passion makes for vibrant writing and I’m glad for voices that help standard church folks see where they’ve hurt others.

Bessenecker is strong on his critique of ordinary religion, and this is nothing new. His book documenting those who stood with the poorest of the poor The New Friars came out 20 year ago out of which came a radical call to rethink missions funding and global equity and more in Overturning Tables: Freeing Missions from the Christian-Industrial Complex. I’ve been told more than once that his 2009 classic, How to Inherit the Earth: Submitting Ourselves to a Servant Savior, is one of the most transforming books they’ve ever read. Bessenecker has earned the right to speak hard words to us and he remains resolutely and gladly an orthodox follower of Jesus. He works for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in their Global Engagement and Justice department.

Bad Religion looks more directly at what the back cover calls “our checkered past.” As Publisher’s Weekly put it, “This accounting of the church’s structural sins if bold, thorough, and evenhanded.”

Scott insists that the best way to cope with the disappointments in our faith communities is not to leave the church. (He has been part of the same congregation for more than 40 years.) He knows that some have experienced terrible trauma at the hands of toxic religion and he convinces readers that discussing this is essential. We care not cover up the churches past and present sins.

Yet, even as he has experienced great disappointments, he knows that God is good. He knows wounds can heal. He knows that we an embody “the prophetic alternative to domination that the church was always meant to be.”

We stock almost all the main books done by Herald Press and are glad for this new one. It is written with compassion and even humility. It is mature but not tame. Scott testifies to the richer spirituality he has found in his journey, and invites readers to join together to make the church better.There are fabulous discussion questions at the end of each chapter, layered for individuals (often rather internal, inviting us to reflect about personal stuff) and for groups. Some are conversational and designed for healthy discussions. Finally, there are “embodiment” sections with suggestions to guide groups to further action.

Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith J D Vance (Harper) $35.00 //OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

I sometimes list books that we don’t whole-hearted recommend. We usually have our reasons, and we usually explain why we think a questionable book might be worth your while. And you know our old joke, that we stock “something to offend everyone.” I don’t want to make light of this — I’ve sweated bullets about it — but I wanted to list this new hot seller, assuring you we can send it if you want. But I feel a bit soiled suggesting it.

I’ll say three quick thing. First, I haven’t read it, but I hope to. I understood, even back then, the criticisms of Hillbilly Elegy — it seems not to be deeply understanding of Appalachian culture and, as a kid raised in the broken homes of the rust belt, the book maybe should have been called something else. Still, I found it compelling and regularly suggested it. (We didn’t think the movie was very good, btw.) If this new book is as interesting as his first, I’ll want to read it.

Secondly, though, I’ve read several good reviews (I rarely read reviews by others until I release my own) from several different theological and political places. Three come to mind, each that said it was shallow about how his Catholic faith shaped his current politics. If this is, as many suspect, a soft sort of launch towards a possible run for President, it is woefully inadequate. It seems he has some big gulf between what he claims to believe about faith and public life and what he actually advocates. That he doesn’t even mention — or so they say — the long-lived Catholic social teaching is illustrative of this blighted faith that fails to fund a faith-based public theology that has anything to do with Christ.

Thirdly, I remain hopeful that the story of a former atheist coming to Christian faith — despite his despicable politics and public behavior — is a good thing. Vance is an obviously very public figure who has written about his conversion. Let’s stop the dumb jokes (I’ve said to myself) about how they have a Protestant church on the cover and set aside a bit of the partisan anger, to give the guy a chance to tell his story. Granted, my fear is that it will reveal that he doesn’t know much about the faith and that what he does claim to know is less than faithful. (Just track down his interview with conservative and Catholic Ross Douthat which I gather left Douthat scratching his head; check this out about 20 minutes in which is Vance sounding good.) Still, one can hardly think of a more public conversion in recent years, so I hope our friends won’t mind me giving this a tentative recommendation, not as a good book by a great man, but as a possibly important book which, if even in tentative ways, points to the saving power of Jesus.

The last two or three BookNotes have described books around themes that are very important to us. They were long (naming a lot of books) and truly important. We got some rewarding feedback and have had some good conversations with customers and friends. Thanks for caring.

In this BookNotes we have a special theme we think you’ll enjoy, one we offer from time to time. We’re listing titles by authors you may not know, or know well, mostly on publishers you haven’t heard of. These books are by friends of ours, produced by indie outfits or perhaps even self published. Each, though, deserves a shout-out they won’t get from the bigs. So here we are, serving self-published indie authors we care about.

And some of these are very good.

We hope you appreciate this seemingly random array of new books, the connecting piece being that the authors are personal friends of ours (or with whom we’ve at least crossed paths with) who we can vouch for. (Believe me, whether they are friends or not, I wouldn’t champion these titles if I didn’t think they were deserving of your attention.) These folks have done good work putting out useful books and even if you haven’t seen them advertised or listed elsewhere, Hearts & Minds is thrilled to tell you about them now. Here’s to the indie DIY spirit, from our small-town, family-owned shop in central Pennsylvania.

ALL ARE 20% OFF.

Among the Lilies: The Song of Songs Ned Bustard (Square Halo Books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

We so enjoy the great privilege of promoting all of the new releases from the Lancaster-based boutique publisher Square Halo Books. They are indie, for sure, but nothing at all like self publishing. Like their comrades-in-arms in their publishing venture of going against the odds, they do classy, creative, outstanding books, published as a labor of love, solo Dei gloria.

That they have a very talented artist as their main manager and designer means SHB releases always look great and most often are illustrated or enhanced with fine art illuminations; they certainly create an excellently made book, small as they are. And so it is with this annotated — it’s not quite a commentary — rendition of the Biblical book often called “The Song of Songs.” It includes woodcuts and lithographs and art pieces by (mostly women) printmakers, Laura Ashley, Ned Bustard, Tanja Butler, Rachel Durfee, Craig Hawkins, Elizabeth Carton and Kathy D Mills, Eric Gill, and others. One of my favorite small pieces is in the solid footnotes section (yep, even that includes an illustration, “Cathedral (After Rodin.)” It’s a great looking book.

You should know that Mr. Bustard has studied this book of the Bible for years. He’s a careful Bible reader and explains a bit about the various approaches to this often erotic text. He’s sharp enough to understand the literature, the symbols, the way (of course) the Christ-centered gospel of redemption shines through; he also knows it is a book about marital sexuality, what he calls “holy erotica.” Some of the black and white lithographs or woodcuts are themselves hinting at a mature sort of erotic art. Kudos to Square Halo Books and their bold willingness to explore what the Holy Scriptures actually portray and teach. And, as they put it, “The book opens with an explanation of the various interpretive approaches that have been applied to the Song of Songs and ends with a chapter addressing some of the challenges to marriage that stifle the pleasures of lovemaking for married couples this side of Eden.”

For what it’s worth, one of Ned’s heros is the late Calvin Seerveld, the Biblical scholar, philosopher, aesthetics teacher, and art collector who wrote (in the 1970s) a play with several voices based on this Biblical book, entitled The Greatest Song. It offers a close reading of “Song of Songs” and includes some excellent stylized woodcuts. One might think that Ned modeled his new Among the Lilies on Seerveld’s treasured Greatest Song but, in fact, he told me, he disagrees with some of Cal’s interpretation. To disagree with the bold and sometimes provocative renderings of the multi-language saint is no sin, so I was eager to dive into Ned’s own notes; knowing that Ned is a bereaved husband who lost his beloved wife, Leslie, gives these reflections a certain poignancy as he listens to the (love) Song. I first thought of this as an art book but it has lots of keen insight into the Hebrew Scriptures with what Curt Thompson calls a “jarringly redemptive” approach.

FREE BOOK OFFER IWHILE SUPPLIES LAST / I’ll tell you what: Seerveld gave us some extra copies of his handsome book The Greatest Song so if you order Bustard’s new Among the Lillies: The Song of Songs Annotated and Illustrated (at our BookNotes 20% off) we will enclose a free Seerveld book. The Greatest Song is a great, creative supplement to the exceptional Square Halo one which you will value as both a Bible reflection and an bone-fide art book. Hooray. While supplies last.

Following Jesus Christ: A Guide to Growing in Authentic Discipleship — Building a Faith and Fruitful Life Thomas A. Tarrants (C.S.Lewis Institute Press) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

We have known Tom for years, not intimately, but enough to know I respect him immensely. We’ve crossed paths repeatedly over the years at events sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Institute (out of Washington DC.) Although rooted in Lewis’s quip about being “mere Christians” the CSLI does studious work to mentor thousands of people through reading groups focused on some of the best of evangelical thought. Less about Lewis, as such, but more about offering a balanced and Biblical worldview that takes up the call to whole-life discipleship, Tom’s work over the years directing CSLI has born fruit.

I have reviewed two books Tom has written over the years — he was understandably very

reluctant to tell his story for decades. He is a converted-to-Christ leader who had previously been incarcerated for charges stemming from his work with the KKK. With shoot-outs with the police and a trial which found him guilty of attempted arson of a Jewish person’s home, Tom was rightly in jail where— in a long story — he was truly transformed by an encounter with the living Lord Jesus Christ. Through yet another miracle his sentence was commuted and he was released where he became friends with the black civil rights activist, John Perkins. They co-wrote a book showing how Christ transformed both of them, entitled He’s My Brother: Former Racial Foes Offer Strategy for Reconciliation; Tom’s fuller story was later told in Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love: How a Violent Klansman Became a Champion of Racial Reconciliation. I was shocked when I first realized the backstory of my gentle friend, a soft-spoken and gentle Christian leader, drawn to serious books and gospel-centered ministry.

I saw all that just to tell you we’ve known Tom and long time and have seen such amazing grace in his life that I’d read anything he wrote. We chatted about this brand new book from time to time over the past years and he poured himself into with care and carefulness. He sincerely wanted to get it right, offering a book that was faithful, helpful, comprehensive, and filling a need for a handbook for basic Christian growth. It is for anyone wanting to know the basics of how transformation happens in Christ (in community) and for anyone who is tasked with mentoring others.

It is so new that I have not studied it carefully, but I can assure you it was done within the context of Tom’s years of mentoring others through the CSLI and with his own collaboration with a handful of experts in these matters of how people change. It is for those who want to experience Jesus’s presence in a more daily way but also for those discipling others.

The first 12 chapters are under the rubric of “Being a Faithful Disciple of Jesus” and the next 8 are guided by the heading “Becoming a Fruitful Disciple of Jesus.” The first section has chapters on the nature of God, why we follow Jesus, what sort of Kingdom vision should inform our prayers and use of the Bible and such. The second part is about the Holy Spirit, , experiencing life in the Spirit and being guided by the Word and Spirit. It’s over 300 pages.

Nearly anyone who has written wisely about all of this has endorsed Following Jesus Christ. His meticulous care is seen in this as he was seeking feedback from those who have done this kind of work well. From Michael Wilkins to Donald Whitney to Greg Ogden to Tom Schwanda to Dennis Hollinger, my, my, so many rave. It is refreshing and faithful and practical and mature.

One woman (known only as Cynthia) used a beta type manuscript for her women’s group and she wrote this:

Following Jesus Christ exposed holes in the fabric of our beliefs, showing where our actions were inconsistent with our theology and challenging us to think harder about the “why” of our spiritual practice. The women in our study group ranged widely in spiritual maturity and educational levels, but the book was accessible and stalemating to all. We read it aloud and the discussion that followed was deep and inspiring.

Unlikely Good: Keys to Tackling Big City Problems Plaguing Your Small Community Aaron J. Anderson (PublishU) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Oh, my, I’ve been eager to tell you about this one for weeks — for those who need it, it is a remarkably wise, interesting, basic sort of guidebook to getting involved in social entrepreneurial work.

Aaron has been a good local pal for years and years; he has pastored an urban PCA church plant, become the head of a very innovative and respected multi-cultural, urban, Christian school (Logos Academy in downtown York, PA) and also is a lead pastor at a very good independent / evangelical church [that follows the preaching schedule of the lectionary, btw] near us in Red Lion, PA.  We’ve watched him emerge as one of the most respected nonprofit leaders in our county and in the city of York. He tells some of the stories — successes and those projects that didn’t fly — in Unlikely Good — which is only half the fun of this inspiring book. The stories are vivid and moving, but the lessons he draws from each story are instructional and full of hard-won wisdom. I’m not kidding: this is a must-have book for anyone in the trenches doing work for the common good, whether you are in a rural area, smaller town, or mid-sized city.

Aaron’s stories (and the texture of this book) are set around York, Pennsylvania, a town notorious for serious racial riots and ongoing disparities. He’s worked helping bring together a Black Ministerium and local police chiefs for hours of tense but (thankfully) ongoing deep and collaborative relationships. He’s done stuff on housing, on job training, on child abuse prevention, educational justice, and more.

Unlikely Good is both a theologically-influenced resource affirming the need for action in society for the common good, but is more a hands-on guide to leadership for nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. Strengthening civil society is vital but Anderson doesn’t just site the big-name sociologist affirming mid-level institutions but gives you tools to take practical steps to create or bolster helpful organizations and communities doing “unlikely good.” He lists books and articles to read, questions to ponder, checklists for planning and growing your efforts, concrete steps to take. From the likes of the famous insights of Leading Change by Harvard Business School guru, John Kotter to Gino Wickman’s plan for systems of traction (in Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business) to Jim Collin’s “hedgehog” notions, Anderson knows his stuff. Besides his MA in Religion from Reformed Theological Seminary, he has a M.Ed from the important Urban Educational Leadership program at Lehigh University. Impressive.

And did I mention he’s a lively speaker, good preacher, and good writer — a great storyteller?

Aaron is quick to admit that most serious social problems are exceedingly complex. Most small towns are large enough to have “big city problems” and, frankly, he seems drawn to these intractable structures of brokenness, eager to make a meaningful difference. This is an actionable guide to doing just that. Highly recommended to Hearts & Minds friends and dreamers wishing to seek the creation of “unlikely good.”

Breathing Christ: Experiencing Jesus in an Exhausting World Marsha Roscoe (Charles Bruce Foundation) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

Beth and I adore Marsha, a local spiritual director and winsome leader of congregational and personal formation for the local ELCA Synod (that’s the central Pennsylvania region of the  mainline Lutherans.) She is beyond lively, a blast to be with, and delightfully dedicated to bringing the light of Christ’s presence to her work in the world of the local mainline denominations. As you’ll see in this book she is (as I said in my own endorsing blurb on the back) Breathing Christ is “charmingly inviting — gentle and honest.” It is a good, simple read, fully of just that — gentle, honest, guidance about embodied spirituality.

I’ll be honest: when I heard Marsha was doing a book I was delighted (hooray for her and for those she serves) but also wondering if, really, we need yet another book on contemplative living, deeper spirituality, and the like. We love her a lot but figured her book would only be useful for those going through her retreats of formation classes.

What a joy to tell you that this is good for anyone — the deeper, seasoned contemplative to the novice in taking up spiritual practices. You will be refreshed and you will be inspired. It is exceptionally clear, practical, and very down to earth and keeps coming back to the glad truth that we are God’s beloved.

In part what I mean by that is hinted at by the title. It is somewhat about breath, after all, and finding rhythms and habits that enable us to make space for God. Although she is informed by the best and deepest mystics and prophets, she speaks of her journey as a suburban housewife, a fairly normal woman, with the ups and downs and struggles and hassles that we all have in daily life. She gives us good guidance not just on our deepest spiritual longings but on important (and often not explained) stuff about nutrition and hydration and sleep. She tells about the Vegas nerve and offers concrete steps to re-habituate you automatic habits of your day. “Small shifts add up,” she notes. She continues:

“Maybe that shift is how you start your morning. Maybe it’s how you end your day. Maybe it’s something as simple as where you set your phone while you eat dinner or what you say to yourself when the to-do list doges unfinished.”

I generally don’t love books with bullet points and steps and lists. For some reason, I was so invited into the refreshing tone of this one that I wanted to keep reading, pondering, re-arranging my own lifestyle to be more aligned with my own desires of knowledge of God and union with Christ. Come Holy Spirit, indeed! Breathing Christ is a quiet little gem of a book!

Gary Neal Hansen (former professor at Dubuque Theological Seminary and author of, among other great resources, the masterful volume on prayer called Kneeling with the Giants) suggests that we:

“Go with Marsha and find yourself taking gentle steps towards a renewed and more focused discipleship.”

Whose Love Knows No End: A Christian’s Life with the Psalms Thomas Sweet (LionScape) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Speaking of well respected Central Pennsylvania authors, I have been eager to talk about this book for a bit, now, too. Thomas Sweet — a retired PCUSA pastor living in Harrisburg — actually came out of our own church (First Presbyterian in York, PA.) That was before our time there (Beth and I started going there shortly after moving to Dallastown to open our bookstore in the early 1980s.) But Tom grew up in our church and has returned to preach a time or two. His wife is an artist, he’s a good, solid preacher, and has a life-time of wisdom as a working pastor. I do not think I’m wrong to connect him in my mind’s eye with our mutual friend, the late Eugene Peterson. Tom is that sort of stable, mature, friendly, and prophetic saint.

And, not unlike Peterson, he has been journalling from his prayerful reading of the Psalter most of his adult life. Not all pastors, let alone all congregants, are rooted in this daily time of reading the poetry of the Psalms, and not are all adept at hearing God speak through these ancient songs. Reverend Sweet gets it. He’s earned the right to be heard.

So, I was delighted when I heard he was self-publishing a book offering his meditative insights on each of the Psalms. He calls it “a contemporary collection of contemplative meditations on the Psalms” altough it is more than mere meditation. He invites us to grappled with the lyrics, the literature and historical and social context, with simple nods to his deep learning about Hebrew culture and the formation of the Scriptural canon. But, yet, he wears his learning lightly, and Whose Love Knows Know End is not primarily an intellectual commentary. These are almost like solid, meaty devotionals, homilies, lived reflections with an eye to faithful application.

Sweet loves the Psalms and knows them well. He suggests that he want to “encourage a wider and deeper engagement with them that leads to a more liberating and love-centered life and living.”

He got this report from another author and pastor, The Reverend Angus Miles Watkins, who wrote:

I am gobsmacked by the thoughtfulness, tenderness, and strength of your journaling on the Psalms. As I read and pray them along with your reflections, they now melt me and touch me pretty deeply. What comes through for me as I read is an essential humility vis-a vis God and an ardent appetite to deepen your life within the Beloved Community. — The Reverend Angus Miles Watkins

 

The First, The Few, and the Only Michael Thornhill (VAWZEN Rising) $36.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.80

This is an amazing book and as Michael has been doing book talks and author events around the country, some have said it was one of the most moving books they’ve ever read. I think, especially, some young, black readers have been grateful for it. He’s shared some of the good reports he has gottenand as a self-published, first time author, I’m sure it is good for him to hear. Bravo, Michael. Right on.

Here are three or four things you should know about this oversized, very creative, and in some ways aggravating book. Besides the typos and run-on sentences (and lack of italics when listing books) and page design issues often endemic to self-done works, there is a really informal vibe to the book. He does lots of storytelling, sharing from his black (Afro-Cuban, actually) youth (in Western Pennsylvania) and as young adult living and working in largely white spaces. He is down-home colloquial at times, inviting us into the details of his life in Western Pennsylvania. This makes for a fun and easy ready, and I smiled hearing him tell of white dudes and caping and hella and missing a dap. It’s just cool reading about a guy’s life.

Some of this, though, includes hard micro aggressions (just downright dumb stuff people do and say) that are the daily lot of most BIPOC folks and some of it is about him coming face to face with gross human hurtfulness and institutionalized racism in school, church, and higher education. He often talks about being beat down and explains his discouragement and weariness. He names names and places giving the memoir a very real feel (although some might think it feels sort of gossipy.) I happen to know some of the people he mentions (some given nicknames from movie characters.) The sad failures in their relationships with Michael (that he sees as painful betrayals) are maybe more complicated than in his telling.

But then I saw his sidebar of this great quote by therapist J. Park:

I don’t need your lectures and lessons. I need you to lean in and listen. My wound is not your thought experiment.

The First, The Few, and the Only is firstly for people of color who are the first to move into a position or place; the few or only who are mostly surrounded by white culture. The cover speaks volumes once you get that that is what the book is about. (Had it been done by a mainstream press, they would have insisted on a subtitle!) As a white guy reading this stunning memoir loaded with analysis (or cultural studies analysis loaded with stories) I want to learn to listen. You too, maybe? These stories are often really sad, exploring hard examples of brokenness in our world — from family hardships to friendship failures to work-place indignities to toxic religion. DEI work being marginalized. The exhaustion experienced by black bodies. Michael explains it all.  If you do not have many black friends who speak honestly to you about their own traumas and multi-layered experiences this will serve you well.

Here’s another thing that makes The First, The Few, and the Only such a good resource, especially for younger readers. It has little full-color pictures, screen shots, historical photos, art pieces, album covers, cartoons and movie scenes on almost every other page. I can’t tell you how unusual these sidebars and illustrations make this book — you will have a blast reading it, believe me. And, further, there are QR codes every now and then that lead to videos and book lists and songs and all kinds of extra stuff packed in. You could spend hours cruising around the internets looking at all the extra visual and auditory content these links provide. Wow. Thank you for pulling all that together, Michael, from pop culture clips to the heavy dramatization of Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim to the Bernie Mac link. And all that stuff about Black Superheros, from Stan Lee to Jack Kirby.

Making the book even more interesting (and useful) are little icons scattered throughout. One is a little blooming green plant and that little leaf, he tells us, is placed in a spot where you may want to catch your breath. Literally, as Resmaa Menakem (author of the important book about racialized trauma My Grandmothers Hands) puts it: “Where’s your breath?” Thanks, Michael, for making the reading of this often breath-taking book, such an embodied experience, inviting us to feel what we feel in our bodies as readers and attend to that. He has another little icon offering “Side Quests” which are said to be further reflections for the curious. As he happily promises, “if a section really lands for you but you want more about the topic…. I got you.”

Further, I suppose you should know that Michael reveals that he has been diagnosed as somewhat neurodivergent, so there’s that. (Which explains, maybe, the wide-ranging free-for-all nature of this sprawling volume.) He offers “Random Links” which he calls “the neurodivergent off ramp” which might help you see how a neurodivergent author’s mind works. He says it is totally optional, of course, “but more fun for sure.” As if you need even more content. Nobody is going to say they didn’t get their money’s worth here.

So. My friends explosive book is jam packed not only with personal stories and black history and his views on white evangelicalism and excursions on all sorts of stuff — blacks in TV, introductions to random characters (his little bit on Thurgood Marshall is lovely to see and I’m glad for his honoring Tommie Smith & John Carlos of the 1968 US Olympic Team.) You’ll learn about 8 archetypes of white leaders in largely white organizations (mostly from recent kid’s films like Toy Story and Frozen and The Incredibles) and you’ll learn about “The White Imagination.” And your learn about that famous jouster against wind-mills, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Michael’s lessons here are poignant, sometimes poetic, and often in-your-face: there is a price to be paid for standing for decency, for justice, for inclusion. And yet, for men and women of color, too often, they don’t honor themselves, playing the role of hero or token and code-switching so much that they lose something of their very souls. It shows up in their very bodies. Michael, in reporting about this so well, is in line of other prophets from James Baldwin to Andre Lourde to, well, Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch of the West who Michael says is “the first, the few, and the only, personified.” Ha! It’s that kind of book and it will make you smile, make you feel, maybe upset you, and will make you want to learn more about our world, your culture, and your own — cue music from Man of La Mancha — impossible dreams.

A Freedom Like No Other: America 250 and the Restoration of the American Republic Os Guinness (Kildare Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Os Guinness has been a forty year friend, a gentleman whose many books have meant very much to me; he is by far the most famous and most prolific of the authors I’ve listed in this BookNotes but this one is, in fact, self-published, so I can name it here. I just talked about this a bit in our recording of the next “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” bi-weekly podcast, that episode dedicated to thinking about the 250th anniversary of our Republic. Look for it next week. For now in this BookNotes — naming recent works that are self-done by friends of the shop — we have to celebrate Os’s most recent work.

He’s been doing a number of important volumes in the last decade about the distinctives of the intentions and ideas of the founding of the United States. (Alongside others, such as the great long-awaited sequel to The Call entitled Carpe Diem Redeemed and two brilliantly nuanced invitations to thoughtful living called The Great Quest and Signals of Transcendence.) As a grateful Brit with a global vision (he was born in China, seeing first hand as a child the awfulness of the Maoist revolution) he is exceptionally positioned not only to comment on the importance of American visions of pluralism and justice and freedom, but of the uniqueness of our Founder’s robust ideas that shaped our grand experiment as a nation.

In books such as Last Call for Liberty (2018), The Magna Carta of Humanity (2021) and Zero Hour America (2022) Os shows with excellent prose the genius of the “magna carta of humanity” which is so clearly rooted in the best of Greco-Roman jurisprudence but, more, importantly, in the Hebrew worldview. In the new A Freedom Like No Other, Os shows, again, his keen devotion to Hebrew philosophy and social theory rooted in the covenantal perspective of the Old Testament. It is no surprise that he had become friends with the late, great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and draws on Sacks’s Biblical and social theology to frame how he appreciates the genius of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ordered liberty that arose from these declarations.

If you have not read his work on America, you could start here, easily. It is serious but less than 200 pages. If you have read his others, you will not be surprised by much here but you will be (again) struck by its passionate and punchy urgency. And while Os tilts conservative on many important, foundational matters (he has been very hard on the militant, post-modern left) some will be glad to hear him criticize President Trump (not least for his large leadership failures in the world.) It is the most blunt he has been, I think.

The plea Os offers in this book is pithy and right: if we want to “make America great again” we have to know and articulate what made her great in the first place. Without sweeping under the rug America’s huge failures (not least the evils of slavery and the brutality of the colonialists treatment of indigenous peoples) there is much that has to be taught and lived to make America great again. It seems as if Guinness fears that the MAGA movement has little energy to devout to the first things of American liberty.

In A Freedom Like No Other, Guinness has 12 chapters, each exploring a unique principle (from what he sometimes calls “the Bible’s covenant politics of freedom and responsibility.” Want to make American great? Sound the shofar and start with notions of authority, dignity, sanctity, liberty, responsibility, morality, reciprocity, harmony, fallibility, accountability, civility, and fidelity. Wow; every chapter is well worth reading.

As his mentors Francis Schaeffer and the sociologist Peter Berger have taught, it seems that as a people we are caught in the tensions of “the extremes of chaos on one side and control on the other.” One side seems to want too much irresponsible freedom and others value freedom not enough. He worries about worldviews and movements that erode ordered liberty —and, added to that, he warns, their are the exceptional dangers of unregulated artificial intelligence. Can we bring reformation to this mess of late modernity, shoring up our polarized culture in “the secular age” with values of truth, character, and, yes, self-government? This book is a serious call — issued passionately in this season of America’s 250 celebrations— for “self-examination, needed correction, and national rededication.”

Christianity and Your Neighbor’s Liberty Scott Miler (Covenant Books) $14.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.96

If Guinness is a major scholar and passionate critic, crying out about our culture’s inability to shore up America’s best ideal, based on her clearest and most vital principles, then Scott Miller’s recent book is perhaps an word of good news. Scott is an ordinary citizen — who has worked in politics, with excellent local Republican representatives in DC and in our state capitol, Harrisburg — who is thoughtful, modest, pleasant. In a way, he says, this is “a book of apologetics as well as a book with a theology of liberty.” That is, it offers a concise and clear-headed guide to doing some of what Guinness so urgently calls unto. Scott walks readers through both the public tradition of social philosophy undergirding the Founding documents, and makes a case that the Biblical influence was significant.

And yet, this doesn’t come across as zealous or dominionist. Miller— who had a personal renewal in his own faith a few years back and made his home in a local Episcopalian congregation — starts with the notion of the Golden Rule and what it means to love one’s neighbor. Isn’t that unique — of the many books and speeches and protests these days of those on the Christian right, most are about our freedom, our liberty. Scott is clear that a Biblical orientation of the sort that shaped the foundational documents of America calls for respect of others.

And he tells a few good stories of local history here in York, the place where the Articles of the Confederation were drafted.

I like how he tells his own story of coming to deeper faith as an adult (in part, Scott reports, by reading books by the New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, specifically The Real Jesus, The Living Jesus, and his book The Creed. If you know that impressive Catholic scholar and those works that translate scholarship about Christ to a living faith in and with Christ, you’ll appreciate Scott’s journey.) In any case, some of this book is about his own believes as they’ve come alive, but also, then, how that relates to his work as a civil servant, one who has worked in politics, and so values religious liberty and freedom for all.

He has come to try to integrate law and religion, the Golden Rule and his study in law school. The book is mostly Biblical reflections, though, and while there are hints of his compassionate views about free markets or what can be legislated (and what ought not be) but, to be honest, this is most a delightful introduction to how this good guy learned about his faith, studied Scripture, developed habits of prayer and how to think about everything from angels to Christ’s Last Supper and more. Always moving towards a reasonable, Biblical-based perspective, Scott has given us a truly lovely set of essays, almost like homilies or wise Sunday school classes. Not too deep, but engaging and useful, Christianity and… is a book we are happy to stock.

The Screen and the Mirror: What Movies Show Us About Ourselves, the World, and God Gina Dalfanzo (Cascade) $23.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.40

Gina has been an author we’ve admired for many years, and she has ordered books from us and even invited me to do a Zoom webinar interviewing her about her Plough book, The Gospel in Dickens. (Maybe you attended that, back in the fall of 2020.) We loved her very nice study Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis, a rare and upbeat work. Through her books and online conversations we’ve come to know that she is a real film buff. What fun! She’s a good pick for this entry in Cascade’s “Pop Culture and the Sacred” series.

The Screen and the Mirror is brand new and we’ve not gotten it into the shop yet, but hope to have it here within a week. The publisher had send me an early e-edition, so I’ve got it! And, man, what a great read. I was hooked with the first honest few pages as she pondered the horrific ending of Chinatown. (And I don’t even know all of the films she discusses. So what? What fun!)

Gina is not the first to do a book like this. (In fact, esteemed film critic Jeffrey Overstreet also just published Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema: A Spiritual Journey published by Broadleaf which could be described as a “film-focused memoir.”) But yet, somehow, Dalfanzo has a touch, an angle of vision, and a tone that is utterly accessible. She’s a very smart woman (again, she’s written about Dickens and Sayers!) but her enjoyment of film is delightful, even when she’s asking pretty significant, worldviewish questions about heavy films. She does a nice job inviting us into films she enjoys as she describes them, sometimes in enchanting detail. But her take on what to take from a film (or any good art) is a bit surprising. And, I think, has some truly striking insights.

One of the important things going on in this study of media, pop culture and the movies is that she gentle criticizes a typical posture that tries to find heros and villains in a film (with us drawn to identify with the hero, of course, even searching for inspiration from the story’s virtuous character.) It’s a bit complicated, but the truth is, that isn’t exactly how storytelling and movies and formation work. And it isn’t the most faithful or fruitful mode for watching.

Here is how the publisher puts it:

Maybe the inspirational model, though it has its good points, isn’t always such a helpful way to view great films and great art in general. Can we learn to watch and think of films in a different way—a humbler way that seeks to learn something about ourselves from the faults and frailties of their characters? This book is an experiment in watching films this way—and a guide to how to take that approach from watching and thinking about films, to how we live our lives.

Speaking of friends of Hearts & Minds, three great pals who write about art and film have exceptionally thoughtful endorsements on the back of Screens and Mirrors — none other than Terry Glaspey, Crystal Downing, and Mary McCambell. If they recommend it, trust me: you should get your popcorn and order this book today.

Encountering the God of Hope: Hope Is Closer Than You Think Connie J. Milchling (PublishU) $15.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

Okay, again, we are absolutely honored to tell you about this simple book by a long time friend of the store, a customer we’ve known for decades. She is a delightful, strong, mature Christian and I would say this tender book is both a memoir about her coping with the death of her husband and an example — I mean this — of how a Christian person can grow in their faith by focusing much on Christ and His Word. Does that sound like a cliche?  Let me explain.

There is afoot a movement (which I understand and in some ways am a part of) that deconstructs cheesy and even harmful theology and cliches about faith, God, theodicy, and more. I adored Kate Bowler’s witty and powerful memoirs about her terminal cancer diagnosis  and think the her title Everything Happens for a Reason And Other Lies I’ve Loved says so much. No, God doesn’t zap people with disease or cause evil in the world. No, we do not have to be glib about pain (our own or others.) Doubt is fine, dissent is healthy, we should have the scruples to think for ourselves and not comfort to a doctrinaire or toxic church. We should move away from that sort of fundamentalist stuff.

But some have, it seems, thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and we have people of faith who hardly turn to their Bibles for insight and comfort. They avoid classic disciplines of faith formation (what we used to call piety) because that is legalistic or what those fundies do.

Connie, I want to say, and her marvelous book, shows us a good way to be an evangelical, a healthy way to hold dear to the notion that God speaks in His Word, that the Holy Spirit can comfort us, that we can memorize Scripture and journal and pray and talk with others about our deepest hurts and longings and what we discern God is saying to us.

Have you ever felt hopeless? Connie sure did when her husband died suddenly (while in Guatemala on a mission trip, helping, as he so often did.) Can you imagine her journey needing to get the body? Can you imagine the shock of such grief? She tells the story without drama — it is a hard story and doesn’t need embellishing — and her pain was eventually (eventually) healed as she found encouragement from Biblical truth. As he leaned on God. As she did what her church helped her do: trust God, find renewal, grow in hope, even as lament colors just about everything.

I love this book and read it in one sitting. It is what her pastor called “profoundly moving work, sacred in the reading.” That’s how I felt, watching her do this hard grief work by being increasingly transformed by Christ through Scripture: it is sacred. I thank her for telling this story of a hope rediscovered and how it is, as another writer put it, “a gift to be received.”

Connie has remarried a guy named Greg and is a still serving as a pastor and teacher at Living Word Community Church in Red Lion, PA.  We are glad for this simple story of her pain, her struggle for real hope, her use of Scripture in her journey, and how God found her, helping her keep hope alive. Along with Biblical teaching and fine storytelling, there are a few poems, as well. It’s a nice book for anyone, but certainly anyone needing an evangelical guide to recovering from tragedy.

The Great Reawakening: Humanity’s Return to Its Spiritual Roots Matthew L. Camlin (Matthew L. Camlin) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

I’m going to switch tones and perspectives, here, just a bit. Matt, too, is a friend, a young, but recently retired PC(USA) pastor in Western Pennsylvania. Some readers of BookNotes will know him from his ministry in New Wilmington where the famous missions conference is held and where Westminster College is located. Other readers surely will know him from playing guitar at our annual retreat for those from small churches, the Wee Kirk Conference. I think the last time I saw Matt was at a retreat I was leading for Presbyterian clergy in his area about reading and the reading life.

I like Matt a lot, in part because of his stellar musical taste (he’s younger than me by decades but we track on a lot) and his literary loves. (nd, he studied with Kenneth Bailey and some other amazing scholars. His MDiv is from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Matt retired recently due to his evolving symptoms from MS. Damn.

Yet, his last years have been give to writing this book; it literally just arrived today so I have not read it in full, but I can tell you from what I know that it is broadly spiritual, generous, perhaps what some might call progressive. It certainly rejects fear-based religion and invites us to the sacred, to connection.

I am sure I’m going to appreciate much of The Great Reawakening in part because it is written both for followers of Jesus (he was a pastor, after all) but also to skeptics and seekers. He is familiar enough with interfaith conversations and world religions to handle those sorts of nuanced matters well. Unlike the above title — straight, lovely, tender evangelical faith at it’s pious best — Matt is edgy, a bit prophetic, and writing with a voice that seems to also tap into global trends and a consciousness that may be emerging in these days of late modernity.

As he puts it on the back The Great Reawakening “is a bold, beautiful invitation to reimagine faith in a time of global unraveling and sacred possibility…. (It) traces a spiritual reawakening already underway across traditions and cultures.” And so,  yes, he is looking also at evolutionary science and indigenous spirituality alongside ancient Christian mysticism.

If you are (or know someone who is) a spiritual refugee or one eager to reimagine our response to life’s most demanding matters, this is both intellectually interesting and, well, soulful.

I like that the very first opening citation comes from the great Kendra Creasy Dean, from her lecture at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary entitled, “Knee-Deep in Flotsam: Reimagining Ministry Now That Everything Has Changed.”  The book looks really interesting, quoting everybody from Stephen Colbert to Robin Kimmerer to papers on religious trauma to Bede Griffiths, Raimon Panikkar, and (of course) Richard Rohr. If only Phyllis Tickle were alive to see this one piece of the “great emergence” she wrote about before her death.

Homegrown Mystics: Restoring Our Nation with the Healing Wisdom America’s Visionaries Bruce Epperly (Anamchara Books) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE =13.59

Bruce Epperly used to live around here and has taught at the UCC seminary in Lancaster. We’ve cross paths a few times here and there and it is remarkable to me how many self published and indie press books he has produced in recent decades. Of his several unique and sometimes eccentric works are remarkably sane resources for mainline pastors (published, for instance, by The Alban Institute, the sadly now out of business church research publisher.) Since he is known by us and many of our local friend (especially UCC pastors) and works now mostly with very indie presses, I wanted to celebrate this 2024 volume. It’s fascinating and really entertaining, too. I learned a lot and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Homegrown Mystics is pretty much what it promises: every chapter tells of a different mystic, spiritual leader, religious poet or prophet, and then offer take-away insights (not simplistic) and prayer ideas. In this sense it is almost like a meaty devotional, with inspiring stories and deep calls for spiritual engagement. The closing prayers at the end of each chapter are often profound. These reflective chapters are informative and evocative, helpfully explaining (almost the way Richard Foster does in, say, Streams of Living Waters) the context, spiritual themes, and ministry of the person under consideration.

Not all of the visionaries he writes about are in the Christian tradition, but many are. You have fabulous chapters on these leaders of uniquely American awakenings and the “homegrown mystics” he invites us to learn from are folks like Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, Emily Dickinson (her chapter is called “Spirituality without Certainty”) and Ann Lee (one of the founders of the Shakers) and the mystic Quaker John Woolman. Naturally, you’ll get Black Elk and John Muir. Moving towards more modern folks he has fabulous chapters on Howard Thurman and Abraham Joshua Heschel. I loved the chapters on Madeleine L’Engle, Mary Oliver, and Maya Angelou.

These wonderful chapter-long reflections are framed by a very good introduction about the spirit of America and our prophets and poets. Are we really a nation of mystics? I wouldn’t have considered that before discovering this little book. It is closed by a really important (if short) chapter called “Mysticism and the Healing of the Nation’s Spirit” about “awakening to our better angels.” Yes, he quotes Lincoln, beautifully so. I would have wished for a citation of Parker Palmer, here, a vital resource for those of us wanting to think in deeply spiritual ways about our public lives and civic engagement, but still. A truly lovely, provocative book.

Wow! The book is amazing! I am an American, and I love my country, but I must admit I’ve been increasingly heartbroken about the state of my country over recent years. Bruce Epperly’s new book brought my American heart more healing than anything else has . . . ever. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is a gift to the soul of our nation and the soul of each citizen. Enthusiastically recommended! — Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith After Doubt and Life After Doom

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BookNotes

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.

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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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