I am going to start this BookNotes without much preamble, other than to say these are a handful of very good books — two a bit deeper than the others — that will help you understand your faith a bit better. We don’t all need Charles Taylor to help remind us (although I recommend Jamie Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor for the best intro to that heady philosopher) that Christian faith just feels less compelling and in some cases may be distasteful to many here in the mid 2020s. For bunches of reasons — from the crosswinds of deep secularization documented so tediously by Taylor to the serious harm done by church corruption in covering up sexual abuse (in Catholic and conservative evangelical traditions, especially) and the obvious way God-talking MAGA ideologues have turned people away from Jesus in the religiously weird Trump years — here in North America, at least, many churches are in decline. To live out our discipleship well, we have to know something about the waters we’re swimming in.

There are tons of great books that make a case for the Christian faith. We have thousands! Some are whimsical and chatty, others offer no-nonsense Bible teaching. Some are wild and creative, some are nearly mystical. Some are newly in print and others are centuries old.

This week’s BookNotes offers ten books that are thoughtful and vibrant, solid studies offering robust faith in our secular age. I put these books together on this list in part because they almost all have a sense of cultural awareness and a couple or seriously laden with allusions from pop culture, film, and gave a very contemporary tone. I love books that are theologically rich and culturally savvy, books that weave together citations from old theologians and rock music, whose authors know how to connect with us by bringing in an illustration from Netflix or the Grammys. Preachers, take note: most of these authors are great communicators and bring us all upbeat, readable, relevant books full of vital insights about faith and discipleship in these times. Hooray.

Be sure to click through to read about each one. At the end there are links to order or to inquire if you have more questions about them. And a reminder that we are still closed for in-store shopping, but eager to visit with folks in the back yard.  ALL ARE 20% OFF.

The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn Out World David Zahl (Brazos) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I almost wanted to make this whole post be about this one book as I so thoroughly enjoyed it, for several important reasons. I hope you know Zahl — he’s the founder of the cool Mockingbird Ministries (including their podcast and blog, etc.) and author of the spectacular Low Anthropology and, before that, Secularity. You can tell from those titles that he’s a bit brainy. He loves writing about cultural trends, puts his finger on the pulse of much of what has been going down for the last decades and for that matter, centuries. He’s gets the big trends in the West and he follows pop culture and baseball and rock music enough to follow much the hottest bit of the current zeitgeist. Although those two previous books had lots of cultural criticism — citing everybody from Jaques Ellul to Francis Spufford to Hartmut Rosa to many social psychology researchers — they were also thrillingly Biblical and hugely beneficial for thoughtful Christian readers. This new one is no different, even if it seems even more lively, more readable, more tender

The Big Relief draws its name and pretty much it’s main thesis from this description of sensation we all long for — in the very moving introduction he notes terms like venting, refueling, caring out space, going off-grid, zoning out — we all do it in different way and what we’re looking for is relief. We could be seeking relief from the pressures of the “drumbeat of demand” of daily life or the “burden of a mortgage payment or the grip of a chronic illness.” Many of us want out of all the socio-political turmoil these days and some of us just carry an existential burden “like the pressure to justify our lives and demonstrate that we’re worthy of the air we breathe.” Who of us haven’t heard power sermons to remind us that we need not attend to that inner voice saying we’re not good enough. Zahl knows how to help us understand the pressure we feel to belong, to keep up to say the right thing. There’s a lot of pressure and he names it brilliantly. With great stories, quips, wit, and stories from his rock music loves as a child of the 1990s. Dig that!

This book, if you’ve not figured it out, is about God’s grace. He explains what grace is — existentially, as we experience it, and theologically (even playfully digging into Lutheran notions of imputation and such. I love that he cites Anne Lamott and Alister McGrath’s Iustitia Dei (almost back to back) and even though I’m not a grunge guy, he knows his Nirvana and Alice in Chains which is pretty darn great to learn in a book citing the likes of Melanchthon and Robert Farrar Capon.

This is, hands down, the best book on grace since the beloved two by Philip Yancey — What’s So Amazing About Grace and Vanishing Grace. We have a whole section here in the bookstore about grace and this will be there with the best of them.

He knows how to tell a story, too, weaving together confessions from his own life, tender scenes from the NBC series Parenthood or a classic shaming scene in Better Call Saul when the older brother won’t respect Jimmy as a colleague in his legal practice. This makes this theologically-informed invitation to experience relief “in a world that demands performance and perfection” both very, very helpful (who isn’t a times a weary soul who doesn’t needed reminded of the great truths of the gospel) and a real blast to read.

I love that there is an endorsing blurb on the back by the excellent, excellent writer — who is incredibly funny, too — Harrison Scott Key, author of Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, The World’s Largest Man, and the more recent, award-winning How To Stay Married.

Key writes:

The Big Relief reminds us that grace is a party, a piñata exploding with God’s best candy, a free and never-ending gift. This book just might help you fall back in love with the weirdest, wildest theological concept in all creation.

Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness Andrew Root (Baker Academic) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

On the heel of the lovely and thoughtful The Big Relief there is this one — an author Zahl cites in his other books, whose work is somewhat on the same path. Root is committed to a different level of scholarship, here, and his book is longer and much heftier than Zahls, and less immediately reader-friendly, as they say, but a valuable companion volume. While this recent one doesn’t seem to be branded as part of the heady previous series — the last was The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms which is exceptionally important and not unrelated to this new one — Evangelism In An Age of Despair has that same approach, blending philosophical study, deep cultural assessments, and refreshing new ideas about how the church can be uniquely faithful despite these cultural temptations to align the gospel message with the methods of the current age.

I’m not wrong in intuiting that these two books go together, as I’ve noticed that Zahl, in fact, has a blurb on the back of Evangelism in an Age of Despair. He writes:

An astounding contribution. I greatly needed this book (and the consolation to which it points). So too, I’d expect, does the world–to say nothing of the church. Highly, highly recommended.”

This book, written with the detail and scholarship Root has become known for, starts with a lengthy story of a woman who is invited to church by a work colleague. It is intentionally detailed and her story comes up later in the book. The question, as it is framed from the start, is how joyous and how difficult and freighted this whole business of sharing God’s good news with others can be.

In an early chapter full of scholarly footnotes and intriguing social science data Root makes the case that while mainline denominational churches are, understandable, not comfortable with the pushy and often theologically shallow (if not arrogant) fundamentalist evangelism styles, they can’t give up the notion of what might be called “soft” evangelism. That is, even in this late-modern era, Root tries to contextualize and reimagine evangelism and outreach, given the consumeristic ways of our capitalist culture (and how some evangelism practices actually play into that non-christian way of life.) You can see the way he complicates, if not problematizes, the nature of our witness.

And yet, he asserts that the church is called not only to a life together in Christ — the crucified God, we must recall — but to live into the process of building signposts for the announcement of that good news. Can we recover notions of evangelism that are inherently consistent with the Biblical worldview and that share a message that is coherent and sensible to moderns?

Here’s part of what he gets at, a pretty new notion for those who read even the best book on sharing the gospel well: he believes that consolidation, walking with others in their suffering, sharing the news of a God who dies, living with pain and sorrow, is the key to late-modern evangelism.

I do not think that Root cites it at all but some of the best stuff I’ve read along these lines was in a seminal book, for me, especially the large second half of the brilliant Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age by Brian Walsh & Richard Middleton (IVP; $27.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39.) Written in the mid-1990s when many evangelicals were decrying postmodern philosophers, they were quick to affirm the cirque of postmodernity to the idols of the modern world, and ask how the church might join that conversation with Biblical fidelity. There is nothing like it, and their key, they suggest, is telling the story of the Scriptures in such a way as to show that the key character is the God who suffers. This is the key for Root, as well, and Evangelism in an Age of Despair could have easily found conversation partners in that remarkable work.

As Root explores “the architecture of our sad times” and wonders how the gospel might relate to that, he offers heady, but important insight. This is one of the most intellectually rich volumes I’ve picked up in months. As Mihee Kim-Kort (famous for Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith) puts it, “As always, Root’s work is rich and generative. I’m eager to ponder this more.” You should be, too. This is an important, demanding book and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse Miroslav Volf (Brazos Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I have celebrated Volf before in our BookNotes columns and it has been a delight to serve him by selling his books at events and conferences; he’s a good and gracious scholar and we admire him a lot. His most recent co-authored volume of theology is 2022’s The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything Brazos; $32.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $26.39) which carried a foreword by N.T. Wright and picks up on important themes about home-making and home-coming, addressing this “aching sense that there is nowhere we truly belong” these days, but that God’s creation is, in fact, the home for humans with their God.

Volf’s Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School has been the setting for some very practical guides to living faith in our complicated world. (A certain Dallastown bookseller even has a blurb on the inside of A Public Faith) and his co-authored most recent volume is A Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (Open Fields; $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40.) Anyway, Volf is an important theological voice, writing both exquisite heavy texts and more practical, down-to-Earth stuff as well.

This new one is a bit meatier than the average self-help sort of book (but not super scholarly.) There are many good paperbacks out nowadays about ambition and the dangers of greed, even as we wonder about our own deepest dreams and hopes. The Cost of Ambition, Volf tells us, had its genesis in thinking he did while preparing for a keynote talk at a conference in Grand Rapids about faith and sport. What is competition, after all, and in the context of play and sports, even, how do we align our athletics with the blunt New Testament mandate to put others before ourselves? In what ways do the virtue of humility play into our lives beyond sports? Is it helpful to compare ourselves to others (let alone to be better than then?) What if it is true that this is all quite toxic, that our drive for superiority “undermines the very things we value most”?

A serious study of this topic necessarily leads to huge philosophical and theological and spiritual questions. And so, in The Cost of Ambition, Volf invites (so to speak) three conversation partners to the table of his in-depth reflection. To get at this question  (what does it mean to show honor to others, to live in graceful ways in the world?) Volf looks at the teachings of three vital thinkers: Soren Kierkegaard, John Milton, and the Apostle Paul. And, yes, he has a chapter on Jesus, as well called, “From Jesus to Genesis.”

There is a hefty conclusion that may be worth the price of the book: he offers twenty-four thesis under the heading “Against Striving for Superiority.” Wow. Just wow.

“Scholarly but readable, and combining moral clarity with compassion, this book is essential on a defining temptation of our times.” — Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times

Platforms to Pillars: Trading the Burden of Performance for the Freedom of God’s Presence Mark Sayers (Moody Press) $15.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

Wow, this is my kind of book — easy to read, upbeat and inspiring, clear and yet informed by the very best contemporary cultural criticism and deep social thinking. I’ve admire eery one of Sayers growing list of good books from his study of French deconstruction and considering as he playful explored Paris Hilton The Trouble with Paris) on through is critique of Jack Kerouac to his recent short book on leadership, A Non-Anxious Presence. An Aussie, for a while he did a great podcast with John Mark Comer (“This Cultural Moment”) and I’m told he now hosts a lively one called the Rebuilders podcast. He’s sharp and has a unique ability to quickly sum up the basic themes of many social theorists and cultural critics. Let’s just say his good books are not as thick as, say, Andrew Root’s, even if they are nearly birds of a feather.

Sayer here looks at what he calls the “platform” society which emphasizes individualism and performance “It’s rooted in the belief that self and personal desires are preeminent.” As it says on the back, Sayers explores how platform mentality is misshaping our contemporary world and contrasts this to the biblical call of Christians to live as pillars.

He looks at the values and ethos of the Silicon Valley and I wasn’t surprised to see him cite Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine, for instance.) I was glad to see him exploring the rise of capitalism and the myth of progress. He  looks at the ancient world quite a bit and weaves it together with some take-away bullet points and lots of keen and useful advice for contemporary Christian leaders. He invites us to steward well our influences as we point to the new creation. Platforms to Pillars is a gem of a little book.

Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity Maria Bowler (Baker Books) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Oh my, this artsy, even flamboyant, manifesto is to be read, the author tells us, as if we have received it like a message in a bottle. Dip in at will, reading it back to front — she doesn’t care. “Who am I to instruct you?” she muses, saying that this is not a guidebook or user’s manual. There will be no formulas. I’m hooked, digging this bohemian anti-guidebook.

And yet, there are some remarkable points here, stuff that can indeed serve as sort of a guide, if not formulaic. She says when she studied with Benedictine nuns much of their time was spent unlearning. So that’s the major middle chunk of this collection of relatively short pieces. Dip in there, at least and unlearn (or start to) one of the most harmful myths foisted on us all: you are what you do. You are worth what you make. That is, this Making Time book is in the same constellation as others in this week’s BookNotes theme as it is (finally) a book about grace, about gracefulness found amidst a culture with a harder, merit-based ethic. A book about discovering abundance in a world of scarcity, as they say.

The first third of the book explores “how productivity has shaped the way we see everything, for the worse.”  I think the last book I grappled with on this topic was the lovely IVP title, The Radical Pursuit of Rest by John Kessler which carried the radical subtitle: Escaping the Productivity Trap. That good book worried about our cultural weariness and posited a theory of rest which we can only embrace if we resist the “productivity trap” and resist thinking we must be productive. Maria Bowler’s book takes that a step further and deeper — with a lot of zeal and zest and pathos. She tells about her own struggle to keep up and the subsequent depression she faced keeping it all together.

In the center “Undoing” portion, the sub-title asks, “If I am not what I do, how will I know what to do?” This is remarkable stuff, naming and showing how we might undo everything for our inner knowledge (indeed, our very view of our very selves) to undoing fixing and pressure and false guilt. She has an excellent and important chapter undoing “sentimentality” which shows how deep all this goes. There is a chapter called Perhaps and another on Numbness.

The third big part asks “How to bring your inner world to the outer world” and those entries are under the rubric of “Making” This is abundant and delightful and invites us to explore “our burning spark” and “making with the fear of failure” in view. Can we begin?

I am not so sure this book is only for artists, creatives, makers. It does seem that is her particular setting and her allusive spirituality is certainly lovely for artists of all sorts. But much of this — alongside some pretty astute cultural analysis and the citations from the usual suspects (Max Weber, Frederick Taylor, Hannah Arendt) — is going to be nicely useful for anyone coping with regret and stress and pressure they are “crafting a life.” In the end, she yields to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Walt Whitman and Simon Weil. It has been a while since I was reminded of the contemplative classic, Primary Speech, by Ann and Barry Ulanov, and they are here, too. What a remarkable little book this is.

Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness Bobby Jamieson (Waterbrook) $17.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

I wasn’t aware of this widely-respected Baptist pastor who was originally from San Francisco where he had a career as a jazz saxophonist. After changing his career he got a PhD from Cambridge, where he taught Greek and New Testament. Anyway, he’s now a pastor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and I think this is his first book. And it is extraordinary.

Again — like the other books on this list — Jamieson is putting the Biblical texting into (as he promises) “dialogue with profoundly insightful critics of modernity to show that life in the modern West is a conveyor belt toward burnout.” (Like the other authors on this list, he, too, cites Hartmut Rosa and also the likes of Wendell Berry and Norma Wirzba.) He shows how the ancient Wisdom text can “help us dismantle our false hopes one by one, learning ground for true satisfaction.

It is well written and in many ways a delightful read. But it is substantive, philosophically informed, but not dry or overly academic. This is what a basic Christian living book can be, inviting us to develop and nurture a more eternal horizon for our lives.’’

Books about happiness are everywhere, and, these days, they are often informed by a new-age kind of positivity or a strict sort of Stoicism. This invites us to ponder the deeper questions in light of the God of the Bible as revealed in Qohelet’s poetry.

Jamieson has the book arranged in three “floors” as he calls the units. The Ground Floor is entitled “Absurd” and carries the epigram “A Memory of the World Unbroken.” The second part is the Middle Floor” which is called  “Gift” and it says, “The Present, at Last.”  The Top Floor is named “Beyond” and the subtitled phrase is, “Through the Darkest of Crisis.”   

This question of whether we should be happy looms throughout the book. He insists it is a driving force of most humans, including the writer of Ecclesiastes and that he learns that even “everything” is “not enough.”  The book, though, seems irreligious at times, and this sparks great curiosity for serious readers.

This isn’t a standard academic commentary although Jamieson has done his homework, citing Kruger (from the Hermeneia Critical Commentary series) to Leo Perdue to Michael V. Fox, and the must-read, remarkably insightful Craig Bartholomew.) Sadly, he missed the 2023 book from Dordt College Press, God Picks Up the Pieces: Ecclesiastes as a Chorus of Voices by Calvin Seerveld. It’s very creatively done, arranged a script of oral choral presentation. In any case, Everything is Never Enough is not a complicated read and it is not dour. “Resilient Happiness”? I could use me some of that! You too?

Do you feel thwarted and cramped by the ambient lameness of the modern world and suspect the problem goes deep? Fresh, direct, and enlivening… Jamieson helps us to see the gifts that God is “constantly flinging’ at us.”  — Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head

Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age edited by Brett McCracken & Ivan Mesa (Crossway) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

One of the things I like about the evangelical movement called The Gospel Coalition is that they bring the rigors of historic evangelical faith to bear on the contemporary culture; I disagree with some of their vibe and some of their positions, but I like their savvy cultural engagement when it comes to film and literature, tech and digital culture, and a balanced sort of political theology for Christ-centered public witness. In any case, some of the TGC books are really worth reading, even if you find yourself in more mainline denominational circles or subscribe to a more progressive theological vision.

This one, for instance: I’ve been wishing, literally, for something like this for quite some time. I cite Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (and a few others of his) all the time; I can hardly do a Zoom workshop or conference breakout sentence or church sermon on reading and my vocation as a bookseller, without alluding to or actually reading out loud the preface of that grand book. You know the part where Postman compares and contrasts big brother taking away our books in 1984 and the other dystopian novel, Brave New World where Huxley suggests that it isn’t what we fear that will undo us, but what we (wrongly) love. In that novel, they don’t have to take our books because nobody wants them anyway: they are too busy feeling good to want to read deeply.

Postman is brilliant in his great historical assessment; he compares the deep theology and serious preaching of the Great Awakening with late 20th century televangelists and he explores the depth of political philosophy cited in the popular Lincoln-Douglas debates, contrasting that with sound bites and modern election ads.

His famous bit about how hard it is to pay attention and care deeply about the world when we have TV ads about hemorrhoids right next to news about massive death tolls in global floods or famines, is more urgent now than ever.

I don’t think he is fully right and I once chatted with him about his implicit assumption of a dualism between pop culture and so-called high culture, and that maybe it is understandable that some artists felt he was throwing them under the rolling bus.

In any case, I say all this, reminding you of the importance of Amusing Ourselves to Death (and many like it, fromThe Shallows by Nicholas Carr to the thick but important The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt) since this brand new book, co-published by TGC, brings together a handful of serious thinkers, scholars, culturally-aware pastors, and theologians to sort of update the Postman thesis and to riff on his work as it may related to 21st century digital culture. Yep, if you like Postman you’ve got to read this!

Of the many books inviting us to reconsider our relationship with screens (think of the immensely rewarding and lovely read, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World by Andy Crouch or the punchy, thoughtful, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel James or the heavy but important Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age by sociologist Felicia Wu Song, just to name three) this new one — Scrolling Ourselves to Death really should be on your list. This matter of the digital landscape that almost all of us live in simply has to be evaluated and considered. Nobody (well, hardly anybody) wants to turn back the clock and, in any case, this is the world of digital devices we’ve got. What does it mean to be “in but not of” the culture? This book can help.

This collection of pieces assumes that “the onslaught” of social media and the ubiquity of screens are reshaping our world and “warping our minds.” Our smartphones have “brought an appetite for distraction” and the mental health challenges that have followed. How can these very modern struggles be an opportunity for the church? What does a gospel-centered approach to all of this look like? From sharp thinkers like Read Mercer Schuchardt to lovely writers like Jen Pollock Michel to the fabulous Jay Y. Kim (you have to read his Listen, Listen, Speak) this vital paperback brings good writing and conventional Christian wisdom to this very, very contemporary setting of media addictions and eroding virtues. The setting and grouping of the profound but readable chapters is well-arranged and the helpful pieces move from analysis to help, from understanding the times to pointing us towards life-giving reformation of our faith formation practices. Agree or not with the arguments and tone of every piece, Scrolling Ourselves to Death helps us “reclaim life.” It affirms embodiment and the delights of human flourishing and it is never far from the central teaching of God’s goodness and the beauty and relief of grace and graciousness.

The Journey of God: Christianity in Six Movements J.D. Lyonhart (IVP) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

This is one heckuva book, a fun, fun, read, filled with jokes and wit and asides and nerdy, smarty-pants asides. I love it (and am still working through it, I’ll admit.) This witty philosopher and evangelical pastor is just the guy for a book like this, and it is a deeper, more polished book than his first. That one has the great title of Monothreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub. Absurdly Arrogant as it playfully is, we have it. It covers a lot of ground.

This new one shows him as a very thoughtful and widely read scholar. (I mean, the dude has a PhD from Cambridge) and remains a fellow at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism. Take that if you don’t believe me he’s super smart! And he knows a bit about, well, everything from science to stand-up comedy.

I loved how the introduction of this book tells of his own wandering years, the big questions he asked (or didn’t) in his drifting teen years. He loves movies and rock songs — I’m guessing prog-rock, but I could be wrong — and tells at the outset (you’ve got to read it as I can’t paraphrase well enough) about getting into certain films. The first lines of the book tell us,

I remember the first time I saw the Lord of the Rings as a kid. I apparently sleepwalked into my parent’s room later that night, where I stood over their bed calmly informing them I was an elf and that doom was upon us all.

After a few other such episodes of, shall we say, over-identifying with characters in movies or shows Ghouls II and The Matrix (been there), for instance, he admits that he was not raised in a religious family “which might explain why I was always reaching for something in its place.” His telling of coming to faith but still not having an adequate story to live into, he says — brilliantly in my view — “God was getting out-told by beat poets, songwriters, comics, playwright, philosophers, scientists, and Quentin Tarantino.”

He continues,

“I’d just never heard the Christian story told well enough. In fact, I hadn’t really heard it told at all — Christianity only ever seemed to sputter out in fragmented pieces, cherry-picked to preach such and such a point, tied together more by appeals to faith than by any narrative logic, beauty, or moral power.”

He is not alone, I am sure.

Whether young folks are raised in mainline denominational circles or within hip evangelicalism, whether they are Catholic or Mennonite (although they might have more narrative mph and moral power than some), I’ll bet you ten bucks that they are experiencing the gospel in this sort of fragmented way, devoid of much obvious beauty or goodness.

J.D. says he wanted to call this Biblical overview, full of big tales told provocatively, A Sexy, Dramatic, Philosophical Introduction to Christianity but his publisher talked him out of it. They reminded him that philosophy was not sexy enough to sell books and that Christians would not buy a book with sexy in the title anyway. So, we get The Journey of God instead but he explains nicely how he’s come to warm to this title, and why the notion of a journey is essential to his narrative approach. And it still is, as he puts it, “less Sunday school, more Pulp Fiction.” I’m not sure it’s that wild and woolly, but ya gotta love a guy that writes a line like that. And, man, I like this guy a lot.

There are oodles of remarkable endnotes — as you might guess from a guy who named his twin boys Soren and Augustine — and he is widely read in science and cosmology, Biblical studies, ancient myths and up-to-date popular culture. The endnotes cites amazing stuff (which is why it takes me a while to wade through all 250 pages since that is part of the learning experience) but what clinches it for me — besides the witty prose and well told creation-fall-redemption sort of narrative arch of Holy Scripture — are the snide little footnotes, snarky asides and corn-ball plays on words and true confessions. There aren’t too many, but I’m glad for that playfulness that makes his philosophizing a blast. Who quotes Heidegger (noting that was a Nazi) and Ridley Scott and Francis Spufford and Dr. Seuss? Who is this guy?

The book invites people to hear the full, epic story of the Bible in these six movements — creation, fall, nation, redemption, church and end. As he says in the forward and the great concluding piece, again, he’s writing this for those who had no idea the Bible was a wild, messy, mostly coherent plot and that the Christian faith was intellectually credible and open to doubt and questions and rabbit hole debates. He’s that guy who stayed up half the night in the dorm, no doubt, asking yet another weird question about quantum physics or linguistics theories or conspiracy stories about some rock star. With or without illegal substances, this guy was funny then, I’m sure, and a gem-stone storyteller now. Thanks be to God.

Sure, he likes to invite us to say but on the other hand and he pushes readers to consider the legitimacy of the complicated questions their mostly secular or pagan neighbors are asking. (He was raised in Vancouver, which says a lot, I think.) But despite his eagerness for intellectual honesty and his delight in poking sacred cows, his answers are surprisingly, at the end of the day, robustly orthodox. He’s the evangelist and preacher man your ever-questioning skeptical college kid needs to meet.

One of the very nice features of The Journey of God is the book’s design. Kudos to IVP for having a black page in front every new chapter of the movement with that new chapter title added in white ink on that facing page. Section by section those marked-off black pages become filled with the plot line, adding the sections and subsections of the key movements in the unfolding Biblical story.

With an open mind — almost too gracious to readers to make up their own minds (“maybe not” he’ll concede) — he invites readers to embrace the coherence of this big sacred plot. He notes what happens when any part of this story is missed or misconstrued (which is a splendid benefit of this book.) And he reminds us, in the moving closing pages, that the story, finally, is about the main character, the One who not only pointed to truth, but said, “I am the truth.” And he nicely notes that this does not mean that all the other stories, myths, movies, and arguments that are not Christ-centered are necessarily fully wrong. They can point the way, so with a big vision of what some of us call common grace, he allows that the stories so many of us love, are pieces of the puzzle that find their best culmination in Jesus.

Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age Rod Dreher (Zondervan) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

I won’t belavor this one as I gave it quite a bit push when it first came out a few months ago. I met Dreher once and had a blast staying up late laughing and telling stories. I came to disapprove of his increasingly hostile posture about the culture and his one-sided critique of the dangers of the secularized left. But I still read him, recalled how deeply moved I was by his two major memoirs (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life and How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.) This new one is fabulous, a fun and provocative read and seems to me to not have that hand-wringing right-wing grievance thing going on. For those who might be reluctant to read him, I very highly recommend this. It was spectacular.

It fits nicely into the theme, such as it is, in this BookNotes. It is about standard Christian living, written by a convert to Greek/Russian Orthodoxy. Yet it is less about the glories of the Orthodox traditions and more about how our culture has gutted out meaning when we lost a sense of transcendence and what we might do to recovery a sense of the numinous. Where do we go to find mystery “in a secular age.” (Yeah, there’s Charles Taylor again.)

This does a good, breezy job diagnosing just a bit the malaise of our secularized era. But it also carries a nearly palpable sense that we long for something more, for awe and wonder, for mystery and deep joy, for meaning that is rooted in something big, deep, spiritual.

In Living in Wonder Dreher takes us on an energetic journey among those search for that more than meets the eye. That just over the horizon sense of meaning, rooted in some transcendent mystery. Although the quest is not unrelated, this is more than about listening to some old Van Morrison albums or digging into romantic poets (although that might not hurt. Ditto with Van the Man!)

This is a journey among seekers who have claimed they’ve sensed the ineffable. It includes folks who swear they’ve encountered UFOs. From Catholics with weeping icons to Pentecostals seeking wild healings, they are, unknowingly, joining a rag-tag movement of those wanting to re-enchant our disenchanted age. With Rod’s great storytelling and fine, fine writing, this holds up a deeply Christian worldview that does not discount the supernatural. He gets there by telling us about some pretty weird stuff, but that’s half the fun (although there is a chapter warning about “the dark enchantment of the occult.”) As novelist Andrew Klavan writes, “it’s thrilling to read an honest and courageous writer like Rod Dreher on the great subject of the age.” Check it out and tell me what you think.

Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel Matt Smethurst (Crossway) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

Not everyone cares for Keller’s conservative, evangelical atonement theology (finding him a bit too conventional) and not everyone cares for his culturally-savvy, philosophical tendencies (thinking he’s a bit too highbrow.) Still others, oddly, find his commitment to a cautious sort of moderate commitment to social justice to be too woke for their tastes.

For me, I think he gets it all just about right, even though I might take exception with certain things across the board. I am not PCA and I don’t buy some of his formulations.

Still, I have read almost all of his books, had wonderful conversations with him (or a few rare occasions) and had the privilege of selling books at his congregation as they would bring in speakers — from NT Wright to Bryan Stevens to Jamie Smith to Miroslov Volf. He was a great example of a thoughtful, gentle, compelling evangelical and I think more should know about his vision of social engagement rooted in a no-nonsense commitment to the first things of the gospel.

Before he died, my friend Ned Bustard of Square Halo Books, pulled together a host of friends who wrote essays about him, a tribute volume called The City for God: Essays Honoring the Work of Timothy Keller (Square Halo Books; $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99.) Tim had a chapter in the first big Square Halo release, It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, so it was fitting that the good folks at this classy, little Lancaster-based indie publisher did this excellent festschrift. It should be better known than it is.

I also have reviewed and extolled the first major work about Keller, published after his death just a few years ago. Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen (Zondervan; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59) has been the standard intellectual biography of this important contemporary pastor and public thinker. It was authorized by the family and covers the important theological influences that shaped his unique life and ministry.

This new book, or so I have heard, has captured the heart of Tim’s wife and others who knew him best. The Square Halo Book notwithstanding, this is an extraordinary, tender, gospel-focused exploration of what most drove Tim Keller. Smethurst gets at something very close to the heart of things as the subtitle itself illustrates — it is about “the transforming power of the gospel.” This is bedrock stuff, that the very power of grace can transform us, from the inside out, so to speak, and transformed people can transform the world.

Robust and passionate endorsements have rolled in, some usual suspects when you think of those who write beautifully about this Reformed theology that centers the transforming (“sanctifying”) power of the cross of Christ and pushes it out towards the renewal of every one of life and future. We have rave reviews from Paul David Tripp and Joni Eareckson Tada, from Sinclair Ferguson (of RTS) to Sam Ferguson (Rector of Falls Church, Anglican.) But perhaps it is the blurb from Mrs. Kathy Keller herself that is most compelling where she says it is “the most thorough examination of the biblical themes that animated all of Tim’s ministry.” She writes:

Matt Smethurst has researched an impressive amount of content for this book: sermons, books, papers, courses, articles, and unpublished conversations. He found resources even I wasn’t familiar with, and he has produced a work of scholarship that will long stand as the most thorough examination of the biblical themes that animated all of Tim’s ministry.” — Kathy Keller

By the way, if anybody is wondering, the theme of this particular BookNotes seems to be books about Christian living and contemporary faithfulness that are aware of social trends and cultural concerns and that are in conversation with some of our best social critics. While Tim Keller on the Christian Life is primarily an exploration of his most basic theological points, it is always, always, explored in the context of 21st century cosmopolitan ministry. And there are two exceptional chapters, one called “When Faith Goes to Work: Serving God and Others in Your Job” and another called “Do Justice, Love Mercy: Embodying the Compassion of the King.” In many ways, this sets Keller off from even his most astute fellow pastors these days and Smethurts is good to show these aspects of his multifaceted vision of ministry.

And, of course, there is a whole chapter on grace — Tim often said how he was indebted to a mentor, Edmund Clowney, and a sermon he preached on the parable of the Prodigal Son, which shaped significantly an milestone sermon Tim preaching in New York shortly after 9-11. As he once put it, “Apart from Jesus Christ, flagrant lawbreaking and fastidious rule keeping are dead ends.” Smethurts cites Keller says, “Jesus’s purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.”

It almost sounds like something David Zahl would say, which brings us back to the need we all have for a great relief.

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Thank you, friends and customers (and customers becoming friends) for reading BookNotes and for your support of our bookstore. Whether your local or among our pod of customers in Alaska, we are grateful for you.

This first little batch of books that I mention are all 20% off.But the main attraction for the next few days will be this massive sale on Brian McLaren books. A whopping 40% off. 

Like many of you these days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what sustains hope. And of course that means looking at the most intransigent problems of our time, the matter of what drives our anxieties. Yes, its the maddening Trumpian nonsense each day — despicable and worthy of our civic resistance — but more, the malaise, the spirit of the times, the idols and ideologies, our withered imaginations and the inadequate worldviews which lead to all sorts of crises (from tragically-increasing suicide rates to terrifying climate change concerns, from hard family problems and so many global wars.) In a word, doom.

An array of books have shaped some of my thinking these days or at least have keep me somewhat sane. In case you’re wondering, there are the brilliant agrarian principles of hope found in Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis by Norman Wirzba (Yale University Press; $26.00) and, in considerable contrast, the audaciously optimistic new book by Ezra Klein, Abundance (Avid Reader Press; $30.00) which I’ve only just started. I was deeply moved and wonderfully charmed by the honest memoir by the wonderful New York Times journalist Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found (Avid Reader Press; $19.99) which he wrote after losing sight in one eye (and fearing he would go completely blind.) Its vulnerable storytelling about his own life and his upbeat conversations with others who have overcome (or at least coped well with) incredible difficulties, setbacks, and struggles, was downright inspiring.

I’ve revisited a book I raved about a year ago, Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing Our Sadness, Grief, Trauma, and Pain by my friend Jeffrey Monroe (Reformed Journal Books; $21.99) and is so, so worth reading, with hard stories told and gracefully evaluated and explored for deeper glimpses of hope. And I just finished a book that has been on my stack for years, Demon Camp: The Strange and Terrible Saga of a Soldier’s Return from War by Jen Percy (Simon & Schuster; $17.00) which is one of the weirder (and captivating) books I’ve read in years. (It is a creatively told bit of modern reportage about a haunted soldier back from Iraq and Afghanistan who helps facilitate wild exorcisms among deeply scared and often suicidal war vets. One reviewer called it “visceral and seductive” — that’s putting it mildly. It’s creepy. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Forever War, Dexter Wilkins, says it is “a tale so extraordinary that at time it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds it’s not just Caleb Daniels that comes into focus, but America, too.” Although the author has studied books like Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, she doesn’t cite the latest books (we have several) about faith-based efforts to psychologically help those with what some describe as moral injury, from having seen and done terrible things in battle. Percy seems to suggest that our culture is in very deep trouble, and unhinged (as the characters in this story truly are; none seem Biblically-rooted) Pentecostals and their spiritual conspiracy-theory mindset isn’t helping. Gasp!

Speaking of weighty assessment of our cultural moment, I previously reviewed and admired the gracious and empathetic travelogue by former conservative evangelical turned progressive Lutheran pastor, Angela Denker (Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves) and her kindness remains in the even more haunting (new) report from the hinterlands, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood (Broadleaf Books; $27.99.) It deserves a bigger, more careful review but know that it is candid and direct — “unflinching” one reviewer called it. Historian and Christian critic of the religious right, Randall Balmer, notes that “readers should not be fooled by Angela Denker’s storytelling ease and graceful prose into thinking this is simply another anodyne book about child-rearing. Her arguments about the sources and the persistence of racism, misogyny, and what she calls “brutish masculinity” are powerful and, sadly, all too relevant.” She makes a powerful case against the toxic aspects of this fundamentalist sub-culture of religious extremism and authoritarianism. There is a radicalization happening around us and she exposes much of it as it influences many young white men, in some exceptionally conservative faith communities. Jemar Tisby calls it “essential” and Kristen Du Mez, of course, has been touting it.

And yet another wise author with an extraordinary book that seems so very appropriate to mention in this short list: Steve Charleston, an Episcopalian Bishop and Native elder and author who offers Christian perspective on native spiritual and advocates for justice for indigenous peoples, has most recently written We Survived the End of the World: Lessons From Native American on Apocalypse and Hope (Broadleaf; $26.99.) What a book!

Some who are aware of the threatening cultural trends and pressures these days talk about apocalypse. The end of an era, if not an end of the civilization as we know it. Hence, new phrases in our vocabulary like “climate grief.” Hence, the aforementioned dread and doom. Charleston — in a graceful and brilliant move — says if we want insight about coping with such impending tragedy, we might learn from the indigenous people groups who, in fact, faced forced removal and cultural genocide; a very certain sort of end of their world. In what some have called “poignant and deeply moving” prose,  Reverend Charleston explains how Native America has already survived apocalypse — and has lessons of courage and hope to share. In a style that is profound, poetic, and yet urgently serious, he “insightfully weaves history and activism” and helps us imagine what the end of a world might be like, and what it means to live through it. It is a book that I suspect you will never forget.

So, yes, I’ve been pondering some ugly stuff, sad about how things are eroding the faith of people I know, and yet always looking at voices of deep hope and wise goodness. Reading is a necessary solace and adds grit to the texture of our discipleship. From books like Fire From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire by Sarah Jaffe (Bold Type Books; $32.50) to The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr (Convergent; $27.00) to the latest collection of Walter Brueggemann essays, Lament That Generates Covenant (Cascade; $23.00) there are eloquent and interesting voices to walk alongside us in these dark days… I’m not sure where you might hear about these sorts of books, but we are glad to get to share these that I’ve been pondering of late.

We commend these that I’ve mentioned above, — we’ll happily deduct 20% off any of those listed prices — but the heart of this BookNotes is to remind you of a particularly helpful author and friend. We have some of Brian McLaren’s books on sale, for five days only, at the extra discount of 40% off. Consider this a reader’s guide to most of his core work. After Saturday they will revert to our customary BookNotes 20% off.

10 Brian McLaren books, each 40% OFF — this 5-day sale expires May 10th.

(While supplies last.)

Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart Brian D. McLaren (St. Martin’s Press) $28.00 // OUR 40% OFF SALE = $16.80

Speaking of impending doom and coping well as people of faith with realism and hope, turning our understandable anxieties into what one might call sacred activism, the newest book by Brian McLaren is just that. I described it at BookNotes in some detail when it first came out but have, now, reason to unload some extras at this extra deep discount.

We were with McLaren a few weeks back at an event and it was really good to connect with him again. We’ve served him in some other book events, and, during the quarantine season of Covid we helped launch a book by having autographed plates. To say Brian has been kind and appreciative of us is nearly an understatement. And, despite some controversy among some traditionalist evangelicals concerned about his shift to a more mainline denominational / ecumenical orientation — what he early one called a “generous orthodoxy” —we have found him to be thoughtful and gracious and a very impressive writer. We would recommend any of his books. And this one is a powerhouse.

Naturally, there are few bits I might have worded a bit differently. No matter, there is no other book like this, none. This is an extraordinary project and we sincerely recommend it.

I’ll describe a few more that we have here, now, at an extra great sale price, but this one is his newest and just a fabulous study of how to understand our times and determine ways to live with resilience and hope. As podcaster and author Tripp Fuller  puts it, Life After Doom is “more than just a book! It’s a movement, a manifesto, and, most important, a road map to a brighter tomorrow.”

Not unlike the book I promoted last week — Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha by Gail Heffner & Dave Warners — Brian has been significantly influenced by friendships with indigenous leaders and authors He happily cites Kaitlin Curtice, Randy Woodley, Steve Charleston (who I mentioned above.) This is wise and good, this interaction with Native worldviews and faith practices that might influence those of us in the more dominant culture to find fresh ways to live out our faith with greater faithfulness and integrity.

Listen to these two friends, authors I so appreciate, as they say why you should buy this book now.

With his usual patience and clarity, Brian McLaren invites us to do necessary spiritual work… And we discover, after doom, the magnificent and beautiful task set before us. This book has convinced me that indeed, we must do this inner work now. ― Debra Rienstra, author of Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth

When I finished Life After Doom, I was overcome by a single unexpected response: gratitude. In these pages, Brian is pastor, teacher, therapist and prophet as he guides us through the multiple crises of our current situation. He challenges both debilitating despair and false hope to awaken our capacity to dream and act courageously for the future. You will thank him. ― Diana Butler Bass, author of Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith Brian D. McLaren (HarperOne) $16.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $10.19

Frederich Buechner reminded us that doubts are “the ants in the pants of faith” and while this book isn’t exactly about doubt, it is about new ways of framing old, often complicated doctrines, and fresh ways of asserting the gospel in ways that might be plausible and helpful to those who can no longer abide certain older orthodoxies.  Years ago we were disinvited to a thoughtful Christian event because they heard that we stocked — and would bring to their event — some of this book. I say, what is there to be afraid of? Read widely, take up a mature approach, think it through yourself and, with an open mind and an eager heart, enjoy the provocation of a master thinker .

Years ago (it came out in 2010) Brian invited us to reconfigure faith to be more Christ-like and responsible, offering new ways to read the Bible, to understand the violence in the tradition, to understand the essence of the gospel (in light of Jesus’s own declarations about the Kingdom of God) and other sorts of festering questions that have perplexed many. From the context of ecumenical and mainline believers, this book isn’t that radical and his answers — while fresh and interesting — were actually not that controversial. From the point of view of the conservative evangelical community in which he pastors and wrote for so many years, it was nearly traitorous.

Just the other day, listening to some solid and godly (Reformed) faith leaders, I heard their dismay about how many churches are failing to step up to this cultural moment, in fidelity to the prophetic tradition and the ways of Jesus, and one said we need “a new kind of Christian witness.” I don’t think she was alluding to this much-discussed book, but — agree or not with all of his conclusions — it certainly would be a good book to talk through for those yearning for a better face to lively, robust, Christian faith these days.

A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian  Brian D. McLaren (Zondervan) $14.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $8.99

Do you remember this book and the huffy ridicule it received in some circles? Well, the most mean rebukes were from the fundamentalists and super strict Calvinists because they felt — and I think they were mostly right — that the chapter on them was the least successful (they would say unfair) chapter in the book. In most of the chapters, Brian — not being of that faith tradition (he was not a mainline Protestant, a Catholic, an Anabaptist or Anglican, after all) — was able to say what he liked about that tradition, what its strengths are, why it has good gifts to offer as a part of a balanced and creative theological identity. (This is not that far from what the great Richard Foster did in his lovely and solid Streams of Living Water.) Alas, because he came out of a harsh fundamentalism and didn’t have much good to say about that conservative sort of dogmatic Calvinism, he conflated those two and was more critical of them than he was the others. It wasn’t the best chapter in the book.

In any event this is his fabulously entertaining, visionary, broad-minded and (mostly) generous invitation to develop a hybrid sort of faith that draws on the best of every tradition. Or, at least, to know a bit about them.

Not a bad idea, eh? Read it and think what you may, and ponder how you might be shaped by the best of these various sorts of Christian traditions. Consider what he gets right and what he gets wrong — in any case, it’s a blast, and a good, good exercise.

I could be picky about every chapter since I have feelings about, well, about every single group he honors and critiques. And yet I love A Generous Orthodoxy. That last chapter says he is “depressed yet hopeful.” Me too, many days. You should buy it now while supplies last.

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words Brian D. McLaren (HarperOne) $17.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $10.79

I don’t know if authors even realize these sorts of things — they have bigger issues to concern themselves with — but I’m sort of proud to have an endorsement on the back of this one. What an honor it is to be asked by a publisher to say a few words about a book or to have a commented cited. I really liked this — I wasn’t sure I would, and the title strikes some as unhelpful — so I was jazzed to see my blurb on the back of the paperback.  Here is what I said (or at least part of the part they posted on the book back cover, between the starred review at the Library Journal and the nice quip by Father Richard Rohr.

“I was absolutely hooked from the first page… I found it to be one of the most stimulating books on spiritual formation I have read in ages.”

Yep, it was true. I recall telling everybody about it, trying to convince folks it was a great read. Shane Claiborne says this “strips things down to the bare essentials… to unveil a simple love for God and neighbor that is worth devoting your life to.” Well, it isn’t that simple, as he explores all manner of quandaries about the spiritual life. Yet, these “12 essential words” are truly a brilliant framework to hang a lot on. I loved this book and I think you might too. Please give it a try.

By the way, the 12 words are arranged in four main parts or themes: Simplicity (“The Season of Spiritual Awakening” in which he has two chapters each on three words), Complexity (“The Season of Spiritual Strengthening” which has two chapters each on three more words), Perplexity (which he calls a “Season of Spiritual Surviving” following that same pattern, two chapters each on three words.) The fourth part also has six chapters, but two do not have titles or ‘words’ which is actually pretty awesome. I loved his reflection on what he called […]. This chapter is called “Harmony: The Season of Spiritual Deepening.”  So, two chapters each on 12 words, even if the last word isn’t a word but being “clothed in silence”

The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey Brian D. McLaren (Fortress) $16.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $10.19

This was the first volume in what was, I supposed, to be a series called “On Location” which invited authors to reflect on their own spiritual journey while doing a travelogue type memoir. Those that have followed Brian’s work know that in his second splendid novel — The Story We Find Ourselves in: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian — the main character (struggling with questions of faith and science, truth and evidence, story and the Bible and evolution) goes to the Galapagos Islands. It made me happy that Brian actually got to go there.

It also makes me happy that this little book is dedicated to his father, who “loved the outdoors and was always ready for an adventure.” McLaren was a college English professor before being a pastor, but his reading the Good Book was also (in faithful, classic ways) supplemented (or preceded?) By his reading the Book of Nature. In this spiritual travelogue he helps us see how it’s done, attending to place and landscape, animals and creatures, history and science and the joy of discovery. It ought to be better known — even the great Barbara Brown Taylor says it may be his most significant.

Of course Galapagos was the birthplace, so to speak, of Darwin’s theories about evolution. Brian isn’t afraid of that but he does move beyond a recounting of natural theology and uses his proximity to this famous place to ponder his own evolution. Has your faith changed over the years? Does “the beauty and fragility” of your landscape hint and anything? Does God’s creation awaken your soul? You might like this nice little book.  The footnotes are pretty great, too.  Who else brings together Leonard Boff and John Muir, Pope Francis and Howard Thurman, Gilligan’s Island and Charles Darwin?

Adventures in Missing the Point Brian D. McLaren & Tony Campolo (Zondervan) $26.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $16.19

Half Brian and half Tony — what a great idea for lively book!

I suppose you know (and I have written on occasion) that we were more than casual friends with Tony. We sold books with and for him several times, had him here to York to speak, and visited with him in Philly. I adored his Kingdom vision, appreciated how a just-advocate could do old-school baptist altar calls, and despite his hilarity, knew he was much smarter than his critics realized. And more sensitive. He was a bold, brave, and tender man, with a heart for God and a love for God’s world. Not unlike Brian.

In the early 2000s many in the evangelical world were talking about what some called the Emergent movement and there must have been twenty books (which we still have, believe it or not) from this emerging community (and a few that were critical — we have those too.) Tony and Brian were both speakers and pastoral leaders to these rising young bucks who were “brave enough to take an honest look at the issues facing the culture-controlled church.”

It may be an overstatement or a distinction without too much of a difference, but Brian was more deeply involved in mentoring and writing about the postmodern emergent crew. Campolo was too busy raising money for third world kids and speaking at major evangelical gigs — Jubilee, Creation, international organizations. But both had legitimate concerns about the ways in which church life (both mainline denominational churches and evangelical and non-denominational ones) were co-opted by the culture and didn’t have the energy or savvy to create passionate and effective missional vision.

But the two of them together and you’ll get quite a picture of how theology and church and spirituality was being considered by many at the turn of the third millennium. They tried to “uncover and name faulty conclusions, suppositions and assumptions.” They addressed some deep stuff and some hot button issues. They both are, in different ways and about somewhat different matters, both skeptical and sympathetic.

They invite all sorts – liberals and conservatives, old-fashioned church folks and edgy young street workers, evangelists and reformers, Catholics and Protestants, Pentecostals and Presbyterians, to stretch our thinking and discover fresh ways to live out faith in healthy and fruitful ways.

I loved this book. Glancing through the table of contents I realize it is needed now more than it was then. Both are good storytellers and good thinkers. It isn’t exactly a point-counterpoint, but in each section, one of them starts off and then the other sort of responds. Sometimes they agree deeply and other times, well… you can read it for yourself. It’s a blast.

The back and forth conversation is arranged in several chapters in three major arenas — God, World, and Soul.  You read their evaluations and proposals on everything from the nature of the Kiddo of God to how to think about the end times, from evangelism to prayer to worship, from the future of seminary education to the importance of women’s roles in leadership. There are discussion questions, too inviting readers to join the conversation.

We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation Brian D. McLaren (Jericho Books) $19.00 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.40

To say that this is a daily devotional sort of sells it short, I think, although it is almost exactly that. In typical McLaren style, he reimagines a bit about how a book following such a regular reading format could really be formative, could actually help.

I don’t know a thing about any of this but I can imagine a book editor or publishing PR person somewhere saying — hey, Brian, why not do a little daily reader, a devotional, a greatest-hits of your many books, arranged for those who only want to dip in a bit each day. And the wheels start spinning and he reads a bit about how learning happens and what really transforms people and what the world needs right now of religious folk. His pitching it as a “quest” is itself sort of cool, eh? That classic title, drawn from a famous book about a third world social experiment years ago  — “we build the road while walking” — says much.

And here’s the point: true spiritual formation leads to what he calls reorientation and activation. It’s not exactly a simple formula of steps one, two, and three — we pray, are changed, and live it out in application — since all of this folds back on itself and we cycle through being and doing, learning and living, living and praying.

But still, given his penchant for experimental education and true transformational faith formation and social movement to better the world, this really is a lively, well thought-out weekly devotional. Can we walk the path — the Jesus Path — together? There are fifty two (plus a few) readings which “offer everything you need to explore what a difference an honest, living, growing faith can make in our world today. It is organized, more or less, around the flow of the church calendar 9so much so that Phyllis Tickle said it was “as startling as it is beautiful.”)

There are excellent reflection questions under the heading of “engage” and there are things for those with children to do as well. Hooray. Get this — you’ll find it useful, I’m sure, and may return to it often…

Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road: Christian Identity in a multi-faith World Brian D. McLaren (Jericho Books) $16.00 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $9.60

I have to admit this is the only Brian McLaren book that I have not read.  It’s not that I’ve not wanted to — I love the title — but just haven’t gotten to it. I’m generally interested in inter-faith conversations and I have a handful that I routinely recommend. This may be his most thorough book, actually. (Well, the new Doom one is very well-researched and deserves significant acclaim.) Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed, could be misunderstood so I’ll take a stab at a quick word about it.

Some are simply so woodenly Christ-centric that they dismiss any effort to find common ground or mutual admiration. This is not a healthy perspective, and we can surely hold to classic Christian doctrine (full of love and loyalty to Jesus) and still be generous to others, even with a capacious orientation to faith; I even know some conservative Reformed scholars who hint at this, not least Richard Mouw in his most recent, succinct work, Divine Generosity: The Scope of Salvation in Reformed Theology.  Anyway, I suspect that those that presume McLaren is on dangerous ground in this question are partially right but mostly are not. Give him a try and see. We can honor our most solid, Biblical convictions and still ask this question.

Others might think that this is sort of a joke, and are so assured of their generous open-mindedness that they hardly need to ask. I would think that those with such universalist tendencies would do well to allow Brian to tutor them into how to proceed. Even if one deeply wants to honor others and their own faith, it is wise to consider how that might work. Just a quick glance through this lively work assures me that this isn’t a cheesy “let’s all just get along” sort of idealism or a simplistic kind of “tolerance.”

So, he does seem to be moving into a profound sort of conversation, a struggle to know how to be at once deeply Christian and utterly gracious, to be true to our own Biblical identity and yet open-hearted and generous. Why did those guys cross the road, anyway? Surely to engage in one of the most important conversations anywhere, anytime. In a world where religious fanatics of all sorts have missiles aimed at each other, maybe this really is a very important book.  Join him, he suggests, and it will be humbling and holy in a sacred space as we seek an authentic encounter and possible missional collaboration. Wow.

Faith After Doubt: Why Your Belief Stopped Working and What to Do About It  Brian D. McLaren (St. Martin’s Essentials) $17.99  // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $10.79

I need not say much about this as it is one of his more recent, and I reviewed it at great length when it first came out in hardcover and then again when it released in this handsome paperback. I will say this: unlike many books about facing doubt — the best are generous and empathic and do not shame those with doubts — are written from a place of solid faith, inviting doubters or those with anguish about the loss of conventional faith to think it through figure it out, a come back to faith. It is reasonable and good and true, and you really don’t want to drift away.

McLaren, I gather, believes this: he remains an outspoken Christian and I am sure he longs for renewal within the church and among those who have left traditional faith communities. But he’s so incredibly honest and so in touch with those whose faith really is nearly gone, that he writes in a way that is less insistent, more open to wherever their conscious leads. He guides people through the steps to consider and reconfigure faith. He uses the same four overarching themes that he used in Naked Faith [see above] — Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony. Questions and doubts are part of this journey, “a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith.”

It is reassuring and healthy, less apologetics and more spiritual direction. There is no other book quite like it.

Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, The Disappointed, and the Disillusioned Brian D. McLaren  (St Martin’s Essentials) $19.00 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.40

If Brian’s Faith After Doubt is a gentle voice offering a friend to walk along the road towards legitimate questions and healthy doubts — that portal into better questions and halters faith, as he puts it — for those who have doubt, this is for those who for more principled reasons really wonder if they can possibility stay Christian at all. For those who are not just doubting but deconstructing, for those who have moved from doubt to disappointment and disillusionment.

One gentle reader I met thought he was just too candid and insistent in the first half about all the problems with the church and bad faith. It is an argument for why it may be reasonable (perhaps even necessary) to leave the Christian faith behind. I resonated with her painful critique but I reminded this lovely church lady that the book was not for her. It was for those — perhaps her grandchildren! — who know well that the church is screwed up and that many formulations of faith have been harmful, even toxic. They need a Christian leader to own up to it, to admit that it isn’t a bad thing to be so revolted with bad faith as to want to leave Christianity altogether. He is building a bridge and honestly reaching those who may have never imagined a Christian writer devoting 10 chapters (almost 100 pages) offering reasons why the faith may deserve a big, old, “No.”

The next 100 pages offer, in counterpoint, 10 reasons why Christianity is worthy and why it should be seriously considered, the “Yes” part of the book. He is not coy or insincere. He’s doing his best to offer 10 reasons to say no and 10 reasons to say yes to faith.  The third portion, 8 chapters, are under the heading of “How.” These are practical guidelines for those making this big choice, inviting them to wise, human, decent, habits of the heart. Maybe you’d advise other things, but this is a whole lot to chew on, good for somewhat you love, I am sure.

+++

TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN TO CLICK ON THE “ORDER” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you want us to ship your orders. We’re eager to serve you in a way that you prefer. Let us know your hopes. We’re not automated, so let’s talk!

Of course the weight and destination of your particular package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

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

• United States Postal Service has an option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.83; 2 lbs would be $5.58. This is the cheapest method available and sometimes is quicker than UPS, but not always.
• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

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BOOKS FOR COLLEGE GRADS

I cannot believe that it is that time of year. Spring (slowly) is emerging here in the South-Central part of Pennsylvania. While most high-school grads won’t be honored until next month, colleges and universities and trade schools everywhere are releasing their graduates into the world very soon.

We’ve got young friends working hard to finish up papers and are cramming for finals this very week. Just yesterday I spoke with a staff person at a Christian Study Center at a major university who opens their doors nearly around the clock as a place for students to visit — for study or prayer. Some of our friends at the CCO (the campus ministry in Pittsburgh that hosts our beloved Jubilee conference and whom we serve as official bookseller) are doing extraordinary things to support their student leaders in this stressful, exciting time. It’s an exciting couple of weeks.

I suppose you won’t mind me reminding you of the need for church folks — congregations, pastors, former youth leaders, mentors, friends, parents, aunts and uncles — to honor those who have gone off to college. We want those students to know God’s presence in this pivotal time in their lives. We want them to know their church cares. We want to encourage them with insight and wisdom. Better than a sentimental plaque or Christian tchotchke, a gift of a well-chosen book helps young academics continue to think and ponder about the deepest things in life and sends a message that resources are available for them as they take the next steps of their life’s journey.

We enjoy replying to emails or questions at our inquiry page at the website when people tell us something about a person to whom they want to send a book. Maybe we can suggest something that would be appreciated by a science major, a future teacher, a fine arts graduate, a young adult heading into engineering or the marketplace. (Or, if you’d rather, a rising Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, evangelical, Mennonite or what have you… ) No matter who your young friends are or what identity they have or what their future plans might be, we think we can help you help them.

I’m going to list just a few books that we think are splendid to honor this time of transition; bread for their journey. I won’t review them thoroughly although each deserves more. We just want to put these before you now to see what your church or family might consider to give as gifts for college grads. Let’s do this.

TEN SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR NEW COLLEGE GRADUATES — ON SALE

After College: Navigating Transitions, Relationship and Faith EXPANDED EDITION Erica Young Reitz (IVP) $18.00 //  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

There is a new revised and expanded edition of this classic that we have celebrated for years now. There is nothing like it in print. You can read an earlier review here but I really invite you to listen to Erica as she was a recent special guest on our bo-weekly THREE BOOKS FROM HEARTS AND MINDS PODCAST (watch on Youtube, listen on Apple podcasts, or listen on Spotify). Erica is so articulate and charming and sharp and inspiring, you simply won’t want to miss this great half-hour conversation I had with her.

Here’s the thing: the anxiety of the transition out of college has only heightened in recent years and the unique situation of Gen Z (who did some of their high school during Covid) required new research and a new edition of this book about the transitions out of college. Nobody in North America has focused as much gracious time and energy with college seniors talking about their next steps and following through as Christian students leave their college fellowship groups and idealistic discipleship programs and move to new towns or cities to take up new jobs, nurture new friendships, find a church, and, often, pay off serious amounts of financial debt. Erica has heard it all, and studied the topic, has helped many.

Trust me — there is no better book to put into the hands of a typical college grad who may really, really need some assistance in this transitional time which is harder than many realize.

I invite you to read carefully these robust endorsements by people I trust. They have put into good words why this book is so fun and wise and good.  These are worth considering.

After College is like a conversation with a wiser, older friend ― someone who knows more and therefore loves more. Drawing on years of working with university students, Erica Reitz opens her heart to the next generation of those who will soon be entering into the marketplaces of the world. She offers uncanny wisdom about what the next years could and should mean for people who long to last ― people who hope that their undergraduate commitments and loves will deepen over the years, rather than be discarded because the realpolitik of life was more than was expected. I hope this book finds its way into the lives of many young men and women who are on their way into the rest of life.  — Steven Garber, The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation Culture, author of Visions of Vocation and A Seamless Life

For nearly forty years I have watched first hand as Christian students graduate from college with high hopes, only to have those hopes dashed by the challenge of translating their education into the categories of the real world. Furthermore, most of them assume that they are alone among their peers in having this painful experience. Naming this fairly typical post-college passage is the first step in helping graduates address this transition with courage and hope. In After College, Erica Reitz has done a masterful job in calling attention to the comprehensive and complex nature of this challenge. She has brought to the task a balance of sound theology, thoughtful reflection and practical advice. I will certainly be recommending this book. — Shirley A. Mullen, former President, Houghton College, Claiming the Courageous Middle

After College offers profound insights about grappling with post-collegiate life in today’s swiftly changing world. Beautifully written by Erica Young Reitz, it seamlessly interweaves real-life stories from recent college graduates with astute quotations from famous writers, biblical paradigms with sociological studies, and practical how-to advice with inspirational hopefulness. At once both personal and professional, Reitz shares the triumphs and trials of her own experience in order to help readers discern God’s calling in both church and society.  — Crystal L. Downing, author of Changing Signs of Truth and The Wages of Cinema

Big changes and transitions often force people to ask big questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? After College provides a helpful guide to wrestle with those questions in a way that is inspiring and hopeful. Erica is a keen listener: she listens well to God, recent research and student stories to offer a roadmap for success in today’s world.  — Derek Melleby, OneLife Institute, author, Make College Count

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

We also talk a bit about this one in the above-mentioned “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast, and while it is my baby, and I’ve written about it a lot, I still want to remind you of it here, now.

Several years back I was invited to do a commencement address at Geneva College, a Western Pennsylvania college — and I was awarded an honorary doctorate (a huge deal that I still can hardly believe.) I preached my heart out inviting these students to make a difference in their careers and callings, to live out the integrated Christian worldview they were exposed to at Geneva. Some folks wanted copies. I found some other similar graduation speeches that implore students to think Christianly, to serve their communities, to be salt and light in the world into which they are heading. It was a blast sorting through and editing some of the most inspiring talks I had heard and we put this book together designed for college graduates who want to be inspired to serve God as they transition into the post-college world.

We’ve got in here fabulous short addresses and we made reflection questions for readers to ponder. You’ll read words of inspiring guidance by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Amy Sherman, John Perkins, and more. Besides by own chapter, wrote a lengthy forward that some have said is very helpful — less breathy and idealistic than most of the big-picture commencement address, encouraging readers to live local, find some friends, dig in, even if the time after college isn’t as big and glitzy as one might wish. Lots of folks move home after college as they seek a job or whatever might come next, and that’s okay.

Also, the above-mentioned expert in the hardships and joys of the post-college years, Erica Young Reitz, wrote a lovely little afterword. She was working on After College and we invited her to sort of summarize her research and thinking to bring these dramatic talks to a practical close. I think it makes for a great little read.

I can autograph these, too, if that makes it special…just let us know.

Dream Big: Know What You Want, Why You Want It, and What You’re Going to Do about It Bob Goff (Thomas Nelson) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I’ve suggested this before as a great, upbeat college grad gift (although, to be honest, it is whimsical and captivating enough to be a good high school grad gift, too.) You know Bob Goff (author of Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World and Everybody Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People) which are hard-to-put-down paperbacks about making a difference in the lives of others by, well, serving, loving, sharing, being there in creative and fun ways. I hope you know them.

Dream Big has the same incredible stories of his nearly unbelievable capers, the same outrageously gracious tone, the cheery encouragement but its focus is very much about helping readers identify their biggest dreams, helping them figure out what they want to do with their lives, and how to take steps to make that happen.

It is, without a doubt, the most fun self-help book you’ll ever read, and it is fabulous for anyone with any sort of anxiety about whether they really can pursue their dreams.

Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy Bob Goff (Thomas Nelson; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59)

By the way, the follow up title to the great Dream Big, is an equally fun read, sort of exploring how we can be more joyful when we focus on what we’re really after. Undistracted shows us — readers of any stage and age, but certainly recent grads transitioning into a world of possibility and change — just what we can do to identify the things that keep us from moving forward, “capturing our purpose” as he puts it. Some may need help overcoming those emotional and practical obstacles that distract us from being who we want to be and doing what we feel passionate about. Undistracted can help — and it’s a fabulous read. What good guidance in this age of distraction.

I’m not sure how generous you’re feeling for your loved one, but if your a Bob Goff fan and know they’d love this sort of thing, you could give them both — they are a nice pairing. And we could do a bit better of a discount that way, too! Just ask.

Catching Whimsy: 365 Days of Possibility Bob Goff (Thomas Nelson) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

As you can see, I adore the hilarious, inspiring, love-fueled, faith-based, Jesus-following, positive thinking of Bob Goff. He has started schools in war-torn zones of the third world, has fought as a lawyer for imprisoned child soldiers in Africa, and has done stuff many would only shudder to even think about. And he does it with verve and joy. And without being a braggart, he loves telling the stories. And people love reading them.

This is a lovely, fabulously-enriching, upbeat daily devotional, each with a story from Goff’s life (or, sometimes, just wise counsel with a practical application) always connected to the Biblical text he reflects on. This would make a great gift for almost anybody — especially maybe those who aren’t used to reading religious devotions or don’t want their readings to be too heavy. We very highly recommend it.

44 Poems on Being With Each Other Pádraig Ó Tuama (W.W. Norton) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

I hope you know the lively, gracious, remarkable Irish poet. peace activist, and spiritual writer Pádraig Ó Tuama. His public radio show Poetry Unbound (part of Krista Tippett’s On Being suite of podcasts) is very popular and those who care about the spoken word these days should know him. (We featured his fascinating Eerdmans book of poetic prayers in the form of collects, Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love and we have his new collection Kitchen Hymns.)

This 2024 hardback is a fabulously rich and thoughtful and lovely exploration of 44 poems about relationships and “being with” and for each other. His curation of these contemporary poems is interesting and would itself be a good gift, the poems themselves, but his reflections on the poems — what some might call an “immersive” experience — is the real gold. This is a handsomely designed and inspiration volume, a nice companion to the previous Poetry Unbound collection from 2022, 50 Poems to Open Your World. Again, the poems are offered and he discusses them, inviting us to an inspiring close reading and visionary application.

The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship & Work Steven Garber (IVP) $20.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79

I will admit that I am biased, here, since Steve is a long-time friend, a dear friend, and I admire him very, very much. But this little book is such a wonder that I tell folks about it any time I can. If you’ve not picked it up from us, I do suggest it for almost anyone.

Garber is philosophically-minded, yet down to Earth. He tells here, in many short chapters, of his growing up out West — his grandfather worked in the cattle industry and his father, a researcher in botany, worked with farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. His interest — nurtured by these hard-working men of integrity that shaped his earliest dreams and faith —is what it means to live a “seamless” life, to inhabit this broken world with a sacramental worldview. That is, what are the connections between Sunday and Monday, between worship and work? Is there a way that we can develop the sort of lives that are coherent? Can we bear the sadnesses that come into this life and not give up?

I know of no other author who is so eloquent and literary and theologically informed yet immensely practical, at least in a manner that matters. His constant thesis — developed more fully in previous books like Fabric of Faithfulness and Visions of Vocation — is how the things we care about shape who we are. The deepest questions which all people, everywhere, ask about meaning and purpose and joy and responsibility animate these lively ruminations offered from all over the world as Steve travels speaking with folks who share these hopes and dreams. From conversations with business execs to artists to politicians, he reports on ways folks care well.

There are chapters about work. There are pieces about public service. There is stuff here about pop culture, about music, and good stuff about literature. He writes movingly about friendship. He tells some fun stories that will make readers smile and some poignant ones that might make you sigh. Each entry is short and is accompanied by a full-color photo of the places he’s been, landscapes he’s seen, or artifacts that point to the bigger lessons learned in each locale. A compact sized paperback with nice paper, it is a handsome little volume.

For those who want to dip in just a bit to one of our great public thinkers and writers, who wonder about making sense of our times and finding meaning in the stuff of life, The Seamless Life would make a fabulous little gift. Steven has a particular affinity for young adults and knows well the complexities of the post-college transition, so it’s an ideal gift. One reviewer — a CEO in the tech industry — called it “a feast.” Friend Charlie Peacock says it contains, swiping a line from Garber himself, “the truest truths.” Singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken says it “gently weaves coherence and grace from the far corners of vocation, friendship, and spirituality.” Some bookseller guy named Borger even has a little blurb on the inside calling Seamless Life “achingly beautiful.”

How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith Mariann Edgar Budde (Avery) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

Much could be said about this book, what Steve Leder (author of For You When I Am Gone) called “the simple, important, dynamics of courageous living” but I will suggest that it would be a good gift from some of you, at least, for some of your idealistic young friends. You may recall that Mariann Budde is the Episopal Bishop of Washington and had the privilege of preaching at a service during President Trump’s inauguration. She made international history once he made a typically rude comment about her bad preaching, mostly because she implored him to show compassion to the needy. In any case, this author of two lovely previous books of spirituality became an international figure for what some saw as significant bravery (her sermon earned her death threats) but which she might say was only her doing her job; preaching gospel truth in a public setting.

Anyway, this is a book, as you can tell from the titles, about how to learn this art of being brave. Historian and journalist Jon Meacham raves, calling it a “searching account.” Rev. Budde’s Bishop (Michael Curry) says that in “sharing her story and that of others who have faced real challenges with ‘grit and grace’” we are reminded that “extraordinary courage is possible for ordinary people.”

We need faith and the tools to become the kind of people that have a deep moral compass and are willing to become leaders of integrity. Dr. Michael Hill (of the Chautauqua Institution) says it is about “humility, introspection, and selfless determination.” 

Maybe this call to virtue and courage would be helpful for others, too, no matter what age, eh?

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

One of the things we hear time and again from church folks or others looking for a good gift to honor a graduate is their fear that students are done reading books. They are, or so it is thought, burned out on academics and don’t want another book for a gift. Some are in the very processing of selling off their boring textbooks.

Granted. I get it. But you know what? It is my sense (and our experience!) that many young adults who are sincere people of faith, don’t have many thoughtful Christian books. Maybe somebody gave them a teen Bible five years ago or they were gifted with a cheesy devotional somewhere along the line. If they were lucky they might have Mere Christianity. Maybe they’ve heard of N. T. Wright or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Desmond Tutu. I suspect they have learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Baptist preacher, but I bet they’ve never read a single book of his. So it goes.

In any case, a good way to allow younger adults to join the movement of thoughtful contemporary (Christian) reading is to give them a book that is at once theologically informed but a lot of fun. Something that grapples with some of the biggest questions in life and yet has a mostly buoyant, practical, immediately engaging sort of tone. Something, I might suggest, for ordinary saints.

Ordinary Saints is one that I’ve celebrated before — and not only because I have a chapter in the ways in which one can serve God in retail business. I’ve pitched this before because it is just such a hoot— it is fun and funny, serious and vital, surprising and refreshing. After a three page fairly intense theological piece on what it means to give glory to God, the book offers tons of short pieces, most very well written, about, well, glorifying God in the ordinary stuff of daily life. There are pieces about making playlists and napping, about building community and doing karaoke, about enjoying comic books and raising chickens. There is a fabulous piece about roller skating and a nifty one on briefcases. Some have adored the chapter on dancing. All knowingly religious, showing that such mundane stuff somehow makes God smile.

There are heavier pieces, too. There is an important contribution on coping with chronic pain. There is an essay about going to therapy which is excellent. One is on mental illness. There are a few chapters offering wise, grief-related reflections.

Naturally, there is a good, basic chapter about glorifying God in ordinary work. (And there is mine on business life which I hear is interesting.) From a theological basis for going to movies to the spirituality of knitting to stuff about traffic and homemaking and storytelling, all Coram Deo, this book makes a great gift for almost anyone.

And, by the way, there are some extraordinary writers in Ordinary Saints, some who are not well known, but a few are, which indicates the calibre of this volume. Who wouldn’t want to give a gift knowing there are contributors like poet Luci Shaw, philosopher Calvin Seerveld, art prof Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, the global phenomenon Malcolm Guite, memoirist Margie Haack… Wow.

Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief, and Grace Reflect the Christian Story Drew Hyun (Zondervan) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We announced this new book just a few weeks ago and it dawned on me that it would make a great gift for a college grad, whether they are strong in Christian thinking or not. I mean, whose life isn’t in some measure beautiful and disappointing and hopeful, right? This book written for seekers is ideal for anyone grappling with the big questions, who wants a coherent framework for thinking about their lives, for those who need to understand that God is with them — in our good, greater world, despite the hurt and paint we face, and can be wonderfully hopeful.

We need that kind of a story, that sort of frame, that sort of lingo to make sense of the various feelings we feel and encounters we have.  Drew Hyun is by all accounts and incredible friend to many in New York City where he lives and this book he’s explain some of what he’s learned about how practices of expressing gratefulness and lament — the gratitude and grief in the subtitle, of course — can help us deepen our awareness of the grace that is at the heart of the Christian worldview.

This is a lovely book, nicely written, captivating and wise. Any young adult who is intrigued by life at all will like it, I’m sure, and many will love it, truly. It’s a great book.

I love how the author Gerry Sittser of Whitworth University (and author of the unforgettable A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss) describes a great book and how this new book captures these very characteristics. Yes!

It is no easy task to write a book, to say nothing of a book for the larger reading public. Good books have a deep root system, which includes, of course, the Bible. They show evidence of being familiar with the long and great tradition of thinkers who have gone before us. They are sensitive to the needs and longings of ordinary people. They are a pleasure to read. They are accessible but never superficial. They are vulnerable but never maudlin. Drew Hyun has written such a book. It drew me in, touched my soul, and called forth faith in me. I kept thinking of people who would benefit from reading it. I trust you will, too.

+++

TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN TO CLICK ON THE “ORDER” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you want us to ship your orders. We’re eager to serve you in a way that you prefer. Let us know your hopes. We’re not automated, so let’s talk!

Of course the weight and destination of your particular package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

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

• United States Postal Service has an option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.83; 2 lbs would be $5.58. This is the cheapest method available and sometimes is quicker than UPS, but not always.
• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

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BEFORE I LIST 10 GREAT BOOKS FOR EARTH DAY, THIS URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT:

PLEASE JOIN US if you’re local or tell others who might be near Central Pennsylvania this weekend.

JOIN US IN LANCASTER, PA (this Friday evening, April 25th at 7:00 PM) and/or IN YORK, PA (this Saturday morning, April 26th at 10:00 AM) for two very special Hearts & Minds events with two esteemed authors, David Warners & Gail Gunst Heffner, authors of Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha.

Sorry these are blurry. I’ve described the info in the body of this BookNotes and you can also find these graphics more readably at the Hearts & Minds Facebook group page and my own

(Byron Borger) personal Facebook page.

I’ve described this book several times at BookNotes over the last half a year because I am such a fan  — we even named it as one of the Best Books I read last year!  It is a real honor to have these activists and authors join us here in central PA all the way from Michigan. I hope you can help us spread the word, and come out to say hello. It’s going to be an evening (and/or morning) presentation you will long remember!

The Friday evening experience with our Michigan guests starts at 7:00 PM and will be held in Lancaster at Sunnyside Mennonite Church which is right on the banks of the Conestoga River; the church has hosted river clean-ups there. It is co-sponsored by the remarkable climate change group working with businesses and others in Lancaster County, RegenALL.

The Saturday morning event starts at 10:00 AM and will be held at a fun venue, Gather 256 in downtown York, near the banks of the Codorus Creek. It is co-sponsored by the fabulous Penn State Extension Master Watershed Steward program. It’s “Go Green” weekend in York, so come on down to 256 W. Philadelphia Street, grab a snack at the cafe, and join us upstairs.

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Those who know me or who have followed BookNotes for a while won’t be surprised to see this coming, but here on the heels of Easter victory, we want to remind you that Earth Day is Tuesday, April 22nd. Begun in 1970. I have often said that I participated in Earth Day that first year with my church youth group and it was because of my mom.

I was a teen when the nation celebrated that very first Earth Day and my mother — raised as a farm girl in the Depression a bit north of here — had our church youth group pick up litter somewhere around what became Codorus State Park near Hanover in southern York County. We used a battered old pick-up truck, flew that green eo-flag, and said a prayer afterwards.

That was that — we weren’t eco-warriors, just small-town United Methodists, but it stayed with me, realizing that my Republican-voting mother, who loved her tomato plants and her rose bushes and the birds that flew through the fields near our home, was a budding naturalist and a quiet advocate for the environment. We recycled long before it was required, although that was partly due, I suspect, to her Depression-era ethos of reusing everything. Years later when I helped organize protests of nonviolent civil disobedience against the dangers of Pennsylvania nuclear plants — before the accident at TMI — I jokingly blamed her for the good trouble I got into.

I’ve noted before that once I preached at an Easter Sunrise service hosted by the local Izaak Walton League, proclaiming that the Christian claim that Jesus rose from the dead had vast implications for our stewardship of creation, which, the Bible tells us in Romans 8, is even now groaning, awaiting its restoration. I knew enough about the scope of Christ’s redemption to know that creation and new creation are intimately related and that Christ’s death undid all sorts of disorders and dysfunctions and Death. I could go on and on about the covenantal promises of God, unfolded through salvation history in the Bible and declared, often, by the Apostle Paul and other early followers of Jesus, that He is about the business of redeeming what centuries later Abraham Kuyper said was “every square inch” of creation.

When we church folk proclaim, “Christ is Risen, indeed!” we not only insist He rose from the grave but that in so doing, He pushed back the very forces of evil. Colossians 2:15 comes to mind, eh?

And so, we can affirm the connections between Resurrection Day and Earth Day.

I’ll list a few more important books below, but first, we want to tell you just a bit more about these two back-to-back author events — FRIDAY EVENING IN LANCASTER and SATURDAY MORNING IN YORK — and ask that you tell somebody about it on our behalf. That one of the authors is one of our longest friends and Hearts & Minds fans (she and her hubby helped us open 43 years ago) is extra fun, but, no matter, we invite you to share about this upcoming pair of talks with anybody you know in central Pennsylvania. (They are doing an afternoon event in Pittsburgh on that SUNDAY, April 27th at Studio Lilthe, 5746 Baum Blvd.)

Please help us spread the word. Details were listed above but read on and we’ll share them again.

If you are anywhere near Lancaster or York (or know anyone who is) believe me, this will be a great opportunity to meet two fabulous authors of a book that I listed as one of the Best Books of 2024, Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha by Gail Gunst Heffner & David Warners (Michigan State University Press; $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99.)

You will be inspired to hear their dramatic story.

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This coming week-end we in central PA will have the opportunity to hear these two Michigan leaders — Gail Heffner and Dave Warners — who have spent more than a decade cleaning up one of the most polluted waterways in their entire state, a Grand Rapids stream that the indigenous people once called the Ken-O-Sha (and which is now known as Plaster Creek, a nod to the booming plaster business that nearly killed the creek.)

Both were employed (Dave still is) by Calvin University, a Christian college in Grand Rapids that long taught a view of faith that compelled them to serve the common good. Warners is a beloved biology professor and Heffner worked for the college serving the local community there, from working with African American churches to co-founding Plaster Creek Stewards with Warners, which mobilized students to begin the long process of learning about what they’ve come to call reconciliation ecology.

Their story is fascinating and complex, with controversies and set-backs as they involved more folks in literal stream clean-up and developing the broader naturalist practices about plantings and water management and the like. They learned about stream restoration and pollution from run-off as they studied watersheds and eco-systems, as they interacted with institutions and groups (some who were helpful and others which opposed their vision of clean waterways and stewarding well the region’s relationships, upstream and down. You’ve seen movies like Eric Brockovich, so you know.)

There is much for us here in Central Pennsylvania to learn from Heffner and Warners and their captivating, detailed book. They are such good presenters, too, so it’s going to be a fabulous evening and/or morning.

AGAIN: The Friday evening experience with our Michigan guests starts at 7:00 PM and is co-sponsored by the remarkable climate change group working with businesses and others in Lancaster County, RegenALL and will be held at Sunnyside Mennonite Church, which is right on the banks of the Conestoga River; the church has hosted river clean-ups there. The Saturday morning event is co-sponsored by the fabulous Penn State Extension Master Watershed Steward program and will be held at a fabulous venue, Gather 256 in downtown York, near the banks of the Codorus Creek, starting at 10:00 AM. It’s “Go Green” weekend in York, so come on down to 256 W. Philadelphia Street, grab a snack at the cafe, and join us upstairs.

As I’ve explained before at BookNotes, Reconciliation In a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha tells about the history of the devaluation of the local ecology (and the confrontation of diverse worldviews that have shape our understanding of the world around us.) Although there was some push-back from some quarters and significant challenges, their multi-faceted approach to stream restoration led to building alliances with a variety of organizations including, importantly, Native people’s tribal groups. There’s some nice stuff about that in the book and I’m eager to hear them explain more during their presentations. They mobilized churches of all sorts, non-profits, farmer advocates, urban planners, water sportspeople, and more, actualizing their mantra that they were working for reconciliation for people to people and people to the rest of creation.

Some of the work was to document the pollutants in the stream (E Coli levels were dangerously high) and to repair erosion and learn about run-off. Of course to do that, they had to be attentive to the local flora and fauna, which, interestingly (as Wendell Berry might put it) “all turned on affection.” They worked with other groups, helping them all nurture a sense of kinship with the natural gifts of God’s good creation. They were learning to be reconciled.

As the famous naturalist and climate change activist Bill McKibben puts it, reconciliation ecology is a discipline we badly need, and this story about what it looks like makes for a “fascinating and powerful book.” Rob Yob, chairman of the Grand River Bands of Ottawa Indians says “I found this book to be extremely interesting and would recommend it for anyone that concerns themselves with watersheds which exist globally.”

HERE’S THE INFO AGAIN IF YOU WANT TO CUT AND PASTE THIS TO SEND OUT:

Hearts & Minds, our bookstore in Dallastown, is sponsoring these two events with these lively and experienced riverkeepers (who are great friends and really fabulous presenters) at two different locations — FRIDAY NIGHT is in Lancaster with RegenALL, the marvelous team leading the way towards local climate solutions. Our guests will be presenting from their book at  Sunnyside Mennonite Church (337 Circle Avenue) on Friday evening, April 25th at 7:00 PM. Of course, everyone is welcome!

Then, SATURDAY MORNING, we’ll be with the Master Watershed Stewards folks and Gail and David will present on their book, again, but this time in downtown York, upstairs at Gather 256, (256 East Philadelphia Street), starting at 10:00 AM.  Please come.

We invite you to learn from these two who have been helping others care for their own creeks and streams and how we, too, can learn about the vast interconnections between waterways, racial justice, environmental science, and social institutions, and how better values can guide our care for God’s creation around us. Reconciliation is a great word to be using here right after Easter — as St. Paul put it in Colossians 1:20, Christ is reconciling all things, even things “on Earth.”

We don’t have that old pick-up truck anymore, or any green Earth Day flags, but I wish my mother was still alive to be there. It’s going to be a marvelous evening at Sunnyside Mennonite in Lancaster and a fantastic Saturday morning at Gather 256 in downtown York.

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HERE ARE TEN OTHER GREAT BOOKS ON FAITH AND THE ENVIRONMENT.

We have more than a hundred titles on this topic in the store, plus lots that are not from a faith perspective as well. Here are a few to start with…

Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care edited by David Warners (Calvin College Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I love this book, a very thoughtful guide to deeper theology, richer spirituality, beautiful writing about our language, our attention, the glories of the gifts of creation and the ways in which our kinship with other creatures might give us new ways to talk about our Earth-keeping and care for creation. Its scope and breadth is a delight, too, as there are chapters on animal care and place-making and more.

David Warners, our guest this weekend (see above) is the co-editor of this and he has an excellent chapter about the notion of gifts (drawing a bit on Robin Kimmerer) and in his introduction he gives a fabulous overview of Plaster Creek Stewards and their move towards reconciliation ecology. Our friend Gail Heffner (the other guest coming this weekend to speak Friday night in Lancaster and again Saturday morning in York) has a groundbreaking chapter on environmental racism. I say groundbreaking as there has been very, very little written from a faith perspective and for a popular Christian audience on this, and we tip our hat to Calvin College Press and Dave and Gail for including this piece in this excellent collection.

Other authors from the Christian creation-care movement are here with powerfully succinct pieces — Steven Bouma-Prediger, Debra Rienstra, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap and so many others.

When I started reading this collection of essays I frankly wondered if I might be bored by a series of ho-hum proposals of alternatives to the old idea of stewardship. But the alternative images are interwoven with an exploration of how humans interact with microbes, rusty nails, ecosystems, and the names of trees, as well as with the impact of environmental degradation on racial minorities. The result is an inspiring book that can teach us new ways to think about — and live more fruitfully in — God’s good and groaning creation.

— J. Richard Middleton, author of A  New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology

Stewards of Eden: What Scriptures Says About the Environment and Why It Matters Sandra Richter (IVP) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Many know this author as a premier Bible teacher, an Old Testament scholar and author, and a lovely voice for church renewal. (Her great Old Testament overview and her study of the Psalms are published by Seedbed, out of Asbury Theological Seminary, and her major volume called Epic of Eden is on IVP Academic.) In any case, this lively and fantastic study of key Biblical texts about creation care opens up the themes beautifully and always with a case study about the groaning of creation, here, now. From Appalachian strip mining to factory farming to “Operation Ranch Hand” (if you don’t know about this, you should!) she makes the biblical theology come alive and applied in broad ways to the issues of the day.

There are great discussion questions as well, making this a great resource for small group Bible studies or book clubs on Sunday school classes. Impressive and engaging.

Creation Care Discipleship: Why Earthkeeping Is an Essential Christian Practice Steven Bouma-Prediger (Baker Academic) $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

I named this one of the best books not only on the topic of creation care but on the texture of Christian discipleship, following the way of Jesus. Who doesn’t want to be a faithful follower mentored and guided by our Lord? This tells us more of what that looks like.

It is actually an extraordinary resource, covering so much, so well. And there are very creatively-written interludes of Biblical re-tellings between each section. These are surprisingly fresh and I think you’ll find them provocative and insightful — between the lines showing us how to read and appropriate the Bible itself in a generative way.

Bouma-Prediger is an outdoor educator who takes collegiates on creation-care wilderness adventures and is a beloved religion prof at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. In this definitive study he offers not only a solid Biblical foundation for creation care as essential to human image-bearing of God, our Creator, and for faithful discipleship but he also explores theology and ethics. He offers wisdom from the global church and has a wonderful section on “living what we believe” by calling us to “Christian faith in action.”

I love the chapter called “Humble Humans in a Holy World” and you’ll love the one called “Lightening and Wind, Hawk and Vulture, Behemoth and Leviathan.”  The final chapter moved me deeply and is needed in this complicated age —“Yearning for Shalom: Becoming Aching Visionaries.” Please consider this book for your own reading and for groups and classes and anyone involved in mentoring others.

I was twenty-one years old when I read my first Bouma-Prediger book. From that moment on, my life has been a sequence of events reverberating from reading this brilliant thinker. This book will have the same effect on a whole new generation. I can’t commend it enough.

 

— A. J. Swoboda, Bushnell University; author of After Doubt and The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for Our Wants

 

Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice David W. Swanson  (IVP) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I mentioned Gail Heffner’s important chapter called “Making the Invisible Visible”  in the excellent collection Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care. This recent paperback, Plundered, is a one of a kind, must-read book that explores the relationship between racism and environmental injustices. Swanson is an urban pastor of a multi-ethnic church who was, for a while set on being an outdoor educator. He knows much and loves the great outdoors and the art of creation care. Here he takes his passion for exposing racial injustice and shows how the weight of much degradation of creation is, in fact, born by people of color, neighborhoods that are mostly made up of black and brown citizens.

Once you see this stuff you can never unsee it, and it should be part of our repertoire of how we think about both racial justice and creation care. Both of these problems, Swanson shows, “have the same origin story” both “rooted in economic forces that exploit and oppress people and land.”

I like Swanson a lot –– he pastors New Community Covenant Church on the South Side of Chicago and is the author of the very good Redisicipling the White Church. Hooray for this really excellent work.

Our Angry Eden: Faith and Hope on a Hotter, Harsher Planet  David Williams (Broadleaf) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I loved this book — read it twice, which is rare for me. The author is a small town PC(USA) pastor in a church not that far from Washington DC. He is a novelist and imaginative thinker and a great writer. He brings some sights into the consequences of our unwise ways of living and offers some guidance for a church that wants to be more faithful around climate change issues. He gets that some may not want to take this crisis as seriously as it deserves and while he doesn’t back away from the horrible curse upon these times, he also is, well, a down-to-Earth, likable, pastor and preacher.  He seems to have a knack for bringing in the less than convinced, inviting everyone to a social ethic that is Christ-like, no matter what.

Williams knows and loves his place, his people, and his affections are obvious. I found this book oddly challenging and reassuring, a prophetic word spoken with an often sharp, but always pastoral voice. He’s witty, too, making our learning about the  “hotter, harsher” realities we are going to be facing a bit easier to stomach.  Highly recommended.

Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision Randy S. Woodley (Eerdmans) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

I think most thoughtful readers understand well that white settlers who colonized North American and who (with some voices of protest and care) committed genocide on the Native population (not to mention decimating native animals and other non-human species) have got to cope with this original sin of our earliest history here. From books like Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (by Native American Mark Charles and Asian-American Soong-Chan Rah) and Sarah Augustine’s The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery, people of faith have learned much. The magisterial The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk won the National Book Award last year and we should know some of this history.

Our guests this weekend, in their Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed have much to say about the history of the oppression of indigenous people in the Upper U.S. Midwest and they insist that the mainstream culture could learn much from the intuitions and practices of older Native tribes. The health of our waterways depends on it.

And so, we are very glad to once again commend to you this marvelous, somewhat academic study of creation care themes by an astute and thoughtful indigenous Christian thinker and leader from the Pacific NW. Woodley refers to shalom as the “harmony way” and unpacks ancient wisdom placing it in conversation with creatine Biblical theology. It’s an engaging, rare, and very informative book.

Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth Debra Rienstra (Fortress Press) $23.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19

I have commented on this, often, noting that this lovely hardback is one of the most moving, graciously written, glorious books about eco-care that we know of. It explores with faith-informed glory all about caring for the Earth creating spaces of refuge. Debra is cited in the book by Heffner & Warners, as she should be (but she does teach with the authors at Calvin University in Grand Rapids.) This is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years, and it repays multiple reads. Truly lovely even as it makes you rethink much. Enjoy!

Filled with beauty, wisdom, and a vision for how things might be, this book itself serves as a refuge for the weary, discouraged, and disheartened. Imaginatively conceived and gorgeously written, it is a work of profound insight and deep goodness. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne

 

For most of us, a crisis like climate change is cause for panic and withdrawal. Rienstra beautifully, winsomely invites us to flip this script. Rather than viewing it as an insurmountable challenge, she argues that the climate crisis is an opportunity for transformation–if only we have the courage, imagination, and resiliency to seize it. –Kyle Meyaard-Schaap,  Evangelical Environmental Network, author of Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Call to Climate Action

 

Rooted Faith: Practices for Living Well on a Fragile Planet Sarah Renee Werner (Herald Press) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Here is some of what I wrote when I first highlighted this at BookNotes bit more than a year ago:

Rooted Faith on Herald Press is a great read, a lovely story about ordinary lifestyle choices of making home well here on this “fragile planet.” You may recall how I raved about one of my favorite reads this past year, At Home on an Unruly Planet, an epic story of four places under threat from climate change. And you surely know we did that webinar recently with Brian Walsh & Steve Bouma-Predigar about the 15th anniversary edition of their heavy, breath-taking, broadly-conceived study about cultural displacement called Beyond Homelessness. Well, Rooted Faith captures the same passions as these books, but is more down-to-Earth, faithful but imminently practical, inviting us to consider stuff we can do as intentional practices to care well for the ecology we are a part of. We do not want to be “homeless” but “rooted.” Right?

Writers and activists have raved about this, with a common thread of how generous and whimsical and pleasant and winsome it is, even as it is very serious. Ched Myers notes the writer’s “poetic imagination” and Randy Woodley says it “reaches us where we live.” That is one of the great, practical strengths of Rooted Faith — it is practical and down to Earth.

Debra Rienstra says it provides “a friendly entry point.” That is very true but those who have read some of the bigger picture stuff who have been in conversations about this for a while right need to read about how to make it real in our daily life.  I am sure some would enjoy studying together…

How To Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World Ethan Tapper (Broadleaf Books) $28.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19

This is a book which is easy to highlight and promote, but harder to explain it’s profound appeal. Much of it is that it is just so well written, so eloquent and interesting. Some of it the storyline — a former hippie “back to nature” guy who doesn’t want to use or destroy anything in nature ends up going to forestry school and learns about the science of ecological systems, the details of forest management, the ways to best mitigate serious damage to our environment, especially our woodlands. He picks up a chainsaw and learns the value of some limited, careful logging. He consults with ethical businesses and eventually becomes a service forester in the state of Maine. As one critic suggested, “If Aldo Leopold were a twenty-first century Vermont forester with only one good eye and a contemporary understanding of power and privilege, this might be the sort of book he’d write.” Exactly.

Others have compared his writing to Annie Dillard or Robert McFarland.

Francis Cannon of Kenyon College says, more deeply, that “this is a manifesto against apathy.”  It isn’t easy — the bittersweet” in the subtitle is vital not to miss.  It is a tad ironic, perhaps, his message that “to save a forest, some trees need to die” but it is realistic and wise and heart-felt. Much has been lost to hurtful practices and bad policies. It is not to late too try again. Follow Tapper into the woods and you will never forget the trip.

Everything Must Change: When the World’s Biggest Problems and Jesus’ Good News Collide Brian McLaren (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Brian’s recent wise and helpful book explores the psychological impact of our awareness of the seriousness of climate change (and the connected other pressures upon us in these days) and is called Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. It is needed, I’m sure and we have it. However, decades ago he wrote a book — inspired somewhat by a book I sent to him, actually, co-written by a dear pal, Mark VanderVennen, with the Dutch economist and Parliament member Bob Goudzwaard, and US college prof David Van Heemst, called Hope In Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises. McLaren was so struck by these three hope-sters and how they showed the underlying engines driving a set of interrelated problems (including ecological crisis and global poverty) that he set out to do his own book on how the Kingdom of Jesus could be a counter-voice to provide alternatives to the set of problems that connect with each other, each driving the other.

There are other books that place our ecological crisis and the call to be Earth-keepers in the broader context of the dangers of modern capitalism, militarism and the like, but nobody does it better. Agree or not with every detail of his big picture analysis or his critique of the church’s apathy or complicty,  Everything Must Change is so insightful about so much, and yet very readable and even inspiring that it is well worth reading carefully.

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TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN TO CLICK ON THE “ORDER” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you want us to ship your orders. We’re eager to serve you in a way that you prefer. Let us know your hopes. We’re not automated, so let’s talk!

Of course the weight and destination of your particular package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

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

• United States Postal Service has an option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.83; 2 lbs would be $5.58. This is the cheapest method available and sometimes is quicker than UPS, but not always.
• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

BookNotes

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There are so many new books coming into the shop here in Dallastown that we want to just tell somebody — anybody — about so many! True book-lovers are a rare breed (you know) and we love to connect authors and readers. But here, in the midst of the week called holy, it seems odd to hype new titles. I think if it were not Holy Week I’d be enthusing about Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurest which just arrived from Crossway and the much anticipated Scrolling Ourselves to Death, the new nod to Neil Postman. I still haven’t reviewed the powerful Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage by Richard Rohr and really ought to be describing Christ in the Rubble: Faith, The Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza by Bethlehem (yes, that Bethlehem) pastor Munther Isaac. I’ve had my eye on Tomorrow Needs You: Seeing Beauty When You Feel Hopeless by Charlotte NC pastor Naeem Fazal and the important new book by Ezra Klein, Abundance. I know some have been waiting for Hillary McBride’s Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing just out from Brazos.  Yesterday we got a stack of a book called Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus: Reading the Bible Like Dallas Willard. Plus, I’m working on a review of the book I’ve enjoyed and been most touched by this season, Good Soil by Jeff Chu.

See what I mean? There are so many new titles that I will have to tell you about later; but not now.

Because this week matters and we must focus.

I hope you attend Maundy Thursday services, and take in the hard stuff at a Good Friday service. I don’t know what to do on Holy Saturday but I hope you can do some prayerful reading, feeling our loss and your longing for hope. Lent has been leading us towards Jerusalem and it’s never easy.

Sometimes in our movement towards Gethsemane and Golgotha we find it helpful to ponder the cross. I’ve highlighted books before, often, to help us explore the crucifixion, the atonement, the death (and the eventual rising) of the Lamb. I’ve often mentioned John Stott’s comprehensive The Cross and of course — for those who like academic study — The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge is even thicker and more sublime. I’ve often mentioned N.T Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began which explores Pauline theology of new creation coming through the cross.  This year my favorite Lenten read was The Woods Between the Worlds by Brian Zahn.

With the symbolic, prophetic action of washing feet during that Last Supper, Jesus embodies the mandate he gave. We call the Thursday night service “Maundy” from the Latin for “mandate.” The new mandate, the command he gives, is simple enough, yet the phrase contains worlds, universes: love one another.

Jesus even says to love one another as I have loved you.

And so, my friends, a book list to help us ponder our Maundy-mandate, the God of love, and the love of God.

(Please scroll to the end to see the final title and the mail-order options and the links to order, all at 20% off. Thanks. May these books be a blessing.)

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love: My Long, Slow Journey into the Love of God John H. Armstrong (Cascade Books) $27.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

This book is rich and deep and thoughtful and honest and complex, and on the surface not hard to explain. It is about a world-class evangelical leader, evangelist, revival preacher, author, and para-church leader who has preached John 3:16 (“for God so loved the world”) a whole lot more than most who — in part due to his own dogmatic and doctrinal approach to truth and God and the Bible and faith —now, as an older man, has come to be persuaded that (more profoundly than he understood before) God is love. And this has nurtured in him a whole new view of just about everything. Because he is a careful thinker and informed by certain ways of thinking about faith, it’s been a long time coming.

We’ve known and respected John for years (as we have appreciated his friend who wrote the explanatory forward, Wes Granberg-Michaelson, the former President of the Reformed Church in America and a leader in the global ecumenical work of the World Council of Churches.) I’ve read most of John’s many books and admire him perhaps as much as any evangelical writing today. We have been grateful for his kind words and support of our efforts here.

John shifted in his thinking decades ago, writing and ministering and advocating for the kind of interfaith conversations (and relationship) needed if we are going to move towards Jesus’s own prayers for us at the end of John, namely, that we would be one. His first major book on this, inspired by a 1950s-era essay by his life-long friend, J. I. Packer, was Your Church Is Too Small (which is to say that your view of the church — especially who’s in and who’s out — is too narrow) which was followed by an expanded, more complex version, Tear Down These Walls: Following Jesus into Deeper Unity.

If you’ve followed conversations about inter-denominational conversations (or even pondered prayerfully these things in your own life) you know there is a swirling bit of energy here, propelling us to proclaim that God wants His people to live in love. It is God’s own love we are embraced by and share. We love because he first loved us, the Apostle Paul insists, and that mirrors the very dance of the Trinity which overflowed in the loving act of the creation of the cosmos. We work for greater love (and justice) in the world but root it in the love of God; God’s love swirling through and empowering all this mercy is nearly mystical when you think about it.

John then wrote a book called Costly Love: The Way to True Unity for All the Followers of Jesus. As a Protestant he sought out a Roman Catholic publisher and it was nicely done by New City Press. You can see that as he nurtured his friends with priests and monks, Catholics and the Orthodox, admiring servants of the poor, missionaries, theologians, and clerics around the world, he deepened his love for the Body of Christ and deepened his own awareness of the love of God as the grounding of the church, the mark of the Christian and the deepest truth about reality. He is right and those books help remind us that we need greater interaction among church folks of all sorts and that Christian unity requires great love for each other (which then spills out into the world.) We love God and neighbor — everybody knows that right? Well, yes and no.

John shares in this remarkable new Transforming Fire of Divine Love that as a Reformed scholar and renewal leader, he always thought love was one of the marks of God, an attribute, alongside God’s other attributes. And that limited view of the love that is God (dis) colored how he viewed God’s nature, God’s work, the role of Jesus, the work of the cross, etc. etc. etc. You see, he takes very seriously (and suggests that many others do not) the Biblical fact that God is Love (1 John 4:8.) God-Love, he calls the Divine One. And he insists this is Biblical and informed by the great cloud of witnesses throughout the church, from the church fathers on.

As I started the book, I almost wondered if he was making a bigger deal of this than he needed to. Who doesn’t affirm those astounding statements of 1 John 4. Okay, I guess, come to think of it, I haven’t heard that many sermons on 1 John 4: 8 or 1 John 4:16 but, geesh, doesn’t everybody presume it?

John did not, he admits. Sure love was part of God’s ways, but not foundational. He thinks many other theologians and preachers do not. He makes his case carefully, Biblically, theologically, and cites everybody from across the theological spectrum. He has copious footnotes (sometimes, in which, he’ll give a warning, evangelical that he truly is, that some author isn’t fully reliable on some other theological topics, but he or she is worth quoting in this context, about this topic.) He is pastorally sensitive, humble and gracious, but wants to — feels a fire in his bones to — be clear that this is the key to Christian doctrine, Christian thinking, Christian piety and spirituality, and Christian witness in the church and world.

Love is the key, and he uses everyone from the most dense Orthodox thinkers to dear Max Lucado to sophisticated solid writers like Fleming Rutledge to flesh this out, to underscore its centrality to our faith. He draws on so many great writers that this book actually serves as an introduction to some of the finest thinkers in church history — from the ancient fathers to Kallistos Ware to Frederick Buechner to Karl Rahner to Brad Jersak.

I hadn’t fully cared to consider how an inadequate assumption about and shallow or banal encounters with the deep love of God might deform our other views and doctrines. In gracious ways Armstrong exposes a failure in admitting the full love of God in books and authors he values, from a weak chapter in Packer’s Knowing God to a mess of a paragraph or two in Tozer’s otherwise important The Knowledge of the Holy.

I suppose it is no secret that John used to be published by Puritan publishers like Banner of Truth and was pals with strict Calvinists like R. C. Sproul; they distanced themselves from him, sometimes in painful ways, when he questioned even a little of their strict views of God and particular theologies about God. His embrace of a broader Kingdom vision was influenced by N. T. Wright, or so I seem to recall and he read voraciously, reaching out to others outside of his own tradition. Here, in The Transforming Fire of Divine Love, he shows how many important figures of the church went on record saying God didn’t truly feel sorrow or grieve. I had no idea some esteemed theological scholars — from Augustine and Aquinas to Calvin and Luther — said such outlandish things. (Okay, I know about some of their outlandish things, but this was new ground for me.)

And so, the question is, do we really understand that God is love? Does it fully color our view of God’s character, God’s essence, our lives in Christ, His cross, His crown, His reign, His plan to restore all of creation, summing up the new creation in love? When we say “gospel-centered” do we really have the great news of God’s love in mind?

This book is a fairly serious but lay-friendly theology study. And yet there are shades of memoir as John tells some of his story, his growth and his deeper encounters with God (in part through his ecumenism.) It is also a guide to living into this ground of being that is nothing but love. In a way, this book is a book of spirituality — it is not surprising that this once fairly logical, nearly scholastic (Calvinistic) theological voice now embraces Dame Julian of Norwich and her “revelations of divine love.” Although conscientious and even wordy at times, it is about encountering God who is love and being transformed by that life-giving Love.

As one reviewer put it, this book shares an idea and an approach and a testimony that is “cleansing and restorative.”

Agree fully or not (heck, even grasp all the implications he alludes to or not) this is a really important book, certainly one John would say is his most important. Kudos to The Fire of Divine Love: My Long, Slow Journey into the Love of God.

The Great Love of God: Enchanting God’s Heart for a Hostile World Heath Lambert (Zondervan Reflective) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If John H. Armstrong was a straight-arrow Protestant and Reformed evangelical who preached revival and renewal but slowly saw many of his assumption about all that erode as he increasingly saw love (with an assist from the Orthodox and great Catholic traditions) as the irreducible nature of God, then this recent book, by a Baptist preacher (of First Baptist in Jacksonville) is a great companion volume on this journey to love. He isn’t quite where Armstrong is, but it’s similar territory.

I think it is fair to say that Heath (who besides being a pastor and a very good writer is also a counselor) has not gone as far in reformulating everything in light of (only) the love of God as Armstrong has. But it is a good start, a half-way point for those wanting to ground their thinking and living in God’s great love, but may — after reading it, of course — find John’s Transforming Fire a bit too influenced by ancient mystics or Russian monks or progressive thinkers wanting to frame love and justice as that which most matters. If that worries you, Lambert is a safe bet.

Lambert gets us a good way down the line, insisting over and over with compelling arguments and even more moving stories, that love is God’s answer to our greatest problems. As it says on the back, after lamenting our culture conflicts,

In The Great Love of God, Lambert provides an accessible, passionate, and intensely personal exploration of how divine love casts out fear, provides ultimate hope, and never fails us. He leads us on a journey to encounter the heart of God’s infinite love and shows how that love can transform you and those around you into people shaped by God’s great love.

Biblical counselor (and one of the more popular writers of devotionals these days, author of New Morning Mercies) Paul David Tripp, says “I am a bit breathless and in awe. I am filled with gratitude and conviction by what I have seen of the love of God. Through the journey and words of Heath Lambert, I have luxuriated in the love of God like I never have before.” Wow.

Love Has a Story: 100 Meditations on the Enduring Love of God Quina Aragon (Moody Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I have just discovered that this author of a set of children’s books that we’ve liked is also a vibrant spoken word artist, a passionate Puerto Rican author residing in Orlando, who just released this marvelous, handsomely designed hardback devotional. (Aragon’s three children’s books that poetically retell the Bible’s storyline through a Trinitarian lens of love are Love Made, Love Gave, and Love Can.)

The brand new Love Has a Story notes that the big drama of God’s work in the world — creating, sustaining, and redeeming it is how some put it — is bigger than you and me. As she puts it, the story starts as the Triune God spills over with love, a love that created the cosmos.

Quina Aragon writes of:

…an overflow of the beautiful love shared between the Father, whose heart bursts for the Son, the Son who adores the Father, all wrapped in the glorious-life-giving love of the Spirit. And this great Love knows and cherishes every secret and intimate details of your story. In fact, this story is for you.

I think you will appreciate this invitation to enter the “grandest love story ever told” through her prose and poems, makes for a great book, a read that could be life-changing for some. We need this narrative approach — seeing the Biblical revelation as a story — and we need to see that it is, at its very heart, a story of love.  Love Has a Story is very nicely done.

Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality David Bender (IVP) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I might have mentioned that Armstrong, above, seems to have shifted from head to heart, even in his use of sharp logic and sustained intellectual arguments, writing with a grace and with the sense that he is unashamed of basking in the love of God. In a way, it is not surprising that alongside his rigorous conversation with scholars of the church, he invites people to know God as Abba (he nicely commends the great Brennan Manning, naming The Ragamuffin Gospel, Abbas Child, and Ruthless Trust.) And so, I, too, wanted to suggest a book that explores the great contemplative tradition, inviting us to an integration of our psychology and our souls, so to speak; John suggests several, including David Benner’s lovely, little Surrender to Love. It is one of the very best introductions to what we mean when we talk about spirituality and I highly recommend it. That Roman Catholic monk and contemplative M. Basil Pennington wrote the forward is icing on the cake.

Yes, this book frames our move towards deeper spiritual formation in terms of surrender. But he isn’t quite talking about gutting-it-out through muscled up obedience to the Law, but, as the title puts it, surrendering to love. As Benner writes, “Only God deserves absolute surrender because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.”

In our self-reliant era, he notes, most of us recoil from the concept of surrender. But what if that which we are surrendering to is safe — “the epitome of goodness and love”?

We highly recommend this book (and the two others in the trilogy, The Gift of Being Yourself and Desiring God’s Will.) The first chapter of Surrender to Love states that, “It all begins with love.” There is a section about fear (and love.)  We can be “transformed by love” and, in God, we “become love.” Yes!

Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World Henri Nouwen (Crossroad Publishing) $24.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

How many spiritual classics did Henri Nouwen pen? So many! Most are real classics, and even those who aren’t best-sellers have fierce followings. Most are the sort you’ll read more than once. It is my observation that Fr. Nouwen was one of the two or three most important writers shaping the religious landscape of the 20th century (as he, almost single-handedly, got Protestants, and eventually, evangelicals, reading in Catholic spirituality. It seems there are more Protestants and evangelicals reading about Ignition spirituality these days than there are actual Jesuits.) In any case, Nouwen’s life-long struggle — not unlike Brennan Manning, another erstwhile Catholic priest — was to know that he was loved, accepted, cared for. He writes in vulnerable, tender ways about this journey towards God’s care.

Many know the backstory of Life of the Beloved — he tells in the introduction how a secular-minded journalist asked Nouwen to write a book about the spiritual life that he and his friends could understand and enjoy. The journalist wasn’t into theological language and couldn’t abide technical terms that would obfuscate. Nouwen wrote this book in response, a book without jargon saying clearly that “you are beloved.”

You are loved. What a liberating fact. What a glorious bit of good news, if it is so.

Read Nouwen’s guide for spiritual living, Life of the Beloved, and see. Some say it is one of his best, and many say it is the one to start with. The three units of the book are “Being the Beloved” then “Becoming the Beloved” leading to “Living as the Beloved.”

Practices of Love: Spiritual Disciples for the Life of the World Kyle David Bennett (Brazos Press) $19.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

The above two books invite us to deeper, even more mindful and contemplative interior life, surrendering to love, and knowing, deep in our bones, that we are beloved. These are foundational books for the spiritual life, full of love and grace. Sooner or later in this journey one learns of spiritual disciplines (as outlined in the classic Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, for instance.) They are increasingly referred to as spiritual practices, stuff we do, habits that form us in virtue, shaping our character. The best book on why habits matter is the marvelous You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith who reminds us that too often secular liturgies, often imbued with the values of civil religion and consumer culture, shape us more than historic Christian practices. And so, we need spiritual tools and disciplines to learn to train for discipleship. Often these are seen as ways to unhinge from the world and deepen our life with God, nurturing an abiding affection for Cod.  All true.

Enter Kyle David Bennet, an old acquaintance, who wrote this book on classic spiritual disciplines inviting us to think about practicing them less as ways to know God’s love but more as ways to help our love for others flourish. What would it look like to think about things like fasting and solitude and silence and prayer as ways to love others?

Bennet makes a case that many of those who first wrote about spiritual practices did so with a plan that they would influence our “horizontal” relationship with others — neighbors, strangers, enemies, even animals and the Earth itself.

How might we reconfigure classic spiritual practices to be sure they aren’t just turning us back on our own selves, focusing on our own precious spirituality, but rather, allowing the practices to be understood as ways to love. (Aside: the new bestseller Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer is a good, good resource in all of this and the free streaming videos are marvelous.) That subtitle of the Kyle Bennett book —“spiritual disciplines for the life of the world” is surely motivated by God’s own love for the world. Our ordinary lives of virtue and faithfulness are done with and for our neighbor’s good.  This book about love and spiritual disciplines finally ends up having a lot to do with public theology and current affairs.

“Who’s afraid of love?” Bennett asks. This is a fabulously interesting, even important book, answering that question. The lively foreword is by Jamie Smith, suggesting this is a must-read for those who appreciated his “cultural liturgies” trilogy or his You Are What You Love.

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

Don’t you love that smiling face of the Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episopal Church USA? Not unlike his late friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Curry is known as a smiling and joyful leader, a great and enthusiastic preacher, a gracious and good man. I do not know all the details of his theology (but a memoir draws on the black spirituals his grandmother taught him) but — if Armstrong is right — perhaps the deeper question is not his doctrinal p’s and q’s but how he articulates the love of God, the gracious work of Jesus, the enfolding goodness of the fire of the Holy Spirit. Can such deep love allow us to “hold on to hope” even in times that are more troubling now then even when he published this in 2020?

You may recall how the world so appreciated Curry’s powerfully redemptive story of love preached at Windsor Castle at the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle five year ago? (Yes, he’s that guy.) This title, which came out after that 15 minutes of fame, explores more deeply the theology of the love of God, the nature of that love, and how it shows up, especially in the lives of people. Anyhow we can be people of hope as we love others well. As Jim Wallis says on the back, “Michael Curry believes in love.”

This radical God-given love can change everything. Love Is the Way isn’t dense theology or mystical spirituality. It is plain and inspiring and clear and powerful. He speaks of his own life and he invites us all to live in a way that is consistent with the Divine love that might allow us to make the world a more merciful, good place. As one critic exclaimed, this book is “heartfelt and extraordinarily important in this fearful time.”  Amen to that.

The Mark of the Christian Francis Schaeffer (IVP) $13.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.19

This thin, little, almost pocket-sized book first published in 1970, was one which many had hoped would leave a lasting mark on the world. Maybe it has. Sadly, this call to Christian love, especially among Christian siblings in the church, seems to have been mostly forgotten. It’s a little classic and in once sense helped motivate John Armstrong in his early quest for trans-denominational Christian love.

Francis Schaeffer here gives a succinct but powerhouse lesson on John 13. You know the passage. While it is indeed about Christian congeniality it is finally about love; it is, perhaps more to the point, about how we bear our witness in and to the world. “By this all will know” who Jesus is, it says. How will they know? “If you love one another.” So, as Schaeffer so memorably puts it, love is the “final apologetic.”

Not only will the watching world know that we are Christians, but more importantly, they will know who Jesus is, if his claims about Himself and his work and his Kingdom are true if they see love in us. Oh my.

Leslie Newbigin, the great British missionary to India, in dealing with a somewhat related theme noted that “the congregation is the hermeneutic of the gospel.” Again, the relationship between the plausibility of the truth claims, and the likelihood that anyone will be persuaded or compelled by it, is dependent upon the love shown in the lives of the local body of believers. Love really is, according to Jesus, “the mark of the Christian”

Interestingly, The Mark of the Christian was first published as a final chapter, sort of an afterword, in Schaeffer’s larger book The Church At the End of the Twentieth Century. He thought it was so important that he asked his editor (Jame Sire) if it could be a stand-alone title. As Sire later said, “the rest is history.” This little classic is a valuable, non-sentimental book which is a must-read for those who do apologetics, evangelism, or care about the witness of the church before the watching world. 59 small pages with a short, incredibly prescient poem, Lament, at the end.

The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus Dorothy Day (Plough Publishing) $12.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $9.60

I wrote not long ago in BookNotes about the latest title in the “Plough Spiritual Guides” series, the new one, Jesus Changes Everything, which is a short anthology of edited pieces by Stanley Hauerwas. This The Reckless Way of Love was one of the earlier “backpack classics for modern pilgrims” that Plough did and it is a fine and wonderful little introduction to the vast amount of prose written by journalist and Christian activist, Dorothy Day.

Dorothy was an extraordinary person; I have spoken with people who knew her, who worked with her, who were arrested with her in nonviolent protests. She was a tireless advocate for the poor who she housed in her “Catholic Worker” movement houses even as she stood for peace and justice in any number of controversial arenas. You know that if she were here today she’d be on the streets aiding refugees, the immigrants that are being snatched up by Trump’s ICE patrols, and standing firm against the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. All in all, she took Catholic social teaching seriously, was devoted to the saints (of which she did not aspire to be one — too easy to dismiss, I think she had said) and she lived somewhat like the beggar Francis of Assisi. Love was her aim. With Russian novels by her side and her typewriter constantly blazing, she prayed the hours, took care of the homeless, and wrote about God’s love. She wrote about knowing God’s love and about showing God’s love. This love is, she often said, quoting Karamazov, a harsh and dreadful kind of love.

Read The Reckless Way of Love to get a glimpse of what she meant. Love in action.

A Love That Never Fails: 1 Corinthians 13 H. Dale Burke (Moody Press) $9.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

How can I write about love without at least offering one good read on one of the most enduring and beloved passages of literature in the world? Lines from this excerpt of Paul’s first letter to the troubled folk in Corinthians have been loving calligraphed on cards and emblazoned on mugs and tee-shirts. The passage has been read, often movingly, in weddings and funerals. It is so familiar as to nearly be a cliche.

I wonder how many of us have routinely studied 1 Corinthians 13? I have not. But I will never forget reading this popular little book (now out of print — but we have some left) and wondering why small Bible study groups or book clubs or Sunday school classes don’t use it more. It is a lovely, helpful read, exploring the phrases and meanings of the famous chapter line by line.

The first chapter is Part I and is called “The Priority of Love.” The second major unit is comprised of chapters gathered under the heading “The Profile of Love.” The final section, Part 3, offers three chapters on “The Permanence of Love.” There is a fantastic little study guide in the back with points to consider and then discussion questions for further reflection.

Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness Michael Card (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

You may know of our appreciate for singer-songwriter and book author and public speaker (and all around nice guy) Michael Card. I’ll never forget our banter when he visited Dallastown to speak and play. I may think that his books on lament and sorrow are among his best, but he has written so many excellent, creative, and illuminating titles. This may be one of his very best.

John Armstrong in Transforming Fire walks the line between scholar and mystic, between pastor and prophet, and says that the fundamental matter in all of theology — the matter that will color and shape all of our convictions and practices — is the question of what we believe the Bible teaches about the essence of God, the very nature of God. And, as we’ve noted, John thinks the ultimate teaching is that God is love.

And yet, there are other metaphors for God, other ways God has revealed God’s own self to us. Certainly, one of the most often used and foundational words for understanding the covenant-making, promise-keeping, faithful God of the Bible is the profound Hebrew word hesed.

Mike Card here very nicely unpacks this reality, showing how this rich Hebrew word carries so much extra (great) baggage. The word connotes so much and while there is hardly an English word for it, it can be described as lovingkindness or covenant faithfulness or just steadfast love. (Just?) God reveals God’s character as one of steadfast love!  Yes. This is throughout the Bible, in the law, the stories of the historical books, the wisdom literature, the prophets, and, yes, ultimately, the “fullness of hesed is embodied in the incarnation of Jesus.”

On the back cover of this splendid book, we read:

“As we follow our God of hesed, we ourselves are transformed to live out the way of hesed, marked by compassion, mercy, and faithfulness. Discover what it means to be people of everlasting love beyond words.”

Oh, mercy.

Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God Brian Zahnd (Waterbrook) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

I mentioned that Armstrong’s punctilious theological chops in his earlier days gave way to a less strident restrained tone about certain doctrinal quandaries moving away from certain sorts of attitudes about theology (theologism, I sometimes call it.) He has some remarks about how the atonement is understood and while this book by Zahnd may not be the most detailed and nuanced articulation of what he later came to call “a poetical theology of the cross” (in The Wood Between the Worlds) it does dive right into the question of God’s wrath. How do we think well about wrath and judgement, love and mercy, grace and goodness? What’s what?

While this is not the same book as Rob Bell wrote years ago that was so widely debated (Love Wins, which was about the extent and scope of God’s intentions to make all things new, perhaps even demolishing hell) it is asking a similar sort of big question: is God mostly angry at us, or is God mostly in love with us? Is Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon title, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, a fair explication of the nature of God and God’s disposition towards (admittedly sinful) people? How might we think differently about the essence of God, the character of God, and the attributes of God if we don’t start with an angry God but a loving God?

This is not standard liberal theology or hip, progressive ideology. Zahn is deeply committed to the Bible and follows faithful hermeneutical principles and writes with a Godly attitude. In ways different than Armstrong, he, too, has come to see things differently than in his earlier years.

As an aside, one small difference — or maybe not so small depending on your take — between Zahnd and Armstrong is that Zahnd is a Dylan aficionado. One of his early books (on the Pentecostal publishing house, Charisma House) is Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure & Mystery of Christianity which is a redemptive study of aesthetics. I am not sure if John would write a book like this (although he might write one called Baseball Will Save the World — ha!) In that older Zahn book there is an important chapter about the interplay of beauty and goodness, art and God, and it is called “The Axis of Love.” It is the self-sacrifice love of Christ, seen most clearly in the cross, that ushers us into a new world (where the Kingdom ways of the Beatitudes guide us) — it is that beauty that is redemptive. It really does dig deep into God’s unconditional love, the beauty of Christ. I wonder if his play on words about the axis of love is counter to the global thinking of former President Bush who talked about an axis of evil?

Agree or not with all the details of Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (and I have my quibbles, more about what texts are left out of his vast survey) it is a very helpful book to explore the passionate love of God.

One of the most beautiful, truthful, and compelling visions of God as revealed by Jesus I have ever read. I can’t shut up about this glorious, necessary, healing book. It is a must-read for every Christian” — Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith

 

Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, Risk and Promise (Currents in Reformational Thought) James H. Olthuis Wipf & Stock) $38.00  // OUR SALE PRICE = $30.40

Okay, we’ve looked at Biblical and standard fare theological reflections on love, focusing on the love God is and the love God shares and the love we are invited to embody, live in, and express. Maybe the Beatles didn’t root their vision in the Triune God of the Bible seen most clearly I the person of Jesus the true King, but, you know, they were hardly wrong. In our Jesus freaky days we sang a chorus, “love, love, love, love, the gospel in a word is love.”

How might an innovative philosopher, a Christian philosopher, explore these themes with his particular accent and approach? Dr. Olthuis has influenced some of the great thinkers we admire most — James K.A. Smith (whose most recent is How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now) and Brian Walsh (Romans Disarmed and Rags of Light: Leonard Cohen and the Landscape of Biblical Imagination are his last two) come to mind — and he was often cited decades ago on the nature of how worldviews work. He has studied continental philosophy and yet was interested in counseling and relationships, so wrote (back in the 1970s and 1980s) some best selling, lovely books on marriage and friendship such as I Pledge Your My Troth. He loved that word from the old English wedding ceremony, troth. It’s sort of a blend of trust and loyalty; the norm of troth calls us to more than mere intellectual assent or convictions but to authentic relationship, to faithful reliability in a context of mutuality. It really is about love, eh?

Maybe it’s connected to Michael Card’s insights about hesed.

Maybe it is related to the journey John Armstrong has been on, although John’s has been in dialogue with theologians and Olthuis’s has been in conversations with postmodern philosophers.

So with his postmodern rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and certitude and a deeper experienced groundedness in the waters of stuff like hesed and troth and perichoresis (the profoundly Biblical realization about the dance of the Trinity overflowing in Divine love), he ponders, how then shall we live? Olthius, only as a serious philosopher can, explores this question in light of what he calls (along with others these days) “theopoetics.” That is, he is doing theology in a fresh new spirit, drawing on the aesthetics of poetry, of the drama of story, shall we say, to color his playful (if at times dense) use of language. This “theoretic” rhetorical approach is profound. And, for those who like an intellectual challenge, it can be a lot of fun. This is one heck of a book, hefty, a bit unhinged. It invites us to know love in such a way that we are free to risk. And, wow, that’s how the dance begins.

For those who might be interested, Olthuis was one of the founding senior members of the learning community in Toronto known as the Institute for Christian Studies. Back in their earliest days he taught with the likes of Calvin Seerveld and Al Wolters and Bernard Zylstra, all Dutch neo-Calvinists working out of a particular philosophical tradition (coming from a philosopher named Herman Dooyeweerd who taught at Kuyper’s Free University of Amsterdam with who most of their founders studied.) One needn’t know or even care much about the details of his fairly arcane philosophy other than to know that that is his philosophical tradition which he has considerably updated with, well, wild dancing in the wild spaces of love. Maybe this is part Dooyeweerd, part Van Morrison at his mystical best, part postmodern philosopher John Captuo. All informed by this deep reflection on the very meaning of love.

The sheer attractive force of this meditation on the love at the heart of everything draws biblical hermeneutics, Derrida and Irigaray, trauma theory, and social ethics into an irresistible theopoetics. In this wild dance of a text, Olthuis may be loving theology itself back to life. — Catherine Keller, author of Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances

Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love is everything we have come to expect from Jim Olthuis — a beautifully written, carefully argued, wide-ranging analysis of the centrality of love in our lives, a veritable philosophical hymn to love. Olthuis is a bright light in these dark days, a balm for an age of anger, rage, and divisiveness in which love is an increasingly scarce commodity. We have never needed him more than now. —John D. Caputo, Villanova University, emeritus

In every sense possible, Olthuis lives up to the subtitle of this remarkable book. This is indeed a theopoetics and must be engaged as such. . . . Having walked the path of trauma and profound brokenness, together with healing and hope, Olthuis embodies a wisdom born of tears. But tears can turn to dancing. So put on your dancing shoes when you read this book. — Brian J. Walsh, coauthor of Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice

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• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

I hope you received or saw our most recent BookNotes which highlighted some great books for Easter baskets. It’s been fun sending out little board books and lush picture books and a few new children’s storybook Bibles.

And yet, there are so many more, older and newer, including some that just showed up here in the shop this week.

I’ll admit it takes hours and hours to describe the books I curate for you here and while good books usually take some explaining, and I’m here to do that, this time I’m  going to keep it somewhat quick. Scroll on down and hit that “order” button at the end of the column.  All these, like the previous ones, are 20% OFF.  Happy gift giving.

Many locations to which we send can get packages in a few days; we pretty sure most orders can get to you before Easter. We ready and willing — while supplies last.

God’s Holy Darkness Sharei Green and Beckah Selnick, illustrated by Nikki Faison (Beaming Books) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I have written about this the last several Lenten seasons and even during Advent when it seemed right to celebrate the beauty of GOd’s holy darkness. Rather than repeat my lengthy discussion, I’ll quote from the back cover:

From the darkness at the beginning of Creation to the blackness of the sky on the night when Christ’s birth was announced, this captivating picture book deconstructs anti-Blackness in Christian theology by exploring instances in the story of God’s people when darkness, blackness, and night are beautiful, good, and holy.

And yes, it shows the darkness that entered the day when Jesus died making it ideal this season.

By the way, the art is pretty modern, edgy, fascinating, complex, even, and rich.

The King of Easter: Jesus Searches for All God’s Children Todd R. Hains, illustrated by Natasha Kennedy (Lexham Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

In that last BookNotes post about books for a child’s Easter basket I commended the fu and theologically solid “FatCat Books” from the good folks at Lexham Press. I mentioned a small and very brief board book that is drawn from this bigger, and delightful exploration of who Jesus is, who he seeks and saves — whether enemies of friends. The fat cat is there as in the others (including the excellent trio, The Lords Prayer, The Ten Commandments, and The Apostles Creed, all illustrated expertly by the very talented Natasha Kennedy.) I love the “all of God’s children” subtitle and I love the dark skin on our savior, King Jesus and I love their telling of how Mary searched for Jesus at the empty tomb and even moves the story along to the transformation of Saul “who killed Jesus’s friends.” I like how it carefully asks the reader if they, too, have been found by Jesus.

The fun spread showing all of Jesus’s friends so children can find them again is great. The ending prayer is mature and the endnotes for parents include helpful guidance. Happy Easter to all!!  Highly recommended.

Rise: A Child’s Guide to Eastertide Laura Alary, illustrated by Giuliano Ferri (Paraclete Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We have highlighted others in this lovely “Circle of Wonder” books for children that highlight seasons of the liturgical cycle of the church year. (For instance, see Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter, Breath: A Child’s Guide to Ascension, Pentecost, and the Growing Time, and Look! A Child’s Guide to Advent and Christmas.) These gentle books invite children (maybe ages 4 – 8) to revel in the colors and sounds of the celebrations and, also, to ponder: what does this have to do with me?

Some would properly insist that Easter’s joy invites kids to know the facts of their salvation, their forgiveness, and the hope of God’s victory of sin. This book brings a more age appropriate metaphoric vision — what does it mean to rise, to get a second chance, to find hope and goodness in the newness God is bringing. I love how this interweaves the Biblical story (of the post-resurrection encounters with Jesus) and the daily activity of the children in the story. As David Csinos (founder of Faith Forward and editor of the books about postmodern children’s ministry by that name) puts it, “Laura Alary has done it again…” He continues:

This book takes readers right to the heart of Eastertide, where they will encounter the grief, wonder, surprise, and joy that wraps around the season One can’t help but close this book and know that Jesus is alive. Hallelujah!

Sparking Peace Teresa Kim Pecinovsky and Hannah Rose Martin, illustrated by Gabhor Utomo (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Oooo, I could say more about this brand new poetic tale which shows how weapons are turned into tools of peace. People can come together, the back cover promises, “to create lasting friendships and positive change.” What an interesting inspiring book.

Sparking Peace is a very redemptive story of a boy who helps his older neighbor clean up her yard and start a new garden. Later, the boy goes with his father to a community event that doesn’t only commemorate the sadness of gun violence but turns weapons into gardening tools just like the Bible predicts. The art is so vivid and moving — and at times exciting as community members (who are bearing grief, it seems) each take a moving swing at the forge under the supervision of their peacemaking blacksmith. You’ll love the ending, and the conversation starters at the end are really helpful. What a beautiful, beautiful book. Check out RAWtools.org which inspired the story.

The Long Road Home Sarah Walton, illustrated by Christina Yang (Crossway) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Although they say this is for ages 6 – 8 it is so rich and lovely that I think it might even be for ages 5 and certainly up to 9 or so. It is summarized, as it says on the back, “Wherever you go, my son, I want you to remember that I love you with a never-ending love.”

This is a creative and wise retelling of the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son. It also has features and stylings of Pilgrim’s Progress with a character named Wander. Perfect. The painting is detailed and rich without being garish. The Long Road Home is beautifully done and tells a great story. It’s a nice square size.

Bible History ABCs: God’s Story from A to Z Stephen Nichols & Ned Bustard (Crossway) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

Speaking of perfect square sized books for little ones, this is an old standard of ours here, an ABC book that is, admittedly, not for 2 or 3 year olds just learning their ABCs but maybe for older pre-schools who have an advanced sense of wit and curiosity. Because, man, there’s some fun stuff in here. It is very rigorously Biblical — Steve is a director at Ligonier Ministries, the organization founded by R. C. Sproul, after all, and Ned — known as the graphic designer who designed and illustrated the Every Moment Holy volumes and the beloved editor of Square Halo Books — is deeply committed to the drama of Scripture. Here they use the alphabet to unlock the nature of God as a promise-keeper and the unfolding sacred story as one of promise and fulfillment. But along the way you’ll learn about all sorts of people and events and animals and a small bit of goofy stuff. I bet this is the only Bible book for children that has an armadillo in the mix. Lot’s of classic art is reproduced as well, with a touch of Ned’s brilliance.

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Painting Wonder: How Pauline Baynes Illustrated the World of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Katie Wray Schon (Waxwing Books) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

What a lovely, somewhat oversized picture book — wonderfully, wonderfully done! — telling the story of the great Pauline Baynes, known for those famous black and white drawings in the original editions of The Chronicles of Narnia. She was raised in lush and beautiful India— she had pet monkeys with whom she drank her tea — and eventually ended up in rather dreary England before World War II. Books kept her imagination alive and she painted the very stories that she loved. The rest is legendary – doing first edition book covers for The Hobbit in 1961 (and, later, the beloved maps), Watershed Down, and so many more. She even designed stained glass windows for a church in England.

The Big Wide Welcome: A True Story About Jesus, James and a Church That Learned to Love All Sorts of People Trillia Newbell, illustrated by Catalina Echeverri (The Good Book Company) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

In the last BookNotes I suggested taking a look at the website of the whole “Tales That Tell the Truth” series, which we love. Echeverri is just brilliant as a whimsical and detailed illustrator who brings verve and energy to the story. The authors are all very skilled at catching the gospel-centered nature of Biblical stories and how old, old episodes are so very relevant for us today.

This one tells children that it is fun to have a favorite food or toy or teddy. Our favorite things mean a lot to us. But we are never to play favorites with people.

Discover in The Big Wide Welcome what a church learned about how Jesus chooses to love people and how they could love others in the same way — and find out how you give people a big wide welcome, too!

You know that some Christians and some churches are beautifully warm places and this can help children understand the welcome and acceptance they’ve experienced. On the other hand, some may be hearing on the news these days that some religious people are known for being unwelcoming, making this Biblical story so very urgent.

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Strong – Psalm 1 Sally Lloyd Jones, illustrated by Jago (ZonderKidz) $12.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

Adapted from the Jesus Storybook Bible these large sized board books with padded covers are great for very little children. THere are six of them, and we’ve got them all. Bright colors, very nicely done by artist and designer Jago around Lloyd-Jones’s elegant, simple phrasing make these just fabulous, simple introductions for young ones. Strong (on Psalm 1) is the newest. Hooray.

My Little Library of God’s Great Love board book boxed set Sally Lloyd-Jones and Jago (Zonderkidz) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

We have a few of the recently-released boxed sets of four of the most popular Sally Lloyd-Jones board books, made smaller (without padded covers.) These small boxed sets — the slipcase itself is very cool — are tremendous gifts. The four smaller editions included in My Little Library of God’s Great Love and includes Found on Psalm 23 , Loved (on the Lord’s Prayer), Near: Psalm 139 and Known: Psalm 139.

Who Is Jesus? 40 Pictures to Share with Your Family Kat Hox, illustrated by Joe Hox (New Growth Press) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

What’s all the fuss at church on Easter, some kids might think. We have presented this before, once suggesting it as a Lenten resource, although, honestly, it is a guide to the life, death, and resurrection and saving power of Christ, so it really is fine for at-home religious education for anyone. It could save the day for Sunday school teachers, too, if you need a quick lesson. It really is an amazing book, chock-full of ideas, truths, insights, Scripture — all based on 40 different symbols or graphics, with a key Bible verse for each one. And a song, too. What a creative couple they are. Author Kate, by the way, is a graduate of Dordt College in Iowa.

There are forty word pictures are cool ways to inspire kids to learn about Jesus, who He was and is, what He taught and did. You’ll find symbols of arks, rams caught in a thicket, snakes, sticks, rocks, tents, shepherds, sheep, water, bread and more. I suspect some families will resonate with some graphics more than others, some aspects of Christ will capture your attention, and you may not want to word things quite the way this sharp mom does.  But even if you want to expand the descriptions or moderate the tone just a bit, these ancient symbols — many from the Old Testament, drawing us into the large covenant drama which Jesus fulfills and carries onward — are good for conversation and they give you discussion start prompts and questions. A hefty hardback, maybe best for 6 – 12, I’d say, although you could adapt it for younger ones.

A Light to Share: Stories of Spreading Love and Changing the World Natalie Frisk, illustrated by Maria Diaz Perera (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This is a fabulous book that introduces children to real people who had the light-switch turned on in their lives (as the author playfully puts it) and they learned to share God’s love and make a difference in the world. This is a book that helps celebrate the Five Hundred Year anniversary of the founding of Anabaptism (Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, Hutterites, Quakers, and the like) even though it doesn’t say so.

In A Light to Share Natalie briefly tells the stories of 12 individuals who became followers of Jesus (sometimes under dramatic situations, sometimes not.) Some became missionaries, some pastors, one was a printer, another a flyer, Dr. Alta became a biologist and teacher, one African refugee became a global peacemaker. Not all are from the US, although most are. Although some of these testimonies are from previous centuries, many of the individuals are still alive— Kate Bowler and central Pennsylvania author, professor and anti-racist activist Drew Hart. (It notes that Bowler’s cancer story may sound sad but her podcast is joyful. It mentions that Hart has a doctorate, which they describe as “big degree.”) There sure are a lot of exclamation points in this book! The enthusiasm may become contagious.

In each story starts saying when the person “was your age…” and has drawings of them as a child. Then it shows them as younger adults and maybe older adults; you really get, in a page or two, the vibrancy and joy and service and faith of these remarkable people. By the way, they don’t say anything about Anabaptists and only once or twice do they mention being a Mennonite. So it really, truly, is good for anyone.

Drawn Onward Daniel Nayeri, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller (Harper Alley) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I’ve described this before and I’m happy to suggest it again. You know the author for his spectacular, true novel Everything Sad Is True (now out in paperback, by the way) and the Newberry Honor Book, The Many Assassinations of  of Samir, the Seller of Dreams. This is his most recent picture book, a dramatic story of loss and grief and adventure and battles and memory and love. Newbery Medal winner Matt De Le Pena (author of Last Stop on Market Street) called it special and enduring.” He’s right to say that “it is rare to find a book this clever that is also emotionally powerful.”

This looks like any number of fantastic adventure stories where a boy with a sword goes on some quintessential journey. But pay close attention to these amazing illustrations and art, and, more follow the plot as you enter a story of poignancy and truth, goodness and courage. It is a lush fantasy world which is the setting for a boy asking if his late mother was glad she was his mom. Oh yes, “a journey there and back.”

And it is all written in palindromes. Wow.

Mother God Teresa Kim Pecinovsky, illustrated by Khoa Le (Beaming Books) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

The illustrations in this Biblically-inspired book are stunning, creative, captivating.  To say it is visually striking is an understatement; Khoa Le has won awards all over the world for her artful expression in children’s literature.

As importantly, the prose in these pages is full of what one reviewer called “page after page of magic and wonderment” in what has also been called a “delightfully powerful book. This brings Scriptural images to bear “vividly” says Rev. Will Gafney, of Brite Divinity School.

With lyrical, rhyming text, this book introduces readers to dozens of images of God inspired by feminine descriptions in the Bible. You will enjoy introducing your child to God as a creative seamstress, generous baker, fierce mother bear, protective mother hen, a strong woman in labor, a nursing mother, a wise grandmother, and a comforting singer of lullabies.  (All of this is metaphorical, of course — it goes without saying, I guess, but I sort of wish Pecinovsky would have noted that, or used the pedestrian “like” a time or two. But I quibble.)

If you love the Bible, you’ll find this a lively asset for your library. [And, I might add, for some of our readers, if this notion strikes you as odd, see the serious and helpful work Women and the Gender of God by Amy Peeler (Eerdmans; $24.99) or the old Is It Okay to Call God Mother? by Paul R. Smith (Baker Academic; $18.00).]

Listening for God: Silence Practice for Little Ones Katie Warner, illustrations by Amy Rodriguez (TAN Books) $16.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.56

Anytime I read this or suggest it to Sunday school teachers or Christian educators or parents, I’m struck — some are reluctant, as if silence and solitude and a contemplative sort of spirituality is odd for children, or they are thrilled, glad to see this conservative Roman Catholic publisher do a book that so many can appreciate. This is a simple book on the story of and implications for us of 1 Kings 19 — you may recall Ruth Haley Barton’s great book In Search of Solitude and Silence that I commended at the start of Lent draws on this story for a burned out prophet who finds God in the “still small voice.” I wish these fun illustrations of Elijah made him look a bit more haggled (and a little less like typical illustrations of Jesus, which may or may not be intentional.) In any case, this is a rare children’s book that invites readers to settle down and listen for God in a “sacred silent time.” For ages 4 – 7.

Between My Hands Mitali Perkins, illustrated by Naveen Selvanathan (FSG) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $ 15.99

We celebrated this picture book before, too — we remain astounded at the quality output of Mitali Perkins (whose brand new one, coming in early May for adults is Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives.) We adored her book for adults about classic children’s literature called Steeped in Stories.

This picture book for ages 4 – 8 is the third in a series of “between” books (see Between Us and Abuela on separated families and the power of art and Home Is In Between, on immigration, new customs in a new school.)

The question on the cover of Between My Hands is “How will you namaste the world?”  It’s a good question. Although it is a tender and cheerful book, Perkins has a lovely author’s note in a page on the back noting that this third in the “Between” picture books is “an invitation to children to offer their gifts and talents in service to the planet through the Indian gesture of namaste, which means, “I bow to you.”

“Given the huge problems in the world,” she continues, “children may not believe they can make a difference for good.” She tells, then, about the character in the story (Maya) who lives in Oakland, California, home of murals and gentrification (and protests.) She says that she chose the names of her characters intentionally; Alvaro is a Spanish name that means “truth” and Jubilee is, she explains, based on the Bible’s Year of Jubilee when slaves were to be set free, and Karina is the Sanskrit word for “mercy.” Maya, Mitali explains, in her own mother tongue, Bangla, means “love.” Highly recommended.

The Princess and the Goblin George MacDonald (Walking Together Press) $29.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

The Princess and Curdie George MacDonald (Walking Together Press) $29.95  // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

It is common to find cheap photocopied editions of these volumes with dumb covers and awful print runs — some online dealers feature these terrible versions as if they were legit, which they usually are not. It is uncommon to find a classy indie press who takes up reproducing vintage-like editions of these classic children’s fairy tales with charm and artfulness and we are delighted to have discovered these.

From the inside covers to the quality of the paper and print to the handsome full color art, these leather-covered and foil-stamped hardbacks are fantastic editions to your family library and must-have books for George MacDonald aficionados.

And shouldn’t most of us be fans of the great Scot thespian, poet, Shakespearean , novelist and preacher of the gospel, lover of God that he was? You know him, surely, for his fiction and prose “baptized the imagination” of C.S. Lewis, who was, as we would put it today, a fanboy. Lewis loved these tales.

And so, we are delighted to present these two handsome volumes for your own (or gift-giving) pleasure.

And, get this: Walking Together Press offers their books to fund their extensive book ministry sharing the printed page in Africa. Their support of grass-roots libraries there, like one in the slum neighborhood in Jos, Nigeria is beautiful.  Hooray.

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And, one more time, for those who missed it:

Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus Wesley Hill (IVP) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I’ve reviewed this book about the theology of resurrection and the way more liturgically-shaped congregations celebrate the season more thoroughly a few weeks back but want to underscore it’s value here, now. This series about the church calendar is succint and moving and this one is fantastic. It’s small, too, making a nice gift for nearly any one.

The newest in the great “Fullness of Time” series of hand-sized, succinct hardbacks, Easter is, I suppose, the one many of us have been waiting for. Advent, Christmastime, Epiphany, Pentecost and Lent have all been published (with Ordinary Time coming next year) and yet we’ve been especially eager for this. How excited and glad I was when I heard that Wes Hill was invited to write it. Edited by Esau McCaulley, each of these have been very good, each in their own way, by robust practitioners of the distinctive habits of the church year. Each offers a historical and theological overview of the church season under consideration and draws out practical stuff to do in order to more appropriately and fruitfully experience the blessings of each particular season of the liturgical calendar.

Easter, the season of resurrection, of course, carries a message and realty that we can simply never get enough of. Obviously I hope nearly everyone on our mailing list orders this. It’s that important, and Wes Hill does such a fine job, it deserves your attention. I mean that.

As I started to read Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus I’ll admit to you, dear readers, that I was a tad reluctant. I wanted to read this fresh, for the first time, on Easter. Alas, an occupational hazard here on the frontlines of bookselling, I had to read it early.

Read the rest of my review here, or, just order it now. You won’t regret it…  Soon we will shout “He Is Risen!” This book will help you understand it all the more.

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TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN TO CLICK ON THE “ORDER” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you want us to ship your orders. We’re eager to serve you in a way that you prefer. Let us know your hopes. We’re not automated, so let’s talk!

Of course the weight and destination of your particular package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

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

• United States Postal Service has an option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.83; 2 lbs would be $5.58. This is the cheapest method available and sometimes is quicker than UPS, but not always.
• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

We’ve got so many children’s books for so many ages and sorts of readers, it is hard to select just a few to tell you about. And, of course, we have or can get those older titles that are either beloved favorites or true classics — loving aunts, uncles, grandparents and others who care for little ones may want to gift those old favorites this Easter season. Or any other time, of course. Books make the best gifts, don’t they?

Just ask us and we might have what you are wanting (or we may be able to order it for you quite quickly.) Thanks for allowing us to be your go-to bookseller (or at least one of them) for all kinds of titles.)

Here, then, at our customary 20% OFF BookNotes special discount, are a nice handful to choose from. Order soon and we’ll send them right out, in time for you to share as Easter gifts.

Pippa and the Singing Tree Kristyn Getty, illustrated by P. J. Lynch (Crossway) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

What a beautiful, wonderful book, written by the great Irish hymn-writer and one of the most lovely, talented, and esteemed children’s illustrators working today. (P. J. Lynch, by the way, for those who are old enough to remember, did stunning illustrations of many books, most notably The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. We had the slides of that marvelous 1994 book shown on a sheet hung up in our store when we hosted the author here before it became famous. We’ve been fans of the beautiful art of P.J. Lynch ever since.)

This new one published by Crossway is about the glory of nature, worshipping God in the ordinary, and the power of praising God through singing.  While it is Christ-centered and full of Biblical spirituality, it is just lovely for anyone, with beautiful drawings of this happy child swinging on a swing hanging from a truly majestic tree. I was showing it to our inquisitive 2 year old just today and she was enthralled, even if the text is more advanced.  There is a great little epilogue for families about Psalm 104:33 and the call to sing to the Lord.

Psalms of Praise: A Movement Primer board book AND Holy Week: An Emotions Primer board book Danielle Hitchen, illustrated by Jessica Blanchard (Harvest House; $12.99 each // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39 each

Last Lent season I recall mentioning Holy Week in the “Baby Believer” series, and it is one we recommend for those who want to the various emotions that may appear during Holy Week. It is unique and very good with one word emotions to go along with the passion of the last week of Jesus’s life. And I’m sure we’ve mentioned the Christmas one as well. These are among our favorite board books for toddlers; each has a typical baby learning format — animals, shapes, oppositions, the alphabet, emotions, movements, and the like — with Biblical content. This earlier one, Psalms of Praise, plays with different movements, ideal for little ones who like to jump and walk and sit and skip and clap and lie down. Nice!

Who Is Our King? board book Todd R. Hains, illustrated by Natasha Kennedy (Lexham) $9.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

The regular FatCat books are lavish, large sized picture books that are sophisticated and racially inclusive — with a dark-skinned Jesus — and we love them. This new pocket one is a very slim board book introducing in the simplest way, the birth, boyhood, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. You’ll find King Jesus’s friends hidden throughout the book — wormy, a spider named Cannonball, Donuts the Mouse, a snail, and, of course, FatCat. I love how the animals adore the true King of the cosmos.

We have all the FatCat books, the handsome larger picture book editions (including the stunning Easter one. Take a look at the publisher’s webpage here showing and describing them all, and swing back here (please) and order any of them from us at 20% off. Superlative!

Jesus Loves the Little Children, All the Children of the World board book Tara Hackney (IVP Kids) $9.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.20

What a simple notion — the lovely, life-changing words of the simple children’s song, but with a fresh lyrical adaptation —and with visual twist. It has real photos of real children from all over the world. Multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, each spread shows kids doing something from their culture — in one they are all eating; in one they all have different sorts of hats or turbans; in another they are all in the water. There are a few photos of little babies and there are some of older kids.

“That means you and that means me, made and loved so perfectly.” What a delight.

100 Sheep: A Counting Parable board book Amy-Jill Levine & Sandy Eisenberg Sasson,, illustrated by Margaux Megabuck (flyway books) $10.00 // OUR SALE PRCIE = $8.00

This is a small board book adaptation of the larger children’s picture book, Who Counts? 100 Sheep, 10 Coins, and 2 Sons. (That book looks at three of Jesus’s parables with numbers.) This little one is just about the one missing sheep. Where can it be? This retelling of he parable of the lost sheep — by a Jewish New Testament scholar and a Jewish rabbi with interest in interfaith friendship and great children’s storytelling — will also help with counting skills. But more importantly, they say, it shows “that God’s love finds us wherever we go.”  Nicely done.

You Are Special board book Max Lucado, illustrated by Sergio Martinez (Crossway) $8.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.19

I suppose you know that the prolific, upbeat, eloquent, and always tenderly evangelical Max Lucado has done several full sized children’s books, several about this heartwarming story of a wooden creature, little people called Wemmicks, carved by their beloved woodworker, Eli.

This is a lovely little board book adaptation drawn from the larger You Are Special picture book, perfect to tuck into a gift basket for a little one maybe as young as 3 up to maybe 6 years old. It’s a truth a child is never too young to hear, told in a way they will remember. You are special. You are loved.  It is, I might add, a remarkable insight that the mean things said, the ugly stickers, don’t stick to you if they don’t matter so much. That you belong to One who loves you is a deep, deep truth that can help even kids who are bullied or criticized.

Little Prayers for Ordinary Days Katy Bowser Hutson, Flo Paris Oakes, and Tish Harrison Warren, illustrated by Liita Forsyth (IVP Kids) $15.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

There are oodles of books of prayers and prayer books for children, many spanning the prayer concerns throughout an ordinary day, helping children sense the presence of God in the normal ups and downs of a child’s daily life. Many are good. This — trust me on this — is one of the best.

Knowing or knowing about these three moms gives me great confidence in their wordsmithing and their theological chops. They are all public thinkers, doctrinally aware, liturgically active, with artistic gifts and temperaments. I adore the two that I know personally and respect the third who has done good curriculum development and other ministry at her parish. What a trio of women.

But the proof is in the praying, so reading these little prayers out loud and see their weaving together a profound Christian understanding of life and times, and their lovely language designed for use with little ones — wow. Relevant and plainspoken but not overly informal. Nice phrases but not overdone. They are prayers, after all, not poems.  I’m so impressed. This is a gem of a little book, not too much, sometimes just a little funny, sometimes restrained, always reverent, if very down to Earth. Yay.

Chasing God’s Glory Dorina Lazo Gilmore-Young, illustrated by Alyssa De Asia (Waterbrook) $12.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

We’ve suggested this fun one before and our enthusiasm hasn’t waned. In this colorfully illustrated child’s story, the little girl Kayla asked her mom to describe God’s glory. Off Mama and Kayla go, on an bicycling adventure looking for signs of wonder and awe, glimpses of the divine in and around their town. From dancing to daffodils, green peppers and bright sunrises, kind words and loving hugs (and so much more) are reminders of God’s glory all around us every day.

If children can be taught this lovely awareness of the presence of God in and around all things — and maybe if they could teach it back to us — the world would be surely a better placed, enchanted as the philosophers say, filled with the nearness of God and the glory of His presence in the ordinary stuff of life. Love it! Maybe for ages 3 – 8 or so.

This African American and beautifully passionate author is a podcaster and glory-chaser herself; the illustrator is Filipino, living in Manila.

I Am God’s Dream Matthew Paul Turner, illustrated by Estrella Bascunan (Convergent) $12.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

This colorful and fun and very encouraging children’s book is, in a way, a follow-up to Turner’s creation story When God Made the World and his lovely When God Made You. This one is, as they put it, “a beautiful celebration of the unique, strong, and wonderful traits in every child — and how God delights in each and every one.”

Again, this is a message with a value that we cannot underestimate — this is a great little resource to help a child know he or she is special;  talented and gifted and called and beloved, with unique character traits (even quirky ones) that delight God and will enable them to make their own marker on the world. For children ages 4 – 8.

Spring Sings Ellie Holcomb, illustrated by Laura Ramos (B+H Kids) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Some of our customers and friends follow Ellie Holcomb— she is an award winning singer-songwriter (as is her husband, Drew Holcomb.) She has done an adult devotional that is popular (Fighting Words) and a number of great children’s books, such as Who Sang the First Songs, an imaginative retelling of the creation narrative and the great Don’t Forget to Remember.

Spring Sings is a l medium sized book, thick board book like pages with a real cover, showing that Eastertime and Springtime both invite us to delight in God’s gifts and to realize — as she puts it — “each bird and bloom is a reminder that God’s love can make all things new.” Spring is singing once again — this book celebrates that in vibrant ways. Poetic and evocative, yet for little ones. Very nice.

The Story of God’s Love for You Sally Lloyd-Jones (Zondervan) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We have highlighted this before and we wish that more people knew about it. I hope you know the best-selling Jesus Storybook Bible — “…where every chapter whispers His name.” It is our biggest selling Bible for preschoolers and is so well-written and enjoyable (and captures so well the unfolding drama of the whole Scriptural story) that we are always happy to recommend it even to somewhat older children.

Because so many like giving it, the publishers came up with a brilliant idea— they took the text of Sally Lloyd-Jones’s Jesus Storybook Bible and removed the fabulous children’s artwork (by ) and dressed it up with just a touch of cool, handsome graphics, and reissued it, with a ribbon marker, as a gift book for older kids or teens. They don’t have to know it was first a kiddie Bible as the eloquent storytelling is good for all ages.

Naturally, we highly. Recommend having The Jesus Storybook Bible for little ones, but this hand-sized edition (with the same texts) designed for youth is a treasure in its own right. Hooray.

God With Us: Bible Stories on the Road to Emmaus Matt Mikalatos, illustrated by David Shephard (Waterbrook) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I’d say this is good for little children, but, frankly, it is ideal for older kids and even teens. Written in graphic novel style with wonderful cartoons and word bubbles, it might appeal to those hooked on Marvel Comics and the like. We’ve got other Marvel type Bibles (think of the best-selling Action Bible and its various spin-offs) and the set of Manga Bibles we’ve mentioned.) So while this isn’t a new idea, it is an absolutely fabulous volume, a short children’s Bible storybook that is full of coherence and wonder.

One of the things that I like about this — besides trusting the theology, vision, and storytelling chops of Matt Mikalatos — is how it tells the big story of Scripture from creation to resurrection by way of the famous walk on the road to Emmaus. Believe me, your hearts will be warmed within you as you read.  It is clever and faithful to the Luke text as it tells us that Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures to teach about himself. This is such a wonderful passage and we simply must teach it and its methodology (linking the story of Jesus to the story of God’s people in the Old Testament) to our children.  Matt and David hit a home run, too, with the upbeat details in the unfolding story.

As it says on the back cover, “this intriguing, funny, and heartfelt journey explores Scripture from Creation to the Resurrection through the eye of curious children (and grown-ups) walking with Yeshua on the Road to Emmaus.”  Hooray.

All the Tales from the Ark Avril Rowlands (Lion Children’s) $9.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

Except for a small black and white illustration that graphically enhances the start of every chapter, this is not a picture storybook, but a chapter book type of volume for young readers. The print is not tiny and it would be delightful to read out loud, too.

These are upbeat and clever fictional stories of what might have happened on the ark In one scene, Mr. Noah talked with God about his issues with the animals.

Listen God, it’s not too late. You need a lion-tamer for this job, or a big game hunter, or a zoo keeper. And I’m scared of spiders and we’ve got two on board.

This fairly thick paperback has forty fun and quite original stories, an older book that won awards in the UK years ago. There were originally three volumes of these tales and in All the Tales from the Ark we get all three volumes in one paperback. We are delighted to recommend them to you now.

Grit and Grace: Heroic Women of the Bible Caryn Rivadeneira, illustrated by Katy Betz (Beaming Books) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Speaking of creative re-telling of Biblical accounts, if the All the Tales from the Ark one is playful and fun, this one, while fun, is exceptionally profound in many ways. It reimagines through creative first person narratives what seventeen women of the Bible would say if they were telling their own personal stories.

Designed for pre-teen girls to connect them with the women of the Bibles, we think this is one of the most imaginative and engaging books of this sort for middle-schoolers. Boys or girls.

Great, thoughtful writers we admire — Amy Julia Becker, Jen Pollock Michel, Jennifer Grant, and Tracey Bianchi, for instance, all rave about it  It really is fantastic.

As Haley Gray Scott puts it,

Witty. Imaginative. Reverent. As a mom of two girls, I’ve wanted to teach my daughters to be confident, courageous, and kind, because God sees them and their life matters. I’m truly delighted to have Grit and Grace as a resource…

Psalms of Wonder: Poems from the Book of Songs Carey Wallace, illustrated by Khoa Le (flyaway books) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

When we first saw this we were simply overjoyed, almost stunned by the beauty of the retelling of these Psalms accompanied by rich, deep, artful illustrations. Carey Wallace, we reminded you, then, was a novelist we admired who had done a spectacular, large, colorfully told and creatively illustrated book of saints. (She has since released on Eerdmans, an amazing book called The Discipline of Inspiration: The Mysterious Encounter with God at the Heart of Creativity; $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59.)

Anyway, this lush collection of full page (or sometimes two-page) paraphrases with art on the facing page, include several in each of six categories — Songs of Wonder, Songs of Courage, Songs of Comfort, Songs of Joy, Songs of Protections, and Songs of Love. She tells us that Psalms are songs we sing to God. This could be given to readers of almost any age. About 30 Psalms in all.

Kaylee Prays for the Children of the World Helen Lee, illustrated by Shin Maeng (IVP Kids) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I adore the editor, writer, speaker, and leader, Helen Lee. Her illustrator, Shin Maeng, also illustrated The Liberator Has Come, a book by Sarah Shin, another author we adore. This is a great pairing even if it is Helen’s first picture book. Kudos to them both.

This is one of my favorite recent children’s books as it tells the gentle story of a girl and her grandfather who read the newspaper together each morning— fetched by their lively dog Kendo — looking for things to pray about. The devout Asian-American grandfather helps his granddaughter make a poster-board of things the Kim family prays about, and she increasingly is learning not only to care for the world’s global needs but to search for God’s hand in things.

One day she notices a photo of a sad boy in Turkey and wonders about the backstory. More, she wonders if God will hear their prayers for this refugee. The artwork here is so compelling and the story, while still lovely and sweet, turns a bit poignant. And so, the lesson here is creatively told and nuanced with wisdom, but assuring us all — children and adult readers — that God hears every prayer.

There are mentions of tragedies throughout the world but the real theme is different ways to pray and a few sentences she forms as prayer. This is a spectacular story and I only hope it inspires other families to pray clearly and compassionately for things happening around the world. What a nice model of how to do that.

There’s a neat note from the author at the end that adults will love. She gives a shout out to the legendary Window on the World book and mentions a few quick things. You’ll learn that the dog Keedo is named after the Korean word for “pray.” And you’ll be reminded of important Bible passages such as Romans 8:26, Psalm 34:18, and James 4:8. She explains the Korean practice of tongsung kido and affirms Asian and African habits of praying together, simultaneously. This is a good touch — kudos, Helen, IVP Kids, and artist Shin Maeng.

The Man in the Tree and the Brand New Start: A True Story about Zacchaeus and the Difference Knowing Jesus Makes Carl Laferton, illustrated by Catalina Echeverri (The Good Book Company) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I hope you do not tire of us celebrating this “Tales that Tell the Truth” series, a gospel-centered set of books that so playfully and yet so faithfully tell Biblical stories, often relating several key passages or incidences and showing how they connect to point us to Christ and his death and resurrection and Kingdom coming. From God’s Very Good Plan to the Easter one, The Garden, The Curtain, and the Cross (also by Laferton and Echeverri and similarly $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59) and so many more, we love them all. (See the full list here at the publisher and then come back and order any from us — all at 20% off.) I think they are about the best children’s Bible story books we’ve ever seen. (A few, you will notice, have been done in board book format, and if you want those, be sure to say.)

This is an especially fun one and it is about Zacchaeus.

I love how it starts:

There are three things you need to know about Zacchaeus. One: he was very short. Two: he was very rich But three… he was not very happy.”

I like how the back cover describe it:

Find out why Zacchaeus ended up in a tree, why Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the tree, and how Bacchus changed completely (and ended up much happier.) And discover the difference that Jesus can make to you, too!

Our kids should feel a sense of joy and goodness when they know they belong to Jesus. And it doesn’t hurt to see the facts of economic justice that flow out of this transformation having been touched by Him.  Kudos once again to Laferton for telling the story so well, and to the marvelous Echeverri, who’s whimsical work set these “Tales That Tell the Truth” apart with verve and grace. Hooray.

The Prince of Yorsha Doon Andrew Peterson, illustrated by Kristina Lister (Waterbrookj) $14.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Okay, this is a fun, adventurous picture book by the widely appreciated and deeply respected literary lover, author, sing-songwriter (and founder of the Rabbit Room and their publishing imprint.) It says on the back, “Decode mysteries, unlock secrets, infiltrate a palace, and discover hidden treasures.”

And that’s just the start as your young readers journey with a reluctant hero (who, they say, “evades enemies, protects and priceless treasure, rescues and prince, and learns the importance of friendship.”

If you followed any of Peterson’s four volume Wingfeather Saga you may recall that a fifth volume came out, Wingfeather Tales, and this is a picture book adaptation of one of the stories in that supplemental Tales book. What fun. Their right be a moral to the story, a value or principle taught, but, come on: it’s a rip-roaring adventure tale. With one heck of a great title: The Prince of Yorsha Doon.

I Am The Spirit of Justice Jemar Tisby, illustrated by Nadia Fisher (Zonderkidz) $18.99   // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

When we announced this earlier we noted that we could hardly believe how good it was. Again, we want to celebrate this fine book commemorating and teaching us about — in fabulously creative prose — Christian leaders who stood against racism over the years of America’s battle with her original sin. Although it is a kid’s picture book edition of American historian Jemar Tisby’s latest (The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race and Resistance; $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99) I Am… could wisely be used in any black history class for families or children, or to supplement any homeschooling history class for little ones. It certainly is a wonderful stand-alone volume and I think should be in every church library.

The prose is glorious as it shows how the Holy Spirit of God works as the spirit of justice through so many who fought for justice. Only in the marvelous appendix do you see who each of the characters portrayed are. Naturally, you’ll see Crispus Attucks and Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglas and Ida. B Well… and some whose names are not as well known. Even without those historical details, though, the lovely writing of those who “erupted like a volcano, igniting faith in the souls of those who risked everything to deliver freedom to all” makes this a keeper.

Stories of I Am the Spirit of Justice Jemar Tisby, illustrated by Jemar Tisby (Zonderkidz) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This is a hardback full of youth-oriented descriptions of many of the characters Tisby teaches about in his adult book The Spirit of Justice. Each chapter is a different person, spanning four centuries from the colonial era to today.  There are over 40 short biographies of these justice activists and faith leaders.

I’ve read and we have stocked oodles of books about black history for youngsters and I think this may be the best I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Zondervan for releasing this, and thanks to Jemar — recent PhD in history that he is, significant adult scholar of several riveting books — for taking the time to share this information for older children. It’s fabulous.

As it say on the back cover of Stories of I Am the Spirit of Justice, “Each chapter explores how the work of these remarkable figures can inspire us today.” Most of us need all the help we can get. Don’t miss this one.

Bless the Earth: A Collection of Poetry for Children to Celebrate and Care for Our World edited by June Corner & Nancy Upper Ling, illustrated by Keum Jin Song (Convergent) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

With Earth Day a few days after Easter this year, it’s a perfect time to celebrate God’s good world and the healing the resurrection promises. In any case, this is lovely, anytime. They describe the beautifully illustrated collection of poems and prayers like this:

Bless the Earth shows the miracle of our planet Earth through beautiful imagery and delightful poetry, calling all people, young and old, to care for our wonderful world. This sweet and welcoming anthology for ages 3 to 8 [I might say 4 – 10) knits together our common humanity and helps us understand how to respect our neighbors — humans, plants,, and animals alike — and reimagine a world that is healthy and whole.

CHILDREN’S BIBLES

We have dozens of children’s Bibles and there are many we adore. If you’ve got children, you need several, of course. From the already-mentioned Jesus Storybook Bible to Desmond Tutu’s wonderful Children of God Storybook Bible to The Biggest Story Bible Storybook by Kevin DeYoung with very stylized, ultra-hip design by Don Clarke to the wondrous “I wonder…” approach of Growing in God’s Love: A Story Bible, to the classy, Lion Children’s Bible for somewhat older readers. I hope you recall our recommendations last Christmas time of The Peace Table: A Storybook Bible (produced mostly by Mennonites and one of the most innovative and captivating children’s Bibles you’ll find) and the must-have God’s Big Picture Storybook by Bible genius N. T Wright. We have both of those at 20% OFF, too.  We do have a lot for all ages and styles — call us if you want to chat.

Here are four that are fairly recent.

God’s Stories as Told By God’s Children a Bible for Normal People project, various illustrators (The Bible for Normal People) $39.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99

This is a tremendously interesting brand new children’s Bible that I’d recommend for families with older elementary age readers — the art is very well done and it is designed expertly (man, I like the look) but it is remarkable because of two or three important features. There is nothing quite like it in print.

Firstly, The Bible for Normal People is an honest and non-fundamentalistic Bible teaching ministry (founded by Peter Enns, who we like a lot. His book How the Bible Actually Works is sensible and helpful, avoiding literalistic assumptions or overly simplistic readings, with a bit of a sub-text that the Bible, and faith, is about entering a wise and just way of life in relationship with God, not dogma or certitude about the details.)  So this is, if not exactly “progressive”,  a fabulous alternative to books which are overly pious or even dishonest in their covering up the complications in the messy Biblical narratives. How can we help kids adore and live into the Word of God if we give them a simple or even weaponized version? This Bible storybook gets us honest and serious, making contributions to children’s Biblical teaching that you hardly find anywhere.  It even notices when the Bible story or text actually is a conversation and invites children into that conversation. Hooray for this.

Secondly, it is done by — get this — a batch of ordinary women and men who are, mostly, leaders, activists, scholars, and thinkers, some who identify as evangelical, some who are  highly liturgical, some who are Anabaptists, some who are progressive, from around the world. Each contributing author has a particular strength in helping kids grapple with the meaning of the Biblical texts — Shane Claiborne on the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, First Nations leader Randy Woodley on the “new heavens and new Earth” — and by drawing on some of the best and most passionate leaders today, readers can’t help but be challenged to care deeply.  It is gentle, informative, a bit provocative, and very, very engaging.

From Marlena Graves to Randy Woodley, Pete Enns to Brent Strawn (one of the leaning Old Testament guys writing today) Brad Jersak to Ellen Davis (famously of Duke Divinity School, and another absolute leader in helping people care about the Old Testament.)  We get mystics like Richard Rohr and peace activist/pastors like Aussie Jarrod McKenna and even a Catholic scholar of the postmodern philosopher Zizek, Marika Rose.

Again, what other children’s Bible has readings from liberationist Miguel A. De La Torre or Egyptian Presbyterian Safwat Marzouk or Messiah University professor and anti-racism activist Drew Hart or Shannon Evans, author of Feminist Prayers for My Daughter and, recently, The Mystics Would Like a Word? Even if you don’t have kids, you’ve got to see this.

Aside from the extraordinary substance found within this collection of global faith leaders, activists, and Biblical scholars, remember that these edgy thinkers and writers have been invited to write for children. This is a children’s story Bible, after all, and is — as the subtitle puts it — “as told by God’s children.” All of these authors (and the various illustrators) know they are God’s beloved and want to help kids (and others) enter into the big story of God’s work as revealed in the Scriptures. They want to unlock the Good Book for engaged and serious reading. There are discussion questions— fairly open-ended and quite thoughtful — and a few good sidebars for inquisitive readers. And there are QR codes for more info. What a resource this is! Don’t miss it.

The Book of Belonging: Bible Stories for Kind and Contemplative Kids Mariko Clark, illustrated by Rachel Eleanor (Convergent) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This has been one of the most eagerly awaiting children’s Bibles to come out in a while and we were thrilled to describe it back before Christmas. With just lovely writing and fabulously rich illustrations it is designed well and we can’t say enough about it.

One of the themes is — obviously — belonging; God loves us so and God brings us into a community of care and courage.n everyone has dignity and this grand story in Scripture shows us what it means to truly belong, to be secure, to be loved.

Also, it is about the only children’s Bible that we know of that emphasizes women of the Bible and is crafted in a way to enhance the goodness and beauty and wonder of these true stories. They avoid violence and feature God’s gentle, liberating power, even using women and girls (as the texts actually show, so they aren’t making this up!)  It is not only for girls —I really believe this! — but it certainly is ideal for girls, maybe ages 6 or 7 up to 12 or so. It’s a gorgeous volume, with some very good historical matters portrayed well (including Hebrew and Greek names.) It’s very highly recommended.

The Biggest Story Family Devotional Kevin DeYoung (Crossway) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

If the first two listed above might be most popular among those with more mainline denominational tastes or those who have concerns that some Christian traditions (and their children’s resources) might imply some acceptance of violence and even brutality, this book features well the core message of God’s redemptive power to, through His mercy and grace, to overcome sin and bring saving faith to the people of God. (In an earlier children’s book, DeYoung described Christ’s work, drawing on the promise of Genesis 3, as the “snake-crusher.”) DeYoung is a vibrant PCA pastor, active in such as the gospel coalition, so he may not like the progressive scholarly behind the first two options. Yet, we appreciate his big The Biggest Story Bible Storybook and this family devotional edition breaks down the stories of that vivid and contemporary looking story Bible with daily readings, discussion questions, family stuff and closing prayers.

This is a great idea, adapting a big children’s Bible into a useful daily reader for families. It is a sturdy hardback, sans dust-jacket, and very handsomely done, with some playful quirks and artful design. Evangelically solid and rather Reformed insights between the lines, inviting us all to grace and gratitude for God’s faithfulness and salvation.

Love God Greatly Bible Storybook Love God Greatly illustrations by Angie Alape Perez with art from children from around the world (Tommy Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This one is quite new and very special for a couple of reasons. There is an adequate amount of text making it interesting for even elementary kids — I’d say ages 5 or 6 to 11 or 12 — and there are fabulous art pieces (beside the more conventional illustrations by Perez) and prayers from real kids from around the globe. Love God Greatly is a mission agency that is trying to make God’s Word accessible to women and children in every nation, “regardless of where they live or what language they speak.” You can imagine their challenges and joys a s they continue to help people “love God greatly with their lives.” They are doing transition work and encouraging Bible study one by one by one.

These captivating children’s illustrations — most are really quite striking — showcasing how they understand God’s work found in 40 cherished stories from the Old and New Testaments. I like the big graphics that name the Bible story on each facing page. A winner!

AND — FOR ALL THE GROWN UPS ON YOUR LIST:

Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus Wesley Hill (IVP) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I’ve reviewed this book about the theology of resurrection and the way more liturgically-shaped congregations celebrate the season more thoroughly a few weeks back but want to underscore it’s value here, now. This series about the church calendar is succint and moving and this one is fantastic. It’s small, too, making a nice gift for nearly any one.

The newest in the great “Fullness of Time” series of hand-sized, succinct hardbacks, Easter is, I suppose, the one many of us have been waiting for. Advent, Christmastime, Epiphany, Pentecost and Lent have all been published (with Ordinary Time coming next year) and yet we’ve been especially eager for this. How excited and glad I was when I heard that Wes Hill was invited to write it. Edited by Esau McCaulley, each of these have been very good, each in their own way, by robust practitioners of the distinctive habits of the church year. Each offers a historical and theological overview of the church season under consideration and draws out practical stuff to do in order to more appropriately and fruitfully experience the blessings of each particular season of the liturgical calendar.

Easter, the season of resurrection, of course, carries a message and realty that we can simply never get enough of. Obviously I hope nearly everyone on our mailing list orders this. It’s that important, and Wes Hill does such a fine job, it deserves your attention. I mean that.

As I started to read Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus I’ll admit to you, dear readers, that I was a tad reluctant. I wanted to read this fresh, for the first time, on Easter. Alas, an occupational hazard here on the frontlines of bookselling, I had to read it early.

Read the rest of my review here, or, just order it now. You won’t regret it…  Soon we will shout “He Is Risen!”

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TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN TO CLICK ON THE “ORDER” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you want us to ship your orders. We’re eager to serve you in a way that you prefer. Let us know your hopes. We’re not automated, so let’s talk!

Of course the weight and destination of your particular package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

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

• United States Postal Service has an option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.83; 2 lbs would be $5.58. This is the cheapest method available and sometimes is quicker than UPS, but not always.
• United States Postal Service has another, quicker option called “Priority Mail” which is $9.00, if it fits in a flat-rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that might take the next size up which is $9.80. “Priority Mail” gets more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may even take longer than USPS. Sometimes they are cheaper than Priority. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

If you just want to say “cheapest” that is fine. If you are eager and don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Keep in mind the possibility of holiday supply chain issues and slower delivery… still, we’re excited to serve you.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

I’m not going to lie; I was moved to tears more than once while listening again to author, therapist, and thought leader Curt Thompson.

It was a real privilege and a great joy to get to sell books at the recent “Compelled by Love” event sponsored by the wonderful Water Street Mission (in Lancaster, PA), a storied, multi-dimensional, anti-poverty ministry that is thinking hard about sustainable service to the poor and marginalized, the unhoused and the addicted (and insofar as they can come alongside them, by starting tutoring programs and creating affordable housing, their children and families.) I admire them even more now that I’ve learned more about their big plans serving others in the name of Jesus.

The event is a way for the Mission to honor the hard work ordinary pastors do and to equip them a bit to serve the hurting in their own neighborhoods and cultural contexts.

This year — a bit different than other “Compelled” events — they brought in Curt Thompson, who is a working psychiatrist with some unusual and profoundly healing clinical practices that I will mention in a moment. I think it was notable that Water Street Mission wanted to help local pastors deepen their capacities to serve those who are suffering in their congregations, those weighed down by grief and sorrow, mental health challenges and loneliness, not just the quintessentially homeless. Curt’s latest book — which I mentioned (again) in last week’s BookNotes, making suggestions for some late Lenten reading — is The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope and it is spectacular. I named it as one of the Best Books of 2024 (it came out in the late fall) and I’m still thinking about it. When Curt started reflecting the other day so very well (preaching?) on Romans 5, as he does in the book, I leaned in to catch his wise words for my own aching heart.

As is often the case, we take more books than we should to author events. (In his discussion of shame it dawned on me that maybe one of the reasons we buy too many author books most times when we do gigs like this — a habit I’ve attributed to my optimism in the book buying audience — may be that I fear being embarrassed. I don’t want to be ashamed of a snafu or be seen as incompetent as a book provider if we run out. Hmm. So we end up with a lot of extras.)

Which is to say that before we pay to return our overstock titles, we’d like to give our faithful BookNotes readers an opportunity to pick up a few on sale. An amazing sale.

For FIVE DAYS ONLY we have four books by Curt Thompson on sale at 40% off.

Wow, this is a deeper discount than we are usually able to do, but it beats us paying shipping to return these extras. It’s a win/win if you order some now. This sale goes through the end of day, Friday April 4th (or while supplies last.) ORDER NOW to get these great discounts.

Curt also recommended four titles for his audience at the Water Street event and we have those four ON SALE for 40% OFF as well.  Again, the hefty discount offer ends Friday at midnight or while supplies last.

REFLECTIONS ON THE DAY WITH AUTHOR CURT THOMPSON AND…

The day unfolded with four major talks by Curt which seemed somewhat to mirror his four volumes. Or at least the bookseller in me noticed that. He moved from asking the question “what story are we telling?” about ourselves (and who or what has shaped that narrative?) to questions of shame and then to re-ordered desires. (We are “wanting” creatures, he wisely noted, drawing on ancient wisdom from Scripture, channeling pre-modern notions from Augustine and post-modern ones from Jamie Smith — we are not “brains on a stick” but we “are what we love.”)

In any case, if we tell a story of our lives through our lives and that story misses the seminal, foundational portions of the Biblical narrative that insist that we are loved and made in God’s image, we are thereby stuck in a less than hopeful story about ourselves and our world. If we miss the Triune God creating us from dirt with dignity and the vocation to extend Eden’s blessings of goodness and beauty into the whole world we will be people of what he calls “the second wound” rather than those who are blessed to be a blessing. You know…

To hear a psychiatrist with an emphasis on neuroscience (and, in fact, neurobiology) talking about brain studies and faith offering moving stories of trauma and community, is nothing short of brilliant. Of the fairly recent movement of Christian thinkers writing about neurology, the brain’s plasticity, how relationships shape human development and such, Curt is nearly a pioneer and certainly a really great popularizer of data emerging for the latest research.

And he asked some tough questions, about our own sense of hurt and shame, and what it might take to find people who can help us in the process of re-ordering our desires, finding new hope and resilience as we want the right stuff — goodness, beauty, truth, community.  He invited us to Christ-like virtues as we speak truth in this complicated cultural moment.

It was remarkable how, after his probing questions, in small groups folks exhibited vulnerability to share with others their past woundedness and what drives their dysfunctions (even in their style of leadership and ministry as well-intended pastors.)

And I was struck when I read the next day about one of the far-right extremists, a Congressman from Tennessee, who had said inaccurate and mean-spirited things about Kamala Harris being a “DEI hire” and therefore mediocre at best. It came out later how many times this MAGA leader (who recently ranted about how NPR hates our country and “hates our Lord”) has been investigated for tax fraud and failure to comply with standard laws about reporting finances (talk about the pot calling the kettle black).) I have been furious with this hypocrite who seems to care little about justice and the common good but, corrupt as he is, despises so many of his fellow citizens and the institutions that have served our culture.

I was, I’ll admit, self-righteously angry when I learned that, in fact, this extremist gentleman supposedly representing Tennessee had parents who supported a black woman running for office in the 1960s, who were endangered as a couple for their brave stands in education for the “underdog” as his father put it. How did a well-loved boy with admirable parents end up so spiteful and closed-minded and dishonest?

And then my friend David Dark, author of We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence (Broadleaf Books; $26.99 // OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $21.59) asked him publicly, “Who harmed you?” Surely, if I can read into David’s question, the dangerous ideologue is hurting. What ruptures in his soul have helped shape his despicable public demeanor?

And I wondered — has David been reading Curt Thompson? What loads are people carrying? What secrets?  How have their deepest longings been deformed? Are not many folks, both decent and despicable, deeply wounded? Have they grown dis-connected (in the language of attachment theory) and do they experience over-riding anxiety about not being adequate or loved? Have they/we turned ugly — haven’t all of us at one point or another? — to mask our shame? What disordered values emerge from our disordered loves? What ruptures need to be repaired in our heart of hearts? David Dark’s morally serious and ultimately generous question spoke volumes.

Which is to say, even though Dr. Thompson did not bring political polarization up in his talks, the story he told — we are made well and loved deeply, even if fallen and shaped by sin and shame, and in Christ can be given new hope as we are transformed to live as harbingers of the coming Kingdom of God — is the most helpful framework for thinking about what is good in the world, what is wrong, and what, in Christ, we are to do as agents of His reconciliation. From our most intimate desires to our public demeanor, from our home life to our political life, we must ask what story are we telling? And what story do we really want to be telling?

((Aside: There is a brand new book just out that invites us to do this sort of work exploring past hurts and traumas with generosity to ourselves and it will be an important resource alongside the Curt Thompson titles I’m highlighting here. We’ll hopefully soon review Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything by Adam Young (Baker Books; $22.99 // our 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $18.39.) It has a forward by Dan Allender and travels similar ground to Thompson, even drawing on the important work of Dr. Daniel Siegel. We have it at 20% off.))

As a speaker and author, Curt Thompson is fun and funny, enthusiastic and passionate, and keenly aware that his work as a healer of the wounded psyches and relationships of so many hurting folks, is to be framed by this bigger Biblical narrative; it is that story that can be the pivot point for those learning to tell a new story in their lives. He knows while moving through anxiety and stress and shame and hurt we can re-develop and nurture a new set of Christ-like yearnings, convictions, and practices, re-shaping even our callings and careers. It is interesting (but not at all surprising) that this psychiatrist routinely cites missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin. Makes sense, eh?

And, again, part of his teaching is that we do not, we cannot, do this alone. We cannot by ourselves heal from our hurts let alone flourish as creative people sent on mission by the God who is known in Jesus the Christ, who is redeeming this broken world. We need supportive friendships, we need small groups, we need authentic community in our neighborhoods and congregations and we need church. Part of his own clinical work includes inviting clients into what he calls “confessional communities” where they pursue new loves for beauty and goodness together. Wow.

My hat is off to the good work being done by Water Street Mission in Lancaster County to serve the poor and build better social structures and economies. And I’m grateful they introduced the healing work of Curt Thompson to pastoral leaders there. It was a joy to participate and great to be reminded of how very much I like Curt and his helpful books.  As noted, we have them now at a rare discount, 40% off, while supplies last. Sale ends Friday night.

Please jump to the bottom to click on the Hearts & Minds order tab, giving us all the needed info so we can promptly fill your order. Thanks.

FOUR BOOKS BY CURT THOMPSON – 40% OFF (five days only.)

Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships Curt Thompson (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.39

On the cover of this, Thompson’s first book, the long subtitle says: “Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships” and that says most of it nicely. This really is an introduction to faith-based thinking about neuroscience and how brain studies can help us understand the ways in which spiritual practices can transform our relationships. Knowing a bit about how we’re wired will go a long way to enhance our lives. This really is a great read, a tad sciencey at times, but with lots of stories and passion. There are great chapters such as “The Prefrontal Cortex and the Mind of Christ” and “Neuroscience: Sin and Redemption.”

I love how he speaks of “the repair of the resurrection” and it is here he first explains how the brain literally works in interaction with us. See the great foundational chapter called “The Mind and Community: The Brain on Love, Mercy, and Justice.” You’ll love it.

For the best overview of Thompson’s work in this field, this is a great place to start. The cover is a little sci-fi, but it is a soulful, thoughtful and very lovely book. Highly recommended.

The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves Curt Thompson (IVP) $27.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $16.79

This is our biggest seller of Curt’s four books and he told me that it is, by far, the one that has gotten the most traction within the book buying world. I have said, often, that it is the best book on the topic, Biblically-rooted, pastorally-wise, informed by good theology and good science. Curt’s obvious love for the Biblical narrative and a storied sense of how God’s Word should be read and lived into is inspiring and his stories of those stuck in cycles of shame and struggle are very helpful. I think this is a really great read but, more importantly, it is a necessary read.

I’ve been waiting for Curt’s book for fifteen years. As a pastor, professor and clinician, I see shame’s devastation firsthand, particularly in the destructive coping mechanisms that accompany it. Curt doesn’t offer quick fixes but instead provides a biblically wise, scientifically sound vision for a life lived in God’s grand story, a story that re-narrates our shame stories and enables us to experience healing and engage in mission. I’ll be recommending this book often.  — Chuck DeGroat, professor of pastoral care and counseling, Western Theological Seminary, cofounder and senior fellow, Newbigin House of Studies

And, for an even more personal testimonial about this powerhouse of a book, listen to Gregory Thompson (a pastor, artist, playwright, anti-racism organizer, author, and founder of New City Commons.) Greg writes:

It took me a month of foraging before my heart finally yielded the courage I needed to open this book on shame. After all, I’ve spent most of my life trying to flee from shame, crouching pathetically as its shadows drew near, surrendering helplessly to its merciless story of who I am. Why in the world would I now–on purpose!–turn and face the central menace of my entire life? Why would any of us? Here’s why: because God loves us. And because God loves us, he follows us in our fleeing, finds us in our shadows and fashions for us a new story–the true story–of ourselves, a story in which we are not finally hated and cast away, but loved and welcomed in. This is what Curt Thompson taught me in this book. Yes, I opened it with fear of the darkness. But with each chapter, I felt like someone had opened a new window in my soul, taming my fears with new shafts of warm light. I read it with hope. I marked it with tears. I finished it with gratitude. And I commend it to anyone burdened by shame with something like pleading: Come out from hiding; it is not shame but Love that you will find!

The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community Curt Thompson (IVP) $28.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $17.39

Well, as I put it at the “Compelled” gathering the other day, standing behind stacks of these handsome hardback books, if The Soul of Shame documents the problems of we glorious wrecks and points us towards hope, then this one, The Soul of Desire, shows how that works, documenting a path towards wholeness.  Again, using neuroscience and profound theology, he playfully reminds us that we are creatures made to want, made to desire, born wanting to give ourselves to something. (There are lovely shades of James K.A. Smith here and you simply must read his You Are What You Love if you have not.) However, the things we most deeply long for must be cultivated — we have substituted other loves and lesser cares that living into the high calling of being a child of God. Can we actually nourish a longing for the right stuff?

Here is how he does it, and you’ve got to read The Soul of Desire for a fuller, more accurate story than my quick paraphrase: in his clinical therapist, the good Doctor invites clients to look at paintings, including abstract work by Japanese-American artist Makoto Fujimura. Yep, he tells patients to ponder profound beauty and see what happens.

Mako wrote an exquisite forward to this book (and some of his breathtaking work is reproduced in nice, full-color plates) and it is marvelous to actually see (and behold) some of the works he actually writes about in the book. Can people do this stuff together? You bet: again, Dr. Curt gets cohorts of clients together to become small groups, communities, if you will, learning to love beauty and goodness and living truthfully. What a story.

Rebekah Lyons writes about the impact this book had on her, citing a mantra from Curt, we were never meant to live alone. She notes, “the more you understand why you long for intimacy, the more empowered you will become to receive it.”

The Soul of Desire is much more than an account of this Christian therapist’s practice, although that part is fascinating. (I want to be in one of those groups, for crying out loud!) But the book is not only for therapist or those interested in the art of soul care. It is for all of us who may need this kind of intervention, calling us to want the right stuff, learn to yearn for beauty and goodness, and, by forming healthy, intimate relationships, becoming more effective agents of God’s work in the world, creating good stuff, beautifully. This may be his most dense work, but it is a true treasure, beautifully done, — a book to own and to discuss and to revisit.

The Soul of Desire is a feast of new creation hope. Weaving together wisdom from Scripture, insights from neurobiology, and stories of broken lives incrementally made whole, Curt Thompson offers much-needed guidance to those beset by grief, trauma, and shame. His daring proposal is that beauty isn’t a luxury but a necessity for our healing, and that this transformative beauty is best encountered and created in the context of vulnerable community. As a pastor, I’m eager to see this profound, even heavenly vision unleashed upon the church. As a person seeking to overcome trauma and shame myself, I’m deeply grateful for Curt’s compassion for hurting people and his unmistakable love for the God of beauty to whom this book ultimately points. — Duke Kwon, pastor of Grace Meridian Hill and coauthor of Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair

The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope Curt Thompson (Zondervan) $27.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $16.79

I could write much about this, Curt’s most recent book; in an earlier BookNotes tribute I admitted, at first, that I wondered if we really needed yet another book on suffering and resilience. Good as even he is as a thinker and writer, I wasn’t eager for another book on this perennial theme. And, man, was I wrong. I named The Deepest Place as one of the very best books of 2024.

I think the plain info shared by the publisher is clear and helpful. They write that his book is, “a unique and intimate exploration of how suffering, spiritual formation, and interpersonal neurobiology intersect. The Deepest Place by award-winning author Curt Thompson shows us how it’s not through the absence of grief but in the presence of it that we discover the joy of vulnerable community and a deeper sense of God’s abundant love.”

And yes, “vulnerable community” is vital. If we have experienced trauma we need durable friends that can embody hope and security.

Yep, he brings a hard truth here, drawing from brain studies and Scripture: hard times not only help us in learning the art of character formation and stamina and hope, but, in fact, are the needed kindling for such a transformational fire within. If vulnerable and receptive, we can find more than resilience, but “the formation of hope.”

And he does this with lots of stories and wise insight and also in conversation with some of the most powerful verses from the Epistle to the Romans. Wow.

Curt Thompson has done it again! No other voice today more skillfully weaves together expertise in psychology, neurobiology, and biblical theology and threads it all together with pastoral sensitivity and graceful writing. Curt brings all of this to bear on the most perplexing aspect of human existence: suffering. The book does not explain away pain with platitudes but tenderly examines human suffering in the raw, especially via stories from Curt’s own medical practice. Most importantly, the book takes readers to that deepest place indeed: the path marked out by Jesus and the apostle Paul, where we are invited to go through suffering with the hope of God’s redemption. It is a path we all must travel — and we are blessed to have Curt as a guide. — Curtis Chang, author of The Anxiety Opportunity, host of the Good Faith podcast, consulting professor, Duke Divinity School, and senior fellow, Fuller Theological Seminary

FOUR BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY CURT THOMPSON – EACH 40% OFF (five days only.)

We know these books well and stock them all so it was a delight to have these four on display at the “Compelled by Love” event. We’ve got some extra’s of these so, again, for five days only, we would love to send them out at 40% OFF. Wow.  Don’t miss this deadline for these big savings.

The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks (Moody Press) $15.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $9.59

I wish I would have asked Curt what he commends about this, but my guess is that it is a very easy and somewhat shorter read, inviting readers into some of the same content — we are often lonely, disoriented, even, and, yet, the church is called to be a vibrant community offering authentic relational support in one’s serious discipleship. What gives?

Wilder studied with Dallas Willard (and wrote a book or two about Willard and his model of formation and discipleship) but is considered a neuro-theologian. Hendricks uses his experience as a pastor of spiritual formation to engage with Wilder’s brain science stuff.

In a nutshell there are two halves of our being —the rational half and the relational half. A healthy community will resist “the toxic spread of narcissism” and find vibrant transformational faith more readily if we embrace both “halves” by becoming “full brained” congregations.

Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care Warren Kinghorn (Eerdmans) $29.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $17.99

We have bunches of books at Hearts & Minds on mental health these days — we always have, but more in the last decade as publishers of all kinds of released helpful resources. We’ve got the most basic guides about mental illness to thoughtful evangelical writers thinking graciously to trauma-informed pastoral caregivers to scholarly stuff about integrating faith and the study of psychology. Wayfaring is a great, solid, mature guidebook, perhaps a bit more scholarly than some, but readable and moving.  That Dr. Thompson was to pick one title on this specific topic and this is the one he chose speaks much.

John Swinton (himself quite the scholar in the field) wrote the forward, saying Kinghorn’s reframing mental health care in a theological vein is “a beautiful contribution” and a “gift to the church.”

As a person who cares for people with mental illness, I have been waiting for this book. Wayfaring is a learned account of how mental illness is not a problem for one person to fix but a challenge we can navigate by walking together. Reading this book, I was reminded about how we are all formed for relationship, all fellow creatures gifted with a profound freedom. We can accompany each other on the journey because we are all wayfarers on our way to the feast.  — Abraham M. Nussbaum, chief education officer, Denver Health; professor of psychiatry and assistant dean of graduate medical education, University of Colorado, author of the eloquent The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine

Warren Kinghorn is a wise and gracious wayfaring guide. With expertise in theology and psychiatry, Kinghorn competently and compassionately walks alongside us — clinicians and clients, Christians and the curious — all who are longing to live with greater mental health and flourishing on our journey to God. Kinghorn counsels us to journey with others, keeping the ultimate end in mind, attentive to whom and what we love, asking what is needed now, while remaining open to wonder and surprise. A feast awaits.    — Charlotte V. O. Witvliet, professor of psychology, Hope College

The Connected Life: The Art and Science of Relational Spirituality Todd W. Hall (IVP) $26.99 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $16.19

Those who listen in (or watch on YouTube) our every-other-week “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast might recall that I rambled on about this one just a few weeks ago. I noted that while it is a practical sort of self-help book, it is written out of a big vision of the Kingdom of God, framed by good thinking about all of life being redeemed by God who is faithful to His promises of fulfillment and restoration. So this is not a cheesy or simplistic handbook or quick-fix formula, but it is practical and very useful. And it’s really well-written. Dr. Hall is a professor of psychology at Biola University in L.A. and has spent years and years working on this relational spirituality approach.

Hall’s main point is that, not unlike attachment theory, human growth and maturity isn’t based only on mere information. Head knowledge, as we sometimes call it, is not enough: we need relationships and, as attachment theory shows, there will be trouble if we do not have a solid foundation of healthy attachment to others. These primal ruptures can keep us from the sort of growth we desire and deep Christian transformation can’t happen easily without rebuilding durable relationships. We just can’t do this human thing — let alone develop as serious followers of Jesus — by ourselves.

Look, it is no secret that we live in an increasingly fragmented and isolating world. Hall knows this first hand and he shares vulnerable lessons as he has spent his life working on this deeply integrated vision of Christian philosophy of psychology. He knows his neurobiology and Curt Thompson recommends this highly. He also wrote a truly lovely forward, which itself is well worth reading. Listen to my comments at our podcast if you’d like and I hope it invites you to buy it from us pronto. It’s a really great book for anyone that is interested in this topic or for anyone wondering how knowing spiritual truths comes in the context of relationships. Yes!

Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation Todd W. Hall with M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (IVP Academic) $40.00 // OUR 40% OFF SALE PRICE = $24.00

I’m glad Curt suggested this one — he calls it a masterpiece saying it is “prophetic in its conviction” and “beautifully imaginative…” This is a major text in the excellent line of books called the Christian Association for Psychological Studies Books (CAPS) series. It is a more scholarly study of what Hall means by “relational spirituality”, a hefty companion to the one listed above. This is about the relational aspects to our inner formation and how our walk with God is always lived out in community. What does it mean to “know and be known”? How do we live out our individual faith that is always embedded in context which necessarily includes others? If God says “it is not right for man to be alone” in the earliest days of our creation narrative, how do we give an account for the relational aspects of being human?

Here is how the publisher describes this important volume that is over 300 pages:

“Human beings are fundamentally relational — we develop, heal, and grow through relationships. Integrating insights from psychology and theology, Todd W. Hall and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall present a definitive model of spiritual transformation based on a relational paradigm, showing how transformation works practically in the context of relationships and community.”

Not only do they explore the need for (and the nature of) a relational spiritual paradigm but they have two excellent chapters on “The Process of Spiritual Transformation” that shows the relational dynamics of spiritual transformation and what they mean by spiritual community. This is rich, good stuff, even for those of us (maybe especially for those of us) who are not trained psychologists but sense a call to be agents of growth within our congregations. We are all, after all, “wounded healers” — right?

Others who have been wise voices in the movement of thinking Christianly about psychology have raved about this long-awaited text.  Listen:

In this long-awaited contribution, the Halls offer an irenic corrective to modern individualism and rationalism that continue to influence much Christianity in the twenty-first century, through this accessible and sophisticated integration of Scripture, Christian theology, contemporary psychological theory and research, and even some Christian philosophy. Building on the deep coherence evident in biblical teaching on the love of the Trinity and contemporary research on attachment and social neuroscience, the authors construct a rich and profound Christian model of human love that takes into account the impact of childhood experience yet gives hope of healing transformation. … there is simply no better introduction today to the formative role that interpersonal relationships play in human development, maturation, flourishing, and eternal life.        — Eric L. Johnson, professor of Christian psychology and counseling at Houston Baptist University, editor of Psychology and Christianity: Five Views

Working from the premise that God’s love is the reason, model, and source for the transformation of our natural love into Christian love, Todd and Liz Hall have provided an extended reflection that ably moves from theology to therapy, from psychological literature to implications for pastoral care. I think this volume will be especially generative for those in ministry who are trying to think in fresh ways about how to move ‘relational’ ministry from being a slogan to a reality. — Kelly M. Kapic, professor of theological studies at Covenant College, author of Embodied Hope and You’re Only Human

AND, Curt Thompson gets the last word:

I have been waiting for this book for a long time. With Relational Spirituality, Todd Hall and Elizabeth Hall have, with erudition and mercy, given us a masterpiece that not only tells us who we are but also points us in the direction of who we long to become. Broad in its scope, prophetic in its conviction, beautifully imaginative in its synthesis of multiple domains of human experience, and accessible in its application, this is sure to become a wellspring of hope and transformation — one that could not come at a more timely moment.  — Curt Thompson

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BookNotes

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I’ll try to make this a quick BookNotes, but I wanted to suggest a few titles — including one brand new, long-awaited, short and spectacular one called Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus by Wesley Hill, the follow up to the very nice first book in the “Fullness of Time” series called Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal by Esau McCaulley.  I didn’t list the Easter one with our previous Lenten list since, well, you know. It seemed early, like highlighting Christmas or Epiphany books even before Advent. But I’ll review it below, now, gladly.

And we simply must first go through the sober time of Lent and the hard Holy Week as we live into the paradoxical story that out of great sadness and death comes the very end of Death; in the unmerited suffering of Jesus (and the subsequent resurrection) the world’s disorder is transformed and creation is restored as His Kingdom of shalom and grace takes hold. In the tragic story of Holy Week there is hope, but we can’t avoid the hard parts just to sneak to the joyous triumph.

During a recent Zoom Lenten class I’ve been doing for a far-away church I quoted from Aaron Damiani’s Moody Press book The Good of Giving Up: Discovering the Freedom of Lent in a part when he worried that we are sometimes half-hearted or awkward on Easter Sunday.

Damiani writes:

In many cases it’s because our imaginations have been malnourished along the way to Resurrection Sunday. We have been secretly snacking on lesser stories — such as politics or our children’s athletic success. In theory the gospel is compelling, but in reality we would rather pay attention to whatever Netflix is offering. We are so full on the junk food of our culture that we cannot metabolize the feast on our Easter plates.

Oh, my.

I’m reminded of a portion from Eugene Peterson’s classic on the Psalms of Ascent, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction noting how our culture too-often wants to avoid suffering;, even talk of grief and sadness is awkward, especially if it goes on “too long.” (This goes on still, today, I think, despite the strides we’ve made in honoring those of us who cope with mental health struggles, depression and the like.) Yet, Peterson reminds us that in so many Psalms — think of the opening lines of Psalm 130 — the Psalmist doesn’t hide or cover-up his anguish. It is voiced as prayer and, Peterson says, “…in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.”

This is not a simple strategy for finding relief from our distress, some of which, for some of us, is patently horrific. And if Augustine is right that sin serves to curve us in on ourselves, in Christ we must also develop the capacity to bear some of the wounds of the world, as well. It hurts — our pain and the suffering of others — and there is no end in sight. And yet, Peterson is right: when we embrace such grief we are at the very heart of things.

Which is what our fasting and prayer and silence and solitude and Lenten vespers services help us with, experiencing our union with Christ in a way that focuses on His suffering, and the suffering heart of God. I would like to believe it is what devotional reading in this season can help us with.

And so, before my rave review of the little Wes Hill Easter title in the “Fullness of Time” series, let me offer you another chance to pick up a book or two for your Lenten reading over the next few weeks.

As I reflect on the Lenten lectures I did and ponder my own soul these dark days, here are a few resources that arise in my mind. In some cases we don’t have many left, so order now if you want.

As always, just click on the ORDER link at the bottom of the column. We’ll write back, assuring you that we’ll take care of the rest, discounts and all.

A Just Passion: A Six-Week Lenten Journey (IVP) $12.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

I have recommended this before and as I dipped into it over and over the past few weeks I was again delighted and want to press it into your hands, insisting that it really is worth having. It is a lovely little book, a great resource. Here is how it works.

A Just Passion offers a page or two a day from a previously published IVP author. They very wisely found these brief excerpts and arranged them in a flow, week by week, with breath prayers and a small litany for each week. It is handsomely arranged, brief, and potent.

The voices chosen do what IVP does well: they represent the broader swatch of beautiful orthodoxy, solid and mostly evangelically-minded writers who each have a way of rooting a care for the world in the core of the radical gospel of the Kingdom of God. This book is just wonderful in showing the relationship of Jesus and justice, reconciliation and racism, poetry and politics, liturgy and life. (Okay, enough with my alliterations. Ha.) These Lenten devotions are from some of the finest writers working these days and they include many people of color, lots of women, a variety of ages and social locations. It is a wonderful guide to Christ our liberator and how His passion and suffering points us to the redemption of the world.

As the editors put it, A Just Passion has been curated to hold in tension the immense weight and hope of Lent. The Scriptures, by the way, are often in the First Nations Version.

You will find here authors such as poet Drew Jackson and activist Donna Barber; the elder evangelical justice leader John Perkins and the younger, passionate Marlena Graves.  From Dominique DuBois Gillard to Ruth Haley Barton, From Eugene Peterson to Soong-Chan Rah, from African American counselor Sheila Wise Rowe to Palestinian pastor Munther Issac, from black Anglican Esau McCaulley to the excellent writer Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, and more and more, these are authors you should know and whose brief reflections will offer you a great insight into the meaning of Lent and remind you of the ave of taking time to ponder these things this month. Highly recommended.

A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent Christine Valters Paintner (Broadleaf) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We only have a few of these left but it has been popular among some of our friends these past two years (So much so that while is it designed as a Lenten read, we keep it handy on the shelf all year round.) Illustrated with very cool woodcuts by Kreg Yingst (author of the excellent, creative, moody and colorful Everything Could Be a Prayer) this gentle compact-sized devotional workbook is designed to help us clarify our true hungers even as it invites us to counter-cultural practices that will help make us whole and nourish our souls.

If fasting is an act of letting go, of making more intentional interior space to lisent to Divine whispers, then her invitation and exercises are helping us let go of toxic or hurtful habits and replacing them with an expansive, risky, playful, faith-oriented perspective. For instance, here are a few or the entries — formed as invitations or challenges — from the table of contents

• Fast from Consuming — Embrace Simplicity
• Fast from Multitasking and Inattention — Embrace Full Presence to the Moment
• Fast from Scarcity Anxiety — Embrace Radical Trust in Abundance
• Fast from Speed and Rushing — Embrace Slowness and Pausing
• Fast from Holding It All Together — Embrace Tenderness and Vulnerability
• Fast from Planning and Deadlines — Embrace Unfolding and Ripening
• Fast from Certainty — Embrace Mystery and Waiting.

I bet some of these invitations intrigue you, eh? Come on!

A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent Walter Brueggemann (WJK) $16.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

What more can I say about the prolific and energetic and evocative Walter Brueggemann. He can throw in a line or phrase that will stick with you perhaps for years. The prayers are generous and poetic, the readings short. In my last Lenten class I read out loud two, just to give participants a taste; one seemed quintessential Brueggemann — “On the Road Again” about the way in which a journey from safety through risk is sort of paradigmatic in the Bible, starting with Abraham and Sarah. He says we are “in their wake” and we must travel “beyond safe places the gifted end that God intends, hopefully to be blessed and a blessing along the way.”

I love this short “A Trip, A Temptation, and a Text” which ponders Jesus being led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. We too, have to listen to the voices of promise and seduction and learn to discern which is which.  One offers assurance, the other mocks.

“We begin our Lenten journey,”  Walter writes, “addressed by the remarkable assurance that the God who summons us is the God who goes along with us.”

Invitation to Solitude and SIlence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence Ruth Haley Barton (IVP) $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

I wanted to list this here, now, in case any of our friends from Duke are reading along. You may recall I referred to this more than once and read a long excerpt about Elijah. (I also commended the recent Trinity Forum conversation with Cherie Harder and Ruth, which is well worth listening to or reading the transcript that TF provides at the link.) Ruth’s moving stories about her own life, growing into the need for solitude and the complexities of finding rhythms of silence, linked to key Bible teachings about “being still” and “knowing” make this one of the great resources for anyone interested in deepening their own spirituality. I heartily recommend any and all of Barton’s books, but this one is seminal, vital, very important for us all.

Invitation to Solitude and Silence isn’t a Lenten book as such, but it does seem that in the next few weeks we may want to build extra time into our lives to seek an encounter with God, and reading this book will give you both motivation and some structure, what and how to do it. With a forward by the late Dallas Willard, this book is a keeper. As are, for the record, each of her other important books. Start here, though.

Holy Solitude: Lenten Reflection with Saints, Hermits, Prophets, and Rebels Heidi Haverkamp (WJK) $14.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.29

This is another book that focuses on the habits of silence, designed especially for busy, contemporary Christians in these complicated days. A great Lenten resource, this shows how solitude is life-giving and how that “still, small voice” of God can transform us for a life of faith and service.

Haverkamp is a writer, preacher, retreat leader and an Episopal priest. She is a Benedictine oblate at Holy Wisdom Monastery near Madison, Wisconsin (a place my own Presbyterian adult daughter has visited more than once.) Faith and resistance, prayer and politics? This is it! She draws on ancient saints of the church and offers very practical guidance about fasting and silence and simple rituals of self-care and service. Nice.

From Wilderness to Glory: Lent and Easter for Everyone N. T. Wright (WJK) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

For those who like their devotional reading straight up Biblical, and maybe are a tad wary of some of the more mystical encounters or think Brueggemann is too evocative and poetic and progressively interested in the Biblical teaching about economics, this, maybe, is a reliable guide for you. N.T. Wright, of course, is one of the preeminent New Testament scholars who has written both academic commentaries (and major works on historiography and readable books about public theology and cultural engagement.) His lay-reader, accessible commentaries are found in a series called New Testament for Everyone where he has incisive reflections on each book of the New Testament.

Drawn from those popular “For Everyone” commentaries, this From Wilderness to Glory has Bible reflection carefully chosen that highlights not only the meaning of the text but how contemporary Christians might encounter God and experience discipleship today.  There are thoughtful questions for reflection or discussion, too. Carefully reflecting on the life and teachings of our Master really is a good habit these next weeks and this is a very reliable guidebook.

Prone to Wander: A Lenten Journey with Women in the Wilderness Joanna Harader (Herald Press) $16.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I know I’ve celebrated this before but as I was doing my Lenten class online I kept speaking about the wilderness. Both the literary deserts and wilderness settings in the Bible stories but the metaphoric spaces of emptiness and disorientation. Call it liminal or Lenten, we all face seasons of uncertainty and desolation, knowing (at our best, anyway) that this paves the way for God to show up, big time. God meets us in the wilderness, they say, and that is the very theme of this book.

This includes stories of doubt and questioning, of “dryness and distance” — and, with Harader’s guidance, “we can find guideposts for the inevitable wilderness times in our own lives.”

This lovely book explores the stories of biblical women who encounter “parched and desolate places.”  It is, by the way, written by the same author and in the same style as Expecting Emmanuel, her beloved Advent devotional. Like that one, it is illustrated expertly by Michell Burkholder, who created hand-cut paper artwork for the volume.

Listen to Isaac Villegas (author of the brand new Migrant God) who writes,

“These pages will renew your capacity to recognize the signs and wonders of God’s provision, sometimes as close as the hand of a friend or the generosity of a stranger.”

The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross Brian Zahnd (IVP) $24.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

I have highlighted this spectacular book before and, again, must admit that it is so good that I wish I had time and capacity to do a major review. It is, in short, one of the best books about the theology of the cross that I have ever read. It is luminous and well-written, but not fanciful or chatty. It is lovely and rich, a bit deeper than some evangelical books these days, and draws deeply on the broad range of thinkers (and writers and artists and pastors) from across the spectrum of the Church down through the ages. From early church fathers to Dostoevsky, from N.T. Wright and Fleming Rutledge to James Cone, he draws together many streams into this waterfall of a book, bringing living water aplenty. I can hardly say enough about it.

A main point for Zahnd, one which I have felt and tried to embrace for decades, is that mere theology alone (especially the sort of at is systematic and precise, offering propositions of dogma that sums up such grand mysteries as the Cross in a succinct sentence) are not only inadequate — such huge matters push us to poetry and doxology and worship — bit also wrong-headed. Summing up the endlessly multi-dimensional beauty of the cross in one summarizing doctrine, or abstracting it as one part of “four spiritual laws” or a mere stop on the Romans Road does violence to how God has revealed this epic moment of self-revelation.

The cross, above all, is the clearest revelation of who God is, in Christ, who died.

No one can say (well, I suppose they can say it but it would be seriously unfair) that Zahn has a low view of the cross because he refused to reduce it to a simple atonement theory. No one can properly say that Zahn isn’t Biblical. He is exceptionally grounded in the Bible story, praising the God of Scripture, grateful that God is seen in the person of Jesus. His death and resurrection is the climax of the Scriptural story and the pivot point in history. This rumination on it all is extraordinary.

Secondly, besides this expansive and appropriately multi-faceted theo-poetic approach, there is another stylistic method: each chapter, which holds before us a certain aspect of “the wood between the worlds”, engages a particular writer. From Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship to Cone’s (Christ and the Lynching Tree, from Hilarion Alfeyev to Rene Girard, Zahnd masterfully weaves their insights into his multi-faceted framework. There is a chapter (“One Ring to Rule Them All” that LOTR and Tolkien fans will love  — he interacts with Fleming Rutledge’s magisterial The Battle for Middle Earth) and another plays with John Coltrane (yep the chapter is “A Love Supreme.”) His “God on the Gallows” section starts with a recollection of the gruesome chapter about the abuse and death of children in The Brothers Karamazov but quickly moves to interact with Night by Elite Wiesel. This is neither incidental or frivolous (not even the great quote from “Southern Man” by Neil Young) but deeply integral to his project. Of assembling and honoring the plurality of insights.

And he’s such a good writer, he offers it with profound insight without lapsing into academic parlance. At least he mostly avoids the dense stuff, making these big theories of atonement and sacrifice and paschal drama so very, very real.

And, not surprisingly (you already noticed that he writes about Cone) he allows his Biblically-based, Trinitarian, Christ-centered exploration on the cross to shape what we might call his entire worldview, his social imagination, his public theology. He has a chapter drawing on Shane Claiborne’s Executing Grace in which he ponders questions about capital punishment. There is a chapter about war — he writes movingly on John Lennon’s song with the chorus “War is over (if you want it)” — and shows how the cross is central to the Christian’s call to peacemaking. That succinct chapter is breathtaking in how it draws on the early church fathers, Orthodox theologians and pushes us to realize the horrific and even suicidal nature of modern warfare. I commend it to you for your consideration.

Alongside Pastor Zahnd’s interaction with works of great literature and his ability to play with key insights from various heavy thinkers, he also interacts with visual artists, some well known — Matthias Grunewald, Fra Angelico, Hieronymus Bosch — others that you may or may not know. From frescos to icons to classic paintings, these are all reproduced in full color. (That IVP offers this book at such a reasonable hardback price makes this even nicer as it is a handsome volume you will spend much time with, I’m sure.)  If you have not heard or maybe need reminded that the cross of Christ really is the supreme centerpiece of God’s love, revealing not the anger of God but the mercies of God, this thoughtful, intellectually rigorous but warm book, written with much love, is a must.

Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginners Guide to Holy Week and Witness at the Cross: A Beginners Guide to Holy Friday Amy-Jill Levine (Abingdon Press) $16.99 and $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICES = $13.59 and $14.39

I cannot say too much about these other than to remind you that Amy-Jill is an upbeat and vivacious communicator, a strong writer, a tad snarky, and a Jewish scholar of Jesus. While she remains active in her local synagogue, her day job is teaching mostly Christian seminarians at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Except for a few more academic ones, most of her books are for ordinary readers and she remains popular, especially among mainline denominational folk who appreciate understanding our texts about Jesus from the viewpoint of a Jewish woman who knows much about the first century world.

In Entering the Passion of Jesus it says on the back that she “delves into the history and literature surrounding the last days of Jesus’s life and sets the narrative in historical context.” Many will enjoy how she humanizes the main characters of the plot and how she analyzes the risks and motives of the story’s characters. In the more recent Witness at the Cross she has “brought to life the characters who the Gospels tell us were witnesses to the Crucifixion.”

Dr. Levine offers a close reading of the important New Testament texts, evaluating them in light of her understanding of first century Judaism and her knowledge of the Roman Empire and its politics and methods. She has a strong, respectful, and some would say very helpful (nonChristian) bias, of course, which is part of the fun of these provocative studies.

Her latest book, by the way, is The Gospel of John: A Beginner’s Guide to the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Abingdon; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19) which stands nicely alongside her other paperbacks on Jesus. Let us know if you need a list…

Fight Like Jesus: How Jesus Waged Peace Throughout Holy Week Jason Porterfield (Herald Press) $17.99  // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I have raved about this before and seriously recommended it to one and all. It is a study of  the details, teachings, and subtle moves of Holy Week that is unlike anything else you’ve read.  It is provocative and it is helpful. Agree fully or not, I highly recommend it for your consideration.

Porterfield, who has lived among the poor in urban spots in North America and in the poorest slums of Indonesia, wants to recover the radical vision of peacemaking that Jesus taught and embodied, especially in Holy Week. By this exploration of what we now call Palm Sunday and onward, we will study why Jesus Himself wept over Jerusalem. (You know why, don’t you. Through his holy, righteous tears, Jesus lamented “If only you knew the things that made for peace.” If only.

Reading this might please Jesus who continues to weep, I am sure, as we continue to fail to be peacemakers (at home, at work, in our public spaces, and in the world of wars.) In eight solid chapters Fight Like Jesus shows us insights to which we most likely haven’t paid adequate attention.

Two models or approaches to making peace pervade these texts of Holy Week and Porterfield expertly examines them both, helping us become trained in the way of Jesus. Many these days have adopted language about “practicing the way” and this will help us do just that. Perhaps through Flight Like Jesus will we “discover anew why he is called the Prince of Peace.”  At the very least you will deepen your own understanding of Holy Week and be nudged towards more serious fidelity to Christ and His ways.

Praying the Stations of the Cross: Finding Hope in a Weary Land Margaret Adams Parker & Katherine Sonderegger (Eerdmans) $24.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

We have several small books — some Roman Catholic, but not all — on the custom of praying through the key events of Jesus’s last day, what is commonly called “The Stations of the Cross.” Most have artful presentations or illustrations. Even if you don’t walk through the locations in a church, reading through these stations can be very rewarding.

There is no better book for this purpose than this hardback masterpiece by the famous and beloved Epsiopalian theology professor and writer Katherine Sonderegger educator and artist Margaret Adams Parker.  This is a profound and spiritually captivating book that will — through their collaboration with word and visuals — (in the words of Bishop Michael Curry) “offer “refreshment, and those in need of spiritual nourishment will be amply satisfied.”  A preacher and an artist offer what Ellen Davis calls “the appalling and praiseworthy story of Jesus’s saving death made plain in word and image.” What a book.

Inspired by this book a year ago we invited people in our own medium-sized Presbyterian church to draw or paint or sculpt or build something for one of the stations, and we had the artists read the Biblical text and speak about their work week by week through Lent, showing them all together during Holy Week of last year. We were pleased how God worked through these mostly unprofessional artisans and it just goes to show what ideas come up when you spend time with a good book. Hooray.

The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope Curt Thompson (Zondervan) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

This is another rich and invaluable title that is not a Lenten title as such but certainly resonates with this theme of caring for our deepest selves and honoring the pain we feel for our own broken lives and for the horrid sadness of this broken world. With the political crisis at home and the wars and the cut off of life-saving aid to so many thousands, who among us isn’t troubled, perhaps longing for some fresh word about pain and grief, resilience and hope? I think I quipped in my Zoom Lenten class that we cannot give ourselves away to a needy world if we are not in some measure healed ourselves. There is, during Lenten, both a journey inward and a journey outward, and it seems Curt’s wise book covers so much that comes up as we pursue with greater care our Lenten habits and practices.

Thompson is an excellent communicator and writer and a respected psychiatrist. His first books showed a particular expertise in the interface of neurology and faith formation; Anatomy of a Soul is a great paperback introduction for beginners of a faithful study of neuroscience and how knowing a bit about how we are wired can help us grow as people and as Christians; his second and third books are simply stunning and among my favorites — The Soul of Shame and The Soul of Desire, both published in hardback by IVP.  Now, in this one, he dives deeper into the topic of suffering and as I said in a previous review, man, was I wrong in thinking little new needed to be said about their perennial topic. It is wise and gracious and moving and thoughtful and, I want to say, ideal for Lenten reading.

Hope, by the way, grows best in community. Learn why by reading this remarkable study.

In The Deepest Place, Curt Thompson once again guides us into goodness with the hallmark gentleness and acumen we’ve come to trust in his books. Curt so beautifully translates incredibly complex insights about the human body, soul, and relationships into words that welcome us into wholeness. The Deepest Place will pierce your imagination with the possibility that your groans and grief really might be the place you encounter your greatest glory. — K. J. Ramsey, trauma therapist, author of The Book of Common Courage and The Lord Is My Courage

Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter Timothy Keller (Penguin) $17.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

Okay I’ll admit, this one is more about the resurrection accounts of Jesus in the gospels and what they mean for us than on the classic Lenten texts or the Holy Week story. Yet, it seems to me to be a good Lenten read (or, yes, obviously, in the season of Eastertide) because of the very title — this applies the confidence of the new creation promised by God through the death and resurrection of Christ and vindicated by his historical resurrection (with eye witness accounts) to this world of fear and hardship.

It is no secret that the late Tim Keller succumbed to the pancreatic cancer that took his life a few years ago. He wrote this book while coming with his own fears and impending death. Also, it is clear he wrote this in a time of great social upheaval, of polarization and fear, with so many dying of Covid, and “the loss of vision for a shared common good.”

How can we survive this moment together, he asked, as he wrote in 2020 into 2021. If the resurrection accounts hold the key to the hope we need as we face “the desperation of daily life”, then Hope in Times of Fear is a much-needed study. As it says on the back cover

Easter reminds the world that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead, and that we can be spiritually resurrected and reborn. This is because the resurrection of Christ brings the future power of God — that will someday heal and renew the entire world — into our lives now.

This is not a naive hope or an utopian sort of idealism.

He shows how the resurrection can shape every aspect of our lives — “our inner emotional lives, our relationships, our pursuit of justice, and our attitudes towards history and even death itself.” Set within the loss of hopefulness in Western culture, this is an exceedingly important book.

This is one of the finest studies of the implications of Easter and, especially since it was written in a time of fraught fears and heavy burdens, it is especially urgent for today. Keller most likely knew it would be his final book. If you are a fan of Keller, obviously, you don’t want to miss this. If you haven’t read him, this is an excellent place to start.

Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus Wesley Hill (IVP) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

The newest in the great “Fullness of Time” series of hand-sized, succinct hardbacks, Easter is, I suppose, the one many of us have been waiting for. Advent, Christmastime, Epiphany, Pentecost and Lent have all been done (with Ordinary Time coming next year) and yet we’ve been especially eager for this. How excited and glad I was when I heard that Wes Hill was invited to write it. Edited by Esau McCaulley, each of these have been very good, each in their own way, by robust practitioners of the distinctive habits of the church year. Each offers a historical and theological overview of the church season under consideration and draws out practical stuff to do in order to more appropriately and fruitfully experience the blessings of each particular season of the liturgical calendar.

Easter, the season of resurrection, of course, carries a message and realty that we can simply never get enough of. Obviously I hope nearly everyone on our mailing list orders this. It’s that important, and Wes Hill does such a fine job, it deserves your attention. I mean that.

As I started to read Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus I’ll admit to you, dear readers, that I was a tad reluctant. I wanted to read this fresh, for the first time, on Easter. Alas, an occupational hazard here on the frontlines of bookselling, I had to read it early. I suspect if you order it from us now you just might succumb as well. It is so good.

Hill starts with a moving story (at least it was moving to me; I’ll admit to shedding some tears) of a grand Easter Vigil service where key points of the unfolding covenantal drama of the whole Bible are read in darkness, with the service timed so that the Easter shouts are timed with the rising of the sun, a multi-sensory experience of this new life breaking into human history. Deeply Scriptural and yet liturgically performative, he unpacks this telling of this experience (it doesn’t hurt that N.T. Wright was the Bishop in that church that chilly English early morn) and it reminded me of how some of friends and loved ones who prefer a higher church worship experience are on to something rich. Words can hardly explain the world-shaking and momentous significance of this death-to-life victory pascha, so perhaps the high drama of liturgy is a wise way to celebrate; he draws on a famous argument by Beth Manard for this that is notable.  In any case, the opening of the book was captivating, rich, informative and moving.

Professor Hill — who has written a fascinating book on the Trinity in the writings of Paul and a recent small one on the Lord’s Prayer (The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying the Our Father published handsomely by Lexham; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19) — teaches at Western Theological Seminary and knows his stuff. Happily, though, his two chapters on the Biblical basis of the resurrection stories (in the four gospels and Acts) are well told, interesting, and a helpful reminder for those of us who know all four stories well but haven’t taken the time to do a close comparison. Nice.

The rest of the book developed themes of the historicity of the bodily resurrection, why the early church did their baptisms on Easter, hinting at the deeper meaning of it all, and a nice reminder of the reason we have fifty days of Eastertide feasts and celebrations (not to mention some lovely reminders to go all out in joyful partying in this season.) There is a chapter called “World Upside Down” on the wholistic nature of the gospel — word and deed, evangelism and justice, charity and social change — informed by a John Stott-esque, Kingdom vision of embodying hope for the real world. He moves to talk about Ascension (which I didn’t expect  but for which I am very, very glad, convinced that it is not given the attention it is due.)

The footnotes are captivating and informative (always a mark of a good book) citing rare ancient text, well known church fathers, modern liturgical thinkers (hooray for Alexander Schumann!) and well known theologians from Calvin to Wesley to Barth to Rahner, and creative writers from George Herbert to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Supper of the Lamb writer priest and chef, Robert Farrar Capon. In other words, it’s a great, great, read.

He ends the book with the chapter “Let Him Easter in Us” (a nod to a line by Hopkins) and the homily offers four things we can take away from the Easter season. My saying it now makes it wound trite but it is not, although it is succinct. I love this last chapter and commend it to you, to be read and re-read over the months to come. Order it soon, please.

Especially if you are interested in the rituals and symbols of the liturgical calendar and why certain churches make a big deal about this season, you will be delighted to learn. But, after all, every Christian tradition affirms the central importance of Easter, right? Maybe you should order a few extras to share.

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The great new books keep on coming, friends, and despite concerns about book buying — especially from real bookstores like ours — we are ever glad to be a part of the (decades-old, now) renaissance of thoughtful, diverse, Christian publishing. Hardly a day goes by that we are not blessed with fascinating orders from all over the land, eager, curious readers who are sometimes desperate for just the right thing to read or to share, to study or promote. We are heartened and humbled by the chance to serve.

We are honored to play a small role in your own formation and your ministry of book-sharing; ha — I know some of you give away as many books as you buy for yourself. Thanks for reading BookNotes and thanks for watching or listening to our “Three Books from Hears & Minds” podcast. Thanks for sending orders to us here in our south central corner of the Keystone State. We are told that what we do matters, and we are grateful for your support.

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As always, scroll to the bottom of this BookNotes column to see all the books discussed and find that order link which takes you to our secure order form page at our website. Or just give us a call (at 717-246-3333.) We’re here 10 am – 6 pm EST Monday through Saturday and we’re happy to chat.

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In no particular order, here are fifteen recent ones that we’re very eager to highlight.

Remissioning Church: A Field Guide to Bringing a Congregation Back to Life Josh Hayden (IVP) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

What a good price this detailed book is, so even if your only slightly worried about the health of your local church, give this a read and you’ll be at least a bit more aware of the issues facing congregations in decline. I’ll cut to the chase: it notes, “the Spirit of God is inviting established churches to embrace the cross as a pathway to new life to grow in missional presence and see the flourishing of their neighborhoods.”

I’ve been impressed with so many books that carry the word “missional” in the title or subtitle these days, although a few years ago it nearly became such a buzz-word as to be considerably less meaningful that in the early, heady days of quoting Newbigin and insisting that we follow a radical Christ into our post-Christian culture by serving well even as we embody the reign of God breaking into our midst (within or, more likely, outside the conventional church walls.) I have long admired the extraordinary books by Howard Snyder (like his must-read Community of the King) that in the last century said that the real point of the Biblical narrative is the coming new creation restoration of “all things” (Ephesians 1:10) under the rubric of the Kingdom of God. The local community of worshipping believers is the hub of that broader wheel, with the scattered people of God being spokes of the church even as they head off to various spheres and callings throughout the work-week. That emphasis on strong community and a large sense of sent-ness was missional before missional was a thing.

Yet, despite the missional / Kingdom vision (and very good work in so many books and talks and podcasts and confabs around the world) churches remain in the doldrums. In recent years, those that use the overtly Biblical language of justice or reconciliation or even community service are under attack, sometimes from their own members, fearing their leaders have gone “woke.” Which, of course, is a darn shame, how the MAGA movement has stolen even our Biblical language, as if justice and liberation and reconciliation are bad things!

Enter Josh Hayden, a church leader who runs trainings for various denominational leaders (and within global networks as well.) Without giving up on a missional vision of cultural contextualization and “reading the signs of the times” he does some basic church revitalization stuff “through a transformational process from death to new life.”

This is brand new so I’ve only skimmed it but I think it may be a truly stand-out book in this genre where there is already a plethora of congregational leaders offering programs and plans to help your church get out of the doldrums.

Dying? How’s that for a plan.

Still there are plenty of field-tested and quite practical strategies offered in Remissioning. It is called “a field guide” after all. United Methodist former Bishop Will Willimon, notes how Hayden loves the local church and that his new book “is destined to help scores of churches find their way to the future.” Maybe you need it, or somebody you know…

1 Corinthians: A Theological, Pastoral, & Missional Commentary Michael J. Gorman (Eerdmans) $39.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99

We don’t often write about the many scholarly theological books and serious Biblical commentaries that we carry; not as many of our customers seem interested — I guess the readers who wade in that part of the deep end of the book buying waters don’t follow us, much — but there are a few masters of the work whose work I will always shout about, glad for their continued efforts and how their research and writing serves the body of Christ (not to mention interested skeptics or seekers.) You know some of the biggest working names in Biblical scholarship these days, I assume, and surely, Mike Gorman is on that list. I’d read anything he does, and you should, too.

His last major volumes were on the spirituality of Paul and the call to “cruciformity.” (There is even a book about his work, with great scholars weighing in, mostly in tribute and fine-tuning.) He has a heady book on John and an accesible one on Revelation. He’s done a major project on Romans and now, in an amazingly insight hardback, he brings his Pauline studies to bear on this beloved (if at time perplexing) letter of the great Apostle to the gentiles.

Gorman, who teaches at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore, MD, has given us in his 1 Corinthians, for those who care about such distinctions, what we might call a theological commentary. That is, he is not limited to merely literalistic and grammatical details and pure exegesis. He moves beyond the simple exegetical exposition and invites us to ponder more carefully what Paul meant and how we can understand this letter not only in its historical and canonical shape but in the framework created by other Pauline letters and the theology that emerges from them. That is, it’s a careful study, line by line, but framed by this bigger, missional concern, for living the truth of the letter in our very 21st century lives.  There is that word missional, again, right in the subtitle, which should alert you to his passion for both big picture theological thinking and very contemporary application.

Here is how Andy Johnson, a fine, emerging scholar who teaches at Nazarene Theological Seminary, puts it: Gorman, he says, “engages with culturally, historically, and theologically diverse voices to bring the concerns of this ancient letter into conversation with challenges facing the church today.” Johnson insists that “it is now my first choice for classroom use and the first recommendation I’ll have for pastors teaching and preaching on 1 Corinthians.”

“…it is now my first choice for classroom use and the first recommendation I’ll have for pastors teaching and preaching on 1 Corinthians.”

Likewise, Lucy Peppiatt (of Westminster Theological Centre in the UK) notes that this volume is “a treasure trove” because Gorman not only “provides a wealth of background information and explanation of the text, but he also captures the spirit and heart of what Paul longs to communicate to this complicated community.”

Paul says (in 1 Cor. 10:11) that this was written “also for our sake” and Mike cares deeply about local contemporary churches of all sorts, hoping they will hear and do what the letter inspires. In this sense he is theological, yes, but also pastoral. It isn’t every major commentary written by a world-class scholar, who offers discussion questions for pondering or even for a group studying together. These are really amazing and very useful for anyone teaching or preaching the text.

(I love, also, how in his “recommended reading” section after the superb introductory chapter, he suggests the most basic titles, the some mid-level ones, and those that are more rigorous or demanding reads. Hooray for this. He offers plenty of good suggestions after each chapter, too. Bibliophiles will love this guy who seems to know something about everything related to this project.)

From his earliest days, Professor Gorman has had a heart for the global church and is aware of the diversity (theologically and ethnically and culturally) of God’s people. He is attentive to this — I hope the word ecumenical doesn’t scare you away — and even as pastoral as he is, Gorman (as Issac Augustine Morales, OP, puts it) “brings out important elements of the text that continue to challenge believers today.”

In other words, this is just what a good commentary can be. Granted, I have not studied every chapter yet, but believe me — if you are a Bible lover and read commentaries at all (and even if you do not) Gorman’s new Eerdmans 1 Corinthians: A Theological, Pastoral, & Mission Commentary is one you will want to have handy. Order it today.

Walking the Way of the Wise: A Biblical Theology of Wisdom Mitchell L. Chase (IVP)$26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

Often when a new volume is released in the Essential Studies in Biblical Theology, I want to whoop about it. This fabulous series of small books {we stock them all] brings a down-to-Earth, Biblically-robust, big-picture overview for thoughtful readers who want to dig in without wading through a 400-page hardback tome. The volumes in the InterVarsity Press ESBT series — a bit like the similarly small “Short Studies in Biblical Theology” published by Crossway — are ideal for those new to focused Biblical study and for anyone who likes the overview vision of seeing how a certain theme is played out throughout the Biblical narrative.

And so, the brand new one in the ESBT series just came out and it is on wisdom. Who doesn’t need more wisdom in their lives, more careful assessment of the many unwise options in our social contexts, more faithful application of Biblical truth in admittedly complex situations? Wisdom is a key to reading Scripture and while the Wisdom literature doesn’t seem to advance the storyline of the unfolding Biblical narrative, we ought to recall that wisdom in the Bible is found in more than the co-called wisdom literature. This book shows just that.

Mitchell Chase here traces the themes of wisdom (and folly) throughout Scripture. This book is, in the words of J. Daniel Hays, “strong academically, but it is also very readable and engaging, enriching to one’s one personal walk with God.”

And, of course, as is the custom in these ESBT books, every text is read in light of the bigger Biblical story and (in the words of Matthew Y. Emerson of Oklahoma Baptist University) “in its culmination in the person and work of Christ.” Walking in the Way of the Wise “sheds light on how every text is written for the instruction of the people of God in every day and age.” Nicely done, with a some study questions in the back.

In God’s Good Image: How Jesus Dignifies, Shapes, and Confronts Our Cultural Identities J.W. Buck (Herald Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

You know how I stand on the big stage at the Jubilee conference to highlight important books for the gathered crowd? I regret not having read this before the last conference as I now wish I had highlighted it for one and all. I had a hunch I was going to like it and pondered putting it on the short list of those few I was promoting at Jubilee, but I just hadn’t spent enough time with it in February.

Now I’m ready to say that I love this book, that I found it challenging and entertaining, well-written and hard-hitting, with a perspective that is so solid and good. Culture is all around us, Buck reminds us, and all we think and do and say is shaped by the cultural air that we breath.  But yet, the subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) values that seep into our souls may not be in keeping with a social imagination shaped by Holy Scripture. What would Jesus say about our very identity to those of us stuck in the dominant culture, absorbing it’s deformed values?

This question is the wonderful topic of this beautiful and thoughtful book. I don’t want to say In God’s Good Image is about race and racism, or even ethnicity as such, but that comes close; that’s part of it. It is about who we are and who Jesus was and is (he did embody a particular identity as a Jewish man in first century Palestine, of course.)

Here’s a heads up: as it says on the back cover, “Jesus empowers those from minority cultures to resist pressure to assimilate in unhealthy ways and instead live into their God-given identity.” And of course, those formed by the majority culture are to “humbly embrace their identity as they foster space for others.” Buck explores all that and more.

This is a book about the glories of a robust doctrine of creation — God made us with differences — and it is, also, between the lines, a book advancing social pluralism. Can we get along, making space for others? Can we see God offering dignity as a key aspect of a healthy culture (and how that might allow us to be both at home and sometimes exiles of that very culture)?

After three chapters about understanding culture (including our sacred identity in Jesus) the next 15 chapters are each grounded in a Biblical text from the Old or New Testaments. What an illuminating Scriptural study about culture!

Then, the last four chapters offer what Buck calls a “Cultural Discovery Process” applied first for individuals and then for churches. There is a closing chapter on “God’s Good Image for Pastors” which is good for all of us, but certainly for congregational leaders.

I love this complex and delightful book by this very good and orderly writer. Three cheers for In God’s Good Image! Buck is a film-maker and church-planter, a creative entrepreneur and social activist as well as a family man, now living in Tucson AZ. I previously loved his visionary and yet very practical handbook to social activism called Everyday Activism: Following 7 Practices of Jesus to Create a Just World (Baker; $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00) and now hold this new one up as a major, lovely contribution.

The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone in Between Ian Morgan Cron (Zondervan) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

I love Ian Cron and while he may not remember me — he’s a very successful author, now, after all — I highlighted his first book, a fictional novel (or was it?) called Chasing Francis about a disgruntled pastor who made a trip to Assisi and brought back exciting Franciscan wisdom for his boring parish and, well, they mostly yawned. (Zondervan; $19.99 //OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99) I loved that book! Then he wrote one of my all time favorite memoirs, a book I still cite in workshops and gladly press into the hands of anyone interested in this genre: Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts (Zondervan; $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19.) What a story!

Cron then grew pretty well known by co-writing one of the most popular (and clear-headed) enneagram books of all time, The Road Back to You, followed by, as his enneagram type must do, I guess, another: The Story of You: An Enneagram Journey to Becoming Your True Self. We’ve got them both although my enneagram type might say we’ve got enough books on the enneagram now. But that second one he did was very moving and I liked that big picture true story stuff.

Which brings us to a book that I think we really, really need. It is a book on the 12-steps (and, iinterestingly, comes out on the heels of another similar book, the wonderful, new, thorough book by John Ortberg called Steps: A Guide to Transforming Your Life When Willpower Isn’t Enough (Tyndale; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) I loved Ortberg’s introduction to the 12 steps of AA (for anyone) and am sure Ian’s new work — written, they say, with “his signature wit, wisdom, and transparency” — will help us understand the importance of these twelve steps and, perhaps, to “see the world in a startling new way.” That’s the promise on the back cover and I’m betting on it.

Look; Ian Cron is a great writer. He’s seen some things and knows both about contemplative mystical stuff and practical psychological stuff. His worldview and social vision remains nearly Franciscan — love God, self, others, and the planet, too — and he is all about transformation (again, for self, others, and the cosmos. Think Richard Rohr.) He is God- centered but knows we all need a fix for the pain of living in a broken world.

Jen Hatmaker, an energetic writer herself, says this book “should come with a warning label” and she insists, “This is not an inconsequential book.” I have hardly ever seen such an enticing and serious blurb on a book jacket (especially one where the author is known for his good humor and wit.)  Not. An. Inconsequential. Book.

Curt Thompson writes of it beautifully and I think he says it best:

With The Fix comes a herald who pulls the curtain back on what we all sense in the deep: that we are people of insatiable longing, that our longing is often brutally and fathomlessly entangled with our pain, and that as a result, we are all addicts. But our author and guide does not leave us there. With the balm of humor that is required if we are to face the bracing reality of our lives as revealed on these pages and with a compelling vulnerability that never seeks its own notoriety, Ian Cron invites us all to come home. And home is where I want to be. Read this book, and begin to find your way there. — Curt Thompson, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Soul of Desire and The Deepest Place

Knowing and Being Known: Hope for All Our Intimate Relationships Erin F. Moniz (IVP) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I won’t say too much about this as it will be described with much enthusiasm in our next podcast, set to drop any day now. I adore this book and am slowly working my way through it. I gush about it in the “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast saying just why it is so very important.

Firstly, I’ll note that this is just a tad academic, but not too much so. Not a scholarly work, really, it is thoughtful and wise, careful and insightful. As many books on relationships are sort of dumbed down and made almost too chatty and casual, this gives the huge topic of intimacy it’s due. It is serious and wise and well-written and important. Wow.

Secondly, the insights found in Knowing and Being Known have developed based on years of experience — field research, I’d call it — with emerging young adults. She is an Anglican pastor who works as a college minister at Baylor University in Waco, TX. Hooray for her and a shout-out to anyone working with college-age young adults: you need this book as I suspect you already know. But here’s the thing: it is not only for those working with young adults and it is not primarily a book about campus ministry. That is her context and social location but, man, she understands the human condition, our deep need for connection, and the important of intimacy within all of our human relationships.  Sheila Wray Gregoire (author of The Great Sex Rescue and a new one on marriage) puts it, “Erin’s vision of churches transformed by real intimacy is both scary and exciting.” Are you ready for it?

Listen to these two profound authors raving about this marvelous new book.

At one level, this book may strike you as old hat. Yet another book on relationships and faith by an evangelical Christian author? But look closer. Here is a sensitive study of intimacy written by a seasoned pastor, informed by extensive fieldwork, leavened with wit and humor, and — above all — strikingly in tune with the overarching story as well as the micro details of the Bible’s grand story of redemption in Christ. If you or someone you know longs for deeper friendships, and especially if you work with emerging adults, this book will enlighten, instruct, inspire, and equip you for the lifelong work of nurturing mutual love. — Wesley Hill, professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, author of Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian and Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus

In an American Christian context awash in pragmatic — but often reductive —takes on marriage implying that marital intimacy is the best or only way to address loneliness, Moniz points us to a robust, theologically rich, and biblical understanding of intimacy. Amid our epidemic of loneliness, she expertly offers us humane, approachable, and expansive theological resources to broaden our imagination about friendship, love, and the relationships that shape our lives. This book shows how the gospel is good news for relationships and points the way toward greater relational flourishing for us all. — Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

The God of Story: Discovering the Narrative of Scripture Through the Language of Storytelling Daneil Schwabauer (Baker) $18.99 // OUIR SALE PRICE = $15.19

As one of the great new books of this season, I’m impressed with The God of Story for a couple of reasons, in part because it both understands the bigger picture flow of the Biblical story as a story — the “narrative” of the subtitle — and because it helps us understand better why that is important. The language of storytelling is itself both ancient and, it seems to me, nearly postmodern, which is to say it isn’t merely about communicating data and facts (as if that’s what the Good Book is all about.)  Nope, we need to understand the power of mythic storytelling to understand the power of the Book.

As I sometimes say when I do workshops on the reading life, stories come to us through narrative (but not only through books and literature — a good hip-hop song, a country ballad, an opera or TV show each have narrative elements and count as some of the best storytelling around. You know; of course you do.)

And so, this author (who is new to me) helps us understand what makes us tick as humans, what language is, why stories matter, how they work, all so that we might more insightfully understand our own storied lives and, frankly, to more faithfully read the Bible. Not bad, eh?

Making it even better, the book comes with a fabulous forward by Leonard Sweet, who has said this sort of stuff his whole long life. Sweet notes some great insights from the book — he writes a good forward, believe me — and ends with a fabulous anecdote about a time when Frederick Buechner and Maya Angelou shared a stage.  I’ll let you read how Len tells of what Maya Angelou said, but I’ll quote Buechner, who, reflecting on our shared humanity, despite our differences, said “We all have the same story, and therefore anybody’s story can illuminate our own.”

You understand more about why that is after reading The God of Story. You’ll be thrilled to learn more about this “language of life” (as Schwabauer calls it) and how the core aspects of a good story (whether a novel or movie or epic poem) can illuminate reality for us all. Daniel Schwabauer is an eloquent and good guide and he is both a fantasy and sci-fi novelist and a English prof at MidAmerica Nazarene University.

Novelist Allen Arnold (and author of The Story of With) says that this is “the most important book on story in decades.” He predicts “you’ll never read a novel, watch a movie, or see your own story through the same eyes again.”  Not bad for one book. This is one you should pick up.

Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman Patrick Hutchison (St. Martin’s Press) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Well, speaking of stories, want a rip-roaring one? Okay, maybe not rip-roaring but certainly riveting. Is this office worker dude going to make it in the wilds of the great Pacific North West? And, more to the point, is he going to make his own house? Who would have thought that the narration of a building project could be so darn interesting? Writer Jospeh Menninger (himself author of A Barn in New England: Making a Home in Three Acres) calls it “a hammer-and-nail mini saga.”

I’m a fan of these kinds of books, writers learning to work with their hands — the wood carver David Esterly of The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making is just so eloquent and wise about the beauty of his work and the recent bestseller Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Scotsman Callum Robinson is so well done about woodworking, building a business, and learning to be responsible. One of our all-time favorite reads is the breathtakingly profound The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty by German woodsman and luthier Martin Schleske, published in 2020 by Eerdmans, who spends considerable time in the woods. And don’t get me started about the many great books about moving off the grid to farm a homestead or live on the land. Hutchison, too, importantly, learns to love his place there at the end of the gravel road called Wit’s End.

Anyway, Cabin was a hot item in many stores this past Christmastime and we were glad to have a few on hand. It isn’t brand new, but it is new enough that I just had to list it here, now. Part Walden, I guess, but funnier, with that Thoreauvian self-reliance thing.

Bob Drury, a pretty funny and imaginative guy himself, says:

Imagine if Bill Bryson had decided to put down stakes during his walk in the woods and asked Charles Bukowski to help him refurbish a derelict shack deep in the forest of the Cascade Mountains.

The Wages of Cinema: A Christian Aesthetic of Film in Conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers Crystal L. Downing (IVP Academic) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

I am not exaggerating when I say that only Crystal Downing could have pulled off such an audacious project as this; her love of semiotics, her brilliant knowledge of all things Dorothy Sayers, her passion for contemporary art and film. Her wit, coming up with that amazingly clever title for this serious book. It’s the latest in the prestigious and fabulously interesting “Studies in Theology and the Arts” series which we gladly keep in stock. Although most in that series are about the visual creativity and the standard painterly arts, one big one (by Malcolm Guite) is on the literature of Coleridge, and now, this new one, on film.

In light of Dorothy Sayers.

One reviewer, Krista Imbesi, of Messiah University, calls Wages… “thought-provoking and insightful” and says “this work offers a fresh perspective on cinema’s artistic and spiritual dimensions.” I’d say that is an understatement! Nobody has done anything quite like this before. I like Jim Beitler (of Wheaton) who says, more vividly, that this is “a blockbuster of a book.” Yes!

I have only begun to skim the almost 250-page work, but I can assure you it has lots about Dorothy Sayers. And lots about movies. Dr. Downing has written scholarly works on Sayers and on cinema, but this new one isn’t just a simple combo,  bringing her previous two together, cobbling together a half-and-half summary of previous work. Not at all. This seems to be a new and major — dare I say landmark or groundbreaking? — contribution to both film studies and Sayers (and therefore, by extension, Inklings) studies even as it skitters around questions of linguistics and aesthetics, culture and society.  Note: we learn that Sayer’s interaction with cinema in the middle of the 20th century was formidable and yet has regularly been dismissed or underestimated; Downing is re-channeling Sayer’s insight. Who knew?

Plus, it sure looks like sustained fun — you’ll get more hours of reading pleasure here than the standard two hours of going to the cineplex. As it says on the back, she explores theological topics “with examples ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Barbie… Downing presents different approaches to film theory and how they can be enriched by the truths of the Christian faith.”

We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Well, Crystal Downing, in the early pages of her book (see above) The Wages of Cinema quotes my favorite philosopher of film, William D. Romanowski, observing that her method differs from his, but that he indeed pays close attention to the aesthetics of film without implying that serious film criticism must be all about the high-brow “hoity-toity” films that nobody has seen. I appreciate that. Alissa Wilkinson, author of this brand new We Tell Oursleves Stories, loves popular culture — she co-wrote a book about zombies and the politics of apocalypse, after all — but also tends to gravitate to not a few films that few people see; she is one of the rising film review stars in our contemporary culture, now writing regularly for The New York Times. She is well grounded in a profoundly Christian worldview and has written a bit about the implications for a public theology for culture studies. She is a robust thinker, as her last book surely showed, the delightfully imaginative story of four famous women eating a meal together — Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women (Broadleaf; $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.19.) She does tend towards the important and profound.

Just released last week, We Tell Ourselves Stories is a major project about the extraordinary writer Joan Didion, who had connections not only to the high-brow New York literary scene, but with Hollywood, and, as one writer puts it, “with politics, and American itself.”  I was at first surprised that Christian film critic Wilkinson was doing a book about Didion but it began to make sense. The more I learned about Didion, the more I couldn’t wait to see what Alissa would do with her storied life. The title itself, as you will discover, is taken from a line by Didion herself…

Emily Nussbaum says the book is “the prefect guide to one of America’s most celebrated literary pioneers.” Perhaps hinting at the theme of the book, she continues, saying that We Tell Ourselves Stories, “explores ways in which Didion taught herself to resist America’s deepest mythologies — even those she had originally embraced.”

Did you catch that? This book is going to somehow be incisive and, as Tracy Daugherty, author of the highly regarded The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, puts it “an invaluable education and a timely warning.”  A warning. By way of looking at the movies.

Didion famously wrote books capturing the disillusionment of the 1960s generations. One critic (who has written about Sylvia Plath) says “Wilkinson expertly conjures that time and place” and say the book is a “moving and lyrical account of Didion’s California dreams.”

But, as Wilkinson clearly shows, Didion was not rosy about the human condition and the stories we tell ourselves (most obviously, in films.) What sort of California dreamin’ did she do? Perhaps, I wonder, something like Jeremiah’s nay-saying when thinking about Babylonian exile?

I am looking forward to learning much about this remarkable woman’s evolution and development and how her deepest perspective perhaps influenced her own sense of life and times. As Julia May Jonas says, We Tell Ourselves Stories is “more than an essential contribution to the Didion canon.” She says it “delves into the evolution of American consciousness with dizzying intelligence and insight.” This, my friends, is an important book. You heard it here. I suspect it is going to be rewarded with many serious accolades by the end of the year.

Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief, and Grace Reflect the Christian Story Drew Hyun (Zondervan) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is one wonderful book and we are so excited to tell you about it. I will be brief, but know that this is one of the great books of its kind that I’ve read in a while. It is, in many ways, an apologetics project — a book making the case for Christian truth and the viability of the Christian faith perhaps written for skeptics and seekers. (The author is clear about that, inviting skeptical readers with a hospitable welcome.) Whether you have serious doubts or significant struggles with the legitimacy of standard Christian belief, or you know someone who does (and who doesn’t?) then this book by Drew Hyun is going to be very reassuring.

First, it is not a preachy sermon or strident philosophical push-back against atheists or secularization. It is not about the culture wars. It doesn’t rebuke those with doubts or disappointments. Rather, it is offering a lens through which we can understand real life, a lens that is rooted in the primary themes of the Biblical drama. Some refer to those highpoints of our story as creation / fall / redemption (he doesn’t put it that was as far as I recall) but the primary chapters of this book seem to parallel that same narrative flow.

That is, the world is good — beautiful, even. And yet, we all live East of Eden and in our fallen world we all experience various sorts of disappointments. Life hurts. And thirdly, given the power of the story of redemption and final restoration, we can be hopeful. If the trilogy of “beauty-disappointment-hope” ins’t a parallel to our slogan of “creation-fall-redemption”, I don’t know what is. And therein lies the goodness of this fine book: who among us doesn’t know beauty and sadness and still hold out for some sort of hope? It is all so real; we don’t have to make a “case for…” or argue about it, but we can, as Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief, and Grace Reflect the Christian Story does, just shine a light to illuminate these distinctive aspects of our human condition. Playful as it is at times (with fun stories and apt allusions to pop culture) the book is deeply, deeply human. It is one of the best invitations to a more real life that I have read in a long while. I hope you buy a few to give away.

The big question throughout this book, then, is how we make sense of a world that is filled with both beauty and disappointment. And, then, given that, where can we find hope? Can the Christian faith give an account for all this stuff we all really feel? Akin to the strategy of Mere Christianity or N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian, can these universal longings point beyond us to something fine?

Rich Villlodas (who knows Hyun from church circles in NYC) is surely right when he says:

Beauty, disappointment, and hope are not words we string together every day, but maybe we should start doing so. These three words capture the essence of life and are core to the Christian story. Drew Hyun has offered a compelling resource for those of us who are longing for a faith big enough to embrace these realities. Drew has brought about beauty and hope for so many people living with deep disappointment. If you read this book, you’ll see why. — Rich Villodas, lead pastor, New Life Fellowship, and author of  The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls

The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create A New Way Forward Malcolm Foley (Brazos Press) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Every now and then a book comes along that offers us truly something new, even if we are fairly well-read in a certain topic. I’ve noted that a few times in this very column and I hope you don’t grow tired of me exclaiming when a book truly says something fresh or good or extraordinary. There are lots of good books on lots of important stuff, but it is special — and deserves our support — when a title truly brings innovative insight, fresh takes, a new perspective, offering in a captivating manner. Rev. Dr. Malcolm Foley — I think this is his first book! — is such a writer and thinker and I have rarely read anything quite like this.

That racism is deeply structural in American culture is so self-evident that only the ideologically-captured refuse to see it. Many people may not all be that individually prejudiced but we all live in this system created, historically, with things (not that long ago) like Jim Crow laws, crass red-lining in the real estate business, inequities in home mortgages, injustices in hiring and firing. Read The New Jim Crow or Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy to see how racism is embedded in the courts and prisons. There is no getting around it that those of us wanting to love our neighbors well and stand for justice as the Bible demands that we do, with a passion for social righteousness simply must do an architectonic critique of the systems and habits and instincts, the principalities and powers and politics that have been structured in ways that are harmful for the common good.

Racism, says Foley, is not mostly about hate, as many popular placards say. It’s about greed.

What?

Wow — this searing critique is one that simply must be read, offering (in the words of Christina Edmondson) “a necessary antidote to racism” by putting down “the delusions and temptations of greed.”

I’m going to have to think about this a lot, and I’m still trying to ponder how to relate the work of anti-racism and being anti-Mammon. Major scholars such as Jonathan Tran (who wrote the important but quite scholarly Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism) have weighed in, and Tran’s remarks about this book are weighty:

Tran writes, simply:

Foley reminds us that the church’s fight against anti-Black lynching and its struggle for economic justice and solidarity are the same fight.

MLK said these very sorts of things and the best of the civil rights movement worked for the poor and for workers rights even as they lobbied for equal rights legislation and the like. Rev. Foley is clear — racism and Mammon are not siblings (two different if connected problems) but racism is the offspring of our love of money. Wow.

I love how some authors (like Aimee Byrd) note how very hopeful this book is. She admits says that such hopeful work is “disruptive” but she also says it is “full of wonder.” That’s a take-away I bet you didn’t see coming…

Foley started out a math and science nerd, ended up at Yale Divinity School, until studying the Puritans and reformation thinkers in a PhD program. He calls them his Nineveh, in that he didn’t feel inclined to want to add his voice to the anti-racism and civil rights movement so he ran from that calling. Well, you know what happened to Jonah, who ran from God’s will. Thank God that Reverend Foley (now with a PhD in history from Baylor) stopped running and did what he had to do: he wrote one of the most amazing books on Christian social ethics and racial justice we’ve seen. Drawing on everyone from early church Fathers to the Westminster Divines to the Grimke sisters to Ida B. Wells, he is a fabulously informed historian. How many books cite Herman Bavinck and James Cone, Basil the Great and Walter Brueggemann? Hooray.

The Anti-Greed Gospel is, at least, a book we should be talking about.

The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight Dan B. Allender & Steve Call (Thomas Nelson) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

I hope you saw the book I reviewed up above, the one called To Know As We Are Known, which is about intimacy in relationships. It is less about sexuality and marriage, but is a landmark work on how emerging adults need to think about such things. It really is for all of us and highlights true intimacy within authentic community.

This new Dan Allender book is a similar sort of book, good for nearly anyone, but created for married couples who need to be reminded that marriage is designed (as they put it) “to be a glorious, transformative, joyous union of two imperfect people seeking profound love, empathy and connection.”

(Take note, fans of Elon Musk, I want to interject: empathy is not a bad thing.)

I nearly weep as I write these words as I know several couples — and you do, too — who simply do not come anywhere close to this normative sort of transformational, healing relationship, but are barely hanging on, and maybe doing emotional damage to one another. Is there hope? Is the gospel big enough and powerful enough to heal the hurts and bring couples towards a life-giving partnership? Can deeply-rooted marital intimacy be cultivated?

This book — called “deeply personal and richly insightful” — is a guide to exploring one’s own stories and how those stories have influenced your relationships and then which offers a plan to “quite the whisper of shame and its corrosive effects.” Can we learn to “lay down our weapons and lean into humility?” How can we live well with our past hurts and learn to “repair rupture”? Can we suffer together and bless one another?

Look: marriage is not about “merely getting along or learning to compromise; it reveals who you are and invites you to who you can become.” Such a vision of radically graceful transformation can finally be a place of honor and rest, of play and joy, of delight and home. Maybe, as they suggest, it can be “a taste of heaven.”

I love Dan Allender who has written deep books on the nature of our stories, on how Psalms can reveal and give voice to our emotions, how love calls us to give our lives away in bold, costly service, on the delight of sabbath, on holy sexuality, and — his most famous I suppose— books about healing the hurt of sexual abuse. Dan has co-written many books with his old pal and world-class Bible scholar Tremper Longman, but here he pairs up with Steve Call, a clinical psychologist who specializes in reconnecting couples in marriage counseling. They work well together at Allender’s Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. This book will be a great gift to many, I am sure. Let us hope and pray. Kudos.

The Traveler’s Path: Finding Spiritual Growth and Inspiration Through Travel Douglas J. Brouwer (The Reformed Journal Books) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

For those who may not know, The Reformed Journal is an older, historic Christian print magazine from the moderate and wisely culturally-engaged Reformed community, mostly from the old CRC and RCA denominations. Delightfully rooted in their “all of life redeemed” worldview that animates much of what some call neo-Calvinism and mostly in communion with other mainline denominational folks, they, historically, it has been a great journal alongside, say, The Christian Century or Christianity Today. I have no direct connections with the famous Dutch Reformed tradition (folks that founded, for instance, Dordt College, Calvin University, Hope College, and Western Seminary in Holland, MI, say, or the ICS in Toronto) but loved the old Reformed Journal. We even still have a few of the great anthology Eerdmans put out decades ago of some of their greatest articles and essays (by the likes of Cornelias Plantinga, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Lewis Smedes, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Allan Boesak, and Rich Mouw) called The Best of the Reformed Journal, edited by James Bratt & Ronald Wells, back before the print journal folded. You should order that!

I tell you that to invite you to follow the updated, online, 21st century itineration of RJ with contemporary writers like Kristen Du Mez and Debra Rienstra and Wes Granberg-Michaelson and Marilyn McEntyre and a big and lovely array of excellent thinkers and writers, many who are working pastors. You can see their RJ featured pieces and their many bloggers HERE.

And I say all that to celebrate, again, that they have started a little, indie publishing outfit, Reformed Journal Books. Their first release was a stunning and important book by Buechner scholar and earnest storyteller and very fine writer, Jeffrey Monroe called Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing our Sadness, Grief, Trauma, and Pain (which I have previously reviewed at BookNotes – $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59) and now, their second official release just came out, the lovely and wise The Traveler’s Path by PC(USA) pastor and writer Douglas Brouwer. (Yes, Central Pennsylvania friends, the Rev. Doug Brouwer that used to pastor in Harrisburg, PA. Hooray!)

Brouwer has pastored in several US locations, and did a stint in Switzerland and, before retirement, in The Hague, Netherlands. Some of this is described in his lively, touching memoir Chasing the Wind: A Pastor’s Life that came out in 2022. His new book is quite a good read and we’re glad to highlight it here.

I am not much of a traveller — many of us simply can’t afford the time or money to do fancy vacations or exotic voyages. Some of us don’t like the hassle and uncertainty of far-away trips. But you know what? Some of us love reading about those who do venture into the wilds, and it is a venerable sort of writing, a genre with its own section in many good bookstores. Mostly written as memoir-like journalism and many even as self-help sort of guides to awareness and what is learned on the road, there are some (but not that many) that are overtly spiritual and pleasantly theological. We’ve got a handful.

Brouwer’s new book highlights travels of all sorts— including mission trips and spiritual pilgrimages — that open up new vistas of adventure and spiritual self-understanding. Brouwer wrote a fine little book years ago on discerning one’s vocation and calling so he has a very solid perspective on these things. He has a sense of place and values that. But yet…  As one reviewer, a travel agent and tour guide, put it, The Traveler’s Path will “stir the soul, beckoning us to explore the deeper meaning of travel, to walk in the footsteps of the divine, and to serve with open hearts wherever we are called.” Nice huh?

Brouwer thinks that travel can be transformational. Those who have done experiential education or service learning know that this can be so. Getting out of our comfort zones can help us with cultural understanding, too, and he reflects about that. He has one chapter (“Making Room for Those Who Cannot Travel”) about those who are incarcerated, and the poignancy of imprisonment.  It was a surprising and great chapter. In this easy-to-read delight of a book, Brouwer tells us about all kinds of travel (include job relocations, another somewhat surprising section) which allows us, in the words of James Bratt, to be guided toward “going abroad and to searching deeper within.”

From William Least-Moon to Cheryl Strayed, Jack Kerouac to Alain de Botton (and the interior journeys of Annie Dillard and Henri Nouwen) Brouwer knows the best writers and enters into conversations with them in an enriching way. The Traveler’s Path is more than a collection of travel narratives, although there are plenty stories. It is not a philosophical treatise, but he invites some good thinking. Thoughtful readers — travelers or not — will enjoy it, I’m sure.

Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible Stanley Hauerwas (Plough Publishing) $12.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $10.36

We love the classy, handsome books done by our friends at the Bruderhof — Plough Publishing, who also does the must-read, exquiste quarterly journal, Plough — and this series of well-printed and designed compact sized paperbacks are on the top of the list. We stock all of their books — their brilliantly conceived graphic stories, their old-school Anabaptist stuff, their poetry and devotionals and memoirs. All of them.

Jesus Changes Everything is edited by the ever-editing Charles Moore, a great behind-the-scenes treasure in serious Christian publishing, and he brings together (but edits) mostly previously published excerpts and chapters and talks by the controversial Duke theologian, picking and updating readable bits and pieces from here and there, making this practically a brand new collection. I am sure even Hauerwas’s biggest fans haven’t seen all of these pieces, and certainly not together in one succinct, portable (and handsome) little volume. Standing well alongside the others in this handsome series of “Plough Spiritual Guides” like collections of the writing of Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Amy Carmichael, Clarence Jordon, Simone Weil, and Abraham Heschel, this new release is one to be treasured. Or cussed at, as the case may be. Let him who have ears…

The solid and helpful introduction to this collection is by Tish Harrison Warren, a fellow Texas Anglican (is Hauerwas a cowboy Episcopalian, as singer-song writer T-Bone Burnett once called himself? His theology may be somewhat Anabaptist and he teaches at a United Methodist related seminary, and he is, after all, a philosopher by trade, I think he  is Episcopalian; he father was a Texan brick-layer.)

In any case, Tish’s splendid introduction is long and serious, almost a full chapter, with very insightful and nicely written explanations of the importance of Hauerwas and his core teachings. As she simply reminds us, “Hauerwas is provocative, but not for provocation’s sake. Instead, he calls us back to the disruptive words of Jesus, and to the church.”

Amen?

The back covers notes that while he is known for zinging insights into today’s ethical questions, he says that “Christians should stop bemoaning their loss of cultural and political power. Instead, they should welcome their status as outsiders and embrace the radical alternative Jesus had in mind for them all along.”

If you haven’t read much in Hauerwasian studies, this is a great starting point, drawing from many of his most serious and widely-discussed books. It is accesible and brief and powerful — just what we need as a fabulous introduction. Very highly recommended.