Happy Labor Day!
Let’s start from a beautiful quote about work from a book about praying the Psalms, a book by an Alaska fisherwoman (and remarkably wide-ranging author), Leslie Leyland Fields. The quote is from Nearing a Far God: Praying the Psalms with Our Whole Selves. (NavPress; $16.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59.)
In a chapter called “Beholding Creation” (on Psalm 8) Leslie writes beautifully about the nature scenes around her on Harvester Island where they’ve spent the winter building their house, looking out at “a brilliant azure bay and emerald mountains, some still with snow.” She is with her young children. Her husband is about to go out to work on an overnight shift on their fishing skiff. “Two figures in neon orange roars past the beach, off to the fishing nets around the island.”
“There’s goes Daddy!” Naphtali calls in her munchkin voice. “When will he be back?”
“He’ll be back around midnight, when you’re sleeping,” I tell her. But you’ll see him in the morning.”
As Duncan’s skiff disappears around the island my mind and heart follow him. I know what’s ahead for the skiff tonight. It’s take-up night, when arm over arm they pull all the nets out of the water, as directed by Fish and Game. We do this at least a dozen times a summer, often in crisis mode: sometimes when storms rage, or the nets are full of fish or kelp or both. I think of the last time I went out to help. My back remembers. My hands remember, crabbed with carpal tunnel syndrome as I picked fish from the nets as fast as I could.
In a perhaps incongruous manner I think of a line by scholar and teacher, Calvin Seerveld, who writes in the memorable piece “The Flash of a Fish Knife” about his father, a fishmonger, and his fiesty but ethical retail sales work with his Long Island customers eyeing up the fresh catch. But that isn’t the connection that first came to mind for me. Seerveld, in another essay, tells of preparing lectures on the history of the philosophy of aesthetics from a Christian historiographic perspective, and was working all night at the kitchen table when his teenage son got up — as I recall it was like 5:00 am — to deliver morning newspapers. Their eyes caught, as the son saw his father still working hard, “the night shift” as Seerveld simply but movingly put it.
Different folks in different careers — a fisherman and the son of a fisherman — and many, many of us, work the night shift sometimes.
Our hats are off to you, no matter your employment, paid or unpaid… Happy Labor Day.
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Most years about this time I honor a few of the books that have come out about living Christian faith in the work-world. It’s been a passion of ours since we opened and we’ve been glad more and more church folk realize that a missional vision of advancing God’s kingdom and influencing the world for the better must include equipping folks to think about their jobs as holy callings — vocations, avenues of service, mission fields. We love God and serve our neighbors by adding to the world’s economy (and faithfully understand that in ways that are often immeasurable by the reductionistic metrics of money and Mammon; some of our best work isn’t even paid, but it contributes so very much to the common good.) We are, as Andy Crouch put it so memorably in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, one of the great books that can help think creatively about our vocations in the world, “culture makers.” As humans made in the very image of our Creator, it’s what we do. As we reflect the image of our worker/maker-God, we do work and make something of the good (now fallen and being redeemed) world of wonders in which we live. To use the language of Genesis 2, we cultivate.
We celebrate today not only with the typical stuff of Labor Day (the dignity of work and justice for workers) but try to remind anyone within listening distance that this is nearly a high holy day in the church of Jesus Christ. If only pastors and people understood it so.
In this BookNotes, in PART ONE, I’ll list a few newer resources (most published within the year) and then, just for fun, will share a big handful of memoirs and other titles set among various careers or jobs (see PART TWO, below.) I loved so many of these books and will just give a shout out to a bunch across the spectrum of workplaces and job opportunities that are captivating and illuminating. Holy spaces, all, even if the writers don’t always know that.
Please see some of the older BookNotes Labor Day columns HERE, HERE, or HERE. I am fond of a story or two I tell HERE, even though we had to take down the link to the powerful James Taylor song, “Millworker.” I hope you those old BookNotes columns (knowing the prices on these old lists are in most cases no longer current.)
PART ONE
Here are fifteen rather new-ish titles to know about, perhaps to pair with some of the older ones listed at the links above.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation: 25th Anniversary Edition Parker Palmer (Jossey Bass) $25.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00
This has been on the top of the lists for many who have appreciated his generous, broad, deeply spiritual (but plainly spoken) invitation to pay attention to our interior lives and discern God’s call upon us. Perhaps best combined with something more robustly theological (like, maybe The Call by Os Guinness or Visions of Vocation by Steve Garber, or Calling and Career by Gordon Smith) this book by this thoughtful, honest, Quaker, is a classic. The brand new edition includes a short new chapter, which is gracious and good, reflecting, too, on the most popular chapter in Let Your Life Speak, the one about suffering. This concise meditation is warm and elegant and beautiful and has been for some a true life-line.
The Sacredness of Secular Work: 4 Ways Your Job Matters for Eternity (Even When Your Not Sharing the Gospel) Jordan Raynor (Waterbrook) $25.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00
Surely most Christians know that life is worth living, and living well, even when we’re not “sharing the gospel.” But there it is: the “great commission is not the only commission.” Our jobs, our work, our vocations, and such, all matter. “From baristas and entrepreneurs to stay-at-home parents and coaches” our daily jobs have intrinsic value. Thought this has been made abundantly clear in any number of good books, so wasn’t (I”ll admit) fully enthused with another book on the topic, but man-oh-man, this is one of the best I’ve read in years, and it’s combination of research, Scripture, storytelling, and vivid illustrations and case studies makes the case powerfully and helpfully. His footnotes are splendid, he’s read widely in the field, and he offers inspiring ways our work can “reveal God’s Kingdom on Earth” here and now. I agree with Randy Alcorn (best-selling author of Heaven) when he says “I think the smile of God is on this book.”
(Jordan Raynor, by the way, wrote one of the great books about these very themes for children, a delightful and informative picture book called The Creator in You, illustrated by Jonathan David [Waterbrook; $12.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39.] It came out in 2022 and we’ve happy to stock it.)
Faithful Work: In the Daily Grind with God and for Others Ross Chapman & Ryan Tafilowski (IVP) $15.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00
Below I will mention Jeff Haanen, the recently retired founder of the highly regarded Denver Institute for Faith & Work. To put it bluntly, Ross Chapman took his place as CEO of the Denver Institute and has stepped up to fill those shoes. While he has theological training and has worked in community and economic development in a medium sized mid-Western town, he was made for this job and is at the helm of one of the great think-tank/resource centers for helping people relate to work, economic systems, professional institutions and the structures of our modern world as redemptive influences. Chapman’s good co-author, Ryan Tafilowski, is a pastor in Colorado and has served as a “theologian in residence” (his PhD is from University of Edinburgh) for the Denver Institute; he brings some pastoral care to the topic as well.
It is a short, compact-sized book which proves not only their ability to introduce the complexities of this hefty topic in concise and sensible ways, but their profound ability to inspire and cast visions of vocation for one and all. It fills a real need in this growing library of books on relating faith and work, for sure.
Faithful Work is general and basic, short and sweet, and you should buy a couple to give away; pastor’s should keep ‘em on hand, at the ready when conversations about “following Jesus everywhere” comes up. It is among the best concise one’s we’ve got.
Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World Michaela O’Donnell (Baker Books) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
Although this came out a few years ago, it is relatively recent and, as one of the very best books on this topic, it deserves an extra shout out here and how. O’Donnell is executive director of Fuller Seminary’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership. She has a brand new book with faith-at-work leader, consultant (and Hearts & Minds champion) Lisa Slayton called Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever Changing World. More on that anon.
O’Donnell’s recipe includes discovering what God is calling you to do in a changing world, defining where you are in this season of work, embracing what the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about calling, developing a mindset and habits suited for the new world of work, and reflecting, then, on how to work out ways that sustain you on the journey. Not bad, huh?
Lived Vocation: Stories of Faith at Work Timothy K. Snyder (Fortress) $21.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59
There is so much that I like about this book, not least of which is the lovely, little pen and ink drawing scattered through-out. (They are reminiscent of an old hippy cookbook we used to love, and the illustrations here are tremendous.) Also, this collection of reflections, while rooted in a solid worldview that affirms the God-saturated nature of reality and the broad scope of Christian redemption, has a different tone than some, offering testimonials of the lived experience of ordinary folks, what the Academic Dean of Austin Presbyterian Seminary (David Jensen) says it “a beautiful interweaving of story and theology, testimony and tradition.” He notes that it is “a model of how theology is done in community, always connected to the Christian life.”
I am not sure the doing of theology proper is the goal of Christian discipleship or that the theologizing done in the workplace is the best part of it all, and, in fact, this book affirms that. This is a complex matter, and lay folks doing good work (often in frustrating settings) do indeed think on their feet about God and the role of the Spirit, about broken systems and Kingdom alternatives, about how to live and more and have their being empowered by knowing God. Sure, but they also tell stories of service and grace and getting jobs done. This is no simple guide to finding meaning at work, but the ethnography pays off with profound insights as you hear reports of person after person in everyday life.
Faith at Work: Christian Vocation in the Professions edited by David W Joy (Concordia) $29.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99
I love these sorts of collections with a number of authors weighing in from their own professional expertise. And what fun this is, with chapters by a pharmacist, a counselor, a lawyer, a nurse, a business person, a public health worker, and a coach.
The first part includes several strong Biblical studies (about work in both the Old and New Testaments) and a good piece by Loy on human and cultural flourishing. There is a chapter on economic systems, and a rare piece on “preaching to professionals in a secular world” by Concordia Seminary prof, Peter Nafzger.
For what it’s worth, Concordia is a conservative Lutheran publisher so most of these contributors bring an evangelical tone and a Lutheran theological orientation to the task. Even if you are not Lutheran (heck, you may not even be Protestant) this is well worth reading.
Faithful is Successful: Notes to the Driven Pilgrim edited by Nathan Grills, David Lewis, & Joshua Swamidass (Outskirts Press) $19.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.96
We were delighted to discover this — a book that emerged from a discipleship training school known as the Harvey Fellows program — as it shows a real variety of practitioners sharing about how they think and live faithfully in their respective fields, from arts to finance to higher education to international affairs. Before the thoughtful testimonials, though, about half the book offers significant rumination on questions that haunt us all —there is good writing on questions of how we discern vocations, what we mean by “integration” and how we might balance our various callings, especially when family and career may be in tension. There are good chapters on ambition, on how we measure success, what a “full-time life” looks like. And then the chapters on “God in the work.”
For what it is worth, Grills is a Public Health Physician, working in disability and chronic disease prevention in India — he is Australian, but his PhD is from Oxford. Lewis is a political science professor at Vanderbilt in TN and Swamidass is a professor of Immunology and Pathology, Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
Proving Ground: 40 Reflections on Growing Faith at Work Graham Hooper (Christian Focus) $14.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99
It isn’t every book that has an endorsement saying it is “…warm, witty, biblical, personal, and kind.” Don’t we all want that kind of a Barnabas-type character coming alongside us to give encouragement and assistance? Indeed, Graham Hooper (who was once “a Senior Executive with a global infrastructure company” – whatever that is) is an Australian business person working in Tanzania. So he’s been around. And, this message is universal — God cares about all manner of work, in all sorts of places, done by all kinds of people. There is good news here: Jesus is present to all of us (not just ministers or priests, not just missionaries or those in church work.) Our loving God is real, and cares, and can help us through the pressures and “tests” of our faith. If you’ve experienced conflict or confusion, setbacks or frustrations at work, this book is for you.
Working from the Inside Out: A Brief Guide to Inner Work That transforms Our Outer World Jeff Haanen (IVP) $18.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.29
Jeff, a writer and entrepreneur, was the founder of the Institute for Faith & Work in Denver, CO, and is one of the grand leaders of this ongoing movement in the world these days, helping people think Christianly and live faithfully in their jobs, careers, and workplaces. As many good books as there are, now, on this, I’d read anything Haanen writes as he has earned the respect of so many. And, further, this book surprisingly is a rare read, a book about cultivating the interior lives for faithful living in-but-not-of the workplaces we find ourselves in. As it says on the back,
“Many today are experiencing social isolation, deep anxieties about the future, and various difficulties in the workplace. For too many of us, work seems tedious, painful, or meaningless. And we don’t know what to do about it.”
Blurbs on the back are from the great writer Philip Yancey, pioneering pastor who wrote Work Matters and founded “Made to Flourish”, Tom Nelson, the great leader at Redeemer Center for Faith and Work (and co-author, with Tim Keller, of the premiere book on this subject, Every Good Endeavor) and more. This really is a lovely, exceptionally wise, deeply balanced and very important resource showing the emotional, relational, vocational, intellectual, and public aspects of our “seamless lives.” So good.
Women, Work, and Calling: Step Into Your Place in God’s World Joanna Meyer (IVP) $15.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79
I’ve mentioned the Denver Institute; their staff have been busy writing, lately, sharing the fruit of their years of groundbreaking work in cultural renewal, championing the integration of faith and labor, and equipping many to be faithful stewards of the many gifts of work and career God has given us. Hooray. Joanna Meyer has been a leading contributor to their work of social flourishing and here offers her unique voice as a woman in the faith and work conversation, and offering keen insight about how women can serve God, even despite some unique challenges and obstacles around gender in the marketplace.
This small book is worth its weight in gold, as they say, and I commend it to women and men. I really enjoyed it. It covers various aspects of this on-going movement, bringing foundational insights up to date (that is stuff about the value of work and the nature of our callings) but also notes how, in fact, the church has often not only been lax in helping workers relate faith to their career areas, but has particularly missed opportunities to disciple women.
I knew of a big church, once, that was getting on board with helping folks discern their true vocations and was starting to have seminars on workplace witness and thinking about the essential value of work done in occupations and careers. And guess where they located and hosted these critically important events? Within their men’s ministry. Can you imagine?
Joanna Meyer is upbeat and gracious, wise and practical, theologically sharp and fully aware of the challenges of many women as they take up their influence in their working lives. Hooray.
Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life David Bahnsen (Post Hill Press) $28.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19
This author’s father was a prolific Bible scholar (and working pastor) appreciated by many, a visionary within the seriously Reformed camp as he was compelling. This son, David, here, shows himself an equally important voice. The book captures his serious views of the good and revelatory nature of creation; he knows his Kuyper and his Bavinck and his Puritans and his Dorothy Sayers. Besides being well read in economics (I love it when I see a reference to the much-discussed Deirdre McCloskey) he is, in his own job, a private wealth management firm. He not only thinks that hard work is good for the soul, but he thinks we have to know a bit about finances and economics. Fair enough. I’ll live with the charts and graphs to follow his passionate stuff about “compounding and accumulating sufficient assets” and something that is apparently called “liquidity events.”
Not only does Bahnsen offer some thinking about retirement and finances and more (he worked for Morgan Stanley for a while) he fairly interacts with other books on the market. For instance, he spends considerable time exposing the false binary (rooted in a dualism between nature and grace, to use theological lingo) of a popular author who invites professional types to rethink their mid-life lives as “halftime” (and move from “success to significance.”) Bahnsen puts it very well, in a manner I’ve often said myself about that well-intended popular book.
He writes, that:
‘Success panic’ does not come because we need to make a different plan for the second half of life. It comes because too many people are being misled about the first half of their lives. If you aren’t taught that your work is inherently valuable to God, and is an integral part of His Kingdom, it’s no surprise that you’d panic upon finding yourself successful in a career you thought was existentially meaningless. A financial survival objective at least keeps your head in the game. But would we have an epidemic of midlife success panic if we taught the existential benefits of work to people of all ages? I think not.
Exactly.
If you, like me, wondered whether a book with a non-ironic, old school telephone on the cover could be relevant, just try to skip that aesthetic and marketing snafu. And skip the forward, where a buddy of his speaks all manner of outlandish untruths about the current state of the literature about faith and work. He must have not been following our BookNotes lists for these past decades and suggests there isn’t anything much of worth out there. Huh? I found it hard to read on, assuming Bahnsen agreed with this puff of nonsense. He is wrong about that, but, still, Full-Time is a vivid, smart and even fiesty reminder of what is at stake in getting this stuff right.
Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work Andrew Lynn (Oxford University Press) $35.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00
This book is academic in nature, a serious bit of researched and peer-reviewed scholarship, but stands as one of the exceptionally significant studies of this faith and work movement, the most important book of its kind since David W. Miller and the Princeton University’s “Faith and Work Initiative” released Faith at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement in 2006.
In fact, David Miller himself offers keen insight about Saving the Protestant Ethic.Miller writes:
The faith at work movement is an ongoing and evolving social movement, not a flash in the pan or a passing fad. Andrew Lynn brings us a strong contribution to the growing number of scholarly studies of the surprisingly diverse nature of the faith at work movement. Lynn’s provocatively titled Saving the Protestant Ethic focuses on and brings us fresh insights into the conservative evangelical Protestant wing of the movement, whose search for meaning and purpose drives their economic activity.
There is much going on here, and the reviewer of a good piece in FareForward about it is right to say, (her) “brief summary surely fails to capture the depth and breadth of Lynn’s extraordinary descriptive project.”
Lynne get the nuances of Protestant sorts of faith traditions and here focuses a bit on the differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals, and has intriguing chapters like “The Four Evangelical Theologies of Work”, “From the Christian Right to the Corporate Right”, and (in chapter seven) “From Culture Wars to Cultural Stewardship.” Wow.
Andrew Lynn (who has a PhD in sociology) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia where he works with James Davison Hunter. His work spans organizational theory, religious studies, and the history of ideas surrounding ethics and economics.
Sacred Strides: The Journey to Belovedness in Work and Rest Justin McRoberts (Thomas Nelson) $18.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19
You may recall that I’ve mentioned this a time or two, once before it came out, another time as I did a recap of great books we sold at the Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh last winter, and I know I’ve named it to customers looking for books on rest and sabbath and the like.
Justin is a good friend, a great artist, a singer-songwriter (and now published poet) and life coach.
I want to highlight Sacred Strides here, again, too, on a list for Labor Day, since it offers what many find to be a whole new way to approach the struggles of finding balance between work and rest. You know how many of us have work or church or civic demands even as we hunger for play and recreation, caring for friends and family, not to mention ordinary tasks like shopping for groceries and doing the laundry. For too many, being busy is like some badge of honor and even as we know it isn’t right, the books that insist we slow down and knock off the idol of finding our worth in our work are fine but not altogether useful. Our work does matter, and there are public callings that are equal to the vocations of parenting and marriage, say. If all of life is being redeemed and work and place, worship and work, are intertwined, how do we do this full life in God?
Justin flips the script just a bit and invites us to realize that, like with walking, we don’t think left foot, right foot, so much as we stride, following a natural, balancing rhythm of interconnected movements. He says it better but his fun and often funny stories invites us to “adopt a new posture toward our day to day lives.” That is, we don’t “balance” work and rest and neither fully affirms our essential belovedness. We start there, embracing a deeper sense of God’s care for us and then discover how to care and work, rest and share, all in ways aligned with our gifts and temperament.
Justin says, “Rest has helped me know I am Beloved in and through my work, and not as a reward for it.” Amen? Read this upbeat, creative set of chapters, linger over them, work your way through them and fine new energy for worship and work, play and prayer, rest amidst our running. Stride, friends. This book is a fun and wild ride, one I very highly recommend.
Plenty Good Room: Co-Creating an Economy of Enough for All Andrew Wilkes (Broadleaf) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
As mentioned, in God’s good but fallen creation, we are called to work for the common good. We love God by loving our neighbors and a major way most of us do this is by doing something productive with our time; we work, entering that complex network that MLK waxed eloquently about. As he noted, for most of us we’ve interacted with workers from all over the globe even before we’ve left the breakfast table. And so, it is wise when talking about faith at work, being creative in the marketplace, living into a vision of vocations, that we also attend to the structures and contexts of our idol-rich culture of late modernity.
People in the Republican movement these days, mostly Trumpian MAGA folk, are always complaining about socialism (as if paving roads and having laws about air pollution or regulations on surgical units at the local hospital, or, heck, even funding schools and libraries are some how left-wing.) Well, I’m no socialist, although I rejoice daily for the simple health care reforms (inadequate as they were) of the Affordable Care Act. I’m no socialist, but it doesn’t hurt us one bit — and could help a lot — if we know something about the best arguments made about the traditions of democratic socialism. This book can help.
Andrew Wilkes is a black pastor in Brooklyn and a self-professed black socialist with a degree in political science. Trained in a thoughtful, mainline seminary, and well schooled in black history, he draws on older sources like W.E.B. Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer as well as modern thinkers from womanist scholars like Keri Day and Katie Cannon and minority theologians like Cornel West or Gustavo Gutierrez or Peter Paris. Happily, he cites the great collection of Martin Luther King Jr. compiling speeches on work and labor, All Labor Has Dignity edited by Michael Honey.
I was struck by how this book draws not only on the great traditions of black theorizing and work for the re-ordering of society, but also Wilkes deep awareness, as an activist, of working groups and think tanks and movement networks like the New Economy Coalition or The Transnational Institute or The Economic Policy Institute. Not too many books have citations on economic details alongside quotes from Karl Barth or inspiration lines from Howard Thurman.
As a scholar-activist for economic democracy, Rev. Wilkes is on the board of the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York and the Institute for Christian Socialism. He knows his stuff. This book isn’t overly academic, though, and offers to readers some faith-based ingenuity for systems that offer “plenty good room — not just for a few, but for all.”
Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground You in an Ever Changing World Michaela O’Donnell & Lisa Pratt Slayton (Baker Books) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
I have announced this previously although since it is quite new, I wanted to list it again, even though it isn’t precisely about the interface of work and spirituality, callings and careers, or jobs and our daily discipleship. Because Michaela wrote Make Work Matter and because Lisa has worked mentoring leaders as Christians in secular work spaces (and consults with many, now, through her Tamim Partners firm) they both are heros in this whole field. They here are writing as leadership coaches and while this wise guide to knowing yourself and how to “do the inner work of waking up and letting go” is generally written for nearly anyone to read, it is (or so it seems to me) especially useful for those in the flux of career changes, job stress, professional challenges, and the like
The stories are great, the metaphors rich and useful, the skills and insights and prayers are perfect. Do you need encouragement, vision (and practical help) to navigate (as they put it) in the fog? Welcome to one of the very best books I’ve read on living in flux.
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PART TWO:
THIRTY fun memoirs or essays by authors with different careers, reflecting on their work and passions. All all 20% off, while supplies last.
A FUNERAL DIRECTOR The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be Thomas Lynch (Norton) $27.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.36
Lynch is a poet and an undertaker and his first book, The Undertaking: Life Notes from the Dismal Trade is one of my favorite books, ever. I’ve written elsewhere how much it meant to me when my father was unexpectedly killed in a car accident. It’s an eloquent and rare book. Except Lynch followed it with others, and those are equally splendid, and in this anthology of pieces from five of his prose volumes, there are also some new chapters. He is a spectacular essayist, a splendid person, and a person who has given voice to the sense of vocation that many funeral directors have. There are other books on being a funeral director (if your interested, you should read the two great ones by central PA undertaker Caleb Wilde, and a great, edgy memoir called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by the great Caitlin Doughty, about working in a crematorium) but this introduction to Lynch shows forth his holy calling in working with the dead.
AN AMATEUR HOME-BUILDER All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House David Giffels (Harper) $20.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79
Those who know me well know that this is one of my favorite authors, a guy from Akron, Ohio. Who knew Akron was once a high-brow town, laden with arts and culture and new money. And who knew that, by the end of the 20th century, it was crumbling and fine old mansions that were falling apart at their glorious old seams, were going for a steal.
Author and rock and roll fan and part time woodworker David Giffels buys such a place and he and his wife and a group of beer swilling pals set out to rebuild that house, turning it into a home, a real home. Pitched as a “delight” and “a truly wonderful books” and “full of heart and cheer” the reviewers are right. It is also exceedingly poignant, even as he learns what it means to grow up and make a home. Surely home-making is one of our most human of callings, and this book which starts as a comic story of a fixer-upper, ends up being a beautiful (if hilarious) reflection on satisfaction and love and grace.
SCIENTISTS God Speaks Science: What Neurons, Giant Squid, and Supernovae Reveal About Our Creator John Van SLoten (Moody Press) $15.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79
I love preacher Van Sloten; his first book was called The Day Metallica Came to Church and his second was as much of a spot-on Labor Day title as any listed above, called Every Job a Parable: What Walmart Greeters, Nurses, and Astronauts Tell Us about God. I have gone on and on about that before, as I have this one. Of course science can point us to God, and the glories of creation remind us of all kinds of holy things. The point here, for our purposes now, though, is that each chapter of God Speaks Science is John’s telling of an interview with a scientist. A different specialist reveals her secrets, describe their calling, tells of their work in the field. From biology to chemistry, from brain science to the vocation of being a hydrologist, these chapters remind us in a delightful way how seemingly secular work can be deeply, profoundly spiritual.
A TRUCKER The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road Finn Murphy (Norton) $16.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59
I did a long review of this when it first came out, so taken was I about this trucker’s life story that drove him to drive. He’s a really smart dude, a good writer, and his life as a long-haul mover was really, really entertaining. In sharing with you about it, again, now, I recall just how much I enjoyed and respected this fascinating guy and this remarkable story.
The Long Haul got a lot of rave reviews and I was glad to see the UVA philosopher turned motorcycle repair guy, Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft commend it. He called it “funny and sad and wise, and it shows us the lives of people we depend on.”
A SMALL BUSINESSMAN and HEMP FARMER Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom and Bust in the New Wild West Finn Murphy (Norton) $17.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39
I don’t know which of Finn Murphy’s books I liked best; as a small business guy (who shares his opinion that the word “entrepreneur” is too long and snooty), I loved this book, set in Boulder, Colorado, and other locations along the Front Range. You will learn a lot about legal CBD which is actually fascinating, and there are vivid scenes of working in the building trades — his $35,000 run to Home Depot is pretty amazing! As you join Finn Murphy on this thrilling ride into the world of small acreage farming, business start up, global sales, cops, shipping, and growing legal hemp. Murphy literally bought the farm out near Boulder and decided to plant this crop that had been in legal exile for almost a hundred years. The introduction alone will have you wanting to keep turning the pages, excited to find out what happens next in this upbeat, funny, tragic, delirious story. The title is clever but a bit of a misnomer, as he grows this crop not for getting high, but for non-hallucinogenic, medicinal and other quite noble uses.
I might mention that I think this dude is the real deal (I loved his “voice” and perspective in The Long Haul, too.) I trust him and would follow his antics anywhere. His care for the chronically underemployed, transients, and cash-only workers is beautiful. The description of the Polish guy (formerly a PhD in industrial engineering from Krakow) who comes to empty his worker’s porta-potty, on page 105, and what Tadziu says about his new job on page106 is worth the price of the book. However, just for the record, Murphy doesn’t articulate a sense of holy calling or even a serious sense of vocation, even though he is clearly excited and driven. He got into The Hemp Space to strike it rich, make some much needed dough, likening himself to others who followed a boom (like the Gold Rush or the Silver Rush) into the Rocky Mountain State. Still, his descriptions of the work and the workers, are a blast, and, frankly, pretty honorable.
Murphy has some experience of starting up a business — for a while he was one of the premier importers of premier cashmere, complete with a private jet in swanky New England, but this, out in the Wild West —I’m telling you what: this is one start-up story you won’t forget…
A GARDENER and WRITER Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden Camille T. Dungy (Simon & Schuster) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
Ha, yet another Colorado story. Like most of our best nature writers there is indeed a sense of calling, indeed, a sense of transcendence even, when they explore, stand in awe and wonder, and write, when they put pen to rugged journal (or fingers to sturdy laptop) as they see and ponder the great outdoors. Dungy is a literature professor living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and her sense of vocation as a teacher seems clear enough. Her husband, too, is a very dedicated, caring prof. But she is also a writer, a published poet, and she is under contract to write this book — something about land and flowers, gardening and earthkeeping. She is taking care of her own plain lawn, nurturing indigenous plants, and more. It’s hard but beautiful work.
Her ability to write such luminous prose about foliage and bugs, slugs and butterflies, grasses and trees, is nothing short of remarkable. That she is called to this work, in a white neighborhood, as a black woman, adds to the drama and passion. This is glorious; very highly recommended.
A CHEF Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection Robert Farrar Capon (Modern Library) $20.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00
Capon was known as a theologian and Bible teacher; he was a writer (a book called Bed and Board on family life, a theological novel and a handful of extraordinary books of Biblical studies, among others.) But if his calling was to be an Episcopal priest and writer, his avocation of cooking (and being a food critic for the New York Times for a season in the 1960s) is what he is perhaps most known for. Certainly is it why he is most beloved; or, should I say that his most popular book, Supper of the Lamb, is so beloved. I can count on one hand the number of books that seem well known and appreciated by folks across the theological and denominational spectrum, and I can tell you of bunches of folks who have actually tried to replicate the extraordinary recipe for lamb that makes up the heart of this rare, gorgeously written, treatise.
Of course there is more than that, here. As the back cover says, it is “on everything from prayer to poetry to puff pastry.” And there is fabulous stuff about knives and that unforgettable bit about the glories of the onion. The subtext might be a book on the holy work of cooking and the calling that many have to create dishes — and maybe a life — that “will alway be more delicious than it is useful.”
COAL MINERS and LAWYERS and ADVOCATES Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia Chris Hamby (Little, Brown) $30.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00
This big book illustrates a sense of calling in so many ways — the call of the lawyers, the advocates of justice, the journalists, the medical docs who testified, over and over, the Union reps, and, of course, the writer, Chris Hamby, himself, are noble people fighting a “David versus Goliath” sort of campaign for justice. The dignity and hard, hard work of the coal miners themselves, men (and some women) who lived in the coal mining towns and suffering the consequences of going to work underground. I mentioned in my hefty review of this (the BookNotes that was posted November 1,2021) that my paternal grandfather died of complications from black lung, and this book was very, very important to me. I really recommend it.
If you know the kind of workers and unions and social service folk in the small mining towns of Appalachia (in this case, mostly northern Appalachian, from Southwestern Pennsylvania into West Virginia and Western Virginal) you will so appreciate this. If you don’t know much about Appalachia, this is the book to read. If you like stories of the struggle for justice against all odds, exposing the corruption of big business (and, sometimes, the complicity of the government) you have got to read Soul Full of Coal Dust. Yes, some jobs are exceedingly hard, even dangerous. The dignity of those growing up in this industry and portrayed beautifully. What a book.
A CIVIL SERVANT IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Diplomacy Shaun A. Casey (Eerdmans) $30.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00
I wanted to list this as it is a serious, careful, heady study of the author’s role in John Kerry’s State Department and his leading the newly formed “Religion and Global Affairs project at State. He studied at Harvard Divinity School and taught public theology at Wesley in DC when he was tapped to enter the world of global conflicts and US diplomacy by helping train a team of those who could help leaders navigate the religions driving much of the complexity of the world’s politics. I’ve read books about spies and books about soldiers and while this doesn’t (on the face of it) have as much adventuresome doom, I kept turning pages, wanting to know more about how early 21st century statecraft was or wasn’t influence by Christians called to help the world understand the spirituality of geopolitics. It’s quite a calling and quite a book.
For what it is worth, I suspect Madame Secret Madeline Albright’s book, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (Harper; $18.99) would also serve to scratch this itch, to see how world-class, major players in geopolitics were shaped by a sense of the call to public service and how, as Christians, they navigated their complicated work, day by day. I haven’t read her book yet, but it ought to be known as an example of a woman of integrity doing difficult work, as prayerfully as she could.
A WOODWORKER The Lost Carving: A Journey to The Heart of Making David Esterly (Penguin) $24.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20
Watch for our every-other-week podcast (“Three books from Hearts & Minds”) to drop on Wednesday of this week where I regale listeners with my opinions in three sorts of books about faith and work, one genre of which served as an inspiration for this column: stories of people who found a sense of calling in their work or describe their passion with such gusto that is surely seems like a true vocation. This book is one of those and the writing is glorious, the story amazing, but the plot is easy to explain.
The oh-so-short version is that David Esterly is so taken with the beauty of the woodwork — done by master craftsman Grinling Gibbons in the late 1600s — in a certain British cathedral that he visits as a child that he cannot help but take up the career of being a woodworker. Years later, that very cathedral catches fire and the wonderfully artful woodwork is destroyed. Spoiler alert: craftsman David Esterly is brought in to repair the very place that drew him to the art of woodworking in the first place. As one reviewer put it, it is uncommon that he is “a visual artist who can coax as much beauty from words as he can from his primary medium.” What a story!
Laura Miller wrote in Salon that the book was “profound and wondrous, rich in thought and lovely in style.”
A VOCATIONAL LEADER The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work Steve Garber (IVP) $20.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00
This is not a memoir or a study of any one job, but it beautifully illustrates Steve’s rare ability to capture in his own unique and eloquent writing style, the ordinariness of so much that glorifies God. From how hamburgers are made at Elevation Burger restaurant to his own growing up with a scientist dad (and a rancher grandad) to stories of economic reforms being promoted by the global candy makers, Mars, Corporation, he tells (in short chapters) something about how folks long for an integrity that relates faith with life. There is a real tapestry here, and that woven fabric is pictured in the first photo that goes with the first essay.
You see, each short piece is enhanced with a photo, usually directly related to the theme of the essay. I once described this as an on-to-road journal, with Steve telling of talks he’s given, people he’s met, organizations he has consulted with, groups he has taught. From colleges asking about the vocation of teaching and learning to film makers creating some of the world’s most famous movies to business execs yearning to get behind the emptiness of a crass bottom line, he invites us into stories of integrity where (as he has said in another book) “vocation is integral, not incidental” to our faith and discipleship.
The quiet, gentle, eloquent storyteller who listens to others so very carefully and writes such compelling vignettes has, himself, had a lot of jobs. He writes about some here. And he sees the high calling of ordinary people in songs and books he reads too — you’ll appreciate his words on the importance of Charles Dickens and I hope you love his comments about Les Mis.
One of the first lines is typically intense, profound, and vital, until you realize it is also a joke. Most of life, he says, is pretty autobiographical. Garber’s small and easy to read collection yearning for a seamless life, named A Seamless Life, is mostly autobiographical and so it is a joy to read, near Labor Day, or any day. Highly recommended.
A HOMESTEADER In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm Tiffany Eberle Kriner (Eerdmans) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
I have highlighted this wonderfully written before here at BookNotes, celebrating how its tender prose captures much about the land, the place, the contours of a life of faithfulness caring for this place. As mid-Western scholar and writer Phil Christian puts it, she turns “the fragments of American history into a story of repentance and renewal, and a beat up bit of land into a life-giving farm.”
Kriner, an English prof at Wheaton College, is attentive to stuff that matters, and it seems to me this is the sign of one called to this sort of work; to any work, really. In this beautiful combination of memoir and literature and nature wiring and social analysis, she invites us to care about our place, which is a calling we all have.
A FURNITURE MANUFACTURER Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Help Save an American Town Beth Macy (Back Bay Books) $17.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60
Beth Macy is clearly an example of one called to a vocation — she is a journalist and her books have inspired many. (She is more recently known for Dopesick, made into the captivating, must-watch, Netflix series, and it’s sequel, Raising Lazarus, where characters who respond to the call to care rise up to help those addicted to fentanyl and other crazy-making third-wave opioids.) In this older one, though, she tells a businessman in Bassett, Virginia, who fights to save the storied furniture factories and realizes he must fight the cheap, off-shore imports coming from China. In scenes to vivid to explain easily, he walks the factory floors, encourages the struggling workers, meets with distributors and retailers, and, yes, finally goes to China to track down the cheap knock offs and find out why the government is facilitating this fiasco that is destroying one of the great regions of manufacturing in the US.
Macy tells of “leal maneuvers, factory efficiencies, sheer grit, and cunning” to grow the company and save hundreds of jobs. Yet there are these hidden truths about the modern industrial practices in our neoliberal and globalized economy.
This is narrative nonfiction at its very best and I couldn’t put it down. Macy’s soul as a writer meets the souls of the workers, here, and she traces their fearless leader John Bassett III, a “shrewd and determined third-generation factory man.” I do not know if the words vocation or calling even appear in this epic story. They don’t have to.
A STEEL MILL / FOUNDRY SUPERVISOR Stronger Than Steel: The Wayne Anderson Story R.C. Sproul (Harper & Row; Value of the Person Consultants) $20.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00
I knew Wayne Alderson a bit when I worked at a Presbyterian Church in McKeesport, PA in the years of transition from the greater Pittsburgh areas being known as the City of Steel and the Steel Valley to being, by the end of the 1980s, a quintessential rust-belt city, writ large. Before all that, in the mid-1970s Wayne Alderson worked for management, running a struggling and racially tense foundry called Pittron in Glassport, PA. There was a hard and ugly strike there and things were bad, as the book explains. Seeing his work as a Christian — Alderson was being mentored at the time by his pastor and also Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul, who later wrote this book about him — he felt that he was called by God to do respectful work with others and his grace and imagination and Godly grit changed the face of the factory. He felt called to encourage his workers and he invited blue collar union guys to a Bible study, which had a huge impact. From there, they resisted racism and alcohol abuse and more. Anderson’s efforts at reconciliation between labor and management went nearly national — an innovative program teaching respect caught on in several places in various industries.
Wayne’s team of new followers of Jesus (and some who liked the respect and sense of calling to the community of dignified work who perhaps were not followers of Jesus) brought change and productivity to that Pittron Plant.
This second edition of the book tells more of Wayne’s story, penned by his daughter, Nancy, who carries on his legacy of taking up the vocation of being a change agent in industrial relations. What an example of somebody taking their faith into their work-space.
A WRITER Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Anne Lamott (Anchor) $17.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60
There are bunches of books about writing and most illustrated what Annie Dillard calls “the writing life” or how Wendell Berry writes about “standing by words.” (I adore, by the way, Wendell Berry’s under-appreciated honoring of the writing of New Jersey medical doctor and poet William Carlos Williams in his The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford.) Of the many helpful, and often autobiographical volumes we have for writers, I still most often recommend Anne Lamont’s, which is funny and wise, a good story and with much helpful stuff on being a writer. The opening pages alone, tell about her father, a writer, are always inspiring to me every time I open the book. Writing is, of course, about paying attention — “bird by bird, buddy,” as her father put it when her ten-year-old brother was overwhelmed doing a huge report on birds for school. Bird by bird, indeed. Bird by Bird is a modern classic.
A PROSECUTOR / SOCIAL WORKER Confessions of a Former Prosecutor: Abandoning Vengeance and Embracing True Justice Preston Shipp with Eric Wilson (Chalice Press) $19.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
This new book is an extraordinary example of someone who senses a strong call to being an agent of god in the world and who lives that out. There are complications along the way, including a twist of fate that “revealed how he enabled an unjust sentence for a 16-year old girl.” He discovered that “in the justice according to Jesus, adversaries can become allies.”
As David Dark notes,
Preston Shipp shares the microphone with a great cloud of loving and mostly living people you’ll want to look up and possibly track down to enter the healing game he describes…. The door to it is right here in these pages.”
Yep, his “ongoing conversion” is described as he steps into a life-long vocation of reforming America’s juvenile justice system.
Shipp’s calling led him to become an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Tennessee. Now he is the Associate Policy Director for the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.
A PHILOSOPHER and COLLEGE PROFESSOR In This World of Wonders: Memoir of a Life in Learning Nicholas Wolterstorff (Eerdmans) $27.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39
Talk about a life well lived. Wolterstorff is certainly one of the leading Christians scholars of our lifetime and in his impressive career he has written as a philosopher who is drawn to several reassuring themes. He has written about aesthetics and about justice; curiously, he has written exceedingly deep tomes about the nature of God, the nature of Christian worship, and the ways in which the arts might enhance such worship. Not everyone cares about his justice work, his political science or his philosophical examinations of liturgy and worship. But they care about his suffering.
Years ago, Nic lost a young adult son and his private journal, short, honest, compelling, and called Lament for a Son became a best seller and remains a classic in some circles. Many feel like they know him as he feared his hurting soul in that little volume.
This autobiography tells vignettes from his life about his marriage and his Christian growth, about his experiences in South Africa and (years ago) in Palestine as he became increasingly an advocate for peace and justice among the world’s most marginalized. He continues to think and speak and write with a Christ-like sensitivity to those who are hurting and excluded.
Surely being a scholar, a teacher, indeed a philosopher, is a unique calling, not for everyone. But for anyone who is a beneficiary of the teaching and writing of such scholars, knowing their own backstory, how they came to be where they are, their own sense of calling, is a beautiful gift. In This World of Wonders: Memoir of a Life in Learning is, I think, a splendid must-read for anyone who follows his Dutch and Reformed church background. (His role in founding a CRC church in Grand Rapids known for gorgeous and somewhat innovative liturgy which helped give rise to the immensely popular Calvin Institute of Christian Worship is told here, as are fascinating details such as his collection of well-crafted furniture and his artful consideration of architecture, including building their own home.)
This is the memoir of one called to Christian scholarship, the story of a professor who has traveled as a public intellectual around the world. It’s a wonder, in a world of wonders.
TEACHERS What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World Taylor Mali (Berkeley) $15.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00
Do you know this impassioned defense of teachers and why we need them now more than ever. Written a few years ago when at a dinner party somebody seemed to scoff at his work as a teacher and asked, “What do teacher’s make?” Well, in a talk that went viral, a poem/sermon that is breathtaking for its power, he replies You can imagine the good stuff that teachers make. It is sharp and funny and in this book he not only offers that famous reply but offers other poignant t stories of a life committed to teaching.
Kirkus Reviews called it “A valentine to teachers everywhere. Big, bright, life-lessons in a pocket-sized package.” I loved this and hope others taking up the calling of education would be inspired in this kind of way. Only one with a high sense of calling says stuff like “I teach for the fire.”
A TEACHER The Flourishing Teacher: Vocation Renewal for a Sacred Profession Christiana Bieber Lake (IVP) $25.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00
While this is wonderfully written and is packed full of school and personal life stories, I’ll admit it isn’t a memoir or even a happy sort of collection of tidbits like the wonders in the little Taylor Mali book, above. The Flourishing Teacher is a major work, a standard, now, I’d say, in our education section. There may be other great ones about developing a Christian viewpoint on pedagogy, books about how to Christianly conceive of schooling and teaching, but this gets to the heart of things in a way that most teachers will deeply appreciate. The very subtitle is the tip-off — “vocational renewal for a sacred profession.” Amen to that, eh?
The way Lake helps her readers understand the sacredness of their profession, and the way she invites vocational renewal is by walking the teacher through twelve months of her year. Starting in August (otherwise known as “Embrace the Lace”) she offers stories and guidance and episodes in this call to enter more conscientiously the rhythms of the academic calendar. Whether you need help in or out of the classroom, whether you work in public schools or are a college teacher, this introduction to the “landscapes of self-care, student engagement, and in structural struggles” is sure to help. Even as one who is not a teacher, I resonated with her call to “rediscover your passion for this vocation.”
ARTISTS Art and Sacrificial Love: A Conversation with Michael D. O’Brien Clemens Cavallin (Ignatius Press) $14.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $11.96
There are dozens of great books about aesthetics and creativity, the calling of the Christian artist and the theology or spirituality of being a creative. So many are among my favorites, but most are, if witty and delightful, still didactic. For this list, I mostly wanted stories, and this short book is written nearly in the style of a novel, a nicely told report of the conversation between two Roman Catholic artists. While O’Brien is better known as a novelist — Father Elijah, The Fathers Tale, Eclipse of the Sun, Sophia’s House, and more) — he started as a painter. (There are full-color reproductions of some of Cavallin’s visual work and some of O’Brien’s paintings as well.) This is a tender and personal and deeply religious conversation about the anguish and the joy of being a Christian in the late modern world, and, particularly about being an artist.
As Cavallin (who is Swedish) prepares you to enter this conversation, he writes,
While writing this book I had in mind especially those of you who … feel drawn to art as an expression of a strong Christian vocation. It need not be sacred art, but any form of art that takes the Christian beliefs and life of the artist seriously and who does not accept a strong division of reality and oneself into secular and religious, private and public, matter and spirit.
ECOLOGISTS and COLLEGE PROFESSORS Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha Gail Gunst Heffner & David P. Warners (Michigan State University Press) $29.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96
I have reviewed this major work twice before and now I want to suggest it yet again, to be read through the lens of one’s sense of call and how God guides folks to commit to decades long work, work that matters over the longer haul.
Gail and David are friends and I know what some might call their social imaginary, their Reformed worldview, their own sense that the grace they’ve experienced in Christ should set them into the world as culture-makers and Kingdom witnesses, pointing the way to goodness and justice and social healing. They’ve got this stuff in their bones and Beth and I enjoy and admire them greatly.
Yet, this book is a detailed and captivating story less about their faith and motivation — although they speak explicitly about it at times — but more about this dream that they had, this project, this hope to recruit college students, institutional authority, church and state, together, to help heal an old and very polluted stream that ran through downtown Grand Rapids, where they lied. What started out as a hope to study and document and eventually restore this notoriously depleted and depleted waterway in a complex watershed (of rural, suburban, small town and highly urbanized environments) because a decades long campaign, funded in part by the DEA and backed by numerous neighborhood associations and river keepers, to literally reimagine how watersheds are seen and how faith is expressed. Their passion for this educational and culturally-reforming movement — resisting some of the chief idols of our time — shines through, even as they share (as is fitting for a peer-reviewed, semi-academic work) the scientific, ecological, and policy matters they were working towards.
Much of the story shows not only their dream of ecological faithfulness (and their faith’s engagement with what some call “reconciliation ecology”) but their work as educators and Christian college leaders. Dave is a scientist and his calling to do research, and teach students to engage in meaningful science work, is more than a delight, but a real privilege to see. Gail’s tireless efforts to harness the social capital of the university to seek the common good of the community and her long-standing efforts in academic-based service learning are clearly a high calling. To read how the two of them, in their respective vocations, with lots of others joining in, sustained this large project of empowering others to care for the clean up of Plaster Creek is a great, great example of faithfulness explored together, being guided by their respective vocations. That they have stewarded well this project steadfastly over many years is what this book finally shows us. Hooray.
Breaking Through: My Life in Science Katalin Kariko (Crown Publishing) $28.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19
Dr. Kariko is a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in RNA-mediated mechanisms. She is an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania, and her research was foundational in the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Which is to say, she saved lives, tens of thousands of lives.
What an inspiring story, filled with the hardships of growing up in the bleak, communist Hungary where her father was a butcher their home lacked running water. She tells of her remarkable immigration to the US and the gift of a postdoctoral fellowship (in 1985) with the hope of remaking a corner of the field of medicine. She documents her struggles as a woman researcher doing studies in what was considered (then) rather arcane. She was disrespected, experienced failures, yet was persistent. She knows the power of tenacity — geesh, there’s a scene where is is plagued with cockroaches in a windowless lab — and the importance of this virtue as scientists search for answers in the gaps of establish knowledge. She was being methodical in her research, pushing for years for innovation and, when the Covid-19 virus caused a global pandemic, her work on mRNA became vital. She tells her story, here, in what Jennifer Doudna (a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry) “a riveting testament to resilience and the power of unwavering belief. ”
WAREHOUSE WORKERS, ETC. Fulfillment: American in the. Shadow of Amazon Alec MacGillis (Picador) $18.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40
As you know, I love narrative nonfiction, that creative sort of reporting and expose that draws us in, giving us well-written descriptions and backstory. This is one of the very best, and important book and a book whose value (according to a piece in the Financial Times) “at this moment in history is unmistakable. Sarah O’Connor continues that this richly reported portrait is “not of a company, but of the country it has helped to reshape.”
There are other books that look in greater detail about the unjust and corrupt business practices of the Amazonian behemoth, but this book mostly features the workers for the many fulfillment centers Amazon has built all over the land. It features extraordinary stories of extraordinary goings-on, from Seattle to Texas to Washington, DC to the way in which they turned a famous, storied steel mill outside of Baltimore and rehired the steel workers to work the conveyor belts in the fulfillment center. In Ohio, “a hard-bitten cardboard maker moves from job to job, while his employers supplant auto manufacturers and bring dead-end work to dead shopping centers.”
To show how Amazon has impacted the retail world, MacGillis studies the now shuttered central Pennsylvania chain, The Bon Ton (and has a section on the Queen Street shopping plaza that is just a few miles from our shop.) It spends some time showing how Jeff Bezos ushers lobbyists and government contractors into his Kalorama mansion.
Fulfillment vividly details the devastating costs of Amazon’s dominance and brutal business practices, showcasing an economy that has concentrated in private hands staggering wealth and power while impoverishing workers, crushing independent business, and supplanting public-governance with private might.
As hurtful as this outfit has been to us and our bookstore (and to the health of the bookstore industry at large) and as bitter as I am about this sordid story, my heart went out to the workers, those in trucking and transportation and warehousing, those who work in data centers and delivery hubs. As the back cover of this wonderfully written book puts it, across the country, “civic fabric is unraveling and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.”
A SOLDIER Waging Peace: One Soldier’s Story of Putting Love First Diane Oestreich (Broadleaf) $24.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99
I hope you recall our big review of this when it released in 2020. The book was a very memorable read and I hope the author is continuing to reach out to many, telling her story of a vocation misunderstood, and the crisis that obliged her to reconsider.
You see, Diane was in the US Army and as a combat medic was deployed to Iraq and, in an episode that seems shocking but should not be surprising, she was commanded to run over an Iraqi child to keep her convoy rolling and keep her battle buddies safe. As she entered the country and was faced with the war, she pondered her own faith, what Jesus taught (as she recalled from Sunday school) and what she really thought she would do if she had to kill. Alas, she was quickly confronted with this choice she never thought she’d have to make.
The story is moving and poignant, adventuresome and well told. I shouldn’t spoil it, but I suppose you can guess that she must speak up and refuse to fight in this awkward setting in the war zone. She ponders long and hard what faithful Christian discipleship entails and wonders what it means for her to be a Christian called to love our enemies.
Waging Peace is a moving book, obviously written by a person with a large patriotic streak. This is no left-wing screed from an old hippy pacifist. But she does conclude that God comes first and that her faithfulness to the way of Jesus her Savior means she also must stop waging war and must, as the title say, wage peace. Let’s just say this threw the proverbial monkey-wrench into her workplace. My heart went out to her, I admired her so, and hold this book up not only as a clear-headed testimony of one soldier who walks away, but as an example of the courage some of us may need if we are forced to compromise our convictions or values in our various jobs. Take courage.
A NUN Cloistered: My Years as a Nun Catherine Coldstream (St. Martin’s) $30.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00
I have had this on my stack to read this summer and I’m about to dive in…. It’s going to be a slow, careful read, I think, as it is considered “a memoir of emotions felt viscerally.” There are spiritual insights, I’m told, and “beautifully crafted lessons.” It is about her idealist call to this vocation, her deep loneliness, and in what might be a mesmerizing style, a glimpse not into the rigors of a conventional, cloistered, monastery, but her discontent and her conclusion that she had to leave the religious life.
Many list Kathleen Norris’s spiritual memoir, Cloister Walk, as an all-time favorite, and perhaps this will be somewhat similar. I adored a book I read years ago about the long call into the Jesuit priesthood, A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, written by Andrew Krivak, a guy who ends up falling in love and after years of taking up that vocation, followed his heart out of the priesthood and ministry. I have heard nothing but fantastic things about Cloistered: My Years as a Nun and I’m eager to join Coldstream in her own journey towards sensing a call, and the realization— think of Henri Nouwen’s moving failure to discern a call to live among the poor in Central America as described in Gracias. — that this was not for her, or at least not anymore. Wow.
A DOCTOR The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine Ricardo Nuila (Scribner) $18.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40 We also have a handsome hardcover on sale for $20.00 if you’d like that…it would make a nice gift.)
Called “gut-wrenching” and “unforgettable” and “lyrical” and “as warm and humanely written as it is urgent and necessary”, The People’s Hospital is “an antidote to hopelessness” and is said to be “a call to action wrapped in powerful storytelling.”
Ricardo Nuila is a physician who follows five uninsured people from Houston, Texas as “their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.” The story unfolds around each of these patients — one is a restaurateur whose insurance doesn’t cover his growing cancer expenses, another is a college student and retail clerk, yet another is a young mother with a high-risk pregnancy, and the fourth is an undocumented immigrant. Geronimo is a 36 year old whose liver failed puts him in a situation where his meager disability check disqualifies him for Medicaid. Yet, despite the detail and poignant storytelling as we follow these main characters, the county hospital called Ben Taub is the place that becomes the main character and Dr. Nuila works with empathy and care to explore how the broken medical system can be restored in a way that could help these clients. Nuila works like a saint called to these ill patients (even though he would not put it that way) and his story will give you hope.
Besides his writing and his work at Ben Taub, Dr. Nuila is a professor of medicine and medical ethics and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine where he directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) program.
A MOTHER and WIFE Stretch Marks I Wasn’t Expecting: A Memoir on Early Marriage and Motherhood Abbie Smith (Kalas) $15.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.76
We have so many good books on parenting that they are falling off the shelves. From every possible perspective and on every imaginable topic, there are Christian (and otherwise) books for almost anyone. Many are very good. Some convey good information but are a bit didactic.
Every now and then we get one that is less a parenting guidebook but a story, a memoir, as this one is, of a young woman who traces the ups and downs of her interior life as she navigates the newness of her recent marriage and eventually her new motherhood. There is nothing tragic or even odd about all this except insofar the woman is a thoughtful Christian leader and was unmarried for quite a while. And there are now some new things to adjust to, some new self identify, some new sense of this new season of calling.
I have long admired Abbie and Beth and I were delighted to promote this book when it was new. Somewhat literary (but not arcane or overdone) it is a honest account of her taking up her vocation as young mom as a young woman. We adored it. Enjoy!
A PREACHER / PASTOR The Preaching Life Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley Books) $17.95 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.36
There are chapters in this first book of Barbara Brown Taylor that I nearly have memorized. As an occasional public speaker, there are paragraphs here that are great to quote, stories from her memoir that I retell and cite. There are a few great pages about how a holy sense of sacrament can color how so many ordinary people do their jobs and she recounts the — a truck driver, a gardener, a doctor, a word processor. As she tells of her own story of vocation, coming to sense she was called to ministry, I was mesmerized and inspired.
The second half of this book is a collection of her famously well-crafted sermons. They are well worth reading and as I recall, most are very good. But it is her life story, her girlhood, her sense of vocation, her early approach to imagination and Bible reading, and worship that captivates me. And, again, those sections on vocation are precious. This is a great, short collection of essays that essentially form an early auto-biography of Taylor’s own call.
UNEMPLOYED and THE BUILDING TRADES The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and A Life Found Don J. Snyder (Back Bay Books) $21.99 / OUR SALE PRICE – $17.59
This is a beautiful, provocative memoir that has stayed in print since the mid-1990s and I will never forgetting reading it, being so dumbfounded at the author’s stupid pride — he lost his job as a college professor and couldn’t bring himself to tell his wife or others near him. For months (!) as he struggled to find work. This reflection (the first half of the book, mostly) about unemployment, especially among the previously white collar, may seem dated, now, but the feelings and shame and financial worries are clearly the same, if not worse. Snyder’s hope to quickly find another job dissipated and soon he was living a lie. As an English prof and writing teacher, at least he could, later, tell the story with candor and great feeling.
Of course, driving the narrative is this sense of his own lack of identity; he still viewed himself as a college professor: it is who he is.
The second half of the book offers what I have often said is some of the most brilliant writing about blue collar work, being a construction work and roofer, that I have ever read. The job he gets is working on is for mansions overhanging the spectacular cliffs off the New England coast, in Maine. The work is dangerous and in dangerously cold weather. It is painful to read about; just dreadfully painful. And here his epiphany kicks in.
As Snyder finds his groove, comes to loves his new job, he finds what he now can say is some sense of calling and we waxes eloquent about the sanctity of working with ones hands. This, this, this is what he was meant for, and his vivid writing about this difficult work in the building trades is nothing short of stunning.
A ROCK STAR and SOCIAL REFORMER Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story Bono (Knopf) $34.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $27.20
I’ve got my list of favorite books by or about rock stars, and this, doubtlessly, is on the top of the list. (Yes, even better than the great big memoir by Bruce Cockburn, Rumours of Glory and the hard to forget and even bigger volume by Jann Wenner, Like a Rolling Stone. ) What is so amazing about this one, besides just how very interesting it all is, and how overtly Christian it consistently is, is how grand of a life Bono and his boys in the band have lived. The way they have leveraged their fame for the good of the world, advocating against world hunger and singing in war zones, and lobbying key world leaders for justice and peace. He knows famous artists and statesmen, he knows religious leaders (and reads good Christian books) and yet can rock and roll (and sometimes party) with the best of them. By turns exciting, sad, tragic, hopeful, radical, provocative, sensible, inspiring, Surrender tells a long and important story in a fun but important voice. I’ve said it before at BookNotes and will say it here, again: this is a great book, and a great illustration of somebody who felt called by God to do this work, and through it all, found ways to live into this vocation, this odd vocation, of being one of the most important rock stars the world has ever known.
A FAILED MISSIONARY and his MOTHER Runaway Radical: A Young Man’s Reckless Journey to Save the World – When Doing Good Goes Wrong Amy Hollingsworth & Jonathan Hollingsworth (Thomas Nelson) $15.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79
I suppose on Labor Day as we celebrate a sense of calling that many fell about their jobs I can name one that seriously went awry. I wrote about this when it first came out and I have thought about it often over the years. As we fan the flames of Kingdom enthusiasm, as we invite people to discern the still small voice of God guiding them along their way, can we overdo it? Might there be safeguards in place to assure us that those we love or advise or influence don’t go off the deep end?
Jonathan Hollingsworth writes his story with honesty and bravery. His mother, writer Amy Hollingsworth wrote every other chapter, telling her side of the complicated and painful story. (Amy Hollingsworth, by the way, has written a number of very good books, but is perhaps best known for her friendship with Mr. Rogers and his book on him, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers — speaking of a guy with a calling to work in media.)
If I was doing a more lengthy review I’d explain more of this extraordinary story, but the short gist is simply this: having read a number of popular “radical” Christian books in his college years, young Jonathan is taken with a passion to serve the poor. He gets rid of most of his stuff, rejecting American commercialism and materialism. On the face of it, it seems to me, it is troubling, with just an extreme view, but I’ve known Catholic Workers who have built an honorable life in radical resistance to injustice and it may be a live, Christian political option. But something was amiss, this quick turnaround, this extremism, this — may be call it youthful arrogance?
The story continues that Jonathan strikes up a friendship with a mission school in Africa and he goes there with a guitar to teach music. It does not go well. The school is not as progressive as he had been led to believe and, eventually, he realized they are strictly fundamentalist, and toxic. They are abusive, and, almost as bad, they misrepresent themselves to their gracious donors stateside. His attempt to discuss these concerns gets him branded as a troublemaker and (you have to read it to fully understand) they essentially hold him captive. He wants to leave and he simply cannot.
In retrospect he and his mom write this story of what it means to follow one’s heart in Christian service, what it’s like to live into a calling, what it means to serve well but not be weird or dysfunctional or harming about it all.
Obviously we don’t please God by doing this or that, let alone getting involved in less than healthy missionary projects. This painful story not only harms the idealistic faith of Jonathan, but for a while confuses his relationship with his mother and father, his home church, his old friends, and, eventually, the children he went to help in the first place. What a book this is, a cautionary tale, and more.
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Our jobs and callings are, as we say, cursed with thorns. Even as redeemed children of God, we see through a glass darkly. We long for the day about which we sing at Christmas in that great line from “Joy to the World.” Jesus comes to make his blessings known — where? The famous line does not say “in our hearts” but, properly, “far as the curse is found.” Does the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus effect how you think about the creation goodness of work, the fallen nature of the thorns, and how Christ is bringing His redemptive Kingdom to bear “far as the curse is found” — even in your workspaces?
Many of the stories above are not particularly religious, but they offer a creative window into different kinds of ways people follow their passions and do their jobs. Some end well, some do not. Let’s continue to read and write about this, working, always, as my friend Steve Garber puts it, for a “seamless life.”
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