Doing that previous BookNotes on new Advent resources last week was fun and it was good to skim back over previous BookNotes from earlier Advents naming books that seemed helpful years ago. Some still are among the very best, so don’t forget to click on those links we shared. Thanks for taking a look — you should don’t want to forget perennial gift items like Plough Publishing’s Watch for the Light or Paraclete’s God With Us, first published in partnership with Image Journal.  You know I’m a fan of Advent by Fleming Rutledge. What glorious books they are.

Here are some devotional and/or faith-building resources for family use this Advent. A few are brand new, a few are good re-runs, and there is something for nearly everyone. Send us an order soon (by useing the link at the very end of the column — scroll all the way down so you don’t miss anything.) We’ll send them out at our discounted prices as soon as we can (usually the same day.) These days we must warn that sometimes, on a few items, there could be a delay.

Just click on the order form link below that takes you to our secure order form page at the Hearts & Minds bookstore website. You can type in anything you want and we’ll take it from there. It is secure for credit card info, so have at it. Thanks.

The History of Christmas: 2000 Years of Faith, Fable and Festivity Heather Lefebvre (Christian Focus) $17.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

What a lovely book this is, fun and fascinating, full of full color art and illustration. This publisher is a typically conservative Scottish one but here is pleasantly ecumenical, exploring the great variety of gospel insights from a whole lot of different places and cultures. There’s clever descriptions and upbeat ideas, guidance on opportunities like having a “medieval Christmas” or a Victorian holiday. Naturally there is a good section on the Reformers and Puritans.

In a colorful style and with fictionalized stories for family reading this really is a theological history, with helpful bits of cultural studies. It has recipes for ordinary first century “Shepherds meal” and Mince pies as ways to understanding faith across the years, from the early church to the middle ages to “Christmas commercialized.” It shows how Christmas was reinvented (the story for this is set in London 1850.)

There are drawings of Bonaventure, Henry the VIII, Santa Claus, and scenes that show the delightfully multi-ethic nature of the church these days. I love this fun, educational book.

The God of Amazing Gifts: Family Devotions for Advent Lizzie Laferton (The Good Book Company) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

We shared this one last week, but it really fits here, so we’ll tell you about it again:

In other years we have sold well the family and seasonal devotionals published by this gospel-centered, solid, evangelical publishing house. They do impressive books and we’re happy to announce this one, a wonderful and fresh devotional that, as one parent put it, “will keep on giving far beyond Christmas.”

The God of Amazing GIfts has 25 devotions that can be used during Advent or spread out before or after Christmas.

Helpfully it has different questions routes for different aged children from 7 – 14+, and a variety of suggestions for application. There are some extra ideas in the back, too, for further family activities and deeper conversations. It might be the thing to help your family dig just a bit deeper this season.

One reviewer says that it is “thought provoking, awe-inspiring, and Jesus-magnifying, a brilliant resource.”

God’s Holy Darkness Shared Green & Becky Selznick, illustrated by Nikki Faison (Beaming Books) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This is one of the most amazing children’s books in many a year, powerful, aesthetically stunning, exceptionally well done. I highly recommend that you find a way to integrate this into your Advent reading with kids of various ages, even though it isn’t directly an obvious Advent book. There is one facing spread that does speak of Advent, so I guess it is an Advent book.

There are two important threads of import in this striking picture book. Firstly, it is (obviously) about darkness. That in itself resonates with themes of Advent, doesn’t it? We really appreciate how artfully it shows this and how vital and captivating this book is, inviting us to “celebrate the beauty of God’s holy darkness.” (Perhaps you recall the wonderfully written memoir exploring this by the exquisite Barbara Brown Taylor called Learning to Walk In the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night; this children’s book is a good companion for that.)

The second theme is wanting to — how do I say this? — redeem the notion of blackness. Too often we hear, or assume subconsciously, that black is bad, that dark times are irredeemably bad, that night and dark are scary and troubling. We needn’t overstate the case but some black friends have said this can be hurtful or confusing, so we need to think this through. God’s Holy Darkness is, in a sense, an anti-racism book.

As it says on the back cover of God’s Holy Darkness:

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.

We often talk about how Christmas is best understood in the flow of the unfolding drama of the history of redemption. That is, we should frame the Christmas season by the whole story of God as portrayed in the big story of Scripture. (In the book by Daniel Spanjer that I highlighted in the last BookNotes, Advent is the Story: Seeing the Nativity Throughout Scripture, it shows how to do this.) This exceptionally artful book does just that allusively, simply, walking us through the pages of Scripture. This is redemptive, nearly subversive, Biblical theology for children. What a book!

The Light Before Christmas: A Family Advent Devotional  Marty Machowski, illustrated by Sarah Bland-Halulko (New Growth Press) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59.

A handsome, slim hardback with a nice deep blue cover and some rich, colored pages and the occasional bright ink makes this four-week Advent family devotional a special treat to behold. Machowski is the Family Life Pastor at Covenant Fellowship Church in Glen Mills, PA (where he has served on the pastoral staff for over thirty years and has made a name for himself as a leader in the new generation of up-beat, grace-based, gospel-centered, Christian curricula.) 

This new one combines devotions on the themes of light and darkness with the story, as they explain, of eleven year old Mia and her grandmother as they prepare for Christmas. “Grandmother loves to share her faith, especially at Christmas time, and although she is bind, she can see the light of Jesus shining bright and helps Mia — and children of all ages — to do the same.” 

Reset: Advent Devotions for the Whole Family J.D. Walt (Seedbed) $9.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $7.96

This is one of the lovely, compact sized “Seedbed Daily Text” volumes, designed to be read out loud in families, written by the editor (who they call “sower-in-chief”) at Seedbed, the Wesleyan renewal ministry out of Asbury Theological Seminary. Walk has four children and is a preacher, poet, and songwriter.

I like that they say that since Advent is the first month of the church calendar, “it’s like a giant reset button crying out to give us a fresh start again.” More than two thousand year ago, they say, “God reset the world.” Indeed.

A Jesus Christmas: Explore God’s Amazing Plan for Christmas Barbara Reaoch (The Good Book Company) $9.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

What a great resource, clear about the gospel and the centrality of Jesus in our lives.

Maybe you know Barbara Reaoch’s book from 2020, (which we recommended last year) A Better Than Anything Christmas: Explore How Jesus Makes Christmas Better; I love it that the very wise (and very smart) Joni Eareckson Tada says of that book “consider this unique book your Christmas toolbox. I give it my double thumbs-up!” Well, A Jesus Christmas is her previous one and is arranged very similarly and is a great companion to it. Who doesn’t want to make their Advent and holiday season more of a “Jesus Christmas”? This will help.

It is a family devotional, each day’s entry looking at a passage from the Gospel.  There is a helpful question and even a space for journaling and occasionally an invitation to draw something. (Unless you have a huge family, each member can share this space, which could be fun.). Of this one, A Jesus Christmas, Joni exclaimed,

With every Christmas becoming more commercialized, parents are earnestly seeking new ways to make the true story of Christmas much more clear to their children. One glance through this remarkable book tells me that A Jesus Christmas is just what mothers and fathers are looking for. What a great family project this is, providing guide points for discussion, age-appropriate activities, and homework for every child. I highly recommend this book as a practical and powerful way to keep Jesus Christ and his Word at the very center of your family’s Christmas.

A Better Than Anything Christmas: Explore How Jesus Makes Christmas Better Barbara Reaoch (The Good Book Company) $9.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

What a great resource, clear about the gospel and the centrality of Jesus in our lives. I love it that the very wise (and very smart) Joni Eareckson Tada says to “consider this unique book your Christmas toolbox. I give it my double thumbs-up!”

Maybe you know Barbara Reaoch’s previous book from 2018, A Jesus Christmas: Explore God’s Amazing Plan for Christmas; this is arranged very similarly and is a great companion to it.

It is a family devotional, each day’s entry looking at a passage from the Gospel  There is a helpful question and even a space for journaling.

Here are what some stellar folks have said about it:

This is yet another outstanding family devotional book for the Christmas season by Barbara Reaoch. If you’ve been blessed by any of her previous books, you’ll enjoy this one as well. She has a knack for starting with something interesting to children and quickly turning it to Jesus and the Bible. This one will appeal both to younger and older children, and parts of each chapter are directed to both groups. The book is imaginatively interactive as well; not just something for kids to listen to. Best of all is how she conveys 25 core truths about Christ in a simple way to show the children how Jesus is Better Than Anything.  – Donald S. Whitney, Professor of biblical spirituality and associate dean at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY and author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Praying the Bible, and Family Worship.

In a world where Christmas is more commercialized than ever before, it is all too easy for parents to drown in the noise of it all. Barbara Reaoch’s A Better Than Anything Christmas is a welcome and refreshing opportunity for parents to zero in on what is truly important: the gospel. The daily advent readings and questions make for excellent family discussions around who Jesus is and why He came. We loved Barbara’s A Jesus Christmas for how it offered our children an opportunity to grapple with big doctrinal ideas in a way that was easily digestible, even cross-culturally. I look forward to sharing A Better Than Anything Christmas with the family this Christmas, most especially for how it promotes theologically robust discussion and a deepening and enduring understanding of God’s Word. From toddlers to teens, this devotional offers far greater value than even the most beautifully wrapped packages beneath the tree.     – Taryn Hayes podcast host, The Gospel Coalition Australia’s The Lydia Project: Conversations with Christian Women

Families Celebrate 2022-2023 Advent and Christmas deck of cards (Augsburg Fortress) $9.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

Give new meaning to the phrase “Christmas cards” by using these (small) cards to do family devotions. As they promise on the back, each card features a ritual, prayer, reflection, or activity. For families with kids ages 3 -13. Cards are dated for use each day from the first Sunday of Advent to the Day of Epiphany (January 6, 2023.) Of course, you could use or re-use them. These are really cute and feature full color art on 56 cards. While supplies last…

Wonders of His Love: Finding Jesus in Isaiah Family Advent Devotional Champ Thornton, illustrated by Jeremy Slagle (New Growth Press) $15.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

The cover may not fully communicate it but this is a very full color, lively, contemporary looking for kids, creatively done thin hardback (with nice, glossy paper) full of gospel-centered good news about God’s grace and Christ’s fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises. Sweet, good stuff, theologically solid and yet playful asides, cookie recipes, conversation starters and some family fun ideas. The book’s four weeks of daily readings explore four images from Isaiah’s prophecies — the Light, the Branch, the Shepherd, and the Savior. 

Endorsements are from pastor and children’s ministry expert Marty Machowski (author of WonderFull, The Ology, Long Story Short and many other stellar kid’s theology books) and Barbara Reaoch, author of A Better Than Anything Christmas.

Coloring Advent: An Adult Coloring Book for the Journey to Bethlehem Christopher Rodkey, with illustrations by Jesse & Natalie Turri (Christian Board of Publication/Chalice Press) $12.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

We tell folks about this every year and I am happy to list this among our favs even though I suppose it isn’t for everyone. Back at the start of the adult coloring book craze. Rev. Dr.. Rodkey, a neighbor, friend, and Dallastown UCC pastor, came into the shop wondering about adult ed options for December at his small, creative church. He had a hunch folks were burned out, tense, in need of some serenity. He thought about just doing an arts and craft thing for adults, a contemplative coloring time. It went over well and he set himself to the task of collaborating with some Pennsylvania illustrators and created this Coloring Advent, based on lectionary readings from the Revised Common Lectionary. There is nothing like that and his brief comments about the Biblical text — yes there are footnotes in a coloring book! — are beyond intriguing with his penchant for including lesser known feast days from the world Christian traditions, from Orthodoxy and Catholicism’s liturgical calendar. A thoughtfully arranged, annotated, ecumenical coloring book that follows the lectionary.

Rev. Rodkey’s subsequent Coloring Lent and Coloring Women of the Bible are equally as fascinating and a lot of informative, clarifying fun. Coloring Advent: An Adult Coloring Book was created here in Dallastown and we are glad to list it here. It isn’t designed for children, but, obviously, anybody can use it, even teens.

Faithful Families for Advent and Christmas: 100 Ways to Make the Season Sacred Traci Smith (Chalice Press) $12.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

This is a nice holiday companion to the popular Faithful Families: Creation Sacred Moments at Home. It offers 100 nifty ideas, some pretty ordinary that anybody would do, some a bit more extensive that are thoughtful and good, and a few that are a bit, uh, unique. Not everyone will “get” each one, granted. Even if you do a few of these or ponder a few others, this book is worth its inexpensive price. Give it a try.

In each of these simple, hands-on practices, Smith gives families the tools to slow down, wait, and focus on all that Jesus coming into the world means. — Karyn Rivadeneira, author, Grit and Grace: Heroic Women of the Bible 

Christmas is Coming! But Waiting is Hard! Family Activities and Devotions for Advent Karen Whiting (Abingdon Press) $16.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

This book is not new but we wanted to highlight it for you; some of our customers are looking for useful resources that have basic lessons and conversation-starters and little crafty type  activities for young ones. This author used to work for Focus on the Family and has developed curriculum for others who want to share basic Christian insight for children. (She was a producer and host of a puppet show on public TV in Miami — yay!)

Besides the reading, each day’s entry includes a prayer, discussion questions, explanation of a Christmas symbol, some reproducibles to help with the symbol activity, and suggested activities to put the Scriptures into action.

The 25 Days of Christmas: A Family Devotional to Help You Celebrate Jesus James Merritt, illustrated by Connie Gabbert (Harvest House) $19.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This was a big hit a couple of years ago not only for its solid, Biblical content but for the rich artwork, nice cloth hardback feel. It’s 9 x 12, so bigger than most (although not thick.)  It will be a keepsake edition. Merritt is a Southern Baptist pastor and co-host of a TV show. He’s written bunches of books.The 25 Days of Christmas has a story to read aloud each day and an activity — things to do, discover, apply.

The Advent Jesse Tree: Devotions for Children and Adults to Prepare for the Coming of the Christ Child at Christmas Dean Meador Lambert (Abingdon Press) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This is an old classic that originally came out in the mid-1980s. We used to sell it widely and encouraged folks to do this great project of creating ornaments that each are related to an Old Testament text that lead up to the Christmas story. What a great way to teach the history of redemption and the unfolding drama of salvation history. The writing here is a bit old-fashioned, the black and white illustrations even more-so; they were old-fashioned when they were in the first edition. Vintage, eh? Still, the idea is solid. We enjoy letting people know about this. These are devotions based on the Biblical texts and symbols but not a craft book to make the symbols for the Jesse Tree. (Let us know if we can help you with that; there are several.)

Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas Ann Voskamp (Tyndale) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This is a contemporary classic, beloved and used by many. It is colorful and excellently made. It is playing on the old Jesse Tree custom. It has vivid, full-color illustrations, downloadable ornaments, and moving scenes from the Bible.  As the publisher says, “Person by person, story by story, retrace the lineage of Jesus. Fall in love with Him all over again as you experience God’s plan of salvation for us–from the Garden of Eden to the manger and beyond.” This is an oversized hardback, like a big coffee table book, a real keepsake.

The Wonder of the Greatest Gift: An Interactive Family Celebration of Advent  Ann Voskamp (Tyndale) $34.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99                                                               We’ve exclaimed about this before, a beautifully designed, big, lavish hardback with pop-up features and lots of extras that serves as a contemporary take on the old Jesse Tree tradition. There’s a little devotional by Voskamp for each of the ornaments — what a keepsake volume.

Here’s how they describe what is included:

• 13-inch 3D pop-up tree
• Devotional booklet with 25 family devotions written by Ann Voskamp
• 24 Christmas tree ornaments with hangers
• Star-shaped tree-topper

Based on her bestseller Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, Ann Voskamp expands her presentation of the timeless Advent tradition of the Jesse Tree with this beautiful keepsake that can be handed down and enjoyed for generations.

Each December, families can celebrate the coming of Jesus by opening the book to see a stunning 13-inch, three-dimensional Jesse Tree pop up from the page. At its foot are 25 doors, one for each day of Advent, which hide meaningful, beautifully detailed ornaments–including the Christmas star–that are ready to be hung on the tree.

The Jesus Storybook Bible: A Christmas Collection: Stories, Songs, and Reflections for the Advent Season inspired by Sally Lloyd-Jones, illustrated by Jago, narrated by David Suchet (Zonderkidz) $24.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

I hope you know this. Here is how we wrote about it before when it was brand new in 2020.

Oh my goodness, we’ve saved the best for last. We are so excited to tell you about this. This Sally Lloyd-Jones Christmas Collection, though, really is a great choice to use during Advent with little children so we wanted to announce it here, now. It is, of course, at our 20% off sale price.

The Jesus Storybook Bible: A Christmas Collection: Stories, Songs, and Reflections for the Advent Season is one of those great books that is oversized and handsome and has a battery/computer gadget thingie that speaks or plays music when a child presses the button.  There is narration, and there are excerpts of four Christmas carols that fit well into the appropriate pages. Kids love these interactive books. That it spreads out widely in the lap is great, too. Kudos, Zonderkidz!

They say this is for ages 4 – 8 but I can imagine a slightly older kid reading it herself. And a slightly younger one could press the buttons and smile at the music, so I’m going to suggest this, being a bit optimistic, for ages 3 – 10.

There are key moments to “press the button” throughout and it will bring hours of pleasure and spiritual formation for children and families using this very cool new product. We’re excited. And the art is cool, whimsical without being silly or sentimental.

You should know that we adore the Jesus Storybook Bible and while there are other children’s story Bibles that we like a lot, we are especially fond of the creative art and excellent writing of this one. And the framework and theological perspective — “Every Story Whispers His Name” — shows the interconnectedness of the Bible stories that unfold and point to the promises fulfilled in Christ. It’s really good. And Advent is the perfect time to plumb those obvious interconnections.

This edition has content that is explicitly Advent themed.

All About… Christmas Alison Mitchell (The Good Book Company) $17.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

I suppose this isn’t an Advent book as such (since it is about Christmas) and we’ll list it again when we do a list of children’s Christmas books in December. But this is so chock-full of information and content that kids are going to want to dig into the Christmas story from the Bible books (of Matthew and Luke) sooner rather than later. They will be able to investigate what life was like in that time and place and discover why we still celebrate this King every Christmas holiday.

All About… Christmas is accessible and fun but really a wonderful guide to so very much about the season. It is full color in the classic style of upbeat kid’s nonfiction books with a terrific blend of illustration and photographs. There are facts and figures, questions and answers, things to explore and things to consider.

We’re glad for this colorful hardback book of about 50 large sized pages (complete with a glossary, of course.)  I can’t say enough about this and if you don’t have children or grandchildren, nieces or nephew, by golly, buy one and give it away, of for each of your congregations Sunday school teachers. It’s that interesting.

One Great Love: An Advent and Christmas Treasury of Readings, Poems, and Prayers edited by Paraclete Press (Paraclete Press) $21.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

We featured this in last week’s Advent newsletter but it dawns on me that some of these nicely presented pieces — not least the fiction excerpts from Louise May Alcott and Charles Dickens, and the holiday poems and prayers and promises — really can be used in a family setting, read out loud or passed around. The artwork is mostly classic, the print in a handsomely done, good sized font, the classy color making it a beloved holiday treasure for you and your children.

From the ancient words of Isaiah to the timeless writings of Henry van Dyke, O. Henry, and contemporary poets (Gayle Boss, Eugene Peterson, Nikki Grimes and more), One Great Love is a fine and lovely book with a real assortment of readings. Not too much, not too fussy or heavy, this is a “just right” volume to have on hand for your family gatherings.

The Birth of Jesus Advent Calendar: The Light Shines in the Darkness Agostino Traini (Beaming Books) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

We have bunches of different sorts of Advent Calendars, of course, classic one-page (9″ x 12″ or so) with old fashioned art and nifty little doors to open. Many are inexpensive and some are larger and some are small. They come and go each year depending on what we find that’s useful.

But this. This is a larger one with a more sturdy wooden design making it truly reusable, year after year. It is modern,  colorful and fascinating —  like a combo pop-up book and nativity scene, perfect for the whole family to use together. This is designed by the illustrious Italian paper artist, Agostino Traini, who has also done, for instance, the Birth of Jesus: A Christmas Pop-up Book and an array of other lavish, pop-up book creations for Beaming Books (such as an incredible one on the creation story, the Lord’s Prayer, an Easter one, and more.) The Birth of Jesus Advent Calendar is a unique item, though — instead of a “window” to open there is a cut-out figure to punch out of the page which becomes a developing, stand-up nativity scene.

If you order this we’ll send you a link to a free guide to download that has a brief bit of info about each of the 25 characters (including the three wise men that are used the day after Christmas.)

“And so, to understand the truly radical nature of Advent, it is necessary to get its relation to Christmas in perspective…”

 

“In a very real sense, the Christian community lives in Advent all the time. It can well be called the Time Between, because the people of God live in the time between the first coming of Christ, incognito in the stable in Bethlehem, and his second coming, in glory, to judge the living and the dead. In the Time Between “our lives are hidden with Christ in God, when Christ who is our life appears, then we also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3: 3-4). Advent contains within itself the crucial balanced of the now and the not-yet that our faith requires.”  — Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

Welcome to the 2023 Hearts & Minds Advent Book List, a yearly extravaganza that I love sharing. There are some perennial classics that I would love to remind you of (so please check out HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE.) There are some recent ones that maybe came out in the last few years but that are not yet well known. Happily, there are plenty of brand new ones. There really is something for everyone. 

(I will do children’s Advent and Christmas books in another post, soon.)

I often say that while Lenten spiritual practices are somewhat more sober and intense and Easter is, obviously, the most important Christian high holy day there is, for many of us, Advent is our favorite time of the year. I think it is wise to not overemphasize the countdown to Christmas and recapture the older, truer meaning of this slow, longing, season of our liturgical calendar, but, let’s face it: there is a lot of joy — even as we struggle with very hard things — in focusing on the hope of Christ’s final victory, the return coming when all will be (as Brits like C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright put it) sorted out and put to rights. Whether you and your family or group is somewhat new to the liturgical practices of this waiting/hoping season or whether you are a seasoned soul, whether you are upbeat this time of year or somewhat dreading it, these books can help.

There are others we have in the store and there are hundreds of others that can be found. We’ve curated this list for you, selecting what we have found to be the most interesting or helpful for our discerning (and delightfully but really diverse) BookNotes readership. All are 20% off (with a few small exceptions, noted below.) Send us an order today, please.

WEEKLY STUDIES AND THOSE GOOD FOR GROUPS OR BOOK CLUBS

Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ Fleming Rutledge (Eerdmans) $30.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Buy this and you’ll hardly need to buy much more for years as it is a thick substantive collection of dozens of sermons. It is, I often say, one of my all time favorite collections and it is lasting years and years and I read and read essays and mostly sermons (many which she calls “pre-Advent) into Christ Our King Sunday and through the Advent season. Get some folks together and pick a few to study together, one or two a week. There is nothing programmatic or any discussion questions, just great chapters. You can do this. 

Invigorating — edgy, intelligent, unflinching, and joyful in all it reclaims. A timely, lively, prophetic word. — Marilyn McEnytyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Fleming Rutledge’s Advent preaching bursts upon us with the same elemental force as the preaching of John the Baptist…Do not drive anesthetized through another season of Advent; read this book.  — Richard Hays, author of Reading with the Grain of Scripture

The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope Kelly Nikondeha (Broadleaf Books) $24.99    OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This is nothing short of stunning and we very highly recommend it this year. There are maybe 10 chapters so it might be harder to do in five weeks with a group, but maybe you could do two chapters each sessions. (They are fairly short, if eloquent and very thoughtful.) Wow.

Kelly has written a wonderful pair of Eerdmans books, one called Adoption about “the sacrament of belonging” (viewing adoption both theologically and rather practically as a white woman living in Africa in an adoptive, bi-racial and multinational family) that was beautifully provocative. Her second one is also not to be missed, an eloquent and passionate reflection called Defiant:What the Women of Exodus Teach Us About Freedom. What a writer she is and a bit of a hero of ours.

Although she lives in Burundi, in East Africa, Nikondeha has long been interested in the plight of Palestinians and has amplified voices there. With blurbs from the likes of Shadia Qubit and Naim Ateek and James Zogby, you will know that this author and her book are highly regarded and respected. I do not know anything quite like this, rooted so clearly in the Biblical narrative and yet with this very contemporary application. This really is an excellent authentically Christmasy advent book.

If you are wearied by or bored with the sentimentality and careless religious nostalgia of American Advent and Christmas, this is the book for you. Kelley Nikondeha takes a deep, alert dive into the natal poetry of the Gospels that has become for us too trite and jaded in its familiarity. She reads this poetry differently because she has, at the same time, made a deep investment in the contemporary life of real people in the actual circumstances of Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, people who happen to be Palestinians who continue to be outsiders to imperial power. The outcome of her bold reading is to see that these Gospel texts initiated a peace movement into the world that defies and subverts the phony peace of every imperialism. This rich, suggestive book permits us to reappropriate in knowing ways the good news of Advent-Christmas, news that destabilizes and emancipates. — Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of Names for the Messiah: An Advent Study

The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ Timothy Keller (Penguin) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

This is an excellent, intelligent, faithful survey of the reasons for Christmas, what has been called “a profoundly moving and intellectually provocative” examination of the nativity story.

There are hard edges to the Christmas story and this illuminating journey may be surprising to traditional Christians (or those who don’t see themselves as religious but can’t escape the season’s presence.) In other words, this is a great gift book for Christians wanting to dig a bit deeper and know why they believe (or even some of what they believe) and for seekers or or unchurched folks who wonder about this talk of the redeeming power of God in this curious question of incarnation. Perhaps yoiu know a skeptical (or religiously disinterested) college student. Give ’em this, please!

As a great Reformed pastor, Keller is known for a gospel-centered message; that is, we cannot rescue ourselves, we can not rustle up the magic or meaning to sustain a purposeful life. If we cannot generate within ourselves enough, then what do we do? Christmas, as Christians of all sorts confess, is very good news indeed, the answer to our human predicament, which he explores curiously and realistically. I love this book, thoughtful without being stuff, offering a winsome apologetic for anyone willing to think things through. 

There are eight interesting chapters, but none are too lengthy. Your group could do two chapters for four weeks, easily, or stretch it out a bit. Highly recommended.

Advent Is the Story: Seeing the Nativity throughout Scripture — A Journey of Reading Through the Advent Season Daniel Spanjer (Square Halo Books) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I waited for this book a long time — I know that Mr Spanjer is a highly respected public leader in Lancaster; he is a department chair and professor of history at Lancaster Bible College and is involved in Alcuin Society, a thoughtful evangelical ministry among college professors in higher education. His pastor at Wheatland Presbyterian was very encouraging of this project and it ended up to be a fabulous little book. I really want to recommend it to you and thank the good folks at Square Halo for offering such a Biblically-wise Advent title to their classy inventory.

It is compact in size and jam-packed with Bible study and thoughtful Scripture reflections, insisting that the coming of Jesus is the Bible’s story. It is arranged as a daily devotional but the entries are grouped in such as way that a small group could use it individually day by day and then come together weekly to discuss that week’s theme. 

The rich readings are grouped in six sections, each with a primary topical essay and then the daily reflections which follow. These topics include The Word, The Temple, The King, The Exodus, The Sacrifice, and The Now and the Not Yet (ending on December 31st.)

I love how Heidi Johnston (author of the UK release, Life in the Big Story: Your Place in God’s Unfolding Plan) puts it:

This is an Advent book that goes where many others do not… From Eden to Babel, from the promised land to the New Jerusalem, this book reminds us that all of history has been marked by the same drumbeat of hope, as God relentlessly pursues the people he loves, stopping at nothing to make his dwelling place among them. 

Prepare the Way for the Lord: Advent and the Message of John the Baptist Adam Hamilton (Abingdon Press) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I am sure that if you are a person who follows religious publishing at all you have heard the name of Adam Hamilton. We respect him a lot and I think that as his popularity has grown he has matured and developed. He’s not too heavy, but is learned. He’s not too punchy but he has great concerns about peace, justice, and civic leadership. He’s not too preachy but has an evangelical heart. He’s a pastor of a huge United Methodist Church but seems really down to Earth. This one looks really, really good.

Philip Yancey has said that Hamilton has “proven to be a faithful guide to applying the Bible to modern life in a sane and balanced way.” Brian McLaren calls him “a national treasure” who “embodied the kind of generous orthodoxy so many of us have been dreaming of and praying for.” 

This book has four fairly short chapters and a nice fifth “afterword” piece. There is, as there usually are with many of his book, a DVD, a Leader’s Guide and even a youth edition. Check out his older ones, too, like Not A Silent Night or The Journey, which we also have. For now, though, we celebrate this 2023 release, Prepare the Way for the Lord: Advent and the Message of John the Baptist as a stand alone book, or to be used in a book study or the fabulous DVD study.

• Book  $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99
• DVD  $39.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99
• Leader’s Guide $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

The Angels of Christmas: Hearing God’s Voice in Advent Susan Robb (Abingdon Press) $16.99       OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

This handsome four chapter book invites us to “experience the angelic visits surrounding the birth of Jesus.” I suspect this has been done before, somewhere, but I do not know of any four session study that offers this fascinating glimpse into the angelic visits in the seasonal narrative.

Susan Robb recently retired as the Senior Associate Minister at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas (where she served for more than 20 years.) Believable, thoughtful, a great preacher, Susan’s loves teaching the Bible and inviting folks into conversational Bible studies. There is no doubt that she is a gifted, practical scholar, a educator in and for the local church.

Naturally, a study like this is getting at not only the nature of these miraculous events, but, notably, GOd’s presence in our own daily lives. As one reviewer put it, she intersects the miraculous happenings of 2000 years ago with the experiences of people’s lives — their joys, sufferings, and hopes. What a beautiful way to hear and study the Nativity story.”

Our old friend who used to live in York, the Rev. Alyce McKenzie (professor of preaching and worship at Perkins School of Theology) says this has Robb’s “trademark clarity and eloquence” and is “ideal for personal growth or small group study.” She even recommends it for all-church studies tied to the sermons of Advent.

• Book  $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59
• DVD  $39.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99
• Leader’s Guide $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Names for the Messiah: An Advent Study Walter Brueggemann (Westminster/John Knox) $15.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

If you scroll back through the archived BookNotes from previous Advent lists you will see this little study listed a few times. This is how I described it a year or so ago: Names for the Message has the brilliant Biblical scholar Walt Brueggemann holding forth in rich essays about the four names of the son who has been given to us as described in Isaiah 9:6. There is in the back a four-week study guide and discussion questions for group conversation complete with a closing prayer.

This tackles some tough historical questions too — what would the Jews in exile have thought about this oracle from the prophet? Did Jesus fulfill this hope; naturally, Christians believe Jesus was the royal Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, and Brueggemann helps us tease out the implications.

Advent in Plain Sight: A Devotion Through Ten Objects Jill J. Duffield (Westminster/John Knox) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

I wrote about this when it came out two years ago. Here is what I said, then, gladly: we premiered last spring a similar one by this author, Lent in Plain Sight, and had so much good feedback on the Lenten one we were glad to see a new Advent one as well. It has great possibilities for a study group or book club or adult ed class.

What an interesting way into the story, focusing on eight objects (and a bonus ninth, the water of Jesus’s baptism) — gates, tears, belts, trees, cloth, light, hearts, gold, water. There are discussion questions and a prayer after each chapter. You could do two chapters each week for four weeks and there would be plenty to ponder. Short, interesting, fresh.

DAILY ADVENT DEVOTIONALS

The Art of Advent: A Painting a Day from Advent to Epiphany Jane Williams (IVP) $17.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

The Art of Christmas: Meditations on the Birth of Jesus Jane Williams (IVP) $17.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

We have touted and sold bunches of The Art of Advent in years past and it remains one of the best bargains you will find — excellent of often classic artwork explored and reflected upon by the great British art scholar (and wife of former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.)

The new “Christmas” one that just came out this year is a bit shorter, but richly wonderful. The Art of Christmas is still 115 pages and excellently done.

Both are just thrilling to have, delightful in a profound way, a glory to know that people think up and make such fabulous books. Each are about 6 1/2 x 5 1/2, easy to mail, making great little gifts — not too weighty but impressive. Get a few of each, while supplies last.

Making Room in Advent: 25 Devotions for a Season of Wonder Bette Dickinson (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

With contemporary art on glossy paper, this is a very handsome little book, cool, a bit edgy, but very nice. I never like that formal font, and it doesn’t do the contemporary vision of the art much justice, in my view. But it does show that it has weight, gravitas, even if the point is pointing us towards joy. Bette Dickinson is described as a “prophetic artist” who has an artful ministry called “Awakening the Soul.”  This hardback book helps us make room. Make room for what, you ask? Each of 25 reflections and art pieces will answer that with 25 different answers. This really is a tremendous book, one of the best of this year. You will love pondering it, I’m sure.

Terry Wildman — an indigenous leader who was the lead translator of the First Nations Version of the New Testament — says that Making Room in Advent is “a welcome contemplative offering birthed from her own experiences… offering artistic depth combined with theological breadth and personal applications.”

Listen to what the very wise Curt Thompson (Soul of Shame and Soul of Desire) writes:

If spaciousness for God and the flourishing He promises is what you desire, I cannot think of a better place to start.

Expecting Emmanuel: Eight Women Who Prepared the Way Joanna Harader with Michelle Burkholder (Herald Press) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Once again, Herald Press hits it out of the park with this fabulous resource, a handsome, full sized book loaded with both Biblical insight and contemporary application. It obviously is an Advent journey, a devotional inviting us through Advent and into Christmas with the women of Jesus’s family line. What a great idea!

Herald Press, which is a Mennonite publishing house, is one of the most fresh and interesting publishers these days bringing lively and provocative, Biblically faithful, progressive voices into the religious conversation. Harader is the pastor of Peace Mennonite Church in Lawrence, Kansas, and is known for creating moving, faithful, worship liturgies. (She has written in Christian Century and the “Shine” Sunday school curriculum.)  

Michelle Burkholder is a pastor in Hyattsville, Maryland and offers illustrations and art design for this volume — something akin to linocuts, she does paper cuts which offer shapes and lines and abstract designs. It adds a very nice touch to the volume.

Besides the standard daily devotions, this book can be used as a guide to preaching and creating worship liturgies. They give readers a lot of tools to use this, from small groups and Sunday school to worship settings with sermon ideas and candle-lighting litanies. There is even a guide for an Advent retreat using this over the course of a few days. (I bet after individuals or small groups use it this year, there will be some who insist on pulling off an Advent retreat next year!)

Expecting Emmanuel is a treasure trove, solid, helpful, interesting. Highly recommended.

In prayers like poems and meditations that weave together the stories of women in the Bible with the lives of readers, Joanna Harader offers a gentle invitation: sit, wait, hold one, don’t give up.  — Melissa Florer-Bixler, author of How to Have an Enemy

Three Wise Women: 40 Devotions Celebrating Advent with Mary, Elizabeth and Anna Dandy Daley Mackall (Paraclete Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Paraclete Press is a premier publisher of ecumenical books with a liturgical and sacramental perspective; their Advent and Lenten books are not just staples for us, but true joys to promote. We stock almost everything they do and, in this case, we’re delighted for this lovely book by an author who is known for doing charming children’s books, YA stuff, and delightfully evangelical resources for Christian living. This may be her most sophisticated project yet and yet it carries her grace and insight. Writing from rural Ohio, she help us, as she says, “anticipate, celebrate, and marvel” at Jesus’s birth.

I suppose this is designed mostly for women readership, but you know us — we’d recommend it to anyone who needs this Biblical content, this encouragement, this bit of healthy calm, published in a handsome hardback. It has illustrations and even a ribbon marker, making it a very nice gift.

None other than New York Times bestselling novelist Bret Lot (who himself has guided many a writer with his Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, on Being a Christian) has a rave endorsement:

Dandi Mackall has done something important, and beautiful, and good, calling her readers to ponder anew this miraculous season when the gift of all gifts was bestowed upon us all, and to do so through the eyes of the blessed women involved. This is a wonderful book.

Brightest and Best: 31 Advent Devotions on Jesus Philippa Ruth Wilson (Christian Focus) $12.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

Christian Focus is a conservative, often Reformed, evangelical publisher from Scotland and we appreciate their no-nonsense theology and their clarity about doctrine and salvation and holiness. Here, then, is a book like no other: it is about the comfort Advent could bring to those who are hurting. Philippa Ruth Wilson has written a lot about Jesus and depression at her blog “A Certain Brightness” (and has published a book of that name about her depression.) This rejects the “happiest time of the year” nonsense and yet communicates “joyful, uplifting, and glorious Christmas truths” to those who need encouragement.

As it says on the back cover, “in a world of poverty, prejudice, and sickness, it can be hard to sing tis the season to be jolly. Brightest and Best is a collection of advent devotions that point to the comfort God has promised in the coming of Jesus.”

Some readers may recall our fondness for the book by Amy Boucher Bye, a sharp thinker and deeply spiritual writer who not too long ago did 7 Ways to Pray: Time-Tested Practices for Encountering God. She has an endorsement here, saying:

Interweaving the wisdom and grace of her aptly termed Carolsville with the wonderous story of Jesus, Philippa Wilson in Brightest and Best sparks longing and love within us during the Advent and Christmas seasons. She welcomes us to share her deep love of the ‘little Lord Jesus’ – a mind-bending notion of the God who became Man. I commend it with joy.

By the way, if this is a topic dear to your heart, don’t miss others we’ve highlighted in past years such as the stellar 2022 WJK-published reflection, A Weary World: Reflections for a Blue by the excellent progressive activist and Denver pastor, Kathy Escobar, and the exquisite, art-filled, one-of-a-kind Wounded in Spirit by David Bannon (published by Paraclete.) Check those out, for sure.

Fully Human, Fully Divine: An Advent Devotional for the Whole Self Whitney Simpson (Upper Room Books) $17.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Okay, this really is a workbook sort of resource in a fine hardback with some contemporary full color art by artist Lauren Wright Pittman. Wow.

It is a four week devotional by an author who has written Holy Listening with Breath, Body, and the Spirit which is informed by a contemplative perspective and vibrant yoga practice. (Some know her from her work at the Wild Goose Festival.) Simpson says that we literally sense Christ’s coming and she here invites us to embrace this, moving through a more intentionally embodied Advent. She works often in the spaces between inner peace and peacemaking, from breath prayer to justice activism, so she is very wholistic. I know this will appeal to some of our friends.

As they put it on the back cover, this is “an opportunity to prepare for God to come into our midst, to prepare for God to become human just like us.”

The chapters are entitled Slow Down and Hope, Simplify for Peace, Sit with Joy, and Savor God’s Love. The publisher explains, “Within each week are a rotation of daily practices including breath prayer, mindful movement, lectio divina, visio divina (which utilizes beautiful, colorful works of art each week), Christian meditation, creative contemplation, and practicing presence.” Theologian and mindfulness teacher Amy Oden calls it “a true Christmas gift.”

Heaven and Nature Sing: 25 Advent Reflections to Bring Joy to the World Hannah Anderson with illustrations by Nathan Anderson (B+H) $22.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Some of our faithful readers recall how we were taking pre-orders and sending out bunches of Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit, Hannah and Nathan’s splendid devotional guide to the outdoors, her gentle and creative writing of nature observations beside her designer husband’s lovely illustrations. Turning of Days was a good seller for us; we were proud to promote it and we talk about it, still. Hannah is a good writer and that was a particularly lovely book.

This new Advent one seems to carry the same care and tone, offering a nice rumination on the often overlooked things in the holiday weeks.

“What does it sound like when rocks, hills, floor, and plains echo his praise” they ask? And what would it mean for you to join the chorus? Isn’t that a million dollar question? If all creation sings, and we get to get in on it, what does that all mean?

She has a light touch and although informed by serious theology of the best sorts, this is a book designed to evoke joy and attention, wonder and awe, helping us see and hear.

It is a Scripturally-rooted book, a Biblical devotional, but it is the little things in the text that she notices (and in our own lives) that she captures as they point to the Babe in the straw. These 25 Advent readings look fabulous and I, for one, am going to savor them this season.  

Gifts of Grace: 25 Advent Devotions Jared C. Wilson (The Good Book Company) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I’ve appreciated this author for his deep commitment to the first things of the gospel, seen clearly in titles like Gospel Wakefulness (what a title, eh?) and Gospel Deeps (which was on the “excellencies of Jesus.”) But I also like that he is sort of whimsical at times, and has a big-picture worldview. I love, even for teens, his fun book called The Story of Everything: How You, Your Pets, and the Swiss Alps Fit Into God’s Plan for the World. He’s fun, but doesn’t mess around — he wants to draw us to the gospel of God’s grace, help us rely on Him, and set us free to see our story in God’s redemptive story, that all-of-life-redeemed hope of a new creation.

This brand new title just came and I am sure it is packed with gospel truths. One can hardly get more clear than the title: these are gifts of grace. I like that a thoughtful social critic like Daniel Darling says that Jared’s words will “speak to your soul and stir your imagination.” Let’s admit it, many of us need to return to simple gospel truths to prevent us from inhabiting this season in a way that is less awestruck and more wearied and weighed down. Maybe this will help.

The Expected One: Anticipating All of Jesus in the Advent Scott James (B+H) $12.99  OUE SALE PRICE = $10.39 

I like the look and feel of this trim-sized, smaller hardback with two color ink, lots of pull quotes or discussion questions of Bible texts (some on a single page) making this short and, while not “busy”, certainly with a lot going on, visually and otherwise. There’s a vivid forward by David Platt, author of the very Christ-centered, Radical that offer an evangelical vision of global mission as trumping the American dream.

There are twenty-five devotions that can be used by individuals or families, actually. He did a similar family devotional for Lent called The Risen One: Experiencing All of Jesus in Lent which many folks really liked. This one came out last year, but I think many missed it.

Be Ready: An Advent Devotional edited by Courtney Richards (Chalice Press) $3.99  NO SALE PRICE

This is a staple bound booklet, nicely done, by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ.) We enjoy stocking their annual Advent release each year as the writing is always upbeat and fresh, rooted in the ecumenical, mainline denomination vision. This year, this month long devotional (which can be used with Advent candles) helps fund their “Week of Compassion”, the relief and development mission fund of the Disciples. In keeping with their justice-seeking, compassionate work, many of the contributors work in multi-ethnic relief, refugee or housing ministries. Nice.

SPECIAL TREATS

One Great Love: An Advent and Christmas Treasury of Readings, Poems, and Prayers (Paraclete Press) $21.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

With what almost feels like a lightly padded cover, this is a lush and handsome volume full of great readings, from ancient hymns to modern poems, from Presidential speeches to classic fiction. You will find credited literature from the Bible to Louisa May Alcott, from O. Henry to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Alongside old favorites like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen you will find moderns like Nikki Grimes and Luci Shaw. There is plenty here for almost anyone — classic theology and seasonal poetry and a bit of joyful whimsy. All garnished with lovely art work, lots of it.

The art in One Great Love is a delightful hodgepodge, from icons to Linotype, from nature scenes to renaissance painters. It strikes a gorgeous balance with holly and ivy and nativity paintings and glorious art from across time and across the world. There are nifty little illustrations, wreaths and candles but they do not distract from the more serious art pieces. It’s a very lovely collection, a beautiful gift and a fabulous book to own and keep. Wonderful.

All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings Deluxe Gift Edition Gayle Boss, illustrations by David G. Klein (Paraclete Press) $24.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

I trust you have seen our reviews here before of this marvelous, evocative, wintertime book. (And the Lenten one, on endangered species and the groaning of creation called Wild Hope: Stories of Lent from the Vanquishing.) We have highly recommended this Advent one for the vivid writing, the profound Biblical and theological worldview that hovers over the work, and the fabulous black and white illustrations — skillfully prepared woodcuts, actually — of animals as they prepare for winter rest. Who would have thought that a book about hibernation would yield such profound insights about the world’s darkness and the December season of Advent?

This one with a bright red hardback cover is a new edition (the regular paperback is still nicely available for $18.99, but at our sale price just $15.19.) For those that wanted a nice gift edition, this deluxe new one is, well, a gift. The cover is different, there is a ribbon marker, the print size a bit bigger and there are classy endpapers, giving this favorite a new energy and making it a real keepsake. Kudos to Paraclete.

Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change Nicholas Holtam (SPCK) $14.99           OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Not only is this as timely as ever (with the UN Climate conference going on this very week in Egypt) and urgently necessary, it is the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book of 2022. You didn’t know the Archbishop of York in the UK had an Advent Book of the Year, did you? Well, now you do. And it is an urgent one.

As the good Archbishop (Stephen Cottrell) himself puts it, this book is “shot through with hope.”

Further, it has some striking, classic artwork, full pages and in full color. It’s very cool, nicely done. My quick skim might suggest that it isn’t integrated deeply into the Advent theme and while it is arranged as a seasonal book for the time in the church calendar, it isn’t overtly such. So buy it now and you can even read it later. Nicely done.

The God of Amazing Gifts: Family Devotions for Advent Lizzie Laferton (The Good Book Company) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

In other years we have sold well the family and seasonal devotionals published by this gospel-centered, solid, evangelical publishing house. They do impressive books and we’re happy to announce this one, a “wonderful and fresh” devotional that, as one parent put it, “will keep on giving far beyond Christmas.”

It has 25 devotions that can be used during Advent or spread out before or after Christmas.

Helpfully it has different questions routes for different aged children from 7 – 14+, and a variety of suggestions for application. There are some extra ideas in the back, too, for further family activities and deeper conversations. It might be the thing to help your family dig just a bit deeper this season.

One reviewer says of it, “Thought provoking, awe-inspiring, and Jesus-magnifying, this is a brilliant resource.”

Emmanuel: An Invitation to Prepare Him Room at Christmas and Always Ruth Chou Simons (Harvest House) $29.99                      OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99  

Ruth Chou Simons has an amazing following these days and her watercolors and calligraphy has become her signature art, as in popular books like GraceLaced and Beholding and Becoming. She is sharp and deeply committed to the Word of God and its reforming influence on our lives. This new one, too, is fully illustrated, a lovely and striking hardback laden with soft colors and wondrous tones, floral prints, leaves, branches… on every page!

As they say on the back slip, “If there is one name for Jesus that captures the whole heart of God, it is Emmanuel — God with us. No other name similarly expresses the fullness of God’s eternal desire for His image-bearers. He’s always wanted us to be with Him.”

As Ms Simons notes, Christmas Day is not the end of our celebrations but the beginning! Emmanuel is an invitation to rejoice in “the everlasting fellowship and hope God extended to us on the day of His Son’s birth, guiding us to realize that having God with us all year long is Christmas’s most incredible gift.” 

Prophets & Promises: Devotions for Advent and Christmas 2022 – 2023 Richard Bruesehoff, Laura Hock, Lydia Posselt, Harvard Stephens and Troy Troftgruben (Augsburg Fortress) $3.00        SORRY, NO DISCOUNT ON THIS ITEM

This is a tiny book, full color with nice photographs for each day alongside the typical Bible verse, short reading and closing prayer. These authors include pastors and spiritual directors, evangelists and a musician and a New Testament prof at Wartburg Seminary (in Iowa.) I love the title, I love the look — the quotes that the authors occasionally use and the authors they draw from are indigenous, people of color, artsy (from Anne Lamott to Zora Neale Hurston.) There are liturgical theologians, sacramental thinkers and contemporary prophets like Braiding Sweetgrass’s Robin Wall Kimmerer. Short and sweet, we thought you might like it.

Leave it to the Lutherans to produce a beautifully attractive, upbeat-looking, full color pocket size devotional and is so inexpensive. While supplies last. 

Families Celebrate 2022-2023 Advent and Christmas deck of cards (Augsburg Fortress) $9.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $7.99

Give new meaning to the phrase “Christmas cards” by using these (small) cards to do family devotions. As they promise on the back, each card features a ritual, prayer, reflection, or activity. For families with kids ages 3 -13. Cards are dated for use each day from the first Sunday of Advent to the Day of Epiphany (January 6, 2023.) Of course, you could use or re-use them. These are really cute and feature full color art on 56 cards. While supplies last…

Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Malcolm Guite (SPCK) $15.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79  

We’ve featured this nearly every year since we discovered it several years back and we are glad for his rich and thoughtful poems. It’s fabulous, rich, and “helps us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of Advent’s many paradoxes.”  We stock almost all of Guite’s amazing volumes (including a lovely little book that explains how he relates faith and literature called The Word Within the Words (Fortress; $12.75.) Still, we are especially fond of his Advent/Christmas one. 

God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming Drew Jackson (IVP) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

We raved about this last year and wanted to share it again. Drew is a black pastor in New York who created and refined these hip-hop infused poems during Covid, informed by the realities of being a person of color in recent years. They are similar — if not in style, in approach — to Guite and others who have done overtly Biblical poetry. Here he walks us through the book of Luke (the first poem is “Theophilus (Lover of God)” while the last is inspired by a healing miracle in Luke 8. So, yes, there is some Advent, Nativity, and other seasonal themes here, at least in the first batch. There are nearly 100 poems (and a great, great forward by Grammy-winner, Jon Batiste.)  Jackson carries on the project, by the way, in a book we’re taking pre-orders for which will be released early January 2023 called Touch the Earth: Poems on the Way. It, by the way, has a foreword by Padraig O Tuama. I’m telling you, Drew is one to watch.

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BookNotes

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In the last BookNotes I mentioned being at the Doxology conference sponsored by The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination (at Western Seminary in Holland MI.) It was thrilling, meeting people who in one way or another had a connection to or interest in the Center’s work, and who, naturally, found themselves somehow in the legacy of Pastor Pete, as Eugene was sometimes called in his early days of ministry. My own workshops on reading and how the printed page can be counted on to inspire our Kingdom imagination were well received and it was fun, then, to list for you at BookNotes some of the books I highlighted, cited, or waved around from up front. Do go back and read that post if you missed it.

Peterson, famously, read novels and wrote poetry and while he was also known as a Bible guy and being a no-nonsense, spiritually-minded pastor, he thought that he did his work —living out his vocation — with more Biblically-faithful verve if he was paying attention to the world in all its splendor and trouble. Which is what fiction and memoir and good journalism can do. It is not surprising that in his annotated listing of recommended books, Take and Read, he has pages of fiction and memoir and history.

The other day I did an intro to Eugene Peterson in an adult ed class (the link is to facebook) at my church, playfully called “Bible Verses that Rocked the World” which explores famous Christians and how they were shaped by the Scriptures. From Luther and Calvin to the Wesleys to contemporaries like Alan Boesak, Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa, we’ve highlighted important figures and a bit about their love for the Word of God.

Perhaps because I knew Eugene a bit or perhaps because it was almost exactly four years since his death last weekend, I found myself sad by this recent reminder of Eugene and the stories I’ve so often told about his love of novels and his love of the Bible. I re-read much of Winn Collier’s tremendously-written, beautiful biography, A Burning in My Bones, which, frankly, doesn’t explain Peterson’s The Message project that much. Love it or not — I’ll admit my feelings are mixed — The Message is more than a clever paraphrase, but a deeply considered, seriously rendered, dynamic equivalence of the Holy Scriptures.

I happen to know some of the heady books he was reading (about Hebrew poetry, Biblical archeology, translation philosophy and such) as he waded through every line, every phrase, in the Hebrew. (I was proud that I was the first to introduce him to Calvin Seerveld’s colorful, occasional translations, too.) The Message became a cultural phenomenon as he paraphrased the ancient Scriptures into the cultural vocabulary of late 20th American, the New Testament appearing in 1993 and the full Bible coming out in 2022. I’m still surprised when I learn of folks who don’t know about it. Doing that little class was a delight, but made me even more melancholy.

And then the new Bono book came out this week; Surrendered: 40 Songs and 40 Stories and he very earnestly mentions Peterson in the acknowledgments, as I expected. Reading that simple line, I broke down in tears.

Here is a beautiful video of Eugene and Jan that is gloriously done, a lovely glimpse of their Montana home and a bit about his convictions and dreams. 

Here is the popular 22-minute video produced so wonderfully by David Taylor at Fuller Theological Seminary of Bono and Eugene (and Jan) talking about the Psalms in their Montana home. 

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In early 1982, before we opened our bookstore here, we were still in Pittsburgh and I was learning a bit about the book trade at the Family Bookstore in the Monroeville Mall. I hate to sound gossipy but the store really didn’t have that many books that interested me; it was an average pop Christian bookstore in the hey-day of evangelical goofiness. A new title came in from somebody named Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, and the allusive title itself captured me. I soon learned it was a line from Nietzsche, and I was hooked. Who was this guy, a Presbyterian from northern Maryland, not far from York, were we were soon moving? He wrote almost like the poet/activist Dan Berrigan, whose work I was immersed in, and he had a great awareness of so very much about the Bible — in the case of Long Obedience, the Psalms of Ascent. By 1982 we had opened our store and IVP released Travelling Light, Eugene’s study of Galatians which was quickly followed by Run with the Horses, on Jeremiah. He always loved the prophet with a burning in his bones, but you can read in Collier’s Burning… what inspired Peterson to write that one and why it is dedicated to “the son of a priest.” These books were lively but astute, culturally aware without being primarily about social issues. He was gritty but not heavy handed and held the laity of his church in high esteem, knowing that the gospel must be lived out in ordinary, daily sorts of circumstances and context. Who has this guy, indeed?

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Here is a guide to most of Peterson’s many books. This list is a bit idiosyncratic, with my own quick annotations, not in chronological order. I hope it is a useful “reader’s guide” helping you work through his many pages, even though I’ll skip some of the devotionals and compilations and a few that are out of print. He is, doubtlessly, one of my all time favorite authors. 

POPULAR LEVEL BOOKS

The Invitation: A Simple Guide to the Bible (NavPress) $12.99  This is a small one that I adore, compact sized, paperback. They took the vivid and very insightful introductions to each book of the Bible that appear in many editions of The Message and put them together as a Bible handbook or interesting introduction. It captures Peterson’s take on things very well and is a real keeper for fans and an easy-to-read starter for nearly anyone. It’s a good introduction to Peterson’s writing and to his solid understanding of the unfolding drama of the history of the Scriptures. One of my favorite small overview’s of the Bible, a great gift for young or old.

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society  (IVP)  $18.00   I don’t know sales histories or that sort of official stuff, but I suspect this is by far Peterson’s best seller and certainly the volume that is most beloved. It is not a commentary, as such, but reflections on the Psalms sung on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, inviting us to this “long obedience.” You see his critique of society (and its easy-answers, self-help truisms, and technical fixes) and of cheap faith. Wow. I’m glad IVP entered this into their ”Signature Classics” collection.

This recent edition has the moving eulogy written by son Leif, delivered at Eugene’s funeral. Obviously, you should own this.

There is a good study guide that can be purchased as well ($12.00) that is good for individual use and certainly for any group using this in a Bible study or book club.

Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life At Its Best (IVP) $18.00  I’ve long been drawn to “the weeping prophet” and this study of Jeremiah was very important for me, learning to engage the Biblical text and apply it with insight to today’s milieu. I’ve never loved the subtitle, but the book is profound, radical, and very well written. Like Long Obedience, it isn’t a full-on commentary, but offers thoughtful reflections on key passages. This edition includes a second preface that was in the anniversary edition and the commemorative sermon his son Eric preached at his funeral. The books is dedicated to Eric, “also the son of a priest.”  Very highly recommended.

Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms That Summon You From Self to Community (Eerdmans) $19.99 This was first published by IVP as Earth and Altar which was a line from a poem by Chesterton. It is a great companion, I’d say, to Long Obedience, offering extraordinary insights into the more public psalms. His phraseology of “the un-selfing of America” was timely and prescient, even if a tad clunky. He was convinced that reading and praying these Psalms would have an effect on us, un-self us, undoing our rugged individualism. I think this is his most under-appreciated book, a true must-read. I’m glad Eerdmans picked it up and re-issued it with the second title.

In any case, it is an excellent book, very highly recommended, espeically if you liked his Long Obedience in the Same Direction.

Traveling Light: Modern Meditations on St. Paul’s Letter of Freedom (Helmers & Howard) $17.95  I am not sure why this study of Galatians didn’t sell so well at first — I think it may have been the cover sporting a colorful hot air ballon. After IVP let it go out of print in the late 80s, it got a new cover— a Marc Chagall painting that I’ve never cared for much — but does give it more gravitas. An old college thought it was nothing short of brilliant and was the most transformative book he ever read. I think some of this may date back to that Bible study group from which Peterson first started The Message, doing what he could to help his Bel Air congregants get excited about this revolutionary stuff. It’s a very strong book, about true freedom.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God (Waterbrook) $16.99  This is the only collection of old sermons that Eugene himself helped edit before he died. He also wrote an extraordinary introduction to this big collection, which itself is wise and makes for great reading. I’ve read just that part more than once and you will do, I’m sure.

Old messages culled and published before his death, As Kingfishers Catch Fire shows a remarkable consistency and common-place brilliance as he preached, year in and year out, at the PC(USA) church in Bel Air, MD. Very nice to work through or dip into from time to time. 400 pages.

Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans) $27.50 This ought not be so pricey but it is nonetheless worth every dollar — it is a gathering of talks, studies, interviews, essays, poems — a real miscellany anthology. There are some legendary pieces in here, excellent stuff you shouldn’t miss. These diverse pieces were mostly published in journals (some academic, like Theology Today or The Princeton Journal or several on homiletics, for instance) and magazines (from Eternity, Leadership, Crux, and Christianity Today.) Taken together they are a goldmine of good stuff.

There are several pieces on literature and writing that will thrill most BookNotes fans. I often cite his “Novelists, Pastors and Poets” and “Pastors and Novels” which are worth the price of the book and make a great case on why reading widely matters for the Christian life, especially for pastors, preachers, and leaders.  

Living the Resurrection: The Risen Christ in Everyday Life (NavPress) $9.99 This may be Peterson’s shortest book and it is a gem. I once created a four week after-Easter Sunday school class from it.

The newer, paperback edition has a great forward by his Presbyterian pastor son, Eric, written after Eugene’s death. The three chapters about the post-resurrection accounts in the gospels are called “Resurrection Wonder”, “Resurrection Meals”, and “Resurrection Friends.”

Small, but so good and easy to read. Don’t miss it.

The Wisdom of Each Other: A Conversation Between Spiritual Friends (Zondervan) $10.99 Again, this is very short and maybe overlooked. It was part of a fabulous set of “Growing Deeper” books by other like-minded writer friends — Walter Wangerin, Luci Shaw, Philip Yancey, Calvin Miller — and this one was a creative experiment, written as a set of letters.

Peterson says his conversation partner, one Gunnar Thorkildsson of Moorhead, MN, is made up but, yet, he also says it is all true. Apparently, this includes verbatim letters he has sent offering spiritual friendship to others over the years. Just about 100 pages, this is one to savor.

Leap Over a Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians (HarperOne) $15.99 In the late 1990s, while at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Peterson did a number of books that, while technically not commentaries, were, perhaps, a bit deeper than his classics like Long Obedience and Run with the Horses. This one is on the life of David, working on texts from Samuel. It is truly a stand-out volume, capturing his quintessential “earthy spirituality.” Leap… is among the very best books on David I’ve read, and his talking about growing up in his father’s butcher shop is precious and revelatory. It was reviewed in the Washington Post and called an “epic everyman analysis.”

Answering God: The Psalms As Tools for Prayer (HarperOne) $16.99  Also published by Harper during his Regent College years, this is one of the great resources we have for understanding the Psalms as a book of prayer. We see his a great confluence of his interest in the Bible, in ancient liturgy, and in prayerful sorts of spiritual formation. It’s not too difficult, but one to read carefully. I think it may be especially helpful for those whose prayer life is unconvincing and unsatisfying. He certainly addresses the causes of dissatisfaction, for some, at least, and offers the Psalms as a way into a more faithful sort of prayer experience.

Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (HarperOne) $16.99  I have read somewhere that this was, in his estimation, the book he worked hardest on; the laborious research and writing taking a toll. He suggests that John was a poet and he cites his fair share of literary figures to open us to the mystical truths here. He loved the Apocalypse of St. John (and after his death, Waterbrook published an old set of sermons from Bel Air on Revelation, a stunning project, called This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be, showing that Reversed Thunder had been peculating a very long time.)

This Hallelujah Banquet (Waterbrook; $18.00) being a set of sermons, is an easier read, of course, and perhaps more inspiring, but Reversed Thunder, remains an allusive, if important, resource for anyone reading and praying this mysterious last book of the Bible.

On Living Well: Brief Reflections on Wisdom for Walking in the Way of Jesus (Waterbrook) $20.00  I am sure I am not alone in worrying if Eugene would have wanted his older work to be released by publishers these days, maybe giving the impression they are capitalizing on his fame.

I trust his family, his sons and daughter, who I am sure have the right cares and commitments in thinking about all this. I am confident they approved of this posthumous project and those involved are sure this is all good. And, ya know what? They are right — this is really good, honoring him and showing the world what the dear folks at Christ Our King in Bel Air read back in the early days.

This is a collection of shorter pieces drawn from his sometimes witty, sometimes clever, church newsletter back at Christ our King Presbyterian. Many pastors have a column or regular piece in a church newsletter but not all are worthy of publishing as this surely is. I’m glad for On Living Well, dated as it may be. Here’s what a few good folks say about it:

Eugene insisted that the crux of Christian spirituality was to get all these God-truths lived, to get them moving into the street. God’s wisdom, Eugene knew, is always relational, always drawing us into the questions, complications, dangers, and joys of genuine life pursued before God and alongside one another. This is why the context of much that we read here — pastoral words written to Eugene’s small congregation — matters so much. These pages are not pious abstractions but personal words to friends, inviting all of us to embrace God’s enchanting invitation to truly live.                — Winn Collier, Director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination and author of  A Burning in My Bones and Love Big, Be Well.

Among the many gifts of human language, the greatest is the use of words for the worship of God, who is the Word. On these pages, over and over, Peterson’s words raise our sense of God’s sheer worthiness out of the clutter of confusion and complication… On Living Well should be greatly treasured. These words are pure acts of worship that will bring the reader into beautiful worship of the source of all beauty. — Karen Swallow Prior, research professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of On Reading Well

We don’t hear the word sage much anymore because there are so few sages these days. But Eugene Peterson was one of deep wisdom. In an age awash in banal how-to books, On Living Well is something else entirely — something we need. On Living Well is a series of meditations on what constitutes the good life, written by a man who indeed knew how to live well. This book brims with the wisdom our day needs.          — Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church and author of When Everything’s on Fire

Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager (Eerdmans) $16.99  Initially released as his first book in 1976 and entitled Growing Up in Christ: A Guide for Families with Adolescents (John Knox Press) this was then re-issued by Revell and called Growing Up in Christ: A Guide for Families with Adolescents. I think it is fair to say it was “critical acclaimed” but not popular and was finally reissued with this more allusive, Biblical title by Eerdmans in the mid-90s once he had become better known. This is not the most well-known book of Peterson’s but while may be a bit dated, it brings a certain sort of vision and insight and tone to the sacred task of parenting. Nothing quite like it in his oeuvre and nothing quite like it on the market. I’m glad it’s still in print, so many years later. 

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LITERARY WORKS

The Pastor: A Memoir (HarperOne) $17.99  Eugene didn’t want to write this, at first, but was sort of talked into it, and he came to enjoy the writing and was glad to tell the story. From his “sacred” mountain home of Montana, and rough-cut upbringing there to his introduction to the broader world of ecumenical scholarship and his eventual call to ministry, this shares it all with eloquence and without didactic sermonizing. He makes much of the phrase “every step an arrival” as he, looking over his shoulder, sees God’s hand guiding the unfolding of his unpretentious life.

Some think it is a must-read, moving and eloquent. I have to admit I liked Collier’s authorized biography, A Burning in My Bones better, but, still, this is from the pastor himself. It’s quite a story, well told!

Holy Luck (Eerdmans) $15.50 Peterson wrote poetry often, and read it widely. He was delighted when we asked him — standing in the parking lot of a Presbytery meeting at First Presbyterian in York, actually — to do a poetry reading at our store. It never happened, so we were especially glad when a bunch of his work got published in a trim sized, handsome paperback. Very nice.

The publisher shares this helpful overview:

Holy Luck presents, in one luminous volume, seventy poems by Peterson, most of them not previously published. Speaking to various aspects of “Kingdom of God” living, these poems are arranged in three sets:

Holy Luck — poems arising out of the Beatitudes
The Rustling Grass — poems opening up invisible Kingdom realities through particular created things
Smooth Stones — occasional poems about discovering significance in every detail encountered while following Jesus

Take and Read: Spiritual Reading, An Annotated List (Eerdmans) $16.50  I wasn’t sure where to list this but for many, it is a cherished volume that has led them wisely into the depths of great Christian literature. It is a whole college class in one inexpensive volume!

I found some small parts of it a bit off-putting, but that’s me, more inclined to easier-to-read modern writers than, say, Alexander Whyte or P. T. Forsyth, who he loves. For anyone that wants a mature guide to the deepest, best books — from ancient mystics Gregory of Nyssa to Theresa of Avila, from fiction by Walker Percy to the grand three-volume novel Kristen Lavransdatter or Buechner’s Godric, memoirs from Dakota to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, theology from von Balthasar to von Rad, this is remarkable stuff and his annotations are exceptionally informative and really interesting. Read the actual books or not, reading his appreciation for them is priceless. I think this is a book that will be very valuable for discerning readers.

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SPIRITUAL THEOLOGY

This five-fold set which is considered to be his magnum opus, can be read in any order although there is a bit of a flow to them, so it makes sense to read them in order, although one surely doesn’t have to. This is his most mature and serious work but designed for thoughtful readers of all sorts, not only those with a bent towards theology and the like. Mature and rich as it is, it actually isn’t technical or academic. Take your time — this is a life-time of good reading.

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Eerdmans) $18.99  Published in 2005 this is the first in the series which is his magnum opus, his magisterial, extraordinary, beautifully written and highly regarded set of what they called “spiritual theology.” I’m not sure he liked the phrase but this is the first and complex of this series. I think it may be the most significant book he has done. It is also his biggest at 380 pages.

The title comes from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem and the book is arranged in three major units, “Christ Plays in Creation” and “Christ Plays in History” and “Christ Plays in Community.” In each section there is a bit of a template of four things he does to show how God shows up in these four arenas. The orderly flow and rhythm makes it helpful and how he does what he does is half the fun. Highly recommended. 

Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Eerdmans) $18.99  This, the second in the series that has been called “monumental” is the shortest and (among those we know, at least) the most popular. It is on the role of the Bible, even a bit about translation and hermeneutics, and then offers great guidance on lectio divina and how to read deeply. Eat This Book — a phrase uttered by two prophets in the Bible, by the way — is one of the best books on this topic, lovely, thoughtful, interesting and helpful. A fabulous little ending appendix has his annotated description of other authors on this topic. He loved the Word and it is beneficial to keep company with a thoughtful pastor guiding us in this elemental Christian practice. Do it!

The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways That Jesus Is the Way (Eerdmans) $18.99  Here is how the publisher describes what Peterson is up to in this marvelous book on discipleship, exploring what it means to follow Jesus, doing His work in His way. They say: 

Arguing that the way Jesus leads and the way we follow are symbiotic, Peterson begins with a study of how the ways of those who came before Christ revealed and prepared the way of the Lord that became complete in Jesus. He then challenges the ways of the contemporary American church, showing in stark relief how what we have chosen to focus on — consumerism, celebrity, charisma, and so forth —obliterates what is unique in the Jesus way.

Wow. This is hard-hitting. And pretty obviously just what we need, now more than ever. In a way, this is the most revealing book about Peterson’s approach to a non-sensational, no-glitz, down-to-Earth faith that does the right stuff in the right way. Whew.

Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Eerdmans) $18.99  Don’t you love the often-cited line from the Emily Dickinson poem (that ends with the truth dazzling us gradually)? This Peterson work is so good, a natural follow-up from The Jesus Way. If we are to be shaped in the ways and way of Jesus, then, naturally, we must immerse ourselves in His teachings. Much of his teaching was told “slant” — in parables, stories, and, naturally, his routines of prayer. 

Tell It Slant is a good overview of the parables and a good glimpse into the style of teaching Jesus used. More foundationally, it is about how Jesus used language, how “slant” language is indirect and oblique, “requiring a participatory imagination.” It points readers “to Jesus’ engaging, relational way of speaking as a model for us today.” 

One appreciative Gospel Coalition reviewer of Peterson’s memoir (The Pastor) liked the book but worried that he didn’t explain his doctrine, that there wasn’t enough dogma, that he shared his life story without didactic theology. Maybe this book explains why that is. Peterson reads theology and is immersed in the Scriptures and it has shaped his worldview, his imagination, but he, like his Master, often told it slant. He lived his life naturally, without cant. I think understanding that about him is important and this book helps us appreciate his use of language.

Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ (Eerdmans) $18.99  This is the fifth volume in this groundbreaking set of “spiritual conversations” around foundational, lived, relational theology, looking at growth, maturity, wisdom — as the subtitle puts it, “growing up in Christ.” Attentive readers will guess that some of it is drawn from the book of Ephesians and it invites us to that wondrous phrase, practicing resurrection. What a wonderful, meaty, thoughtful, and captivating vision, what has been called a tour de force and a beautiful, culmination to this magnificent series. 

I’ll let his friend Marva Dawn explain its importance:

This is the perfect culmination to Eugene Peterson’s fivefold Conversations in Spiritual Theology. How much the church would be transfigured if we could all more fully live as one with Christ in His Resurrection! You will delight in the way Peterson takes portions of Ephesians and displays the results of ‘rocket’ verbs and other word choices, of disciplines toward maturity, and of movements ‘upward, inward, Godward.’ This is a life-transforming book for us all!”  Marva Dawn, author of A Royal Waste of Time and Truly the Community

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VOCATIONAL HOLINESS FOR PASTORS

I started off this part of the list with the lovely set of letters between Eric and Eugene since they are about pastoring. And, at the end, I listed an all-time fav, a book he co-authored with his pal and our former customer, Marva Dawn, The Unnecessary Pastor. It isn’t snobby or off putting, and I often wondered if it would have sold better with a different title. In any case, it’s wonderful, vivid, and shows his good collaboration with Marva and deserves to be in this section of our guide to Peterson’s work.

The middle four have uniform covers and comprise a quartet. I am no pastor and you may not be either, but I’m telling you, this is rich, wonderful, stuff, good for anyone. Read them all — you won’t regret it. And them give them to your pastor. Whether she is old or young, new at the job or a seasoned saint, Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran or non-denominational, these are perfect pastoral gifts.

Letters to a Young Pastor: Timothy Conversations Between Father and Son with Eric E. Peterson (NavPress) $19.99  This is a short and lively set of real letters Eugene and his son, Eric, then a new Presbyterian pastor, exchanged. Tender, wise, interesting. Just published in 2020, this is a lovely book, part Eugene, part Eric; he mentions some fatherly stuff, books he’s reading and lectures he’s preparing, so there is a small bit of autobiography that you’ll enjoy. But it is mostly about pastoring, replying to Eric’s very real questions.  Don’t miss the companion volume, Letters to a Young Congregation by Eric, himself, by the way. Or, for that matter, Eric’s excellent study Wade in the Water: Following the Sacred Stream of Baptism.) Letters to a Young Pastor is a very, very nice book and it is great to see Peterson in conversation with this colleague in ministry, his son.

Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Eerdmans) $20.99  This is a seminal book, providing a sea-change for many (maybe for Peterson himself) as he describes his early efforts and process of teaching parishioners how to pray and read the Bible. His descriptions of the pastoral task, of the “angles” to work, are priceless. I could say more, but you should read it yourself. Very nicely done, a bit intense and often tender, it is highly recommended. I think it is the one in this series to start with.

Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Eerdmans) $20.99  I know there are some who have said this is Rev. Peterson’s most important book, a deep and profound study of the calling of a pastor and his coining of that phrase “vocational holiness.” The image he plays with — the “unpredictable plant” — is from the end of Jonah. Ha!

He say that book is “a parable with a prayer at its center” and yields some nearly subversive views for pastoring well. Yes, in his hands it does. Wow.

The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Eerdmans) $19.99  This is a very good read, good for anyone, and certainly vital for pastors these days. Curiously (and not often recalled) this was first out in the series of white hardbacks done by Leadership Journal. It wasn’t so much about leadership skills and didn’t fit their style or expectation and went out of print. Happily it was given a new cover and entered into what then became a trilogy of three great titles by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids. Nice.

Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Eerdmans) $21.99  Ahh, this was one of Peterson’s early books, first published by John Knox, a Presbyterian publishing house, in the late 1970s, I think. After it went out of print in the 1980s it eventually was repackaged and released as the first in the pastoral set of “vocational holiness” books. It fits and, as the publisher insists, sets the stage for the others in the series.

Written at the height of pastoral care movements that drew on psychology and social science, this returns to the Old Testament and the Jewish roots of faith to determine what pastoral work is about. This may be his most demanding book, a very creatively written, playfully allusive but intense study of various Biblical books and their contributions to forming the character and faith of a serious pastor. I love this book, truly, but some find it a bit complex.  From five Old Testament books he draws these tasks of the called pastor:  prayer-directing, story-making, pain-sharing, nay-saying and community-building. 

The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call co-authored with Marva J. Dawn (Eerdmans) $27.00  As I noted above, this is a fabulous read, and a great study of the church — the people and the leadership and the pastoring that goes on as we gather as God’s people. Designed for pastors, I guess, I’d highly recommend it to one and all. It’s a real delight seeing Marva and Eugene in collaboration, in all their counter-cultural, even radical, glory. Marva looks to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians for instruction for churches seeking to live faithfully in today’s world. In turn, Eugene explores Romans, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, drawing from them a gospel-informed view of pastoral identity.  Rediscovering the call, indeed. 266 pages.

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BIBLICAL STUDIES

Westminster Bible Companion: First and Second Samuel (WJK) $33.00  Not too many people know that Peterson did a major commentary on his beloved history books of 1 & 2 Samuel. It’s in the WBC series and is readable accessible, with good opening up of the narrative flow and stories of these core portions of the Old Testament drama. Nicely done.

I like this description:

The power of story as God’s word to the community of faith is never more clear than in the books of Samuel. Emotion, drama, complexity of character, and mystery fill the pages of these two biblical books. Eugene Peterson’s commentary emphasizes the resonance and interplay between these stories of kings and prophets and the social and cultural issues that concern us today.

The NRSV Life With God Bible (HarperBibles) $49.99 (burgundy leather) // with Deuterocanonical books  $44.99 (deep (brown leather)

I want to give a loud shout out to this smaller-sized, beautifully made NRSV study bible. It was dreamed up by Dallas Willard and Richard Foster with the Biblical oversight offered by Peterson and Walter Brueggemann. This doesn’t have as complex a study apparatus as most major study Bibles do, and it only comes in a compact size. But it is wonderful, having garnered praises from folks as diverse as Max Lucado and Tony Campolo, calling it thrilling and impactful and outstanding. Besides spiritually attuned study notes, 16 good maps, profiles of Biblical characters, topic indexes and such, there are challenging spiritual exercises and a developing set of fifteen essays on living the “with-God life.”  You can see Peterson’s hand in this, for sure.

The Message Devotional Bible (NavPress) $29.99 (hardcover); $39.99 (brown leather-like); $39.99 (large print hardcover)

There are just bunches and bunches of editions The Message and we carry most of them. (Take a look at the NavPress website to see the beautiful designs and various sizes and shapes and prices and send us an order or just give us a ring, please.) This one is special because it has interspersed devotional and reflective notes and study aids from Peterson. As you’d expect there is a Bible reading plan and helpful index and a topical guide (and those great introductions to each book of the Bible.) There are insights galore, meditative reflections and a “neighboring” set of comments about incarnating the gospel in our places. These notes are drawn from previously published books, but many are for previously unpublished sermons and writings. I like the balance and guidance this useful edition offers. I happen to use the large print hardback which is a bit heftier, but still quite handsome.

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Pastoral Work: Engagements with the Vision of Eugene Peterson edited by Jason Byassee and L. Roger Owens (Cascade) $24.00  How can I not mention this, a collection volume of serious engagement with Peterson’s unique style of vocational holiness and Biblical orientation. This isn’t a glowing tribute, really, although all of the many authors are true fans; most were friends. They do tell some stories, naturally, but each offers an important exploration of as aspect of Peterson’s vision and practices. I love this book and highly recommend it to one and all, even though it is designed, I suppose, mostly for church leaders.

I suppose there hasn’t been much critical engagement with Peterson’s body of work because he hasn’t mostly served in the typical academy. Pastoral Work brings together some of the finest scholar-pastors working today to describe the way “Peterson has inspired and infuriated them” on the way to (hopefully) more faithful pastorates.

Most of these authors are mainstream ecumenical names, from Stephanie Paulsell to Anthony Robbins to Will Willimon to Marty Copenhagen to Carol Howard Merritt.Most have certain leanings of a deeply Biblical sort. The chapter by Trygve David Johnson (chaplain at Hope College) is tremendous. I admire Kristen Deede Johnson — co-author of The Justice Calling — very much and her chapter is tremendous comparing and contrasting Peterson and James Davison Hunter on institutions. Don’t miss Tim Condor’s somewhat edgy piece “Twenty-five years of Working the Angles.” I really enjoyed the vibrant Lilian Daniel’s chapter, “Eugene Peterson Saved My Ministry, and Ten Ways He Can Save Yours Too, with Jesus’s Help (Not).” Prince Raney Rivers brings a black megachurch pastor’s voice into the mix showing just how wide Peterson’s influence was. What a book.

A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene Peterson Winn Collier (Waterbrook) $20.00 (paperback) $28.00 (hardback, while supplies last.) OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE =  $16.00 (paperback) and 22.40 (hardback, while supplies last.)

I’ve said it before and I need to say it again — this is one of the great books of our time, a lovely, gorgeously- written, insightful, entertaining and officially authorized biography. Winn — who understands Peterson deeply and is a sympathetic writer — is honest, too, not offering cheap applause let alone hagiography (which Peterson wouldn’t have wanted.) He had the complete blessing of the Peterson family, had access to the crawl space below the Flathead Lake house where bunches of boxes of bunches of papers were kept — diaries, copies of letters, even records of conversations with his Dallastown bookseller. Nobody could have picked a better writer for this major project and it was a huge labor of love. We have a few hardbacks left and plenty of the paperbacks. Get some as Christmas gifts, why don’t you. It’s a super book, highly recommend by both Beth and me. And lots of more famous folks, too. You can’t go wrong.

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• United States Postal Service has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, now, 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 $9.20. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

BookNotes

It was the first time I was at a bone fide big event in almost three years. (About 100 participants still seems like a “big” gig for me.) Before Covid, setting up book displays at conferences and gatherings was nearly a third of our business, and we have been immeasurably blessed by friendships solidified at these annual events. From UCC clergy retreats to Lutheran and Episcopalian Bishop’s convocations, from Christian Legal Society conferences to the Redeemer Center for Faith & Work events to the Wee Kirk (Scottish for “small church”) retreats, some of our best customers and favorite friends developed from our travelling roadshow. Shifting away from that these past years was painful — financially and relationally. And we remain wary, sad that it seems few care to wear masks indoors these days, all over.

So it was with a lot of hesitation that I got on a plane at BWI and headed to Western Michigan, to the lovely town of Holland, to take part in the inaugural Doxology gathering sponsored by our friends at The Eugene Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination. Inspired by Peterson’s gritty spirituality, Biblical theology, pastoral care, and appreciation for the arts, music, novels, and poetry, the Peterson Center is a haven and a blessedly fitting tribute to his gentle ongoing legacy.

Eugene was a loyal customer at Hearts & Minds and we had numerous conversations over the years, firstly in our  First Presbyterian Church of York parking lot (and later via fax or phone, and at locations as diverse as St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute at the famous Baltimore seminary and at Wee Kirk at the Western Pennsylvania Laurelville Mennonite Retreat Center. He and Jan were always gracious when I popped in to their Pittsburgh Theological Seminary apartment to hand deliver an order and even in their fruitful retirement years in Montana as we sent them books and greetings from back East.

There was no hagiography at the Doxology event — they knew Peterson’s aversion to such hoopla and were intentional about not invoking his name too often. (He didn’t even like conferences, we were told, so, well, there was that. Ha.)

I had the immense pleasure of meeting and hanging out a bit with one of Eugene and Jan’s grown children, Eric Peterson, who I had spoken with on the phone but never encountered face to face. I really appreciate him a lot, for a bunch of reasons. You may recall that I reviewed two books he released just a few years ago — Letters to a Young Pastor: Timothy Conversations Between Father and Son (which was the publication of a set of letters between Eric and his dad) and Letters to a Young Congregation: Nurturing the Growth of a Faithful Church (remarkably wise Peterson-esque wisdom for any sort of congregation.) He’sa PC(USA) pastor, a very good writer and powerful storyteller. You can see my reviews of those two here. Both sell for $19.99 each and are still at our BookNotes 20% off, making either one $15.99.

One of the leaders of this Peterson Center is Winn Collier, a dear friend and fine customer of ours. I really hope you know his marvelous biography of Eugene, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson (Waterbrook). We may be one of the only places that still have a few of the spanking new hardbacks in stock ($28.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40) as well as the recent paperbacks ($20.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00.) Beth and I both found it tender and bold, funny and inspiring, a page-turned we didn’t want to end. It’s a great story of a very good church leader, a colorful character in his own right, and in the telling of the life, we learn a whole lot about a whole lot of vital, human stuff. We highly recommend it.

Enjoy these two great endorsements, richly written as they would need to be to blurb this masterpiece:

How do you reduce into words the vital reality of this man, scholar, searcher, teacher, and faithful friend? Eugene was a man who brought Scripture to fresh life for me and millions of others–who else would invite the phrase Holy Luck into a retelling of the Beatitudes? Winn Collier’s skilled storytelling weaves the threads of Eugene’s life into something fitting, like the prayer shawl he wore in his study every day. — Luci Shaw, Regent College writer-in-residence and author of The Generosity poems

I knew Eugene Peterson for thirty years, or at least I thought I did. He didn’t talk much, especially about himself. I knew nothing about his mouse tattoo, his Pentecostal mother’s radio program, the abysmal failure of his first church plant attempt, his friendship with a young Pat Robertson, or his square dancing prowess. Somehow Winn Collier ferreted out the little known facts about Eugene that, taken together, complete the picture of a humble, gentle giant who brought the Bible to new life for millions and became an inspirational model for beleaguered pastors everywhere. — Philip Yancey, author of Where the Light Fell

I hope you also know Winn for his tremendous novel (in fictional letters) called Love Big Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church (Eerdmans; $17.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39.) This small story has garnered amazing raves from the likes of Robert Benson, Corban Addison, Mandy Smith, Karen Wright Marsh.

A.J Swoboda said of Love Big Be Well,

Shatters all of our idolatrous addictions to big and growing and oversized franchised Christianities. Faithfulness absolutely must become the church’s new big. What Collier pens here is nothing short of miraculous. These letters demand to be read.

Pastor Peterson himself said about this story of the fictional pastor Jonas McAnn and his little church:

This book is a tour de force — an angle on understanding the life of both congregation and pastor that exceeds anything I have ever read. No directions, no programs, just an immersion into what really takes place in the life of a congregation and a pastor. Winn Collier’s writing is alive.

Under the guidance of Winn and his colleague Sam Gutierrez, the Doxology conference was a time for laughter and praise, song and poetry, anguished storytelling and quiet hope. I was honored to meet Samuel Wells (rector of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London and author of over 40 books!) and the young, black, New York poet/pastor Drew Jackson, author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and the January 2023 release Touch the Earth: Poems on the Way. 

I was really moved by the major presentations offered by Sam Wells. What a good guy. I admit to searching out his Hauerwasian influences, having just read most of In Conversation: Samuel Wells and Stanley Hauerwas (Church Publishing; $17.95 – OUR SALE PRICE = $14.36.) I am going to have another go of the second edition of Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Baker Academic; $27.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60.)

I think if I were to recommend one recent Wells’ book it would be one that I tried to promote when it came out earlier this year, Humbler Faith, Bigger God: Finding a Story to Live By (Eerdmans; $22.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39.) It is a good read, serious but clear, and in many ways offers a re-working and compilation of much of his major writing. It serves as an excellent introduction to his body of work and a great summary of some of his greatest ideas and inspiring directives. I highly recommended it last Spring but now that I’ve met him and heard him (and pummeled him with questions during a ride back to the airport) I’m an even bigger fan.

We stock a good many of his titles, so give us a ring if you want us to find anything, even some published in the UK.

I also really, really liked meeting Drew Jackson. It is hard to describe his fabulous poems, drawing their inspiration from the gospel stories in Luke, and his contemporary blending of good words at the “intersection of justice, peace, and contemplation, with a passion to contribute toward a more just and whole world.” From hip hop stylings to quieter lines, his words dance off the page with allusive and aesthetically-pleasing energy and insight.

Drew Jackson’s first book was raved about by all sorts of folks from Richard Rohr to Jon Batiste to Nikole Lim   and is entitled God Speaks through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming. It offers poems (written during the pandemic in lower Manhattan) based on the first eight chapters of Luke. (IVP; $16.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80) and it was very popular last year.

The forthcoming one (officially releasing in early January 2023) has an introduction by Pádraig Ó Tuama! It similarly draws on Luke and will be called Touch the Earth: Poems on the Way (IVP; $18.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40. DUE January 10, 2022.) Described as part protest poetry and part Bible commentary, it is striking, inspiring stuff, some even better than the first great volume.

As stimulating as it is (and it is!) Drew is also a pastor and preacher, so he knows something about caring for his people, connecting, serving. I liked him a lot and appreciated the poems he performed from this forthcoming work. You should pre-order it now. It come outs January 10th but we will no doubt have it early. Yay.

I’m so glad to see our friend Cole Arthur Riley chiming in with this great endorsement:

This collection is a companion for mystics and storytellers alike. Poem after poem, Drew Jackson approaches questions of community and trust and meets them not with the bore of certainty but a reverence for the unspoken, for mystery and suspense. Jackson’s words will leave you waiting in the silence . . . but never alone.                     — Cole Arthur Riley, creator of Black Liturgies and author of This Here Flesh

Consider this insightful explanation from the great Barbara Holmes, author of Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church:

In Touch the Earth, Drew Jackson’s poetry offers a word-weary world a new language of engagement, disruption, and insight. As with all great poetry, the words are spare, but the literary images loom large, creating indelible impressions on the reader. Like echoes that reverberate long after the first sound, the poems stay with you, they dance with your spirit. After reading the poem ‘Shake the Dust,’ I am still considering a much broader definition of power, one no longer confined to the monarchs, governments, and oppressors but with a conscience as sticky as cling wrap that refuses to allow its memories to be shaken loose. This collection is a meditative treasure.

Another lovely poet shared some of her work at Doxology and I was delighted to have met Amy Nemecek (a true bookstore lover, having worked in a very good one for years.) You should consider supporting her first release, The Language of the Birds and other Poems just out from Paraclete Press in their “Iron Pen” imprint. ($20.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00.) Poet Luci Shaw calls it “brilliant” and novelist Sharon Garlough Brown says reading her work was an “opportunity for worship.” Dwight Baker (CEO of Baker Publishing Group) refers to her “poetic grace.” It’s really good.

Amy’s poem’s shepherd by soul into a wondrous journey. I was inspired, transported, and seen. I highly recommend these poems for you. Enjoy how they will expand your own heart. — Gem Fadling, author of Hold That Thought: Sorting Through the Voices in Our Heads

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I did a workshop a couple of times at Doxology, doing my thing about why the reading life matters, how engaging the printed page works, sharing stories of those who have found solace and insight in books. I really appreciated the chance to do this and thank those who were so complimentary and encouraging. Believe me, it was refreshing and real blessing for me.

I might try to do some of that stuff at some online thing sometime, but for now, you might want to know a few of the books I cited and quoted from. A few were real favorites.

(There are just so many artful titles to cite — my, my, I quickly quoted Anne Lamott and C. S. Lewis and Wendell Berry and Karen Swallow Prior and missed so many who were in my mind, from In the Shelter by poet/activist Padraig O Trauma to Catching the Light – Why I Write by Muscogee poet Joy Harjo to The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty by German luthier Martin Schleske to The Soul of Wine and The Spirituality of Wine by theologian and winemaker and vineyardist Gisela Kreglinger (with a Peterson forward) to Steeped in Stories by Matali Perkins to the brand new Let There Be Art by Rachel Marie Kang and the recent The Beauty Chasers by Timothy Willard to the many volumes of Mako Fujimura or Calvin Seerveld who I’m sure I name-dropped.)

BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS, READING ABOUT READING

(Order any of these bulleted listings and get a free book sent along with your order. We’ll send Reading for the Common Good out at no cost as our gift to you, while supplies last.)

This list of titles of books about books (mostly) that I actually used in my presentation at Doxology evolves and changes whenever I’m called upon to share this kind of reminder to read widely, but this time, I read moving excerpts from (or at least held up and celebrated) the following:

• Subversive Spirituality Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans) $27.50
• Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists. Cornelius Plantinga (Eerdmans) $14.99
• The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry Austin Carty (Eerdmans) $19.99
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press) $16.00
• The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints Jessica Hooten Wilson (Brazos Press) $24.99
• Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons Frederick Buechner (HarperOne) $16.99
• Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies Marilyn McEntyre (Eerdmans) $19.99
• When Poets Pray Marilyn McEntyre (Eerdmans) $20.99
• The Preaching Life Barbara Brown Taylor (Cowley) $17.95
• Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy Mary McCampbell (Fortress Press) $28.00
• The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing Marita Golden (Crown Publishing) $14.99
• Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just Claude Atcho (Brazos Press) $19.99
• The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Other’s Eyes C.S. Lewis (HarperOne) $19.99
• My Theology: The Word within the Words Malcolm Guite (Fortress Press) $12.75
• Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind Alan Jacobs (Penguin) $16.00
• Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity Stephen Roach (Square Halo Books) $11.99
• Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish C. Christopher Smith (IVP) $16.00

FREE BOOK OFFER:

Okay, so I didn’t get to them all, but, each is a treasure to behold.  I’ll tell you what.  Order any from that list from the bullet points and we’ll send you a free copy (while supplies last) of Chris Smith’s essential little book, Reading for the Common Good.

BRAND NEW AND/OR  FORTHCOMING

It is often said that poetry slows us down, not unlike the best spiritual practices, helping us to pay attention, maybe even cultivating a sense of awe and wonder. Here are three very important new books, two about poetry, one by a poet, that are out now, or soon.

A Century of Poetry: 100 Poems for Searching the Heart Rowan Williams (SPCK) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

We ordered this as an import from England because we realized just how important it could be. What a thrill that it just arrived! A beautiful, hefty hardback (with a helpful type font that isn’t too tiny) is extraordinary on several levels.

The compilation itself is unique and a great survey of a century’s worth of poems that would fit well on anyone’s shelf. Known as an astute reader (and a published poet himself) Williams picked from a massive array, narrowing it down to a few well known ones (W. H. Auden, T. S. Elliot, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton, Dylan Thomas, Christian Wiman) and many that most will not know. Good for him that he picked some global entries, from the Jewish scholar Yehuda Amichai to authors with names like Tadeusz Rozewicz and Vikram Seth and Avrom Sutzkever. For thoughtful reasons that he explains in the introduction, the poets are arranged alphabetically. 

This book, however, is not just a collection of artfully reflective pieces, but each entry is followed by the great Archbishop’s Christian reflections on the searching nature of these poets and their work. I am sure I am going to love these ruminations and I am sure they will help those of us who are not all that fond of poetry (who sometimes don’t “get it”) and who need some guidance to see what is there to be seen. This is going to make a great gift this holiday season, too. Hooray!

Each poem in this collection is a door ajar, which Rowan Williams nudges open, inviting us in, where he carefully shows us around. He leaves us in a room of many windows, the light streaming in, our souls enriched, this book in our hand. — Frances Ward, poetry editor, Theology

This is a compendium of poems you could spend a lifetime absorbing. Rowan Williams has gathered a diverse array of poets that grapple with mystery, ultimacy, and the terrifying beauty of being human. These are deep wells,, and Williams is a gentle guide into the depths of riches. — James K.A. Smith editor-in-chief, Image, recent author of How to Embody Time

Inciting Joy: Essays Ross Gay (Algonquin Books) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

Perhaps you know poet Ross Gay’s 2019 collection of essays, The Book of Delights that became a much-appreciated work during the time of quarantine. (It is now out in paperback for $17.99.) We are glad for his brand new second collection of nearly genre-defying lyrical essays, again about (as was said of Book of Delights), “the small joys we overlook in our busy lives.” True to its title, it is sure to inspire and delight —subversively working its magic in these often dreary days, guilty of inciting joy. Here is how the publisher describes it: 

Inciting Joy: Essays is a collection of long-form essays on joy, in which the author turns his curious and poetic mind to everything from skateboarding and cover songs, basketball and race, dancing and academia, death and laughter, and, always, the garden and the natural world”

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World Pádraig Ó Tuama (W. W. Norton & Company) $27.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.36  DUE DECEMBER 6, 2022

I wrote about this in the last BookNotes but it is going to be so widely discussed, I wanted to announce it again. Here is some of what I wrote:

We hope you know the world-famous Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama. His extraordinary, lovely book published by Broadleaf takes the name of his website, In the Shelter. He is interested there in questions of violence and exclusion, hospitality and home, shelter and redemption. In recent years he has become known for more than his peacemaking work in Northern Ireland (see his Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community or the moving Between the Bells: Stories of Reconciliation from Corrymeela) and is increasingly recognized as a poet of considerable skill and wide appeal. You may have heard him on NPR as he hosted the On Being poetry podcast called “Poetry Unbound.” It is from that project that he gets the title of this eagerly anticipated new volume.

This forthcoming book is a collection of fifty poems (mostly by contemporary poets, such as, say, Ada Lemon or Ilya Kaminsky or Margaret Atwood) and he then offers pages and pages of wonderfully touching and observant reflection. He is not only a splendid curator of poems, he is a teacher, a guide, and a spiritual director. It is extraordinary.

Poetry Unbound is fifty poems and 300 pages of commentary revealing and confessing why a line of verse might make you weep. But more than that, it is a collection of moments and meditations and a turning toward the ways that some memories, of sorrow and joy, might make us hold on a little while longer, long enough in fact.             – Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon

Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving… If you are looking for a read that will warm your heart, inspire your creative mind, and renew your faith in the resilience of the human race, look no further. — Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership Wendell Berry (Counterpoint) $26.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80  DUE NOVEMBER 8, 2022

In a BookNotes post about Eugene Peterson and the Christian imagination it is perfect timing to tell you about a soon to be released collection of previously unpublished short stories by the master of the craft, Wendell Berry. Peterson really appreciated Berry’s fiction — he famously loved Jayber Crow as well as the Kentucky farmer’s serious nonfiction. I honestly don’t know if they ever met; I never heard, actually. Peterson also appreciated Wallace Stegner under whom Mr. Berry studied early on. I know Eugene appreciated Berry’s book about writing called Standing By Words and his marvelous study of the localized poetry of Juan Carlos Williams (“of Rutherford New Jersey”, as Berry always described him in the book The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford.) He loved his sabbath poems…

And so, we have here a forthcoming volume of thirteen new stories. This is huge — almost as eager awaited (and in some circles, more so) of his major new nonfiction release this fall called The Need to Be Whole, which very deeply explores patriotism and race. I do not know of anyone who has seen How It Went, yet, but the publisher has said this much:

For those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry’s offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it’s taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that’s what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.

These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy’s life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.

Pre-order this now and we’ll send it as soon as it arrives, hopefully by November 8th 2022.

Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice Jessica Hooten Wilson (Brazos Press) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99  DUE MARCH 28, 2023

I have not yet seen an advanced reader copy of this but I am positive it will be great. I know it is a long way out, yet — it is due out in March of 2020, but you can pre-order it now, of course. I wanted to mention it as it could be one of the very best books in this whole genre of reading well, reading widely, and doing so as a spiritual discipline. I know she will have a chapter on Augustine, one called “reading like Julian of Norwich” and another on “reading like Dorothy Sayers.” It will examine the multi-dimensional sensation of reading and ask, “what kind of a reader are you?” I really eager!

In a way, this is a follow-up to the one we have raved about (and listed above), this year’s The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints.

The forthcoming masterpiece is already getting some early buzz. Listen to this:

In her deft and beautiful way, Jessica Hooten Wilson crafts a theology of reading for Christians who have forgotten why it matters. She challenges us to take up and read –not only because it teaches about the faith of our past but because it makes our faith stronger for the present too. Get this book to learn, to grow, and to be inspired. — Beth Allison Barr Professor of History, Baylor University; The Making of Biblical Womanhood

In Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson makes the case for reading as a means of transformation into Christlikeness. Her own meditations on the theology, spirituality, and ethics of reading are punctuated with studies of great Christian readers, male and female, down through the ages, which adds a rich layer of historical insight to her own brilliant reflections. We live in an age of shallowness, and reading is perhaps its greatest casualty. But Hooten Wilson issues a clarion call to rediscover depth. This book is profound and practical at once. As St. Augustine would say, tolle lege (take and read)! —Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest;  Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

To read Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Reading for the Love of God is to enter into a sacred apprenticeship with the faithful believers and minds of the church that have gone before us, learning at their feet with Hooten Wilson as our wise and faithful guide. To read this book is to truly learn how to read spiritually — and readers who approach this book humbly will not walk away unchanged. Reading for the Love of God is a tremendous gift, one that will shape, reform, and revitalize the way the church reads. By helping us read for the love of God, Hooten Wilson helps us live for the love of God. I’ll be recommending this book widely in my parish and beyond for years to come. —Claude Atcho, pastor of Church of the Resurrection, Charlottesville, Virginia; Reading Black Books

Again, please note that this releases in March 2023. Those who pre-order it will be our our solid waiting list but we won’t run your credit card info until we send it. Easy.

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TO PLACE AN ORDER

PLEASE READ AND THEN CLICK ON THE “ORDER HERE” LINK BELOW.

It is very helpful if you tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders.

The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a 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 the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, now, 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 $9.20. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

Thanks to those who sent encouraging notes about our last BookNotes newsletter. It is intense stuff reading about the bizarre accusations of a stolen election and it is tragic to learn of the former President’s affiliation with such gonzo bad guys as Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers rebels. We understand that good people and faithful Christians can disagree about policy considerations and since the Bible itself has a fairly complex social ethic, it isn’t always simple to deduce what policies are best for the common good. But the ludicrous “stop the steal” stuff has to be resisted with all our might and good Americans should refuse to support those who are complicit in any of that Trumpian illogic. I trust that those books helped make a case about the systemic nature of the January 6th “unthinkable” that many Republicans are still saluting. Anyway, although we didn’t sell many of those books, we’re glad you read my thoughts about them.

We still have those five that I reviewed at a 20% off, so let us know if we can ship any to you or yours.

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New books continue to come out and we are more than excited to share the news about some forthcoming gems, treasures of various sorts for all kinds of readers.

Here is a good list of forthcoming titles you can pre-order from us now. (Of course, as we often say, you can always pre-order anything, anytime.)

IF YOU ARE PRE-ORDERING MORE THAN ONE PLEASE TELL US IF YOU’D LIKE US TO SHIP THEM AS THEY ARRIVE OR HOLD TOGETHER TO CONSOLIDATE, SHIPPING TOGETHER WHEN THE LATER ONES ARRIVE. WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU WELL SO LET US KNOW AS MANY OF YOUR EXPECTATIONS AS YOU CAN.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions Temple Grandin (Riverhead) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40 AVAILABLE NOW

This thoughtful hardback just arrived and I’ve not had time to peruse it, but, you know, she is just amazing, a remarkable person, leader, thinker, and educator. She has a knack for demystifying complex social and psychological science. This introduces us to a certain sort of person and their perceptions, based on her own vivid experiences, I’m sure, and the latest research. 

Dinosaurs: A Novel Lydia Millett (W. W. Norton) $26.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.56  AVAILABLE NOW

Do you know the award winning novel A Children’s Bible from a year or two ago? Wow. This is Millet’s stunning new novel, named as one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 by the Boston Globe, Literary Hub and The Millions. It is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona “to recover from failed love.” You can expect that his life will be entangled with his new neighbors. One reviewer said the novel asks, “in the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?” 

Blood from a Stone: A Memoir of How Wine Brought Me Back from the Dead Adam McHugh (IVP) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00  AVAILABLE NOW

You may know McHugh’s previous books such as his award-winning Introverts in the Church and the excellent, nearly contemplative paperback, The Listening Life. This brand new one, however, is about grief and loss and transition — helped along by the good gifts of God’s creation. Can this beleaguered, hurting author find healing through wine, friends, and the beauty of the French wine country or the glories of California’s central coast? Is there something to indeed savor, here?

With the first line being “This is the story of how wine brought be back from the dead” you know this is going to be interesting. As McHugh tells of his new take on an old story, he observes, “Most stories about religion and drink are stories of recovery. I’m not sure if mine isn’t a story of recovery too.”

McHugh is a sommelier and Certified Specialist of Wine who lives in Santa Ynez Valley, CA. And a very fine writer.

Adam McHugh’s stunning memoir, Blood from a Stone, brings a sideways beatitude: Blessed are the lonely, the detached, the fired, the tired, and the spiritually hungry. They will see God if they’re paying attention and willing to be surprised. Read, savor, and listen for the low hum of deep faith in this personal story of a man who writes with a keen awareness of grief and a self-deprecating honesty. You’ll leave with a renewed longing for food and meaning, cheese and history, and wine you can’t pronounce  — Emily P. Freeman, author of The Next Right Thing

Demon Copperhead: A Novel Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) $32.50  OUR SALE PRICE = $26.00  DUE OCTOBER 18, 2022

It has been several years since Kingsolver’s spectacular and very interesting Unsheltered. I have since re-read both of her collections of essays High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonders, both which I love. In this much anticipated story she puts a new twist on the Dickens classic David Copperfield, apparently, it is stunning. It has been called a tour de force and a virtuoso work. The short summary from the publisher summarizes the plot in a pedestrian way: “The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.” But, with Kingsolver there is always more going on, much more. I’m sure this is going to be much talked about these next months. 

Here are what some impressed advanced readers have said:

Demon is a voice for the ages — akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield — only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best. — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

Readers see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath Demon’s self-protective exterior…. Emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. — Kirkus Review

A deeply evocative story…Kingsolver’s account of the opioid epidemic and its impact on the social fabric of Appalachia is drawn to heartbreaking effect. This is a powerful story, both brilliant in its many social messages regarding foster care, child hunger, and rural struggles, and breathless in its delivery. — Publishers Weekly

Liberation Day: Stories George Saunders (Random House) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40  AVAILABLE OCTOBER 18, 2022

Those who follow the art of the short story know that Saunders is considered one of the true masters of the form. (His only real novel, I think, was the highly regarded Lincoln in the Bardo.) These new stories, we are told, explore “ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with fellow humans.” Well, that’s not too bad, is it? The Oprah Daily called it “pitch perfect” and “an exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.” Allrightee, then.

Saunders makes you feel as though you are reading fiction for the first time. — Khaled Hosseini

The Old Testament and God – Old Testament Origins and the Question of God  Craig G. Bartholomew (Baker Academic) $54.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $43.99  DUE OCTOBER 18, 2022

Speaking of a our de force… It is a bit tricky to explain this briefly, but we can say two quick things. Firstly, Dr. Bartholomew is one of the best Biblical scholars around, weaving together his deep understanding of the best way to read and keen insight about how to inhabit the unfolding drama of the Biblical story. The world “worldview” may seem a bit dated in these postmodern times but he is what I sometimes call a worldviewish thinker and writer. He studied with Cal Seerveld at Toronto’s ICS, after all, and now directs the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge, England. Secondly, this book, to put it boldly, is going to do in world of the Old Testament studies what N.T. Wright’s magisterial multi-volume set did for the New Testament. You will note the hat tip in Bartholomew’s subtitle to Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series.

The Old Testament and God, the first in a four-volume series, examines what we should do with the Old Testament, argues for a “critical realist” approach, situates the Old Testament against the worldviews of the ancient Near East, and explores the character of Yahweh as he comes to us in the Old Testament.

Rave reviews come from the likes of Richard Bauckham, Tremper Longman, Matthew Levering, and Christopher J. H. Wright. Serious Biblical scholars should certainly consider this.

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle Jon Meacham (Random House) $40.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $32.00  AVAILABLE OCTOBER 18, 2022

Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian. He has not done a new book of historical biography in a while and this is the one we’ve been waiting for. The endorsements have been predictably fabulous, insisting this is excellent history and a fine example of what I might call the relevance of good historical story-telling. Relevant, indeed. Listen to this:

In his captivating new book, Jon Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time. And There Was Light brilliantly interweaves the best of gripping narrative history with a deeper search for the complex interplay among morality, politics, and power in a life, in a democracy, and in an America ripped apart over slavery. Here Meacham takes us to the heart of the president who shaped events at ‘the existential hour.’ In doing so, he fortifies us to meet our own. — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Biography at its best, the great historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, paints an intimate portrait of an individual which simultaneously provides a sweeping view of history. With this deep, compelling work, Jon Meacham has achieved this gold standard. Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln’s complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America’s long quest to live up to its founding ideals. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

If Dr. Henry “Skip” Gates says it is a biography “for our time” and if Doris Kearns Goodwin says it achieves the “gold standard” for such books, you know it is one you should consider. I know most of us only buy a few books about history any given year and most of us only buy a few on Lincoln. This should be on everyone’s list, I’d think…

Beyond Welcome: Centering Immigrants in Our Christian Response to Immigration  Karen Gonzalez (Brazos Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19  DUE OCTOBER 18, 2022

We have met Karen and think the world of her. Her previous book on immigration issues was a lovely read, passionate and solid. Kudus to Herald Press for that. Here, in her brand new one, she goes deeper, with even more zeal and understandable passion for making the story of immigrants — stories like her own — more central not only in the telling of the story of American immigration but in our speculation and theologizing about it all. The voices of the immigrant and refugee, the too often marginalized, ought to be more central in our attention and in our imagination and in our hearts.

Naturally, she tells a bunch of stories and she offers what can only be called a fresh Biblical hermeneutic to see how the Biblical stories interlock with those of her community. It’s a lively read, interesting, compelling, important. We just got them in and I’ve already skimmed it, realizing it is so very interesting. What a gem!

I like what it on the back cover:

Many of us have good intentions, working hard to welcome immigrants with hospitality and solidarity. But how can we do that in a way that empowers our immigrant neighbors rather than pushing them to the fringes of white-dominant culture?

Karen González draws from the Bible and her own experiences to examine why the traditional approach to immigration ministries and activism is at best incomplete and at worst harmful. She advocates putting immigrants in the center of the conversation and helps us recognize ourselves in our immigrant neighbors.

Here is the voice of her colleague at World Relief, Matthew Soerens:

Whether you agree with González’s conclusions or not —I  usually did, occasionally did not, and in a few cases am still wrestling with what I think, long after reading this poignant book — you will find Beyond Welcome to be challenging, constructive, and helpful.  — Matthew Soerens, US director of church mobilization and advocacy, World Relief; coauthor of Welcoming the Stranger

Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw (Zondervan) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99  DUE OCTOBER 21, 2022

One of the grand features of this radically Biblical volume (first published maybe a decade ago) is its extraordinary, full color imagery and hip graphic appeal. Edgy and cool, busy and splashy in a subversive sort of way, this illustrated book calls us to the Biblical images of exile and the words of the prophets, picking up the sort of stuff later spelled out in scholarly detail by the likes of Walsh and Keesmaat (in Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire/Demanding Justice, which Shane endorsed.) Of course, Jesus isn’t exactly running for office these days so we now need to figure what to do; we must improvise our way towards faithful socio-political views and public actions. This book will help and we are glad that the publisher is seeing fit to bring it out anew.

There is nothing like it. Hooray.

Things That Matter Most: Essays on Home, Friendship, and Love  Christopher de Vinck (Paraclete Press) $22.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39  DUE OCTOBER 25, 2022 (expected sooner)

Oh my, what a lovely, easy to read, and poignant little book. Some of our readers will love this and will love giving it as an encouraging gift for someone who needs a little “pick me up” with tender substance.

We’ve been fans of Chris de Vinck for years (probably since his stunning book The Power of the Powerless, which was a story about his own handicapped brother) released in the late 1980s. We have collected and read (and tried to sell) his essays and stories. He was, as you may know, a good friend and kindred spirit with the late Henri Nouwen and a very dear pal with Mister Fred Rogers. His most recent previous books included Ashes, a gripping World War II novel based on the experiences of his own relatives with the Nazi concentration camps and the life-long friendships that emerged and an sentimental holiday novel, Mr. Nicholas: A Magical Christmas Tale (with a forward by Joanne Rogers, Fred’s wife.) 

This new one has a grand introduction by one of our favorite people in the book industry, Jeff Crosby (formerly a bookstore worker, then a publisher at IVP, and now of the ECPA, and author of his own forthcoming book of reflections, The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts. That isn’t due until next May but, yes, you can pre-order it now and we will be put on the waiting list.)

Jeff has long been a fan of de Vinck and has become a friend. His forward to Things That Matter Most: Essays on Home, Friendship, and Love is lovely, to say the least. He notes that it “helps us see with our hearts” which sounds more pious than it is, I think. With essays on fireflies and board games (and more on bugs) and much on the poignancy of human connection and empathy, and a section of pieces on humility, this is just really nice writing about things that matter, even if at first you haven’t pondered them. Like all good art, it nicely illuminates. 

I like collections of essays but this is designed with some larger fonts, pull quotes in sidebar boxes, and a touch of whimsy. It isn’t overly demanding or dense. I recommend it highly.

The Passenger: A Novel Cormac McCarthy (Knopf Publishing) $30.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00  DUE OCTOBER 25, 2022

How do we begin to say the importance for serious booksellers of having a new McCarthy novel to sell? He is considered among the very best and it has been — not surprisingly — sixteen years since his last work. The Passenger is the first of a two volume series (the second, Stella Marris, comes in early December which you can also pre-order. There will even, then, be a boxed set of the two.) This novel is, on the surface, about a New Orleans salvage diver who is “haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursed for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death she cannot reconcile with God.”

McCarthy reigns as a titan of American lit — an undisputed heir to Melville and Faulkner, the subject of infinite grad-school theses, and a hard-nosed dispenser of what Saul Bellow called ‘life-giving and death-dealing’ sentences… It’s the humid, fevered, magniloquent, Bible-cadenced, comma-starved, word-drunk prose of what some fans consider his masterwork, Suttree. There’s a lot here. It might make your head spin… What it all adds up to — perhaps surprisingly — is a doomed and unsettling love story, a Platonic tragedy…. Electric and thunderous… An astonishing pair of novels. Taken together, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an intellectually breathtaking achievement. —Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

After sixteen years of characteristic seclusion, McCarthy returns with a one-two punch… The Passenger is an elegiac meditation on guilt, grief, and spirituality. Packed with textbook McCarthy hallmarks, like transgressive behaviors and cascades of ecstatic language, it’s a welcome return from a legend who’s been gone too long.        — Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

Chilling and masterly…. His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts. — Booklist

Heart Speak: A Visual Interpretation of Let Your Life Speak Sherrill Knezel in collaboration with Parker Palmer (formatio/IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40  DUE OCTOBER 25, 2022

I can’t wait to see this and I cannot say much about it other than tell you, simply, what it is. It is a colorful and creatively done visual adaptation of the classic book on vocation by Quaker writer Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak. If that book itself was gentle and generous, inviting us to take up a life that matters, listening well to our own hearts, this guides those who need a different approach to this material. There are infographics and calligraphied quotes and colorful hearts, a design style some call “sketch noting.”  I’m sure it is going to be very well done, not at all goofy, but not too psychedelic either.

The author, by the way, is a life-long doodler and “sketch noter” and she did a bit of research on the scribbling thing, taking in the brain science and data which she put into an excellent TED talk, telling her stories of the power of all of this, inspired somewhat by the author Mike Rohde. It’s amazing and you can watch it, here. (And you really should. But be sure to come back, since there’s more books to tell you about. Maybe it will remind you of a book I did a long forward to years ago by my friend Lisa Nichols Hickman, Writing in the Margins: Connecting with God on the Pages of Your Bible.)

Here’s what singer-songwriter, activist, and author Carrie Newcomber says about this soon to be released book inspired by Parker Palmer, Heart Speak:

The White Mosque: A Memoir Sofia Samatar (Catapult) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60  DUE OCTOBER 25, 2022

Every now and then we hear of a book through industry journals or pre-pub newsletters and we are immediately struck by how very interesting a title or author may seem. This is exactly one of these — I’ve not previously heard of this writer, a highly regarded indie author, apparently, (known for fantasy novels) but here she is retracing some of the steps of her own people — Mennonites in the heart of Central Asia. 

One article about her started like this: “Sofia Samatar has a way with a sentence.” It goes on to mention her Nebula-and Hugo-nominated stories or novels and says, “her work has a way of pairing the mundane and the sublime with causal aplomb.” So there’s that that catches the eye.

But The White Mosque captured my attention further because the author once boarded at the well-known Mennonite high school near us in Lancaster, PA. Wow. Later, she fell into a rabbit hole, it seems, as she was trying to reshape some of her awareness of a group of German-speaking Mennonites who went to what is now Uzbekistan on a quest that “promised no less than the second coming of Christ.” Huh? Try as she might, she realized this was no novel, and her own journey to the site — lead by what one might call sort of a cult-leader — propelled her to weave together her own memoir into this odd, cross-cultural and inter-religious journey.  Ms Samatar is this child of a Black Somali Muslim and a white Mennonite and she became “obsessed with the story.”

As she grew into this life of two cultures she realized that what appeared to be, at first glance, “polar opposites” actually had considerable overlaps, confluences that helped shape how she now sees the world. Born and raised in Goshen, Indiana, she was, as they say, “a third culture kid” but she followed her parents around the globe. (Her father, Said Sheikh Samatar, was a professor of African history in Tanzania, London, Kentucky and Rutgers, NJ.  Her scholarly father wanted her, after her high schools years in Lancaster, to apply to Harvard or Yale but, against his wishes, she followed some friends to the quintessentially radical Mennonite college in Goshen, Indiana.)

I am not sure if this memoir covers her formative years, her reading habits (starting with Narnia, I’ve heard) or her marriage to another Mennonite writer, Keith Miller. The two of them did mission work, teaching high school in South Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War. With the country under curfew, both of them wrote and wrote — longhand.

This is a nonfiction story but, as she reports in a great article in Publisher’s Weekly, it’s “a nonfiction world that can still feel like a novel.” Writing it was surely transformative and we believe it’s a sleeper of a title that many of our customers will enjoy. I can’t wait. Pre-order it today!

The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion  Clarence Jordan edited by Frederick Downing (Plough Publishing) $12.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $9.60   DUE OCTOBER 25, 2022 

I wonder if you know this terrific series of inexpensive, compact readers of significant Christian voices handsomely published by Plough Publishing? They have made very important contributions to Christian publishing by compiling these remarkable, compact, volumes. There is Love in the Void by Simone Weil, The Scandal of Redemption by Oscar Romero, The Reckless Way of Love by Dorothy Day, That Way and No Other by Amy Carmichael, and, recently, the fabulous Thunder and Soul by Abraham Joshua Heschel. The brand new one, The Inconvenient Gospel compiles the words and sermons and writings of Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, as a “demonstration plot” of what the Kingdom of God might look like.

Beth visited there in the mid-70s and it was very influential, as you might guess. Years earlier they had been machine-gunned for being racially integrated and more than once their crops were burned. (To this day they have a fabulous mail order business of locally grown nuts; they shifted to out-of-state mail order since the locals boycotted them.) There are many stories about Koinonia Farms — Jordan was the preacher who told Millard Fuller to give away his wealth and come back to follow Jesus, which he did, starting up, eventually, a ministry called Habitat for Humanity. Jordan was a great Baptist who paraphrased the New Testament into what he called “The Cotton Patch” version, using colloquial Southern sharecropper lingo (Jesus is put in a peach crate, not a manger, and his best buddy was Rock.) He was known for being as blunt, and as kind, as Jesus.

These messages by Clarence Jordan (like the others in the series) are enduring but of all of them, this is the author whose writings may be the most likely to languish into obscurity. Big kudos to our Bruderhof friends for once again doing an excellent thing in adding the work of this rural Baptist preacher to this very distinguished series. Thoughtful ecological theologian Norman Wirzba calls The Inconvenient Gospel “an essential book.” Order one today.

(Watch this fabulous little documentary video where you can hear is voice and learn about his prophetic Kingdom work in Jim Crow Georgia.)

Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System  Scott Morris (Eerdmans) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19  DUE OCTOBER 27, 2022

Scott Morris is not as known as he should be, a real hero for those who know his good work in starting Church Health, a faith-based health care center in Memphis which serves the underserved with Christianly offering medical care. He’s been a strong voice for thinking faithfully about medicine and the spirituality of health and he has especially spoken for — and enacted — the need to include the poor and the vulnerable. The small but potent book Dust and Breath: Faith, Health, and Why the Church Should Care about Both by Kendra Hotz & Matthew Mathews tells of his work among the marginalized in Memphis as a case study of what churches can do to serve the health care needs of the poor. 

This new book, Care, is just what we need now, and Dr. Morris is a near-perfect author for the job. It is, as the subtitle suggests, less a call to start up Christian health care clinics, but how to push for, as citizens, a more comprehensive health care proposal for our broken health care system, which certainly will include private/public cooperation. I really do not know of any book quite like it.

As it says on the back, Morris draws on his experience as a medical doctor, pastor, and founder and CEO of the nation’s largest charitably funded faith-based health care center. As a United Methodist in the tradition of John Wesley, Morris knows a bit about the wholistic nature of the gospel — as his friend Jim Wallis writes in the moving preface, Wesley’s was a model for that kind of care for body and soul and he believed that special care must be given to the sick. Wesley was an advocate for and practitioner of the healing ministry of the church and that includes advocacy for good health care policy. 

There’s lots of stories here, both from the gospels and from contemporary America.  With endorsements from the likes of quality writers like Philip Yancey, this book is a winner. I hope health care workers, at least, join together to read it, as good, good things can come from small groups of folks reading dynamite books like this. 

Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? Timothy Keller (Viking) $27.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60  DUE NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Keller is a great communicator who is known for being quite fluent in the culture’s best thinkers and attuned to the conversations going on. He lives in Manhattan and has reached thousands with a wholistic, thoughtful, gracious Reformed worldview. I have a bone to pick with him from time to time but he nonetheless is a hero and model. He’s on that short list of authors who I think I’d read almost anything they wrote. He’s smart and yet not overly academic; he’s Biblically based and gospel-centered but not stuffy. We’ve got some connections with old mutual friends and influences and it has been an honor to sell books on occasion at his church — including one grand night with N.T. Wright, another with Bryan Stevenson, another with John Inazu as he presented (and then talked with Tim) about his then-new book on pluralism. I even got to speak about the vocation of bookselling once at one of his legendary faith and work conferences.

But here, this: along with a recent handful (on suffering, on prayer, particularly) he brings it down home and real personal. I’ve got an advanced copy of this one and I am so struck by how this brilliant theological mind with a disposition to talk about big cultural matters and equip Christians to be salt and light in their respective worlds, is also, truly, a pastor, and can guide ordinary folks into the hard stuff of Christian virtue. Like forgiveness. Wow.

Publisher’s Weekly tried to explain why it would be useful for bookstores to carry by saying it delivers a “thorough and eloquent apologetic for forgiveness” and another review assured us that it “presents a solid defense of Christian forgiveness theology within a modern, relevant context, quoting sources as varied as Augustine, Adele, Kafka, and Clint Eastwood…. Refreshing, accessible work on the basics of forgiveness from a Christian perspective.”

The subtitle tells much: it is both the “why” and the “how.” There are some exceptionally thoughtful but practical checklists and guidelines in several appendices, including on one forgiveness practices and another on achieving reconciliation. 250 good pages.

Liturgies for Hope: Sixty Prayers for the Highs, the Lows, and Everything in Between Audrey Allege & Elizabeth Moore (Waterbrook Press) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00  DUE NOVEMBER 1, 2002

Oh my, there are a lot of books like this coming out these days. Perhaps this wave of great new prayer books is inspired by the two exquisite, leather-bound volumes of Every Moment Holy or the online “Black Liturgies” created by Cole Arthur Riley (author of the stunning memoir This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us) or perhaps going back to the 2010 release of the groundbreaking Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals compiled by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enoma Okra. In any event, we’ve got recent, cool books like Prayers for the People: Things We Didn’t KNow We Could Say to God by Terry Stokes (Convergent Books) and Ordinary Blessings: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Everyday Life by Meta Herrick Carlson (Fortress Press) and her Broadleaf one called Ordinary Blessings for Parents: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Family Life. Maybe you’ll even recall our BookNotes rave about Cornelius Plantinga’s compact Eerdmans hardback, Morning and Evening Prayers.

Which brings us to Liturgies for Hope which releases in a few weeks. It is extraordinary, thoughtful, theologically substantive, raw; the prayers are long and often heartbreakingly honest and sometimes funny. I’m not sure about the language of “liturgies” these days since these are singular voice prayers, but they are solid and moving. The foreword is by Jon Tyson, pastor of Church of the City in New York, a guy I respect quite a bit. One of the authors works with the church and has received the Academy of American Poets Prize, among other awards. The other works in the publishing industry and serves the church on their creative team. 

There are amazing prayers here — good words for those complete in injustice, prayers for creativity, laments about public health, cries for those who are anguished by simply being alone, or by being too busy.  There are prayers of mystery, prayers of wonder, prayers of confession, prayers of joy, prayers of hope. And more. As good readers (and writers) Rich Villodas and Christie Purifoy say, below, this is a truly valuable resource. You should pre-order it today.

As someone who has spent many hours praying, here’s what I’ve come to realize: it’s still very hard to do. One of the best gifts that has helped me develop my life with God is the prayers and liturgies of others. I often need the words of others to help me form my own words. This is what Audrey Elledge and Elizabeth Moore do for us in this needed book. They offer beautiful words to help us access the longings of our souls and bring them to God. If you’re looking for a jumpstart to your spiritual life, start here. — Rich Villodas, lead pastor of New Life Fellowship and author of Good and Beautiful and Kind

This is a marvelous book. I am not surprised it emerged from one of the urban epicenters of our global pandemic — of course this fierce hope would grow in such a place and such a season. Audrey Elledge and Elizabeth Moore weave rich Scriptural imagery into powerful, prayerful poetry covering topics that are at once universal but also timely in their particularity. The liturgical pronouns shift between we, you, and I in a way that is spacious and welcoming. Best of all, this book compelled even this solitary reader to reach out to her friends; these are liturgies that simply must be prayed in the company of others.  — Christie Purifoy, author of Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story Bono (Knopf Publishing) $34.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $27.20  DUE NOVEMBER 1, 2022

I hardly have to say who Bono is (do I?) or even explain how much the powerful, often groundbreaking, music of U2 has meant to us over the years. From their earliest records (which we stocked before most knew who they were) to their most recent work, and all the colorful zeal of their fearless leader, we have been very big fans. Knowing how his faith continued to seep out, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes between the lines, but, often, directly, up front, out loud, Bono remains one of the most interesting followers of Jesus of our era.

I hope in this forthcoming memoir he describes his friendship with Eugene Peterson (who didn’t even take his call the first time Bono called him, since Peterson had no idea who he was!) and the beautiful video he and Peterson made, visiting together in Montana about the Psalms. 

Whether that small episode in Bono’s influential life appears or not, this is a book I know many of our customers will want to read. Others, I am sure, will want to give it as a Christmas gift. It’s on my list! 

Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture Christopher Watkin (Zondervan Academic) $39.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $31.99    DUE NOVEMBER 1, 2022

This is another that I am awaiting my own advanced copy, which may not come, so I’m just guessing here. But I’m excited and think this may be one of the great tools for thinking about God’s story and how it engages the human story of cultures unfolding and our role in it all. Watkin is a sharp guy — there is no doubt about that — and he is trying to center the Biblical vision of Christ’s Kingdom allowing us all to be “in but not of” the world in which we find ourselves. I think this is going to be great. In fact, Dan Strange (Plugged In and Making Faith Magnetic) calls it “absolutely essential reading” and Natasha Moore of the Centre for Public Christianity calls it “urgent and a tremendously exciting read.” 

For what it is worth, Watkin has published conservative critiques of Foucault and of Derrida. He wrote a very stimulating and under-appreciated volume on how Genesis 1 and 2 are, for lack of a better phrase, “tools of cultural critique.” He argues that we need not get consumed by debates about Darwin and dinosaurs and the length of days or the Earth, but, rather, should pick up from our primal origin story, classic doctrines of the Trinity and the substantive importance of creation itself. As was said about that book, Thinking Through Creation,

These foundational, biblical truths of the Trinity and creation are among the richest sources of insights and tools for robust and sensitive engagement with contemporary culture. With diagrams and clear explanations both of the Bible and our contemporary world, Christopher Watkin reclaims the Trinity and creation from their cultural despisers and shows how these foundational doctrines speak into, question, and reorient some of the most important debates in today’s society.

And so, we now have this major volume coming out and we are excited to alert you to it. Here is how the publisher describes it:

In Biblical Critical Theory, Christopher Watkin draws a winsome vision for biblical cultural engagement in which faithfulness to Scripture and sensitivity to culture walk hand in hand. If Christians want to speak with a fresh, engaging and constructive voice within our culture, we need to press deeper into the core truths of the Bible.

Listen to this:

A book that I have been eagerly anticipating for years. … My prayers are that this book will bear much intellectual and spiritual fruit in many lives over the decades ahead.      — Timothy Keller, founding pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian, New York 

An important update of Augustine’s City of God, a proposal for making biblical sense of what is happening in contemporary culture. — Kevin Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

Christopher Watkin’s expert, timely compendium of Christian Scripture’s subversive engagement of dominating themes of our modern age brings welcome healing to our world. — Esther Lightcap Meek, author of Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People

Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times  D. L. Mayfield (Broadleaf) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59  DUE NOVEMBER 8, 2022

This sits even now on my bedside and my frustratingly hectic pace of life these past few weeks (and a stack of other important volumes) has kept me from diving in as a wanted to. But any day now this will become one of my favorite books of the year, I am sure.

Those who know much about Dorothy and those who do not, I think, will be excellently served by this one-of-a-kind book. Mayfield is an edgy sort of post evangelical, I gather, and this puts her among the very best fans of The Catholic Worker,  the newspaper and movement. Jim Wallis, Lisa Sharon Harper, David Dark, Shane Claiborne and any number of non-Roman Catholic activists have drawn inspiration from Day’s radical lifestyle, her service of the poor no matter what, and her faithfulness to the church, despite all. My own journey has been crisscrossed by a number of CW folk and I must say that the extraordinary biography Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Randolph Blythe remains one of my all time favorite books. As I heard that DL was doing this one, I prayed that she knew Loughery and Blythe’s work and indeed she does. The footnotes are just fascinating and excellent. This author of Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith has now given us a perfect follow up to that fabulous memoir.

Unruly Saint is written by a very good writer and a good thinker, a woman who, like Dorothy, it seems, is seeking some new way to be faithful to God, to inhabit the Christian tradition well, to serve and love others. In this sense the book is almost a memoir, a story of Mayfield’s own encounter with Day. Although she seems very knowledgeable she says it is not, technically, a biography. It is Dorothy’s challenge to us, illustrated keenly as DL herself grappled with the woman and her books and her legacy.

One of Dorothy’s friends was Robert Ellsberg, now editor at Orbis Books. He has a forward in Unruly (quite an honor) and he says that Dorothy would have liked DL and would have liked the book. He quotes, as I had hoped, that great line at the end of The Long Loneliness, “It happened as we sat there talking and it is still going on.” He continues, “In her encounter with Dorothy, D.L. Mayfield has caught that spark. And in this book she passes it on.”

There are bunches of great endorsements of this, but that one is all we need. If Ellsworth says it is one to read, then trust that. Pre-order it today and we’ll send it out a bit early. 

The Heart in Pilgrimage: A Treasury of Classic Devotionals on the Christian Life Leland Ryken (Crossway) $34.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $27.99  DUE NOVEMBER 8, 2022

I have not laid eyes on this at all but the name alone — esteemed literary professor, Leland Ryken — gives you a hint that this will be a rich, classic, warm (if heady) collection, nicely made by Crossway (even with a ribbon marker.) It’s going to make a fabulous gift for those who don’t mind the older cadences and rhetoric of classic devotional literature.

Since I cannot say much, here are those who can, and do:

Having already opened the eyes of the body of Christ to its treasury of devotional poetry in The Soul in Paraphrase, Leland Ryken now widens our vision to take in the depth and breadth of two millennia of devotional prose. Running the gamut from the giants of the genre (Augustine, John Donne, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther, Brother Lawrence, Blaise Pascal, Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux) to writers we do not usually identify with devotional writing (Florence Nightingale, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George MacDonald, Jane Austen, George Washington Carver), The Heart in Pilgrimage conducts its readers on a spiritual journey that is well worth taking. — Louis Markos, Professor in English, Houston Baptist University; author The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes

Whenever I am asked to recommend a volume that combines literary study with sound Christian teaching, I recommend Leland Ryken. His new collection of rich devotional literature will move to the top of my list of recommended works. The Heart in Pilgrimage is a treasury of wisdom and beauty to which readers will return again and again.” — Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books

Like cool water to a parched throat, Leland Ryken has produced a soul-quenching gift with this collection of devotionals. Filled with beautiful writing devoted to an even more beautiful subject, The Heart in Pilgrimage delivers the truths of the Christian faith through masterful expression, promising to awaken fresh affections for the Lord among believers of every stripe. — Collin Huber, Senior Editor, Fathom Magazine

Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation Robert Chao Romero & Jeff Liou (Baker Academic) $23.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19  DELAYED – NOW DUE APRIL 2023

We have been waiting for a solid book like this with sympathies for racial justice activism and a knowing awareness that the Bible is clear about being, in a righteous way, woke. We must wake up to social injustices and imagine the new thing God is doing, calling out systemic injustices and helping us all grapple with where we are in this moment of history.

Naturally, some who have posited theories about the nature of the real world as we know it — as in the hard sciences, say — are atheistic, and of those, some are nonetheless congenial to Christian values and some are hostile. Some who are mostly right carry some odd baggage. It is, as they say, a mixed bag.

And so, in our efforts to be faithful Christian thinkers about the ideas that are in the air around us, we must “take every thought captive” and grapple wisely with the claims and the critique of every school of thought and every lively ideology. Things such as CRT.

Sadly, this particular school of thought has been bandied about with whole books against it, ill-informed preachers and writers throwing the baby out with the bath water, and, worse, getting on right-wing radio shows and firing up the crowds to get them to despise this “CRT” even as they hardly know what it is. Some pseudo-scholars have weighed in louder than they should have and even good friends have broken fellowship over their opinions of these second and third level authors. This forthcoming one is going to be wise and solid, I’m sure.

This book, I believe, will go to the primary sources, suss out what shapes them and how they have been influential. It will not suffer fools but it will not be partisan or ideological, either. As the publisher calmly puts it, “Their aim is to offer analysis and critique that go beyond the debates about social identity and the culture wars and aid those who are engaging the issues in Christian life and ministry. Reflection/discussion questions, exercises, a glossary of key CRT terms, and suggested readings make the book helpful for students or small groups.”

Here is the fascinating arrangement of the book. Notice this:

• 1. Creation: Community Cultural Wealth and the Glory and Honor of the Nations
• 2. Fall: Sin and Racism–the Ordinary Businesses of Society
• 3. Redemption: CRT in Institutions
• 4. Consummation: The Beloved Community

I cannot wait to get my hands on this. You, too? Pre-order it now and we will send it the moment it comes in — a bit early, we suspect.

Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology Through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-Earth Austin Freeman (Lexham) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59  DUE NOVEMBER 16, 2022

We’re very excited about this, seeing how a Protestant (with a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and now teaching at Houston Baptist, no less) creates what some will no doubt consider to be the standard text on the theology of JRR Tolkien. Allow me to just crib from the publishers info — it so fascinating us and want to highlight it here:

J. R. R. Tolkien was many things: English Catholic, father and husband, survivor of two world wars, Oxford professor, and author. But he was also a theologian. Tolkien’s writings exhibit a coherent theology of God and his works, but Tolkien did not present his views with systematic arguments. Rather, he expressed theology through story.

In Tolkien Dogmatics, Austin M. Freeman inspects Tolkien’s entire corpus — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and beyond — as a window into his theology. In his stories, lectures, and letters, Tolkien creatively and carefully engaged with his Christian faith. Tolkien Dogmatics is a comprehensive manual of Tolkien’s theological thought arranged in traditional systematic theology categories, with sections on God, revelation, creation, evil, Christ and salvation, the church, and last things. Through Tolkien’s imagination, we reencounter our faith.

By the way, did you know that although there are maybe a zillion or so books about Tolkien’s pal C.S. Lewis, I only know one book that literally explores and systematizes Lewis’s theological ideas? That is the brilliant little volume called Deeper Magic: The Theology Behind the Writings of C.S. Lewis by the lively Donald T. Williams, published by Square Halo Books. And, by the way, you should know their two exceptionally interesting books, C.S. Lewis and the Arts: Creativity in the Shadowlands and J.R.R. Tolkien and the Arts: A Theology of Subcreation. So much goodness!

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World Pádraig Ó Tuama (W. W. Norton & Company) $27.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.36  DUE DECEMBER 6, 2022

I hope you know the world-famous Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama. His extraordinary, lovely book published by Broadleaf takes the name of his website, In the Shelter. He is interested there in questions of violence and exclusion, hospitality and home, shelter and redemption. In recent years he has become known for more than his peacemaking work in Northern Ireland (see his Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community or the moving Between the Bells: Stories of Reconciliation from Corrymeela) and is increasingly recognized as a poet of considerable skill and wide appeal. You may have heard him on NPR as he hosted the On Being poetry podcast called “Poetry Unbound.” It is from that project that he gets the title of this brand new volume.

This book is a collection of fifty poems (mostly by contemporary poets, such as, say, Ada Lemon or Ilya Kaminsky or Margaret Atwood) and he then offers pages and pages of wonderfully touching and observant reflection. He is not only a splendid curator of poems, he is a teacher, a guide, and a spiritual director. It is extraordinary.

Poetry Unbound is fifty poems and 300 pages of commentary revealing and confessing why a line of verse might make you weep. But more than that, it is a collection of moments and meditations and a turning toward the ways that some memories, of sorrow and joy, might make us hold on a little while longer, long enough in fact.– Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon

Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving…. If you are looking for a read that will warm your heart, inspire your creative mind, and renew your faith in the resilience of the human race, look no further. — Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees

Learning Humility: A Year of Searching for a Vanishing Virtue Richard J. Foster (IVP) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00  DUE DECEMBER 6, 2022 (expected sooner.)

I have not seen this yet but it is nearly a publishing event when the great Richard Foster releases a new book. His Celebration of Discipline continues to sell decades since its release date and this joyous, exceptionally well-read, and helpful Quaker — who knows the Catholic monastic tradition better than most Catholics — has given us many rich and lasting books. This one is culturally urgent and is curious — it is arranged by the sessions of the Lakota seasons.

These two quotes by two respected companions and friends explain the book wonderfully. Please read: 

Humility is an essential and highly nuanced topic for us Christians; there are such fine lines to be found–between humility and humiliation, self-regard and self-promotion, healthy self-esteem and the sin of pride. Foster finds the line and walks it beautifully. The idea that we do not try to attain humility directly but we ‘come at the matter indirectly. We simply take up those things that, in God’s time and in God’s way, will lead us into the virtue of humility’ is tremendously hopeful. It is worth the price of the book. — Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center and author of Sacred Rhythms

Destined to be another classic from Richard J. Foster, Learning Humility is a gift from a gifted writer. In this book we get to walk with Richard not only on the trails of Colorado but also on the terrain of the soul. Richard is a true scribe of the kingdom who brings forth treasures old and new (Matthew 13:52). The breadth and depth of the wisdom bearers he quotes is immense, from Peter and Paul, to Evagrius and Julian, to Chief Joseph and Underhill, to Kelly and Law, and to Murray and contemporary writers. Framed by the thirteen months and moons of the Lakota and filled with liturgies and litanies, this book ignited in me a hunger for humility in my own life. This is one of Richard’s signature gifts: he makes us long for difficult things by helping us see that virtues, like humility, are the pearl of great price, worth giving all we have to obtain it. This book is an engaging and insightful gem, and I am the better for having read it.   –James Bryan Smith, author of The Good and Beautiful God

This is a major volume on a simple subject. Oh my. Order it now.

Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious: Reframed and Expanded David Dark (Broadleaf Books) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19  DUE DECEMBER 13, 2022

Coming a few weeks before Christmas, this newly imagined, significantly edited, “reframed and expanded” edition of a great contemporary classic is sure to be a great read for many (and a great gift as well.) I did a pretty lengthy review of the first edition back five or six years ago. What a joy to see it is being reissued, soon.

Here’s the gist: David is convinced, rightly so, that everyone is religious. No one is, as they say, neutral. Or to shift the image a bit, everyone lives within a story. Everyone is coming from somewhere. Helping people realize the urgency of this human task of being honest about what drives or inspires us is a great gift and with Dark’s characteristic fluency in the popular arts and Americana literature and great religious thinkers, he can appeal to a very wide swath of good folk. His imagined reader — at least for the first edition — was perhaps the somewhat culturally hip and socially aware “spiritual but not religious” or maybe the proverbial “none.” As in “none of the above.” But, of course, life is too short for any of that. “Come on, I’m talking to you” as the Tears for Fears song went. Come on!

David is fiesty and gentle, kind and blunt. He loves the poetic nay-saying of Daniel Berrigan and the bold prophetic clarity of Southern Baptists like Will Campbell and Clarence Jordan. He loves The Simpsons and early on wrote about Radiohead and U2. These days he’s a bit of a twitter sensation, a righteous gadfly and minor pain in the backside to those who do not love their neighbors well, especially if they are celebrities who might do otherwise. He’s a lovely man, a strong thinker, and a vivid communicator. This book is all that.

Here is what the publisher suggests is in store in this updated edition:

“With the same keen powers of cultural observation, candor, and wit his readers have come to know and love, Dark weaves in current themes around the pandemic and vaccine responses, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, Critical Race Theory, and more. By looking intentionally at our weird religious background (we all have one), he helps us acknowledge the content of our everyday existence–the good, the bad, and the glaringly inconsistent. When we make peace with the idea of being religious, we can more practically envision an undivided life.”

For those of us who claim to be religious and those of us who religiously deny such labels, Dark grants us the gift and burden to think deeply about the imagination, scaffolding, and consequences of our religiosity. In reading his journey and cautions, my sense of personal accountability and religious identity were expanded. Such is a book that reads the reader and if we stick with it we gain insight into self and neighbor. — Christina Edmondson, scholar activist and host of Truth’s Table podcast, author of Faithful Antiracism.

David Dark is one of our most astute and necessary cultural critics. His work gracefully opens new doors of understanding and breaks down barriers between secular and non-, and it puts a lot of old mythology out to pasture with a daring affirmation at the heart of his radical critique. Life’s Too Short refreshingly ropes everyone in, insisting that we’re all in it together. We forget that. — Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic

++++

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BookNotes

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DISCOUNT

20% OFF

Over the last few weeks I have had one of the most electrifying and harrowing reading experiences of my life. I have read a handful of books back to back and I want very much to tell you about them. No, I am not oddly obsessed (well, okay, maybe a little) but I feel strongly that I am trying to live into one of my life verses, 1 Chronicles 12:23, that the Lord gave to me in 1978. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure; it’s the one that mentions the “sons of Issachar” who “understood the times and knew what God’s people should do.” Our bookstore was designed and we continue to curate it, we sometimes say, to help cultivate wise sons and daughters of Issachar.

And so, I invite you to read my reflections on five books about the former President Trump’s campaign to stop the counting of proper votes in that dramatic 2020 election and his intention to overturn the certification of them in that fateful electoral college procedure on January 6th, 2021.

(As always, you can order them at our discounted prices by clicking on the link at the very end of this long BookNotes column.)

That Mr. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign started even before he was elected in 2016 when he warned, wrongly, that American elections are fraudulent, is well known. The spectacular hold the vast pattern of often egregious lies, QAnon nonsense, and conspiracy theories that went from wacky to weird to truly absurd, has had on his MAGA followers has been truly something to ponder. That some otherwise smart people have gotten caught up in this cult-like devotion (despite no evidence proving any of his election allegations) is both heartbreaking and mind-numbingly maddening. That otherwise fine Christian folks would fall for the exceptionally strange ideas proposed by outrageous oddballs like Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn and evil-doers like Roger Stone and Alex Jones is absolutely beyond me. How can Christian people live with themselves aligning themselves with such stuff?

That it all gave rise to bloody and murderous hand-to-hand combat — outnumbered police were stabbed with flags used as spears; one poor cop had his gas masked ripped off of him while held down and was sprayed mercilessly with bear spray — as a traitorous Republican mob stormed their way into the Capitol, some intending to prevent the peaceful transfer of power (and others, it seems, intending to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi) is a stain on the Trump movement that we must never forget. 

These five books are reputable and moving. I found them difficult to put down; if it wasn’t so very recent and true and consequential I’d say they were entertaining in a spy and mystery-thriller kind of way. They are excellently documented and offer horrific detail and new insights into what went on leading up to the uprising, perhaps the most momentous civic event of our lifetime.

That the Republic Party has increasingly been taken captive by a new generation of extremist Trumpians is certainly one of the most significant developments in our contemporary political landscape. How Mr. Trump’s flamboyant dishonesty about “the steal” captured the imaginations of so many remains inexplicable. These books do not answer this question although they are stand-outs among a cascade of new titles (with more to come) trying to figure out what the heck has happened to us as a nation, and, at least, what we should do about the riotous mob who attacked the Capitol to do political damage if not to stage an actual coup.

Behind much of it looms the question of what we should make of the fact that many of our fellow citizens either deny or minimize the violent realities of the January 6th take-over of the Capitol and who continue to believe, against all evidence, that the vote counting of the 2020 election was dishonest.

(That some who are most vocal about the outlandish and unproven allegation of a “Steal” are running for office — like in our own state with the religiously unusual candidate Mastriano [don’t get me started about his refusal to disavow the Rod of Iron cult] and how he targets fellow citizens for future injustice — should alarm any normal citizen, and certainly Biblically-informed Christians who should surely know better. But he praises the Lord and plays Steven Curtis Chapman songs at his rallies. Heaven help us.)

This is serious stuff, my friends, and we at Hearts & Minds take seriously our Issacharian role to alert you to these sorts of books. As always here at BookNotes, they are 20% off. Order some today by clicking on the link at the very end.

TWO MORE QUICK INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS: Because this terrible assault on truth and facts and law and order and the duly elected winner of the 2020 election has been conducted by those on the far-right side of the political spectrum and given how the mainstream GOP was largely complicit and implicated in this, these books will seem quite partisan. I am sorry. One does not need to be a loyalist to the Democratic Party or its policies (I am not) to believe that the Republicans have lost their moral center by refusing to distance themselves from the racist alt-right and failing to extricate themselves from the dishonesty of the Trumpian MAGA movement.

I often call for followers of Christ to be less politically partisan and to stand with the poor and oppressed and for righteous ways regardless of party affiliation. “Principles, not parties” is how one good Christian civic organization puts it. We must critique the philosophical ideologies of both major parties and I often cite the heavy but important book by David Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (IVP; $35.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00.) My dear and late friend Ron Sider was impeccable in this as can be seen in his manifesto about how to “think Christianly” about political policy, seen most thoroughly in his Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement (Brazos Press; $24.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20.) There are plenty of other great books on nurturing a truly Christian sense of citizenship and political life but I mention these to remind us that we are not trying to be partisan. That isn’t the point.

In any case, of these five riveting reads, two were written by Republicans, one by a Democratic Congressman, and two by reporters whose affiliations I do not know. All are fair about the seriously unethical ways Mr. Trump comported himself and the incredibly odd situation with so many insisting, without any evidence, that the election was stolen. Each remind us that all of this is worse than most of us realize and that it is a cultural matter that we must more deeply understand.

Which leads me to a final point in my preamble. How in the world did so many people fall for the Big Lie and how does propaganda and disinformation make its way into the common citizenry? I have previously recommended Bonnie Kristian’s excellent new book Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (Brazos Press; $24.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99.) It is a wonderful read, eloquent and moderate in tone. (Given how wildly dangerous the QAnon and Stop the Steal stuff has been, I’d have wished for a bit more zealous outcry from here but she is exceedingly calm and exceptionally balanced.) Her study of mass media and groupthink and the ethics of news consumption and what to do about what we know and what we don’t know, is a must-read these days. As Jeffrey Bilbro (the gentle Wendell Berry scholar who wrote the beautiful Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News) said of it, Untrustworthy “is never condescending and always sympathetic; it is never partisan and always incisive.” Kristian offers specific ways to take action to combat “the truth crisis” in our lives, families, and church communities, even offering a wonderfully clear proposal for “a practical epistemology.”  Thank God.

Okay. Put on your seatbelts, friends. This is going to get bumpy. I hope you order several of these from us asap.

 Here are the books I will be describing.

• Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show Jonathan Karl (Dutton) $28.00   OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40
• The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It Mark Bowden & Matthew Teague (Atlantic Monthly Press) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40
• The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th Denver Riggleman with Walker Hunter (Henry Holt & Company) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99
• Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell Tim Miller (Harper) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59
• Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy Jamie Raskin (Harper) $27.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show Jonathan Karl (Dutton) $28.00   OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

Jonathan Karl is the Chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of a previous work on the incessantly peculiar and often despicable behaviors of our 45th President, Front Row at the Trump Show. His crisp, informative reporting and essential fairness has been affirmed by many principled conservatives who endorsed his first book —Peggy Noonan (in the Wall Street Journal), the biographer of Ronald Reagan, Lou Cannon, the nearly impeccable George F. Will.

One significant critic said “we’ve read every book about the Trump presidency. This is the best.” 

This new one picks up where the previous left off, but it is travelling very certain ground—“the explosive account of the downfall of the Tump president and the betrayal of American democracy.” Karl has known Donald Trump longer than any other White House correspondent (and had remarkable access to him, including after Biden’s inauguration; there is a spectacular chapter at the end of Karl being hosted by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

This is a vivid account of the last months of the Trump campaign by a highly qualified journalist. I have postie-notes and book-markers throughout this book highlighting hundreds of the jaw-dropping episodes that Karl tell. Some are utterly bizarre, others politically unorthodox, many just rude (such as how the Trump family broke the age old tradition of inviting the next President and his wife to visit in the White House before the inauguration; even though Trump had spent endless time trying to prove that Obama wasn’t even a real American, then President Obama and his wife entertained the Trump’s twice prior to their own move in day.) More egregious dangerous things unfold, as we know, and Mr. Karl gives us a front row seat.

It starts with the little known episode of how Mr. Trump’s royal “body guy” (a security guard who had previously been fired) was given an unprecedented position of power whereby he could fire almost anyone in the White House; the chapter called “The Purge” tells of the work of no-nothing Johnny Mentee. I could hardly believe my eyes learning about that. Karl moves to stories of Covid (and how the President knowingly risked spreading it to others, including the famous episode when Chris Christie got it) and the strange press conference where the President rambled on about possibly injecting cleaners. Poor Dr. Birx, who was sitting right there with the under secretary of Homeland Security who was equally aghast. It goes from bizarre to despicable when, in the next chapter, there is a moment by moment exploration of the famous church photo-op. You know — the one with the unjust, violent removal of protesters and the take-over of a local church while holding a Bible in a rather awkward manner. Whew.

Betrayal brings us into the frantic days of the election and the effort to overturn election results. On and on it goes for 350 pages and I wanted more when it was over.  There is so much included, and nicely written. Some have said it is the definitive account of the final months and no one reading it would deny that what happened at the end of 2020 was riveting to read about and enough to send shivers up the spine of most serious patriots. 

Betrayal convincingly makes the case that the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day was even more precarious than we knew at the time. Karl isn’t a progressive pundit or a hyperbolic columnist. He is one of the most-respected correspondents in DC He and so many others are saying: America was on the precipice of a constitutional crisis. And we could wind up back there again soon.          — Brian Stelter, CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter

The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It Mark Bowden & Matthew Teague (Atlantic Monthly Press) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

This is one of the most detailed studies of the Trump Big Lie that I have read and should sure convince anyone anywhere that his conspiratorial accusations are nonsensical, incoherent, and often laughably ridiculous. You have to read the accounts of this dramatic story yourself to learn it all, but the short version is that it tells in narrative fashion — written with such verve that you almost think your reading a Grisham novel or spy drama — of the accusations of election fraud and what did or didn’t happen in each account. It would take pages to even summarize the many points and counterpoints but Bowden & Teague deserve an award for investigative reporting for this patriotic truth-telling. This is very, very informative and offers crucial information. One reviewer called it “a marvel of reporting.” Indeed.

Some of the accusations Trump’s people make (and continue to make) are just nutty and can be dismissed easily. There was a picture of somebody moving boxes and it was tweeted out with a caption insisting it showed shenanigans. On investigation it became obvious that the poll workers (under the constant gaze of bipartisan poll watchers) did this throughout their process, moving boxes from this location to that, counted and double-counted, moved from this space to that. There was absolutely nothing nefarious about the picture whatsoever.

In many of the cases — including some that the Trump team insisted was proof of fraud — Trump’s election count was actually in the lead. The claims of fake stuff happening was ludicrous, for starters, unkind to our many dedicated counters and poll workers who were doing their best and, frankly, foolish for Trump since he was winning in those very places he insisted stuff was fishy. How dumb.

The book goes into dramatic detail as it races across the country, follows the accusations and demands for recounts, the lawsuits (those thrown out and those that went to court where Trump’s team repeatedly lost. Lost, lost, lost. They had their day in court — sometimes tried by Trump-appointed judges! — and they lost. There is just no there, there. This book explains it all in dramatic storytelling, loaded with facts. 

The Steal is powerful on several levels and is a must-read for anyone curious about the legitimacy of the claims of fraud, the steal, the accusations of corruption. It takes these claims seriously at times and goes to great lengths to study the back story, the politics, the facts on the ground about how votes are counted and recounted, and how it all ends up. There is nothing like it in print and deserves to be widely known as we will continue to have to clarify the true truth to people who — for reasons that are beyond me — continue to believe against the evidence that the election was stolen.

Some of the claims that come into play are technical in nature (that is, claiming that Dominion computers could be hacked.) Upon closer look the allegations were just weird — claims about Venezuelan Hugo Chavez (who is dead) having intercepted computers that count votes (a literal impossibility, by the way, since the voting isn’t “on line.”) Claims that somebody in Germany was playing footloose with the votes. (Again, this is simply impossible. High school computer science geeks could explain this.) Sidney Powell and Rudy Giulianii continued to make outrageous claims of this impossible sort and continued to make them even after they were proven to be false. They were often chastised by judges during their proverbial day in court (get that: they evidence was so non-existence, that even Trump appointed judges mocked them and threw out the claims, almost always.) Still, they continued to spread falsehoods about the so-called stolen election, flagrantly repeating episodes that had been shown to be false. It took way, way too long for President Trump to finally cut loose the delusional Powell, but she did her damage.

The Steal explores the drama of these characters and their wacky schemes, going into great detail about the allegations made by the disgraced Attorney Powell and the scary Michael Flynn, of the Pillow Guy Mike Lindell and Jenna Ellis and the religiously heterodox Pennsylvania Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. If this were a suspense thriller, a spy novel, we would say these characters are simply too outlandish to be true. But yet, here we are.

The book tells of the true believers — there is the confused Gary Phelman who demanded access to where other poll watchers already were because he has an unofficial “certificate” making him (as he put it, “the ears and eyes of the President of the United States” who was apparently sending out these unauthorized certificates) and the pushy Greg Stenstrom in Chester County who demanded to be allowed to go behind the scenes at a ballot counting spot (The Wharf, in Delco, PA) because he had an authorization to be a poll watcher in another part of the county. That was where that footage came from that went viral of a Republican poll watcher being excluded — there already were proper Republican poll watchers in place and Stenstrom simply wasn’t authorized to be in that location, so of course they didn’t admit him. But it sure looked bad on film and not only did it fire up the skeptical base about Democrat shenanigans, it so fired up Stenstrom that he brow beat a local judge to pass a ruling allowing him to delay the count and get himself in. (Where, importantly, there was no foul play.) Then there were the unscrupulous folks behind Project Veritas — and the over-reaction story about one poor postal worker in Erie, PA. You’ve got to read about him. Story after story, The Steal will keep you up at night, exploring fairly each allegation, state by state, to determine what really happened.

Over and over the stakes are high and these accusations were gaining momentum, passed around the internets among those expecting a steal — Mr Trump had said it would happen — reading trouble into all sorts of pretty normal stuff. The self fulfilling prophesies won the day, despite the facts of minimal election errors. Granted, the Covid pandemic and the necessary rules about social distancing didn’t help any; that differing states having different rules about mail-in ballots is discussed which gave rise to some understandable frustrations which were properly adjudicated in the courts. (Our own situation in Pennsylvania being one of the more sticky ones, actually.)

The final clause in the subtitle of The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It is important as the book looks at who the real heroes of our election were. It is, in the final analysis, a tribute to those who said “no” to the trouble-makers, who played by the rules and insisted others do, too. Some — like Brad Raffensperger, the Trump-supporting election guy (technically called the Secretary of State) in Georgia — famously stood their ground even when their preferred candidate lost the election. For bravely abiding by proper law and order with impeccable scruples they got death threats and vile phone messages, rape threats and hate mail and worse. Why the Trump-driven GOP didn’t “call out” those who are so vulgar and so unhinged is beyond me but I applaud this book for exposing the ugliness of some and the quiet heroism of others.

From Arizona to Michigan to Pennsylvania to George the threat of violence against those following the rules was sickening. Your heart will go out to those (often Republican) local leaders who didn’t fall for the groupthink of Trump’s pressure campaign and simply followed the evidence and stuck to the facts. And paid a price to do so. This book needs to be read.

There is a lot of content in this page-turner of a book, lots of drama; it is almost mind-numbing to what lengths the Trump MAGA team would go to try to save the election from being stolen, even as it became evident that the votes were legit and even after lawsuit after lawsuit found nothing. is a book that you will never forget about a movement that, sadly, we may not be able to forget. This stuff is not going away. The Steal is a book that is must to have on your shelf for future reference.

There are, by the way, three appendices included. There is a list of House of Representatives members who objected to certifying the electoral college results. There is a list of Senators who refused to certify the electoral college results. And there is a listing and guide to the lawsuits filed to challenge the 2020 election results. This, truly, will bring you up to speed.

The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th Denver Riggleman with Walker Hunter (Henry Holt & Company) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Okay, if Bowden and Teague are investigate reporters trying to fairly tell about the effort to undo the elections and the arguments about what was fudged, what was sound, what the complaints were and why those accusations all fall flat — all by immersing us in the stories of those who resisted these fly-by-night accusers (those they call “the true patriots”) then this book is an insiders look on just what happened and how it all went south, especially with the uprising on January 6th. This is one insider’s view and, man, is it spicy. And informative. And real.  Wow.

Denver Riggleman is quite a character. He served as a one-term GOP Representative in DC and because of his former career in the Air Force intelligence and experience with the NSA and expertise in the field of technical aspects of intelligence (tracking phone calls, just for instance) he served for a bit on The US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. (It was not a Commission, a la the popular 9/11 Commission, by the way, as that was voted down, after seemingly being agreed upon by the House Republicans.) We learn a bit about Riggleman’s story and how he came to serve the Committee as a technical advisor and investigator. It is colorful, a bit raw — he is not a polished writer but a straight shooting military guy who is concerned about all the partisan nonsense.

This is the first book by a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate — my hunch is not all on the Committee are glad Riggleman has published his own telling of his work so soon; he does seem to be a bit of a fast-moving, get her done kind of guy, so it makes sense. I have to tell you a bit about who Riggleman is and what qualified him to serve the Commission and why it is, I’ve come to believe, exceedingly valuable to have his side of things in print. His personal story interspersed with the drama of his technical investigations sure makes for one heckuva read. Wow — what a glimpse into the real world of intelligence gathering.

Three things about Riggleman. He was raised Mormon but left that world with some degree of appreciation — he’s a good guy at heart, I’m sure — but with a lot of red flags about cults, groupthink, superstition, conspiracy theories, and the like. He sees that stuff a mile away and he does not suffer fools gladly, as they say. He doesn’t cross over any lines — it could have been studied more — but his wondering why so many people fall for what he calls the “bullshit” (that’s about the least colorful thing he calls it) of the Trump MAGA accusations about a stolen election is tremendously interesting. His background in cults makes it even more so. He has seen radicalization in Afghanistan and the Middle East and cut his military teeth in the awful horror of the Serbian/Croatian wars so he has some experience in sizing up how people become “true believers” in a cause that is not rooted in reality or truth or goodness. Anyway, his growing up rough, the conversion of his family to a religious faith and his determination that it was somewhat cult-like is helpful.

Secondly, as I’ve said, he’s a military guy with tons of experience in cracking codes, tracking down hidden information, doing bigger things than finding missing phone numbers. But that’s where his expertise came in handy as he set up what he had hoped would be a several million dollar research center to trace the network of call contacts in the phone given to the Committee by Mark Meadows, President Trump’s Chief of Staff. The thousands of texts, images, calls, and connections are at first not useful information — they’ve got millions of lines of numbers, but at first no names attached — but he created a huge graph connecting who called who. He hired some geeks in Greensburg PA with various interfacing software programs to get on all this, trying to find out which unsavory characters — The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, etc. — were most in touch with White House personnel leading up to the legal and bloody attack on the Capitol on January 6th. What he discovers will blow your mind.

As I have said before — and as I trust you surely know — everybody knew they were coming. The White House had contact with some who planned the insurrection, and it was well known that some who were coming were spreading the word to bring weapons. Anybody paying attention to Facebook and the web that week knew it was happening; those tuned to the deep web and the dark web (as Riggleman explains) would have known much more. The question is how connected the White House was, and did the White House’s connection with creeps like Roger Stone (and Bannon and the rest of the cast of violent and unsavory characters) indicate that they had hoped for a violent attack on the Capitol police and the congresspeople in the building?  In any case, Riggleman has contacts in the spy biz  and he routinely consults with police investigations and he tells some pretty cool stories about the gear and the people — he knows a guy, as they say — they recruited on a shoestring budget to suss out who was involved in this illegal uprising to storm the Capitol and attempt to murder elected officials like Mike Pence. At certain points I had to pinch myself to remember this wasn’t a fictional spy novel but something that actually happened in our own capitol just a year or so ago.

Thirdly, Riggleman has been a life-long redneck conservative. He is proud that he lived in Appalachia for a while and he’s got this blue collar demeanor and perspective. He is outspoken and blunt, daring and right wing. At least he was. Like many people I know he overlooks the flaws of the likes of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and sees them and their time as an honorable era of positive, even Godly, Republicanism. He knows his Constitution and he loved his GOP. But with the Trump stuff, he grew sour and when he ran for office and ran afoul the party line — standing against racism, for instance — he grew bitter about much of the far right ideology and its tribe. His time in the Freedom Caucus (with central Pennsylvania’s own far right ideologue Congressman Scott Perry) has given him keen insight into human behavior, party loyalty, the idols of ideology, and why the “stolen election” nonsense has taken hold.

Riggleman is the guy for this book, exposing the stupidity of much of the Big Lie and yet showing compassion for the people — like his own mother! — who believe it. His blow by blow description of how they piece by piece figured out who was talking to who leading up to the riots makes the book move along with page-turning speed and gripping, no-nonsense prose. And there is the big question looming: who used that phone in the White House early afternoon June 6th to call somebody inside the Capitol, someone rioting that very moment? That seems to be Riggleman’s “white whale” and he is passionate about following the evidence, looking at the facts and seeing where that leads. He is less concerned about partisan points and more about the answers to his tech kinds of questions, especially questions about what he called “the Rosetta Stone for the January 6th investigation” — Meadow’s phone texts which, he says, provided “a staggering amount of information.” 

I suppose you know that (as he puts it) “The White House is technically required to keep track of the commander in chief’s calls, thanks to the Presidential Records Acts, which was enacted in the wake of Watergate.” He notes that this sometimes leaves room for negligence, carelessness, and, sometimes deliberate misconduct.

And I suppose you also know that on January 6th the White House went dark for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes.

He writes,

I didn’t know why the White House went dark and I didn’t really care. As an intelligence officer, you learn not to make assumptions. It might have been an innocent mistake; it could have been a cover-up. What mattered to me — as the senior technical advisor to the Committee and as an American — was why they stopped tracking the calls, and what happened next.

As the answers unfold and we learn the details (or at least those he in good conscience could share; he sometimes says he can’t say more) we also learn more about who is involved in this big network of neo-Nazi groups and Oath Keepers and right wing religionists and ordinary Republicans who believed Trump and his MAGA team. More interestingly, he wonders why people fall for this stuff.

Which leads him to QAnon. He is adept at cracking into the dark web and he knows some stuff — he can’t even say what all, I gather — about the espionage needed if we are going to figure out who is inspiring folks to do violence and things like the plan to prevent the election to go through. That there are these way-underground dark web groups with chat boards and such, shaping the fevered fears of many that then are picked up in more mainstream ways, is an immense problem. That huge networks like Fox picks up and repeat truly outlandish stuff from the dark webs is jaw-droppingly dangerous for our society and, frankly, our safety. 

Denver Riggleman tells of some sick, nutty conspiracies that someone who is at least seemingly respectable reports in some relatively mainstream way. The fake stories (about election fraud, or worse) get on some far right network — Trump’s own alternative to twitter, say, or OAN network. Next it is picked up by the more popular Fox and soon the sketchy story has been seen by millions. And they almost all believe it is gospel. How does this happen? What are we to do? 

Just when I thought The Breach had sort of peaked and had reached its dramatic climax, the next chapter (“The Traitor”) blew me away. Holy smokes — people actually believe that what was once a Benghazi conspiracy fringy story could morph into an accusation that Obama’s SEAL Team Six didn’t really kill Bin Laden (there was a body double) and Obama had one of the SEALs murdered. This harebrained QAnon stuff was retweeted by then President Trump!

Riggleman and his co-writer Walker Hunger tell of a press conference where Trump was directly asked about QAnon and he obviously lied about not knowing about who they are. The reporter played along, graciously explaining its theory about the Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals that the Democrats were supporting. The NBC White House correspondent Shannon Pettypiece said to the President, “Does that sound like something you are behind?”  The Breach tells what happened next and reflects on the story:

There it was. Trump was standing behind the White House podium. He hd the prefect opportunity to use the full force of his presidential platform to denounce the most unhinged and angry aspects of Canon. The chance to have a positive impact on the segment of his base that was going off the rails was all teed up for him. Trump didn’t take it. Nope. Rather than doing what any remotely decent person would have done, he actually doubled down and almost endorsed QAnon’s dark, apocalyptic vision of world affairs.

After quoting verbatim what the President said about QAnon, he observes,

The end-times death cult conspiracies were now coming from behind the White House podium.

This is not a curious digression but is deeply connected to the “Stop the Steal” marches, the wild stuff Ginny Thomas has said (about Democrats being captured and put on barges headed to GITMO) and more. How have things gotten this unhinged?

Riddleman — again, think of his background as a former Mormon which he now views as somewhat cult-like and his expertise on the psychology of radicalization from his work in counterterrorism doing Air Force intelligence in hot war zones overseas — is very, very concerned about the influence of conspiracy theories. In fact, before losing his last election, one of his heroic bipartisan efforts was to pass an anti-QAnon Resolution in the House.

This has led him also to take on the notorious election denier and Trump friend Alex Jones. If the Proud Boys engage in (among other awful stuff) holocaust denial, Alex Jones claimed that the Sandy Hook murders of children was a hoax. And these are the guys the beloved President befriended. Every time I see a Trump sign or yard side I think of this, wondering if my neighbors approve of such evil ideas? We simply must say it: Alex Jones is a dangerous and wicked man.  Riddleman is a brave Republican, willing to speak out about this sickness in the party.

And then, in Chapter 10 — “The Byrne Identity” — the book reports even yet weirder stuff. Riddleman expose the war documents Trump’s people had and, indeed, the next chapter is called “Executive Disorder” which shows how many MAGA hard-liners wanted Trump to use EO 13848, stretching it’s meaning, enabling him to declare an emergency and send out the National Guard and take over voting machines. This stuff tending towards a coup (and more from the likes of madman Patrick Byrne spelled out in his unbelievable Deep Capture website) was in the air. Trump’s advisers were increasingly bizarre and unprofessional — from Powell to Giuliani to Jenna Ellis. As a military man and hyper patriot, Riddleman has no time for the scoundrels. Of former and onetime national security adviser and dangerously odd General Michael Flynn and his coup-plotting (on, for instance, a Newsman interview on December 17th 2020), Riddleman cannot restrain his disdain:

I think Flynn is a shameful and spineless disgrace. I also recognize him as a clear and present danger.

I could say more but you get the drift. This is a deep dive into the far fringe elements of Trumpworld. Oddly, these conspiracy-filed voices seem to be his most loyal fans and certainly were influential in the days leading up to the big plan to take over the Capitol if Mike Pence didn’t come through to overturn the election. Surely not everyone knows that so much of this is so far out or otherwise good citizens would be running for the hills (or sending Tump-mania packing.) This kind of stuff needs to be read, discussed, and we need to put books like this into the hands of those who favor election-denying candidates. This book has some colorful language. It’s quite a read. You should know it.

Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell Tim Miller (Harper) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I was not sure I wanted to review this book, as its subtitle is overly provocative and the writing laced with casual profanity. The young-ish, hip author has been the consummate Republican operative and is very well known within the higher-ups of the Grand Old Party. He did communication work for candidates, admittedly for short term gain (often doing negative ads.) He was not happy with himself. I am not alert enough to national politics to have know his name but those in the know in the Republican movement know him well. Since he early on realized Mr. Trump was not good for the country or the party Tim Miller has become anathema among his former friends and colleagues. He a self-confident worker and independent thinker so I have a hunch he doesn’t really care what they think of him. Except, well, he sort of undid a lifetime of professional friendships and, uh, his whole career. So there’s that.

I’ve got several good friends who are fond of the old political theory adage about how one may not want to see “how the sausage is made.” Well, this mea culpa gives us a very rare view into the back room deals and fund-raising plans and media appearances and campaign strategy meetings and red-eye private jet flights and all sorts of other gigs that make up typical big time American political efforts. Mr. Miller had never wanted to be an elected official so most don’t know his name. But he is known by those behind the scenes — and those who report on that stuff, such as pundit James Carville, who says, “Everyone should read this book, especially fellow Democrats who want to better understand our political foes.”

Here’s the short version of Miller’s fast-paced, snarky memoir: he rose to fame and influence in the RNC as one of the architects of its widely reported “autopsy” after the 2012 landslide for Obama. As a keen-eyed and principled strategist, he worked with other top-level leaders to forge a winning plan that would help Republicans appeal to more folks (women in the blue suburbs, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ persons) and help them stay true to conservative values in a changing postmodern culture. Quite a feat, but this guy knew his stuff and worked hard with all sorts of important (and in some cases famous) politicos. 

Miller was the communication director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and before that the chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential Campaign. He worked with McCain, even in Iowa. To say he’s been around is an understatement. (And, whew, the amount of late night drinking these guys do is truly remarkable.) There is candor and revelation (and, one has to wonder, maybe a hint of spiritual longing, with prayer even mentioned once or twice.) He did lots of interviews with old friends and co-workers asking how they (perhaps like himself) justified their work with candidates who they personally disapproved of. Naturally, many had jobs they needed and careers they wanted and, well, they were motivated often by just trying to stay afloat.

He actually has sort of a taxonomy of different ways different people could live with themselves working for stuff that was frankly wrong. These handful of chapters is very interesting and I think pretty insightful.

Interestingly he tells a lot of stories — once he was editing a fund raising newsletter that was targeting Republican senior citizens. It was laden with race-baiting and all sorts of alarmist scary stuff. He “red-lined” some of it but his bosses (and the candidate in question) told him that unless the press would write about this negative sort of fear-mongering stuff, he shouldn’t edit it. In retrospect he realized this was just wrong and he didn’t speak up.

Maybe you recall an old Sidney Lumet film called Power (with Richard Gere, Gene Hackman, Julie Christie, Denzel Washington) about the campaign consultants behind the scenes as they shape a candidate for public consumption and their own compromises with their own sense of ethics — it’s their job, after all. It’s a great movie about personal integrity and I kept thinking of it as I read this page-turning expose of how and why so many relatively normal, respectable, decent Republican players turned a blind eye to Trump’s corruption, narcissism, bad temper, crass materialism, no-nothing anti-intellectualism, routine dishonesty, and confusion about American politics and Republican principles. Why?

Why, indeed? We have heard that many Republicans privately despised the President (and many feared him as well, for understandable reasons.) Yet the question remains “How did this happen?”

Miller is angry and he is angry at himself. Yet he is not a jerk and this isn’t merely a hard critique, although it is that. He is understandably understanding. The jacket flap copy says he “cuts into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see” and he does. He names names, often, and describes long, heart-to-heart debates with key GOP operatives, pushing them to be honest with themselves, to speak out, to right the ship. It is bracingly honest, but while it promises to expose “the contortions of his former peers in the conservative establishment” he is not mean-spirited or ugly about it all. He is mostly heart-broken and alarmed. As he puts it, he “draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP and the Trumpian takeover of the Republican political class, including the horrors of January 6, 2021.”

That he tells of his coming out as a gay man (and the “mental gymnastics that enable him to justify becoming a hit man for homophobes”) reveals a lot. It is a gripping book, at times quite tender, and interesting in all sorts of ways. Beyond the political details, it is a profound study of what it means to be true to one’s values, to be authentic and honest, to have integrity. Wild as it is and as much cool, hipster lingo as there is, it is really worth reading. The author is earnest and it is to the point and is trying to cultivate a sense of honesty and integrity.

Consider this hefty endorsement:

When the history of this era is written, the dominant question will likely be, How did this happen? Tim Miller’s Why We Did It offers a crucial insider’s answer to that question. It’s a must-read report from the belly of the beast detailing how the unimaginable becomes inevitable. Looking back at a career in politics and being horrified at what you were part of is not the most fun exercise in life. Tim examines his role with clear honesty, sadness, and an amusing sense of the absurd. This is a big, important book. Read it. — Stuart Stevens, political consultant and co-founder of Strategic Partners & Media.

Or this, which captures much about Why We Did It:

Tim is a supremely gifted storyteller who writes with brutal honesty and stylish gallows humor about the GOP’s toxic mix of opportunists, joy riders, and grifters who enabled Donald Trump’s rise and guaranteed his enduring grip on the Republican Party. Tim takes a scalpel to the malignant tumor smothering American democracy by dissecting his own friends and onetime colleagues. The most valuable contribution of Tim’s book may be the anthropological examination of just how little separates a ‘normal’ Republican from an activist working to overthrow a free and fair presidential election. — Nicolle Wallace, Deadline: White House

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy Jamie Raskin (Harper) $27.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is the book I wanted to introduce first, but felt like maybe the others fit better early on the list. They are clear-headed and honest and robust in their investigations of the often utterly bizarre accusations of the Big Lie that so many have fallen for. I listed those first, but this one — oh my. It blew me away and is one of the most moving and compelling and tender books I have read in years. I said to Beth the other day it may have to be added on to my ever-changing list of Best Books I’ve Ever Read. I think it is almost that good and surely is unforgettable.

As you may know, Congressman Jamie Raskin is a Democratic leader from Maryland who helped with the first impeachment hearings against Donald Trump (that was the whole Russian election scam.) Before his time running (with his kids helping with the campaign) for a seat in Annapolis in the State House he was a good natured law professor. (He is a Harvard Law grad and a constitutional law guy, actually.) That is he pretty far left — sort of a fun and smiling Bernie, maybe — makes him super interesting as well.

We learn a bit about his famous dad (who had worked in the Kennedy administration for a which) who was arrested for anti-draft protest in 1968 with Dr. Spock and Rev. William Sloan Coffin (for those old enough to remember that) and how his father helped start the Institute for Policy Studies with Richard Barnet. He learned his justice-seeking, civil rights values in this remarkable setting in a famously loving family; the civic pride he and his family takes in him being an elected official and public servant is palpable. He has good chums all over the country and is pals with folks from various poltical persuasions. His voice was immediately friendly and inspiring. 

Perhaps you may also know that his beloved young adult son and best friend, Tommy, took his own life on December 31st 2019. The book opens with that unspeakable tragedy and while I have read other narratives of families bereaved by suicide, I have never read anything so heart-breaking and gripping. I knew this was part of the backstory of Jamie Raskin as he took up Nancy Pelosi’s call to become the lead manager of the second impeachment trail against Donald Trump for his dangerous role in inspiring and possibly planning the January 6th insurrection.

This personal loss faced so bravely is part of what is so unthinkable, the double entrance of the title almost too painful to admit. This book is the first time the famous House leader discusses the “unimaginable convergence of personal and public trauma.” What a story. What a book. I am deeply grateful to the Congressman for doing the hard work of facing all this and telling us about it in this stunning book.

Although he is candid about the pain of losing his son (and how his wife and two daughters processed that as well and how so many good people rallied around them) the main story is about going back to work— the first time since the death of his son a week previous — on January 6th. His grown daughter and a son-in-law went along (to watch after him, actually, they admitted, in case he couldn’t emotionally sustain himself) and then the attack began. This insider’s account of the fear of an active shooter coming after them, the bloody combat, the stabbings and neo-Nazi stuff (you can imagine how Jewish people felt) and the toxic bear spray — the Trumpian MAGA team had come armed to the teeth. It is the most riveting account of the attack I have read and it is gruesome.

One story: some of the Democratic congressional leaders, flat on their bellies, crawled to the other side of the room to lie in place with Republicans thinking that if the mob broke through and started shooting, they would surely pick off the Democrats first. Can you imagine!

Another story: Jamie was honorably concerned about his friends and colleagues in the great hall at the time, but he was firstly alarmed for his daughter and his son-in-law who had been escorted out and were hiding under a Congress person’s desk. Cell phone was spotty as the surreal attack continued, hour after hour. He was understandably panicked as he had just lost one child and sure didn’t want to lose another — even as he blamed himself for allowing her to come along. What a nightmare.

On it went. He saw a police officer stabbed with a flagpole being used as a spear — this is no time for snarky comments about how unpatriotic that is. These rioters were inspired by a well-dressed US President but they were there in gear, prepared for battle; for many nothing was sacred.

Unthinkable is about trauma, not only his own private hell but the trauma elected officials felt that day (even though some, who were crying in fear and screaming in outrage soon minimized the damage in egregious turnabouts for obvious partisan optics.) And yes, the book moves not only through the horror of that day from an insider’s view but to the process of recovery from trauma that all good citizens had to begin. Somewhat like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the forever infamous 9-11 attacks, this murderous uprising must live in infamy. The casualties were obviously less (but more severe than most realize or dare to recall) but the fact that it came from our own — fellow citizens, driven on with complicity from the White House, later with elected officials implicated — it is a tragedy that simply must be faced. And this book helps us do that better than any I’ve read.

The vivid telling of the uprising to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after an obviously legitimate election — with chants of being willing to capture and perhaps even execute Mike Pence if necessary — is the first part of the book. If it were only that part it would be well worth reading (especially, again, as there are portions — not digressions! — writing seamlessly about his family, his son, how Covid prevented healthy and life-giving interaction for so many.) But the rest of the book picks up with Raskin’s courageous leadership in the second impeachment trail. How that developed, the round-the-clock research his team had to endure, the professionalism and patriotism of the crew, it is all very impressive.

I keep wondering, dear Hearts & Minds friends, how BookNotes readers who favored the Republican candidate will respond to my telling of how much I appreciated this important book. I know Raskin is not without faults. Still, I hope you are willing to engage, as they say, and take an open-minded look at the arguments for the second impeachment and the magnitude of the sheer dedication and tenacity that drove those committed to finding and exposing the truth of the President’s involvement in the traitorous uprising. Agree fully or not with all that Mr. Raskin believes (I surely do not) he is a  good and caring public servant and I feel he has his shared some of his soul in this vulnerable, honest book. He gives me hope that some Congressional officials can embody a deep and caring sort of integrity, combing the personal and the poltical it ways that strike me as good.   

Raskin is a moving writer. For instance:

This is not a book about Donald Trump. Quite the opposite. It is about the people whose dreams and actions have allowed us to survive Donald Trump…

Tyrants tell stories only about themselves because history for them begins and ends with their own insatiable appetites. But my own story of despair and survival depends entirely on other people, above all the good and compassionate people, the ones like my son, Tommy, the non-narcissists, the feisty, life-size human beings who hate bullying and fascism naturally — people just the right size for a democracy in which each person has one vote and one voice, where we are all ‘created equal’ and thus given an equal chance to lead a life of decency and integrity.

I have learned that trauma can steal everything from you that is most precious and rip joy right out of your life. But, paradoxically, it can also make your stronger and wiser and connect you more deeply to other people than you ever imagined by enabling you to touch their misfortunes and integrate their loses and pain with your own.

Yes, you will learn much of what you need to know about the nefarious alt-right groups that were inspired by the President and the vile uprising that tried to prevent the proper passing of the electoral college votes. Yes, you’ll learn about the President’s unseemly pressure upon (and then grotesque abandonment of) his Vice President. Yes, you will see how a few brave Republicans spoke out against the MAGA madness that had come to this. This is an excellent and informative book about all of that.

But, it is more. As David Remnick of The New Yorker has written about it,

Unthinkable is not a work of emotional austerity; rather, it is an unburdening, a howl, a devotional. The grief is nightmarish, but the love that suffuses the text is even more powerful—the love for family and a lost child, as well as a love for a fragile democracy. It takes its greatest inspiration from the idealism of Raskin’s son.

++++

TO PLACE AN ORDER

PLEASE READ AND THEN CLICK ON THE “ORDER HERE” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders.

The weight and destination of your package varies

but you can use this as a 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 the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 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 $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

POST LABOR DAY SALE AND A FREE BOOK WITH EVERY ORDER                                      God At Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Vieth, Jr.

FIVE DAYS ONLY – EXPIRES 9/30/22

30% OFF (WHILE SUPPLIES LAST)

We don’t usually tell our customers what to do with their purchases, but, ya know, I think I might be a bit pushy and suggest something. We’re a few weeks past Labor Day Sunday and I know more than one friend was a bit perturbed that there was no mention in their church about work or labor, no prayers for people at their jobs, no honoring of nurses, teachers, factory workers, engineers, unionists, or businesspeople. The proverbial butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers just don’t get much recognition in most churches, not even on Labor Day. 

So, why not share with your pastors and preachers a book or two, now while the memory is still fresh? It is likely they have never read anything like this. You could wait until next summer, I suppose, but, ya know, I think the time is now. We have a few at 30% off (for five days only) and we’ll throw in a free book we have a batch of, while supplies last.

We do not suggest being too pesky about it, of course — certainly there is no call to be unpleasant, even if you deeply long to be told that what you do matters to God and that your job site really is a venue for your own discipleship and spirituality. I know that there is some pain about the routine apathy towards your work life that you experience in church; I get it. So here’s a chance to gently educate your pastor, preacher, worship leader, educator, spiritual director, youth pastor, campus minister, or others on your congregation’s leadership team. We’ve selected a handful of great titles that we happen to be able to sell a bit more cheaply now and we’re happy to offer these resources for you or yours.

THE EXTRA 30% DISCOUNT EXPIRES FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2022. After that they revert to the typical BookNotes 20% off.

I won’t go into great detail about them here since I’ve reviewed most of those at BookNotes before. If you have any questions, hop on our inquiry page and ask away. We’re here to help. (I’ve done some Zoom conversations with groups about these very sorts of titles and could do some show and tell with your adult ed committee if that would be useful.) In any case, check these out and order a few pronto. We only have a few of some of these and the extra discount is while supplies last.

Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human John Mark Comer (Zondervan) $19.99  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.99 

I’ll admit I adore this book and so respect Comer and his several good books. I have joked before about how hip and cool he is and how even the page design (with short sentences, a certain contemporary font and lots of white pace) appeal to younger readers. But his conversational tone and snark is one thing: his profound insight and solid help framing the topic of work and public life (and rest) by the large question of what it means to be human is, frankly, nothing short of brilliant. It’s a great read (nicely setting the stage, perhaps, for Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Colling by Andy Crouch, another personal favorite) and is very highly recommended.

Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work Tom Nelson (Crossway) $17.99       OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $12.59

We rave about this because it is written by a pastor who came to realize he was almost engaging in pastoral malpractice by getting everybody to sign up for church work and not faithfully equipping them to live out their faith in their workplaces. This is the story of how that church grew, with stories by a variety of congregants about how they think Christianly and serve God in their own career areas.  It’s really a very fine book, good for pastors or ordinary work-world folk. 

Living Salty and Light-Filled Lives in the Workplace Luke Bobo (Resource Publications) $16.00  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.20

I like this little book and really respect the author. Luke is a strong African American leader who worked for a while at Made to Flourish (an organization Tom Nelson founded to equip churches to minister well to their congregation in the work world and to steward their gifts to help make a difference in their communities.) We’ve all heard about being “salt and light” from Matthew 5 but few have spelled out the challenges of obeying Christ’s call in those 90,000 hours that we spend working over the course of our lives.

This small book — with a great forward by Jerome Barrs — helps both  blue-collar workers and white collar professionals to imagine how to live out faith in the workplace.  There are good discussion questions and the whole book is just under 100 pages. Nice.

Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work Timothy Keller & Katherine Leary Alsdorf (Penguin) $18.00  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $12.60

I have long admired Tim Keller as an astute, evangelical pastor in New York, but his co-written here, Katherine Leary Alsdorf, is, similarly, nothing short of brilliant. She worked in the serious world of a global business corporation and came to faith in mid-life. Eventually she took over the innovative (and at the time, nearly groundbreaking) Center for Faith & Work at Redeemer Presbyterian in New York. She led them to create classes, professional groups, industry specific book lists, discussion guides and a Fellows program to train thoughtful young Christians to be faithful leaders in their various work venues. This book is still the gold standard on these things and every pastor should have it. There is a blurb on the back from Comment magazine’s review which, come to think of it, I think I wrote. I’m a fan.

Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World Michaela O’Donnell (Baker Books) 19.99  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $13.99

This is a 2021 release and is certainly one of the best books in recent years on this topic, inviting to a “path toward more more meaningful work that makes an impact.”  There are three main sections of Make Work Matter that starts off with “Where Do You Want to Go?” And shifts to several chapters under the heading “Who Will You Become?” leading to the final section, four profound chapters on “How Will You Get There?”

Dr. O’Donnell is executive director of the De Press Center for Leadership (at Fuller Seminary) and is not only an entrepreneur, teacher, leadership coach and sought-after speaker, she is a great writer. She helps hold out a dream of “closing the gap between what you’re doing now and the life-giving work you desire.” Ordinary pastors should be helping parishioners chart a way forward into this kind of discernment about their callings and careers, so this book could provide a model for many.

The recommending blurbs on the inside offer raves and come from some of the best people in their field, from Redeemer’s legendary Missy Wallace to the aforementioned Luke Bobo to great leadership writer Roy Goble (Salvaged: Leadership Lessons Pulled from the Junkyard), our old Pittsburgh pal Lisa Slayton (CEO of Tamim Partners and associate at Denver’s Institute for Faith and Work), Denise Daniels (Working in the Presence of God: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Work), Tod Bolsinger (Canoeing the Mountains), and, importantly, Dave Evans of Stanford, co-author of Designing Your Life. When this many good authors and leaders endorse a book, you know it’s worth having.

Daniel M. Doriani (Presbyterian & Reformed) $12.99  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $9.09

This thin book, in some ways, is a practical sequel to his more major volume, Work: Its Purpose, Dignity, and Transformation.)  In just a bit over 100 pages he has given us a great introduction to the topic, laden with stories, case studies, examples, and a passionate clarity that is nearly unsurpassed. Inspired by Tim Keller and his New York Center for Faith and Work, Dan starred the Center for Faith & Work St. Louis. 

If you’ve ever wondered how you can best serve God and your neighbor faithfully in your work, this study provides welcome encouragement and guidance. Discover what makes your work both good and strategically valuable — the develop a concrete plan to make a difference in your corner of the world. 

For the last year, my friend Dan Doriani and I have empowered twenty-five multicultural leaders through weekly cohorts on Work That Makes a Difference. These meetings and Dan’s book are transforming communities with hope. I highly recommend Dan’s book and invite you to join the team of faith-and-work disciple makers that ‘walk the talk’ by living the love of Jesus daily in the marketplace.–Brad Wos, Multicultural Director, Evangelical Free Church of America Central District

God’s Big Canvas of Calling and Renewal Dr. Stephen R. Graves (KJK Inc.) $10.00  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $7.00

I love this little book that, among other things (like its solid, lively content) is one of the nicest designed books in this list. Handsome, graphically arranged, well made with some handsome pull quotes and near blank pages. It is clear-headed, offers a very faithful wholistic vision of the full gospel unfolding towards the redemption  of all things, but also has some down-to-Earth strategy stuff about embedding the gospel in organizational health and development. Very impressive.

Discipleship with Monday in Mind: How Churches Across the Country Are Helping Their People Connect Faith and Work Skye Jethani & Luke Bobo (Made to Flourish) $8.99    OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $6.29

If you are taking me up on the suggestion to gift some books to your congregational leaders — or if you are a congregational leader — you really, really should consider this. It’s nearly pocket sized, compact and only about 90 pages. It is a great little book about which we can easily say there is simply nothing like it in print. (Yes there are some bigger and more complex books on mentoring people into marketplace ministry and the like — see, for instance, the fabulous Equipping Christians for Kingdom Purpose in they Work: A Guide For All Who Make Disciples by Tom Lutz & Heidi Unruh.) But this is short and sweet and has lots of great examples to offer encouragement. It is a short guide to expanding pastoral practice, attending to corporate worship and including all this work-world stuff into our spiritual formation and disciple-making programming. There is even a bit on including this in our mission and outreach work. Fantastic!

Work and Worship: Reconnecting our Labor and Liturgy Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson  (Baker Academic) $29.99  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $20.99

I remain so enchanted by this magisterial work — see my early review of it at BookNotes HERE or HERE — and am pleased to offer it here for those who want to share it with their worship planners and preachers. With the brilliant foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff you might realize it is mature and somewhat sophisticated and it is. But, importantly, as Wolterstorff highlights in his foreword, they see that the breach, the gap, the disconnect between faith and the works world can be healed not only by a theology of work and encouragement to see career’s as holy callings, but by integrating, naturally and regularly, our theology of work into the worshipping life of our gathering faith communities. That is we must sing it, pray it, recite it. There must be a more explicate connection between liturgy and labor and in this regard, this book is one-of-kind. It does not bring me joy to say that there is nothing like it in print, but it is also exciting. This simply must be on the shelf of every worship planner and worship leader, regardless of denomination of worship style. It is urgent.

Happily as many have said, Kaemingk and Willson know what they are doing. They are robust in their knowledge of a theology of work and a theology of worship. They are uniquely skilled to bring these things together and they offer tons of resources, litanies, prayers, hymns and songs, and more to help congregants worship well. 

Here, finally, is the book that will take the ‘faith and work’ conversation to new depths of intentionality. With theological clarity and real-world accountability, Kaemingk and Willson mend what we have rent asunder. Advancing scholarship in theology of culture, it is also a must-read for those who lead worship for workers–which includes, of course, everyone. This should become a standard textbook, for the sake of the church and for the sake of the world. — James K. A. Smith, Calvin University; author of You Are What You Love, On the Road with Saint Augustine, and How to Inhabit Time

Kaemingk and Willson make an inspired contribution to the underdeveloped connection between work and worship in Christian life. They do not take the predictable approach of beginning with a theology of work and applying it to worship; rather, they come at it from the opposite direction, proposing that when references to labor are faithfully represented in the liturgy, it forms us for the work we ultimately present to God in all vocations. — Constance M. Cherry, Indiana Wesleyan University; author of The Worship Architect

Born of years of deepening commitment and maturing insight, the great gift of this groundbreaking book is its remarkably rich study of Scripture and history, showing that the deepest, truest witness through the centuries comes from an understanding of liturgy and labor–which is surprisingly seamless. Work and Worship is a gift to the church. — Steven Garber, senior fellow for vocation and the common good, Murdock Charitable Trust; author of The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work

The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work  Steve Garber (IVP) $20.00   OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.90

Those who follow BookNotes know that I highlight this from time to time, a book of short essays that I simply adore. These pieces are tender and passionate, short and sweet. They are, in a way, reports from Steve’s amazing travels, teaching about the connections between work and worship, weaving together (as his earlier book put it) belief and behavior. What does it look like to be a person of profound integrity, whose life holds together, seamless? He’s no idealist and he is aware — deeper than almost anyone I know, I sometimes think — that the world is broken and that are all implicated. Sure, he’s a bit intense at times. But he usually writes with a lovely, light touch. This handsome, compact sized hardback has full color photos and a great feel in the hand. I love this book and we’re so glad it hints at the deep integration that relates worship and work, living deeply with visions of vocation. It mostly shows rather than tells, with good storytelling. Somebody you know will love it.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction Matthew B. Crawford (FSG) $17.00  OUR SPECIAL 30% OFF SALE PRICE = $11.90

Okay, this is the only one on the list not written out of an overtly theological perspective, although the insight and wisdom of Matthew Crawford is solid and lovely. You may know his much talked about book (a bit philosophical but a must-read, called Shop Class As Soul Craft in which he tells the story of his getting tired of his obtuse white-collar professional job and starting up his own motorcycle repair shop. It’s a great screed against the “information age” which fails to appreciate skilled workers, shop class, craftspeople.) This one is a “brilliant and searching new work of social criticism” which follows up his previous rumination on the ethical and practical importance of manual competence. If Shop Class extolled mastering our skills of working in the creation, this explores our fractured mental lives, the forces that seem to distract and disrupt us.  

This is not just a screed against computers or automation but he does argue that we must reckon with the way “attention sculpt the self.” He looks at the intense focus of short order cooks and ice hockey players, the “quasi-autistic behavior” of gambling addicts, the slow craft of building pipe organs. As it says on the back, “He shows that our current crisis of attend is only superficially the result of digital technology” because it really is a deeper question that pervade how Western culture understands humans in the world. This has radical implications, he insists, about how we raise children, design public spaces, and arrange democracy itself.

This cogent, analytic, book makes a strong argument and the attitudes we have about our life in the world, include our callings and careers, our work (and worship) might need to be reconsidered after reading it. It isn’t only about work, but it includes some cool stories of workers who use their skills well. I wanted to offer it here on this short list of key titles. Enjoy.

++++

TO PLACE AN ORDER

PLEASE READ AND THEN CLICK ON THE “ORDER HERE” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders.

The weight and destination of your package varies

but you can use this as a 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 the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 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 $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

7 MORE NEW ONES – 20% OFF

Some folks seemed to appreciate the quick listing of 15 brand new books in the most recent BookNotes. I didn’t want to overdo it, but I had thought of listing these new ones as well.

So, here ya go, a postscript to the BookNotes from the other day — seven more that are quite new and in some cases brand new. I have hardly opened the pages of some of these (although a few I’ve read in advanced manuscripts form which the publishers were kind enough to share with me months ago.)  Here we go, announcements of new books about which I’m sure you would want to know. Send us an order to Hearts & Minds today. Use the secure order form at the end, and we’ll take care of the rest, deducting the discount with a smile.

Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture Justin Ariel Bailey (Baker Academic) $21.99 OUR DISCOUNT PRICE = $17.59

Yes, this is on the excellent Baker Academic imprint, but not all on that imprint are hefty textbooks. This is a bit serious but for any educated reader and anyone who wants to nurture their holy calling as culture makers it will be, I am sure, a excellent resource. As one reviewer put it, it is “equal parts innovative, surprising, and enlightening, this book sings.”

Interpreting Your World just came so I can’t say for sure, but I am guessing this book about a theology of flourishing is going to be stunning, something I’m going to savor through the fall and draw on for years to come. This is the broad book about a deep hunger for meaningful living — clearly in response to the triune God of the sacred story in Scripture — that seemed between the lines of Justin Bailey’s early heft volume on fresh ways to think about the art of apologetics, Reimagining Apologetics. For those aware of the nuances of various sorts of Reformed theologians, you might get a kick out of knowing Bailey teaches at Dordt University in Iowa. 

Here are two spectacular endorsements:

Bailey offers readers a profound gift. With clarity and skill, he introduces us to the dynamic ways theology and culture intersect. Rejecting simplistic and reductionistic Christian understandings, this book introduces us to the complex field of human action and divine grace that we call culture. — Matthew Kaemingk, Richard Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life, Fuller Theological Seminary, co-editor of Reformed Public Theology: A Global Vision for Life in the World and co-author of Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy

Justin Bailey’s theology is a theology of flourishing, a theology that understands an artist’s heart. His discourse enters into culture not just to engage it but to liberate it. This is a theology that is integrated and quite beautiful to behold. Interpreting Your World offers a lens for cultural goodness and for the sanctification of our imaginations; it is an invitation into new creation. — Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art and Faith: A Theology of Making and Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life

I’ve glanced through the discussion questions at the end of each chapter and they are provocative and interesting, making this ideal for a study group. His appendix on discerning the nature and meaning of cultural artifacts by way of the five lenses itself is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

The Church After Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship Andrew Root (Baker Academic) $27.99  OUR DISCOUNT PRICE = $22.39

Oh man, I’m so excited about this. It just came and I can’t say much about it, but you may know that Root has been doing a whole series of very mature reflections on the nature of the church in these times, in this secular age. Yes, earlier works in the series put congregational life (and one on pastoring) into conversation with the likes of social critics and intellectuals like Charles Taylor.  

In each of these stimulating volumes — the previous one came out about a half a year ago, entitled Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age — Root brings fresh analysis of the ways our Western culture and our contemporary trends have shaped and influenced how we presume churches ought to work and wonders, with great theological awareness, how authentic and faithful spirituality might mitigate these deforming influences. 

There are tons of amazing quotes on the back of this brand new book. Some are saying it is the best one yet — “perceptive and engaging, a godsend for leaders and pastors.” The back cover explains the book like this:

The call for pastors and congregations to be innovative can have a dark side: an obsession with contemporary relevance and entrepreneurship that lacks theological depth and promises burnout and exhaustion. The Church After Innovation shines a light on the problem and offers a treatment.

I like what Brian Brock (now at the University of Aberdeen) says, “There’s something satisfying about a story that is this big, bold, and revealing about how our cultural presumptions came to be — especially when so beautifully told.

“There’s something satisfying about a story that is this big, bold, and revealing about how our cultural presumptions came to be — especially when so beautifully told.”

And part of that big story, apparently, is going to be how chasing church innovation (often for the sake of numerical growth) may be rooted in our tacit assumptions — the air we breathe — learned from consumerism and late modern capitalism. Richard Beck puts in succinctly:

With penetrating analysis and prophetic force, Root exposes how the false idols of capitalism are being smuggled into the church through the Trojan horses of innovation and entrepreneurialism. A bold, necessary, and urgent book. — Richard Beck, Abilene Christian University; author of Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

Learning Our Names: Asian American Christians on Identity, Relationships, and Vocation Sabrina S. Chan, Linson Daniel, E. David de Leon, and La Thao (IVP) $20.00

For decades and decades, the thoughtful, evangelical campus ministry InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has been shaped by their many Asian-American students, many who have risen to leadership within the large organization. For decades their publishing division, one of our favorite publishers, IVP, have released books about the identity and unique struggles of Asian Americans, espeically for college age young adults. 

For instance, the classic Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents or Tom Lin’s Losing Face & Finding Grace: 12 Bible Studies for Asian-Americans; Invitation to Lead Guidance for Emerging Asian American Leaders by Paul Tokunaga, More Than Serving Tea: Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership and Faith edited by Nikki A. Toyama-Szeto and Tracey Gee, and Growing Healthy Asian American Churches edited by Peter Cha, S. Steve Kang, and Helen Lee, among others. Although more academic, I am very excited to see the forthcoming  Doing Asian American Theology: A Contextualized Framework for Faith and Practice coming in November 2022 by Daneil D. Lee. Send us a pre-order today!

Learning Our Names (which opens with a rumination by Sabrina Chan on the various itineration of her name in Mandarin and Cantonese) is a fabulous, excellent, new collaboration by four IVCF staff or former leaders — part of families from Hong Kong, India, Philippines, and the Hmong people group. Chan is the national director of IVCF’s Asian American Ministries, working out of Durham, NC, Daniel is now a pastor of a multi ethnic church in Dallas, de Leon is a doctoral student at Fordham (in NYC) and Thao works on campuses in Wisconsin. What a diverse and delightful set of contexts! Skimming the chapter titles and topics and discussion questions makes me want to read this soon. Kudos to this unique team for the gifts they’ve offered here and for the publisher who so handsomely designed it.

This book is, I suppose, firstly for Asian American persons and faith communities as the authors offer  up to the minute insights and guidance for navigating the unique waters of our times, looking at spirituality and discipleship, interpersonal relations, vocational calling and family and ethnic identity. Solid Christian perspective for those living in the “multiple tensions” of being Asian American Christians, coping with pressures of being seen as “the model minority” or the “perpetual foreigner.”

A timely and expansive exploration for both Asian Americans and those who want to learn by entering into the stories and experience of Asian Americans. — Nikki Toyama-Szeto, executive director, Christians for Social Action

They Came For Mine: Healing from the Trauma of Racial Violence Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts (Westminster John Knox) $19.00  OUR DISCOUNT PRICE = $15.20

This is brand new and I cannot say much other than it is humbling and moving to even it hold it in my hands, skimming the footnotes, seeing who this brave author draws upon and recommends, a bit about her story, her journey, her rigorous scholarship and her audacious commitment to the ongoing freedom movement. As you might guess, the title is an allusion to a riff she does on Martin Niemoeller’s famous speech about the need to stand up for each other. The book is, as the wonderful writer and lively thinker Dante Stewart (of Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle) puts it:

Part memoir, part mediation, part manifesto, this work has the character and skill of poetry, the brilliance of grace, the mystery of Black wisdom, and the illumination that the world we have been given is not all that there is to life.

If the book we’ve highly recommended for several years on this topic, Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience by Sheila Wise Rowe (with a foreword by Soong-Chan Rah) remains our first go-to selection on this complex topic, They Came for Mine may indeed be the natural follow up. It, too, cites the exceptionally moving My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (by Resmaa Menakem) and, of course, the must-read volume on trauma, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. There is some overlap, I suppose.

But I gather that the new Lewis-Giggetts is (as you might expect from WJK) from a more liberationist perspective, with citations from James Baldwin, intersectional scholars, Toni Morrison, and a cadre of anti-racist workers.

The blurbs on the back are compelling. Two that illustrate the authors orientation, by significant writers in this radical tradition — Chanequa Walker-Barnes (professor of Practical Theology and pastoral Counseling at Columbia Theological Seminary and author of I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation and Jacqui Lewis, who is described as a public theologian and the first Black or female senior minister at the progressive, multicultural Collegiate Church in Manhattan. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and Drew University, she is the creator of the MSNBC online show Just Faith and the PBS show Faith and Justice, in which she led important conversations about culture and current events. Jacqui is the author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World. 

As you can see, this volume stands in the robust tradition of womanist and activist black theologians and is clear about the ongoing trauma of inhabiting a black body in a culture defined by white supremacy. If you get that, this book will be a valuable guide to deeper awareness and deeper healing admist our racist society. If you are suspect of this claim, I invite you to consider it. It reminds us of why we must #SayHerName, sadly, over and over. This stuff is not going away, so we need serious resources like this. Please check it out.

Tracey Michael Lewis-Giggetts is author of the 2020 release, Choosing Your Lens: How White Christians Can Become Better Allies and is the founder of HeARTspace, a healing community that uses storytelling and the arts to serve those who have experienced trauma. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Essence Magazine, Oprah Daily, and more.

When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse Chuck DeGroat (IVP) $18.00 paperback                     OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I do not have to say much about this new paperback release as we have reviewed it before. It has been much discussed and really appreciated by many since it first came out in hardback — yep, in mid-March, 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was hitting us all. Not a great time for a book release, although, oddly, an important title for those very times. Maybe the know-it-alls didn’t “come to church” in person, but they were around. Not a few churches had hard fall-outs with strong personalities demanding this or that. 

One is tempted to cite The Talking Heads song and sigh, “Same as it ever was.” Yes, pride and stubbornness plagues any human organization and churches have plenty of oddballs and bullies. Maybe more than some organizations. We need to know how to handle such hard stuff.

When Narcissism Comes to Church is really good for any sort of congregation, and good for anyone to read even for other contexts, it certainly is a must for any congregational leader. It does focus on this particular diagnostic disorder: narcissism. DeGroat is a pastoral counselor and knows his stuff. He shows how these tendencies are around, all over many of our best churches and para-church ministries; he explores in wonderful prose how the narcissism disorder itself can show up. And what to do, with goodness and grace.  

There are, I might add, importantly, a couple of very good chapters on the narcissistic pastor.  Yup; that’s a thing.

Why does narcissism seem to thrive in many churches? This is a vital book, perhaps the only thing of its kind, trying to answer that. Blurbs on the back are from Dan Allender, Curt Thompson and Nancy Ortberg.  A great forward is written by Richard Mouw which says a lot. As Dan Allender puts it, When Narcissism Comes to Church is “a landmark work of wisdom, tenderness, honor, and hope.”

Now this landmark book is in paperback. It’s now a couple of dollars cheaper and you could buy several at our discounted price. It’s worth working through (as are, by the way, his other good books.) Congratulations, Chuck! 

Against Liberal Theology: Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity Roger E. Olson (Zondervan Reflective) $18.99

This is a book I tore through, eager to read and absorb, and I liked it a lot. Mostly. We are happy to commend it. Let me explain, too briefly.

I’ll just say three quick things. 

Firstly, this is not a book about what sort of social implications we think the gospel carries, what kind of public ethic we work for, how we ought to be people of justice, creation-care, racial reconciliation and the like. He favors that sort of robust Kingdom theology that sees — perhaps somewhat like the theologically impeccable friend of his, the late Ron Sider — the Bible relating to all of life and the Lordship of Christ over culture and its deforming idols. He’s thoughtful and, frankly, not conservative, theologically, and certainly not politically.  No worries there. This is a book about theology as such, and he goes to great lengths to be clear just what he is worried about (and what he is not addressing.) Don’t misunderstand the term “liberal” or “progressive” as having anything to do with politics as that isn’t his topic.

Secondly, although he is greatly concerned about a trajectory among some that for perhaps even understandable reasons, is moving towards deconstructing and eroding fairly classic, standard, historic doctrines of orthodox faith, he is not mean-spirited, not a fundamentalist, not judging motives, or fixating with nuances of small disagreements. He is no-nonsense in a way, just naming clearly what he sees and backing it up with quotes that alarm him (from the late Marcus Borg, say, or Brian McLaren or Doug Ottati — three gents I have met and, like Olson, can happily respect; Brian is an old friend who I very much appreciate.) Olsen is wanting to be clear and candid although his book isn’t quite as terse as, say, the classic Christianity and Liberalism written by the former Princeton professor J. Gresham Machen in 1923 — almost one hundred years ago.

Thirdly, while I am not totally in agreement with his assessment of the dangers of some liberal theology, he is, I think, mostly correct, in both his analysis of contemporary trends and his critique of older, classic, theological liberalism. He goes a good job, though, drawing on the magisterial volumes by Gary Dorrien, especially The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005 and, naturally, shows the detrimental impact of the likes of Friedrich Schleirmacher, Adolf von Harnack, and Paul Tillich, up to John Spong, for instance.

Roger Olson has written many good books. Interestingly, in Against Liberal Theology he speaks of working for two mainline denominational churches — one pastored by a disillusioned Baptist, the other by a mainline liberal Presbyterian — so he has seen this lack of gospel-centered clarity play out in congregation life, in preaching and Christian ed, family ministry and mission. I see, now, why he wrote the very interesting Counterfeit Christianity: The Persistence of Errors in the Church (Abingdon Press.) I really liked his concise paperback, Who Needs Theology? An Invitation to the Study of God, co-written with his own rather postmodern friend, the late Stanley Grenz. His largest volume is the wonderful clothbound, The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity and Diversity (IVP Academic.) Perhaps most germane to this new book is his 2008 release, How to Be Evangelical Without Being Conservative (with a forward by Scot McKnight.) It is out of print — ahh, if only it had sold more! — but we have a few left, natch.

McKnight endorses this one, too:

Roger Olson’s Against Liberal Theology is a courageous and calm definition, examination, and evaluation of the collapse of authentic, orthodox Christian theology in the minds, hearts, and hands of one liberal (not progressive) theologian after another. In their own words, Olson often shines a bright, piercing light on their own criticisms. This is a vintage example of Olson being Olson: he knows the literature, he is candid, he is fair, and he is unstinting in criticism of the pitfalls of liberal theologians. And he examines only those who overtly espouse ‘liberal’ in their theology. Those most attracted into progressivism and then into liberalism will benefit from a humble reading of this book. — Scot McKnight, professor of New Testament, Northern Seminary, author, most recently, of My Theology: The Audacity of Peace

Zero Hour America: History’s Ultimatum Over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give Os Guinness (IVP) $23.00. OUR SALE PRICE = $18.40

It is never a bad day when a new Os Guinness book shows up. He is always my teacher, a long-time supporter of our family-run bookstore, and an admirable example of a Christian leader who speaks often in secular, scholarly circles — think tanks, study centers, action groups, professional organizations, civic projects, even the United Nations. His book The Call is on my short list of all-time favorite books. He is best known in evangelical circles, known for his astute observations, his impeccable, note-less speechifying, and his wise, non-partisan call for God’s people to be in but not of the world around us. He is sometimes known as a public intellectual, sometimes a cultural critic, often as a passionate evangelical preacher. His PhD is from Oxford where he studied the work of the significant Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger. Os describes his own inspiration drawn from the three scholars who most influenced his thinking and life in the wonderful Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion. Those three influences, mentors of sorts? C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Peter Berger.

In Dr. Guinness’s last major book, the 2021 volume The Magna Carta of Humanity, he added a fourth to his list of most appreciated mentors, the beloved and highly respected late Rabbi of London, Jonathan Sacks. In that volume Guinness conscientiously showed connections between the Hebrew God and consequent Biblical worldview — shaped by ordered law and virtuous freedom — that so formed the best of Western views of civic life and certainly the framers of the US Constitution. As a Brit living in the US, Guinness feels a certain responsibility to honor his American guests by sounding the alarm at the dangers he perceives threatening our almost 250 year-old Republic.  (In 2012 he wrote a book called, notably, A Free People’s Suicide.) He has several books on what he once called “The American Hour” and is a globally respected voice on religious pluralism and sustainable freedom. He may be one of the best — if not best known — of democracy’s allies that the contemporary world may now have. That he has experienced the ravages of communist terror (he was born and lived his earliest years in China and lost loved ones to the Most takeover) is itself a poignant matter of personal credibility.

As he says throughout his Magna Carta book, and in many stirring lectures given in recent years, it is imperative that we reflect on the differences between the awful French Revolution of 1789 and the momentous US Revolution of 1776. Some of you may be old enough to recall that scene in Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live film (or book) showing the implications and historical consequences of these two vastly different revolutions, one leading to mass totalitarianism, the other to a flawed but beautiful vision of freedom for all.

It grieves me to say that I was not sure what to make of Zero Hour America since he had just published the weighty The Magna Carta of Humanity last year. I figured this was, perhaps — to use an image from the days of rock and roll recordings — a collection of outtakes, alternative versions, unedited extras, bonus tracks for the true fans. I think I was mostly right. And, as with those quirky CD releases, some of the newly released material from a previous recording session might have come from the cutting floor, stuff that didn’t make the first release. Or fiesty reworkings of some of the same stuff, maybe making it even more compelling; true fans will probably think they’ve heard some of this before, but with a new sort of reverb and some louder kick drums.

Perhaps this is wrong of me, and I do not mean it to be unkind. But Zero Hour is a slimmed down, passion-driven, cry of the heart — Os’s plea for us to wake up before it is too late. For careful readers, there isn’t much new, although, yet, every page has new quotes, new citations, new examples, re-saying much of what has been said before, underscored. He draws on such a wide array of sources, citing with approval ancient scholars from around the globe, seeming to particularly appreciate of the likes of Arnold Toynbee. And, of course, the great Abraham Lincoln. HIs working knowledge of global writers and the philosophy of historiography is a intellectual joy to behold.

As I said in my reviews of his previous book, I am in disagreement with him in his assessment of the nature of the threats to democracy. He, perhaps like Rod Dreher (just for instance) acknowledges the threat from the far right, but worries more about the Gramscian long march through the institutions by the so-called Marxian left. He alarms us about the “post-democratic, one-party technocratic elite that have emerged in America to replace American democracy with America’s newly forming authoritarian oligarchy.” I don’t exactly know who that is, or how they are doing that and he doesn’t say. He seems to think it is mostly “the elites” who opposed viscerally the former President Trump. That’s just odd. He condemns the “proto-authoritarians in the political sphere who are blind to their creeping authoritarianism”, now “marching under a banner…” and I guess he means Democrats, but is trying to be courteous in not saying so. That he worries about Black Lives Matters and woke businesses and postmodern professors and Foucault’s disciples isn’t so bad — he makes a fair point — but that he doesn’t talk about the insurrection of January 6th and former President Trump’s big lie, hoodwinking a major part of the American people into distrusting our modern elections, is a nearly unforgivable omission in a book like this, published in the last half of 2022. It is almost as if he wrote this a decade ago, before the notable horrors and massive disinformation of the last few years. 

Which is not to say we don’t need to read this book. In fact, those who are likely to be frustrated, as I am, with the direction and tone of the last few books by Os, may need it the most. People who are by constitution conservative and by principle Republican may not need this reminder, although they will be impressed with the balanced, thoughtful, faithful exegesis of our nation’s deepest impulses and ideas. He is not alt-right and has no particular partisan loyalties. Such readers will be fired up by Zero Hour, understandably so. 

Importantly, such conservative readers need to be reminded, by a spokesperson they can trust, that, indeed, slavery and racism remains an unreckoned with injustice that cries out to heaven for redress. Guiness is not a fan of the historical assumptions of, say, the 1619 Project (although he never spells out why) but make no mistake: he cares about social justice and has a Biblically-inspired vision of justice for all, each living “under their vine and fig tree.” He has an entire chapter called “Righting Wrongs.” He cares about the abuse of power.

However, again, it may be those of us who are in the center or who tilt left and who remain outraged at the chicanery of the Trumpian movement and the rhetoric of the MAGA idols, who need reminded of some very basic stuff, found — emphatically — here in the latest from the real Dr. Os.

In a rumination on Deuteronomy 17 where the Hebrew king was called to study the covenant “all the days of his life”, Guinness imagines how US Presidents might be called to lead well beyond their swearing in.

Like the great Jewish leader Moses or like Winston Churchill with his immense grasp of history, your task is to guide the destiny of the American republic with a profound and ever-growing understanding of the ideas and ideals of the American republic and the best and worst of the American past. To ‘make America great again’, Mr. Trump, and to ‘restore the soul of America’, Mr Biden, you must address what made America great in the first place.

I wonder if this, icing on the cake of The Magna Carta of Freedom, and its lively prelude volume, Last Call for Liberty, make a trilogy that might help us all clarify what our nation might be about. It is interesting that, in fact, Os calls for such a project to help us recover — or at least clarify — what freedom is within the American experiment.

Guinness writes, “What The Federalist Papers did for the Constitutional Convention, a fresh and powerful restatement of the founding character of America needs to do for our time.” 

“What The Federalist Papers did for the Constitutional Convention, a fresh and powerful restatement of the founding character of America needs to do for our time.”

It may not be read as widely as a major release on the international stage, but this could be the very sort of clarification some need.

Guinness’s big themes are reviewed in a final powerfully concise chapter called “Zero Hour America” which is pitched (as is most of the book) as a dire ultimatum. Yet, he is (as he puts it) “fired by hope” and insists that “a warning is not a prediction.”

Yes, he says, “America will fall — unless.” And in covenant hope, therein lies the call. That great “unless.” We may fine-tune what that entails, but he is surely right. We are in a kairos time. I have never heard Os so urgent, so passionate, so fiery.  Agree fully or not, this book is a grand summary and reminder, a manifesto of what we must do, soon.

++++

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BookNotes

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Thanks to those who ordered that marvelously enjoyable Stories of My Life by the great children’s writer and advocate for literacy, Katherine Paterson. What a joy to also send out books like her Great Gilly Hopkins and Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved. Not to mention our friend’s great book that we featured again last week,  Square Halo Books’ recent Wild Things and Castles in the Sky which we can’t say enough about.

This BookNotes is going to be a relatively rapid-fire listing of 12 new books we got into the store here within the last week or so. (Or in some cases, just yesterday!) I will try not to say much about them, other than that we ordered them months ago because we knew they’d be of interest to you, our peeps. We are glad you are so supportive of our efforts here at Hearst & Minds as we craft a somewhat different sort of Christian bookstore.  Enjoy these varied new releases – and send us an order, soon. We are eager to serve, happy to help.

Be sure to scroll thru to the end where you will find the secure “order” links. We are glad for your commitment to support small business. We’ll be sure to follow up personally. It’s what we do.

Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters Bob Smietana (Worthy) $27.00                                     OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

You may (or should) know Bob Smietana as one of the most respected writers on the religion beat. He is currently a national reporter for the wire service Religion News Service. Blurbs on the back include raves from the Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey and the important Ryan Burge (author of The Nones.) He’s been at this for decades and this is his description of our times, skillfully helping us see the trends, get the picture, understand the data, and sense our place in these complicated and serious times. A key concern is why people are leaving the church and what we might wisely do about it.

This is brand new and important. Don’t miss it.

Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself) David Zahl (Brazos Press) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Oh my, I’d like to tell you a lot about this – I’m part way through and find it a hoot and a half. The cover is weirdly funny and the title may be a bit obscure. Anthropology means a view of the human person (not necessarily cultural anthropology which studies, at least in our mind’s eye, rare tribes and far away people groups.) This, rather, is asking what we should think of ourselves, and other members of the pretty stupid (and grand) human race. It has been called perceptive, funny, subversive, nourishing. Zahl’s father, Paul, was a sober-minded and thoughtfully gospel-centered Episcopalian theologian (you should order his old Eerdmans book that we keep on hand, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.) David founded the uber-cool Mockingbird Ministries and is the chief editor of the “Mockingbird” blog. Not long ago he wrote (and then expanded in the paperback version) the deep but really great Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do about It.) We’re fans.

This excellent, witty new study of human nature and how it influences our expectations (from friendship to work to politics to marriage) is a thoughtfully Christian study, but is deeply human and humane. It is liberating, really, to, well (and this is a bit simple) lower our expectations. As an old comedy album from 1971 put it, “We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Do I hear an Amen to that?

And – dang, I like this! – this may be the only book on which Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mike Cosper both have endorsements. Nadia says “This is the book I have been waiting for: an antidote to all the self-help nonsense that weighs down our bookshelves and our self-regard.”

Liturgical Mission: The Work of the People for the Life of the World Winfield Bevins (IVP) $20.00    OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

Allow me to quickly say that I admire this author a lot. He is passionate about how evangelical and sacramental worldviews overlap and is convinced that many of our youngest, postmodern rising adults are drifting not from true faith but from a consumeristic and entertainment model of worship and church life. We really liked his book called Ever Ancient Ever New: The Allure of Liturgy for a New Generation And think he’s mostly right. We can hope so.

This new one now takes the author out and broadens it not just to a “new generation” but to all of us longing to reclaim ancient practices for everyday life and mission. As a Wesleyan, he gets a warm-hearted friendship with God, he preaches the gospel, and he has a robust cultural analysis and social engagement. He cares about reaching the world and he cares about congregational life. He knows that worship is formative and vital.

In this book he is, writing from his seat as director of the Center for Church Multiplication at Asbury Theological Seminary, showcasing his passion for mission and for a wholistic, missional mindset. We’ve got a million books on being contextualized and missional these days, but this is really fresh, bringing a liturgical awareness of the work of the people, for the sake of the world.

There is a lovely forward by Justo Gonzalez which should be greatly valued.

Christine Pohl weighs in, saying,

Rejecting common bifurcations of sacraments and justice, ancient creeds and current relevance, worship and mission, Bevins argues persuasively for a fresh integration of them in contemporary church life.

That’s really it, eh? No bifurcations! If only we could say it in Latin or something. What an invitation this must be. Can’t wait to study it and spread its wisdom.

God Is Mallory Wyckoff (Eerdmans) $21.99             OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

I heard from our great Eerdmans sales rep that we’d like this, and he got me some early pages. Wow.  I knew of Mallory from her work at Preemptive Love (which is high praise in my book, especially given some of their recent struggles.) Her DMin is from Lipscomb University (in “missional spiritual formation”) and she has done an advanced dissertation on the impact of sexual trauma on survivors theological perceptions and spirituality. Anyway, she is a young and rising star in Kingdom work and has been called “a trusted voice for people seeking to navigate their spirituality with curiosity, honesty, and courage.”

There are fabulous endorsements, too – Ian Morgan Cron, the great author (and, now, enneagram guru) says, “I urge you to accept my friend Mallory’s invitation to expand the ways you think about the Divine and live into a better, truer, story.”  From Richard Beck to Catherine Meeks, wise people have noted that this study of the nature of God written out of the author’s own experience is (as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove puts it) “something both beautiful and disorienting.” This is authentic stuff, poignant and helpful.

Strength for the Fight: The Life and Faith of Jackie Robinson Gary Scott Smith (Eerdmans) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Yes!  This is the second book written by a friend and customer on the great Jackie Robinson. (I reviewed Michael Long’s 2017 Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography commending it heartily. Now he commends this one, saying it is “meticulously researched” and both “insightful and uplifting.” Further, Mike says “Strength for the Fight situates Robinson’s faith in wider society and culture as no other book does. It’s a significant contribution not only to our understanding of Robinson but also the growing field of religion and sports.”

Gary is an excellent and esteemed historian, now retired from years teaching college. (He did two massive volumes about the faith of American Presidents published by Oxford University Press which indicates his sophistication.) He happens to have a Christian passion for the poor and underserved and has done good work in personal service in multicultural settings in Western PA. In any case, it makes sense for him to tackle this icon; it stands as one of the best in the prestigious Library of Religious Biographies that Eerdmans happily continues to publish. This one is surely a must-read. Congrats, Gary!

Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation Brother Lawrence; translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Broadleaf) $25.99     OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

It brings me great joy to recommend this, a fresh and inviting translation of this beloved classic. I have gotten a lot of mileage using the basic storyline of Nicholas Herman, better known as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, and his learning to pray while doing the dishes. His experience buying communion wine – exchanging filthy lucre, as they say, with heathens, no less, outside the walls of the French monastery yields a cosmic sense of oneness that rivals the famous passage of his vision in St. Louis told in Thomas Merton’s memoir. In any case, it preaches well, but I have to admit I haven’t truly adored the little book. Like many classics in the Renovare handbooks, I’m sort of like Jana Riess in her fun Flunking Sainthood. Yup; that’s me. But this handsome compact hardback with an excellent introduction to the life of Brother L, well, it just might be the book to bring his “spirituality of the ordinary” into our day and age. So far, I’m loving it and you just might as well.

Richard Rohr assures us that it is a “careful, comprehensive translation” and that it “beautifully captures Brother Lawrence.”  Others who pile on the praise include the staid and deep Martin Laird and the lovely Barbara Brown Taylor and even Jamie Smith, who colorfully notes that to get this book you just have to “imagine Mr. Rogers as a mystic.” Exactly.

More of You: The Fat Girls Field Guide to the Modern World Amanda Martinez Beck (Broadleaf) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This is not brand, brand new, but I’ve not given it the shout out it deserves. Amanda Beck has written well about body image and weight issues and a spirituality of self-care in other books, including the very good Lovely: How I Learned to Embrace the Body God Gave Me. She is the co-creator and cohost of the “Fat and Faithful” podcast. She has received a lot of traction at her Instagram account which just indicates the remarkable need for resources like this. Beck’s passionate writing has been featured in various outlets, from the evangelical Christianity Today to the thoughtfully Jesuit America. Right on! It is an honor to care such vulnerable, thoughtful books.

A devotional author we like, Jessica Kantrowitz (365 Days of Peace) notes that,

Beck sets out to give the reader a knapsack of tools to navigate a world that is often unsafe and unjust for fat people. She emphasizes her signature line, “All bodies are good bodies.” This is a must-read for anyone with a body.

Elusive Grace: Loving Your Enemies While Striving for God’s Justice Scott Black Johnston (WJK) $19.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.20

The cover of this isn’t as classy as I’d wish – it really deserves to be an elegant hardback with deckled edge pages. With the lovely forward by Barbara Brown Taylor you are alerted that this is fully thoughtful and quite eloquent. Blurbs on the back are from great preachers such as Thomas Long and Cleophus LaRue, professor of homiletics at Princeton.

Yes, it is a bit provocative and yet delightful. (Barbara Brown Taylor asks, “In what other book can you find Lin Manuel Miranda and Ben Franklin in the same sentence?”) It is a sweet call to intentional patterns of Christian community that form us and it is about civic-minded, public life. It is about “reclaiming virtue” and “retraining our hearts.” There is a lot about the church and there are study lessons and discussion questions making it ideal for small groups, adult classes, book clubs and such within your church.

Elusive Grace is filled with hope-filled guidance and it’s rightfully critical of much going on in our polarized society. He brings a lot of voices into conversation with Holy Scripture, from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Emily Dickinson to Mister Rogers. I could go on with other fun pop culture examples, but you get the drift.

Scott Black Johnston is Senior Pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. In the PC(USA) that’s not too shabby.

Creating Cultures of Belonging: Cultivating Organizations Where Women and Men Thrive Beth Birmingham and Eeva Sallinen Simard (IVP) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

This is brand new but we’ve been cheering for it for a year. As Mimi Haddad (President of CBE International) puts it, it is a “thoroughly researched, courageous critique of organizational practices and their impact on women and human flourishing. A must-read for women in Christian organizations.” I hate to admit it, but I know some who really need it, now.

The quote puts it clearly – it is a book inviting Christian organizations (from churches to mission agencies, nonprofits, schools, ministries, and parachurch groups) to reflect the diversity and justice of God’s Kingdom. Many of our best organizations desire to have women in positions of leadership, however this sometimes (for a variety of reasons explored here) sometimes proved difficult when the organizational culture is one that isn’t open. Sometimes the organizational culture silences women or even penalizes the unique giftings that women bring to the table. Obstacles are real, even in this day and age, and, sadly, a book like this is just what is needed – good data, important research, and lots of upbeat stories and solid guidance.

This guidebook is commended by organizational guru Tod Bolsinger and the wonderful writer and immigrant activist Karen Gonzales. (Karen has a new book coming in mid-October from Brazos which you can pre-order, naturally — Beyond Welcome: Centering Immigrants in Our Christian Response to Immigration. She serves as the human resource director at World Relief.)

Beth Birmingham is an NGO leadership and organizational consultant, development researcher, trainer and former college professor. She works with TearFund USA and is involved in the status-quo disrupting organization Christian Alliance for Inclusive Development. Eeva Sallinen Simard is director of an international health project at World Relief and has more than fifteen years of experience working with missional NGOs. She is co-convener of the Wheaton College Network Initiative for Development, Gender, and Christianity.

Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith Bekah McNeel (Eerdmans) $26.99                                      OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

This is a beautiful, complex, rare, and interesting book. I don’t often say loudly that there is no such book on the market but this seems true to me – there is simply nothing like this out there. It is a true story, an evangelical church woman who got burned out when hurt by a seriously toxic situation and simply drifted from church and, perhaps, from faith. She was, as they say, deconstructing.

I will write more about this in an upcoming BookNotes (eventually) about this very topic of those drifting from faith and deconstructing their older beliefs, for better or worse and will naturally name this. For now, know this: this combines her earnest grappling with what she and her husband believe and how all that changed when she had children.

As it says in the introduction:

This book is about the various places and ways that uncertainty shows up for parents who, having left or altered the faith they once knew, and now must decide what to give their kids. It’s about church attendance, Bible memorization, school choices, and sex talks. It’s about forging new paths in racial justice and creation-care while the intractable voices in your head call you a pagan Marxist for doing so.

I like the books of Cindy Wang Brandt (such as her lively, lefty Parenting Forward: How to Raise Children with Justice, Mercy, and Kindness.) Her long, good endorsement where she raves about this starts, “I’m biased because I wrote one, but I love parenting books. These books answer the question: where do we go from here as a human civilization?” Or, I might say, they at least try to. If you wonder, too, Bekah’s book, she says, is for you, mostly as stories to consider. I

Silencing White Noise: Six Practices to Overcome Our Inaction on Race Willie Dwayne Francois III (Brazos Press) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We have more books on racism and justice and multi-ethnic ministry and reconciliation and the like that it is hard to know what makes any new ones necessary. But this. This. Oh my, this is mature and solid and important. I hope to write about it more. I’ve had an advanced manuscript and have been waiting for this day when it arrives, as it did a day ago. Congrats to Dr. Francois (with a DMin from Candler) who is senior pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Pleasantville NJ and seems boundlessly tireless. He teaches liberation theology at New York Theological Seminary and has created Public Love Organizing and its PLOT (Public Love Organizing Training) program, doing anti-racism work all the while teaching at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

The rave endorsements on the back of this are from well known scholar activists, from Oberty Hendricks to Jennifer Harvey. Stephanie Paulsell of Harvard Divinity School says it is “an unflinching look at how the white noise of racism keeps us stalled out on the road to a true multiracial democracy and a call to cultivate practices that can get us moving.”

This is Biblical and theological but aimed at actionable steps. Kudos to Brazos, as always.

Necessary Christianity: What Jesus Shows We Must Be and Do Claude Alexander, Jr. (IVP) $16.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

Another brand new one that I’ve hardly looked at, but can assure you is solid, clear, poignant, and powerful, is this, Necessary Christianity. Bishop Claude Alexander, Jr. is the well-respected, black senior pastor of the Park Church in Charlotte NC and serves on the boards of numerous evangelical organizations (including the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities and IVCF.) This is, according to Mac Pier – who has written mighty books about prayer, by the way – “a brilliant exposition on the life of Jesus… by helping serious people of faith discover the “musts” of our followership of Jesus.” As Mac notes, Rev. Alexander helps us “live consequentially. Every major decision needs to be evaluated through the lens of Jesus’s musts on each of us.”

In other words, as Russell Moore puts it, this book is for you if you have trouble focusing on what really matters. This is about Christian maturity, about following Christ, about his cross and Kingdom. A few things are simply not optional, but necessary. This book explores what we do, day by day, and how to live with a sense of divine necessity, as he calls it. Nicely done.

There are six chapters and what looks to be a very good discussion guide in the back.  Hooray.

A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing Amanda Held Opelt (Worthy) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

This came out a bit ago and I’ve mentioned it before but I just have to announce it again. It is, quite simply, a beautiful walk through 12 different grief practices. Amanda is the bereaved sister of the late Rachel Held Evans so it starts with her coping with that sudden loss. She writes well, includes some humor, and the book feels like a clever cross between a memoir of sorrow and an anthropologist’s survey of what might seem like oddball practices to the uninitiated.

There is so much here – it’s a great read. From fairly common habits (sending cards) to the nearly superstitious (covering mirrors) to the nearly amusing (see “funeral games” – who knew?) to the beautiful (like coping with fear through “telling the bees”), there is something here for everyone. Join Amanda as she sits shiva or as she takes in the beauty of funeral food. You will laugh, I bet, and you may cry. It’s a great book.

The fine writer Jen Pollock Michel says it “invites us to put our aching bodies in motion, to glimpse at the surviving we can all do.” Other fine raves on the back are from Sarah Bessey, Jeff Chu, Michael Card, and K.J. Ramsey, all authors we’ve commended here. Trust us – A Hole in the World is well worth having.

The Other Side of Hope Danielle Strickland (Nelson) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Oh my, there’s a lot to explain about this but I promised I’d keep it quick. I’ve read several books by this heroic and outspoken leader who has worked against trafficking for the Salvation Army in Canada and has served in a large church (which she left in solidarity with abuse victims that were not being taken seriously until their pastor was arrested.) She doesn’t always do the courageous and heroic thing, according to this fabulous read (which is nearly like a memoir, each chapter telling about episodes of her journey.) But, wow, how God has shown up, claimed and empowered her. I still recall her fabulous talk at the CCOs Jubilee conference a few years back and appreciated her podcast with the ever-upbeat Bob Goff. Diana gets around and is an author you should know.

Here’s the fun thing: half of this book is stories of her slowly finding hope in her ragged, rugged situations. It is hard to put down and I kept saying to myself “I’ll just read one more” and on and on I went, turning pages, until…

Well, until you have to turn the book over and start over from the back, with an upside-down new start. The designers imagined this way to get to “the other side” of hope and the second half is described as “flipping the script on cynicism and despair and rediscovering our humanity.” I suppose we could say we start with stories and then get to the theory, but even this second section is laden with examples and stories of folks she’s met on her walk on the wild side. What hard won hope! Flipping the script, for real.

If the front of the book sort of looks like a classy museum painting, the back is the backside, the dirty canvas, the wooden frame and wires. Cheers to Hannah McNeilly for this original package design. And thanks to the candor and hope of this broken servant of the Lord, Danielle Strickland. Buy it today if you like good stories, hard stuff redeemed by a God who is there.

Following Jesus in a Digital Age Jason Thacker (B+H) $12.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $10.39

Jason Thacker is an amazing young scholar and this recent, compact book, while succinct, is weighty, full of substance and a bit of gravitas. It is a fine companion to one of our favorite reads of this year, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological Age by the remarkable Andy Crouch. Jason Thacker isn’t as charmingly eloquent but he’s solid and exceptionally sharp.

His first book (The Age of AI) carried an excellent forward by Richard Mouw, by the way, and this new one is less specific and looks at the broader scope of our technological age. He heads the ERLC Research Institute, researching technology and its impact. He is no Luddite but he is worried and here he calls God’s people to “step into the challenges of the digital age from a place of hope and discernment.” It’s a good perspective, a helpful way to lean into all of this, since most of us are nearly like the proverbial fish in water asking, “what’s water?”

Thacker invites us to pursue wisdom, truth, responsibility, and identity in our post-truth, curated, polarized age. Highly recommended.

In the Shadow of His Wings: 40 Uplifting Devotions Inspired by Birds Rosylnn Long (Bethany Publishing) $17.99                          OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This doesn’t take much to describe but I wish I could put it into your hands to open it and gaze at the beautiful, full-color pictures. It isn’t overly artful or eccentric, just solid faith-building devotions illustrated with wonderful, inspiring photos. One friend of the store recently said she read through three or four devotionals straight through — they were that good. Designed for a 40-day journey, maybe you, too, will breeze through, and then come back to ponder. But half the fun is enjoying the photography.

Rosylnn Long’s photography has been featured in Birds and Blooms magazine, Minnesota Weatherguide calendars, and other Minnesota publications. (So you can guess where she’s from.) She loves God and God’s creation and her study of birds has given her this unique opportunity to dwell with God in His creation, observing. Check out her prints at lynnlongprintscom. This handsome hardback makes a nice gift, eh? Order one today.

++++

TO PLACE AN ORDER

PLEASE READ AND THEN CLICK ON THE “ORDER HERE” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders.

The weight and destination of your package varies

but you can use this as a 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 the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 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 $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

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One of the books I praised most heartily earlier this year was Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children edited by Leslie Bustard, Carey Bustard, and Thea Rosenburg (Square Halo Books; $29.99 – OUR BOOKNOTES DISCOUNT PRICE = $23.99.) It is one of my favorite books about books and certainly on the top of the list of books parents should have to inspire them to read widely to their kiddos. I like these kinds of books and whenever the opportunity presents itself, we recommend The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease (Penguin; $20.00) and the lovely, updated Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life by Gladys Hunt (Zondervan; $21.99)

Recently we’ve gotten into the store the terrific book called Mothering By the Book: The Power of Reading Aloud to Overcome Fear and Recapture Joy by Jennifer Pepito (Bethany House; $16.99) that comes with a lovely foreword by the great Sally Clarkson. We shouldn’t forget the wonderful work of Sarah Mackenzie (founder of “Read Aloud Revival”) and her book The Read Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids (Zondervan; $18.99.)

I like more reflective books on kid’s books as well. I can’t say enough about the stunning Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls by Mitali Perkins (Broadleaf; $24.99.) You really should read it!  Recently, I’ve been dipping in to my old copies of the marvelous Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult by Bruce Handy (Simon & Schuster; $17.00) and the somewhat eccentric and deep Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature by Jonathan Cott (University of Minnesota Press; $19.95.) There is in the new edition a forward by the ever brilliant (and perfectly suited for this nearly mysterious project) Maria Popova, founder of the weekly email newsletter, The Marginalian. As Jerry Griswold wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times Book Review,

“This book is a serious, even profound study of complex writers and the depth concealed under the hard-wrought simplicity of their stories.” 

Perhaps that is what some of the myriad authors in Wild Things and Castles in the Sky are getting at, which is why I loved it so. There is so much going on in “hard-wrought” simple stories that end up being not so simple after all. Co-editor of Wild Things, educator Carey Bustard, offers her kid’s lit reviews in her chapter framed by notions of goodness, beauty, and truth.  Artist and songwriter Matthew Clark’s piece mentions fantasy novelist George MacDonald and how he “gently scratches the surface to release the delicious fragrance of goodness.” Joy Strawbridge’s entry on Middle Grade Fiction is called “Growing Holy Imagination.” That’s it, isn’t it?!

In a chapter on suffering called “Cracks in the Creation”, Ashley Artavia Novalis writes wisely about various sorts of kid’s books that approach this tender topic with great empathy. Recalling a memorable Mister Rogers’ episode about the assassination of Robert F Kennedy she tells how Mister Rogers offered “a masterclass in how families can help children grieve and serves as a prime example of one of Mister Rogers’ key philosophies behind the neighborhood: “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”” 

“In the same way,” Novalis continues, “good stories of adversity provide a language for suffering.” 

Which brings me to…

Stories of My Life Katherine Paterson  (Westminster John Knox) $22.00                                                 OUR BOOKNOTES 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $17.60

Which brings me to one of the great patron saints of 20th century (and early 21st century) children’s literature, the extraordinary Katherine Paterson. Had I been asked to do a chapter in a book like Wild Things and Castles in the Sky I’d have surely told of my own learning to love children’s books as an adult while reading (or listening to) Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, and Jacob Have I Loved, three of the most esteemed and honored of Paterson’s dozens of books. I will never forget the spectacular talk she gave at the 1998 Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing on the role of the imagination, the best of the keynotes that year, sandwiched between Elie Weisel and John Updike. She tells about that lecture, and staying in the Grand Rapids home of the legendary writer (and Calvin prof) Gary Schmidt for that weekend, when she got the phone call saying she won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award, in her new book of memories, Stories of My Life. It is utterly magnificent, touching, and I found it captivating — a gentle but absolute page-turner!

I was very moved by this sprawling set of memories from her life, including what she has learned about parents and grandparents on her side of the family — she was a Womeldorf; her mother came from a grand Southern family, the Goetchius’s. We learn a bit about the colorful stories of her late husband — he was a Paterson (“with one t” she noticed, quickly) whose own father had very colorful years of, among other things, serving in World War One, being gassed, losing a leg, and being treated for TB. It is very nicely written with a calm and no-nonsense style. It was truly lovely, without being luminous, engaging without pretension. She says firmly in the beginning that it is not a memoir. It is, as the title sensibly proclaims, a set of stories from her life.

And what a life she has led. I can hardly say enough about this wonderful read about a wonderful Christian woman whose contribution to (and fame in) the world of contemporary children’s literature is nearly unsurmountable. She is, certainly, one of the great children’s writers of these times.

How can I persuade you to order this handsome volume full of entertaining and edifying stories of a life well lived? If you do not know that she was born in China (her parents were medical missionaries) who fled as a little one during the Japanese invasion, and who returned, only to be exiled again (mostly due to tensions with the communists that time) and you do not know that she herself was a Presbyterian missionary in Japan, if you do not know her moving stories like Bridge to Terabithia and her several nonfiction books about the role of the imagination and of faithful but not overtly religious storytelling, I hardly know where to begin. Any good library would have her many out of print children’s titles and now you can easily learn about her life and times.

Here are just a few fascinating and enjoyable moments you will encounter if you order Stories From My Life.

Firstly, you know you are in for a treat (and will be walking among the gods of stories) when you open the book to find a fabulous short intro by none other than Kate DiCamillo. She highlights a key moment of vulnerability in the narrative when she alerts us to Katherine’s story of being a child (home from the Chinese mission field, wearing second-hand clothing, a bit shy, and seemingly not welcomed into her new school) and not receiving any Valentine Day cards in school. Kate notes that Katherine writes that she told her mother many years later about this and she was, of course, aghast. Mother wondered why Katherine never wrote about the hurtful incident. As DiCamillo recalls, Katherine “answered her by saying, “All my books are about the day I didn’t get any valentines.”

And then, in her own great gift, the great Kate DiCamillo says:

This book is a valentine.

It is Katherine’s Valentine to her parents and to her children. It is her Valentine to life and to stories.

It is her valentine to us.

Kate Dicamillo also has badgered Katherine to include the story of Maude, a relative of her grandfather’s who was the last person to kiss Robert E. Lee, who, in turn kissed little Katherine. DiCamillo loved the story so, she threatened to write it up herself if Katherine didn’t write it down. So, yes, here is the bit about Lee, although, personally, I enjoyed the episode about her brother and the bones of Lee’s famous horse, Traveller. You will have to read it to discover that yourself.

The second foreword is so endearing and masterfully written and insightful that I’ve read it twice — it is by writer Nancy Price Graff and she tells of the twosome’s weekly lunch at a diner in their town in Vermont. For over twenty years the women have grown old together in their regular Naugahyde booth. Paterson has written 40-some books in fifty years, performing what she calls “the fragile magic” of spinning stores for children and young adults. But she doesn’t talk about her writing or much about her fame. 

“Week after week,” Graff writes,

…one of the great storytellers in the world has told me the story of her exceptional life. Diners no more than three feet away, deep into their meatloaf, are oblivious to the presence of the former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, the winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. It would never cross their minds that the gray-haired woman sitting two booths over, wearing a turtleneck and a pink sweater, might have had dinner last week with the librarian of Congress or the empress of Japan.

The stories are not exactly chronological and in fact, starts with a good piece responding to “Three Frequently Asked Questions.” I was hooked. In one of these early pages she tells of being at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia. (Now known as Union, it was started when there was a need for theological education for women headed to the mission field or into educational tasks since the Presbyterian churches were not yet ordaining women so women were not as likely to attend a seminary like Princeton, say.) One of her favorite professors stopped her in the hall — he has been reading her exam —and said in made her wonder if she ever thought of being a writer.

Now I, the lifelong reader, the summa cum laude graduate in English literature, knew what great writing was, so how could Dr. Little imagine, on the basis of an essay on an exam, that I could be a writer? ‘No,’ I said primly. I had no intention of being a writer because I wouldn’t want to add another mediocre writer to the world.

Well, the prof pushed back, wondering if perhaps that was exactly what God was calling her to do.  Katherine tell us simply:

It was hard to imagine that God needed a lot more mediocre writers in the world, so I didn’t become a writer or movie star. I became a missionary.

Her first piece of writing, by the way, was a great Sunday school book for middle school age kids published in 1966, Who Am I?, which is still in print from Eerdmans. She was by then home from her Japanese mission experience (1957 – 1961), had married John whom she had met at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and was teaching in Pennington NJ, while John attended Princeton. By ’66 they had moved to Tacoma Park, MD.

One of the opening questions in that long opening chapter was “How does it feel to be famous?” Children and others ask this at book readings and interviews and it is a question she is not fully comfortable with. She tends to be shy, although has learned to be brave. She tells of being at very fancy dinners at a head table and being ignored. She has been shunted here and there on book tours and speaking engagements and sometimes mistreated. She reports that she’d come home whining to her husband that she is not treated “like a human being.”  This reveals both her insecurities, it seems, and her life’s overarching principle — that people, made in God’s image, should be treated with understanding and kindness. This matter of being uncared for comes up over and over and I found it quite gripping. Near the end of Stories… she admits that she wrote The Great Gilly Hopkins after pondering a question of how it would feel to be considered disposable. 

The Paterson’s have adopted two children, one from Hong Kong and one an indigenous Native baby. She and her husband were great parents, it seems. They have been foster parents, too, and it was painfully difficult. “After The Great Gilly Hopkins was published, I realized, belatedly, that I had put two foster children in the story. I might not have been Gilly. I might well have been William Ernest.”

She was an honorable child, usually, it seems, but playful and adventurous (and a good reader, bored with early school book readers.) There are stories of family in China, and of being back in the US, a “home” she did not know, of course. (Today we call this phenomenon being “third culture kids.”) Her parents loved her dearly, even though there were harrowing times of her dad being on Chinese riverboats trying to smuggle life-saving medicines and supplies to Christian hospitals for the Chinese people. There were times when he’d to travel undetected for remarkable distances, keeping away from the Japanese invaders and the young communists and certain military officials. What a story!

(Her parent’s backgrounds were fascinating themselves. She is somehow distantly related to Mark Twain. After WW I her father was cared for by a Mrs. Lathrop Brown, whose husband was a special assistant to the Department of Interior, high up in the Wilson administration. She had been a New York debutante and her husband had been Franklin Roosevelt’s roommate at Harvard. As a disabled veteran, he was fortunate to have her as a caregiver and she stayed in touch with her parents until she died. In fact, she sent boxes of children’s books to little Katherine in China. When they were exiled from China and spent an awful time in 1938 as refugees, she had arranged for a chauffeur to meet them at the boat in New York harbor.)

Katherine’s time in Japan is explained and there are a few memorable stories. It doesn’t take much —she’s working that ‘fragile magic’ — and I was in tears at a going away party which had a Japanese pastor reading Ephesians 2:14 (a personal favorite, about the dividing walls being broken down in Christ) and Paul’s revolutionary words in Galatians 3:28. It is especially powerful knowing that Katherine had admitted that she had trained to return to her native China. Going there on mission was not to be and when she was assigned to Japan — the feared and despised enemy that had attacked China (and perpetrated atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking in 1937) — it caused turmoil in her soul. Of course she went and then, knowing the language and caring for the people, a Japanese pastor says,

Katherine is young, I am old. She is a woman, I am a man. She is American. I am Japanese. When she was the child of missionaries in China, I was a colonel in the occupying army in Manchuria. She comes from the Presbyterian tradition, I come from the Pentecostal. The world would think it is impossible that she and I should love each other. But Christ has broken down the barriers that should divide us. We are one in Christ Jesus.

After her own sermonizing just a bit, she notes how the influence of Japan is evident in all her work. “My first three novels are set there, as well as the beautiful picture book The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, whose illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillard garnered a Boston-Globe-Horn Book Award.” She has translated some Japanese folk tales, as well, illustrated by the award-winning Suekichi Akab. She quietly notes that she wouldn’t be the writer she is if it were not for her four years in ministry there. “To be loved by people you thought hated you is an experience I wish everyone could have.” 

“To be loved by people you thought hated you is an experience I wish everyone could have.”

She loved her job as a teacher, then, first in 1955 reading aloud to poor rural kids in a one-room school in Virginia. Oooh, was she irritated that these kids were all said to be dumb because they supposedly had done poorly on IQ tests. These kids were not dumb! (And she henceforth distrusted standardized tests.) She doesn’t think she was much of a teacher but she gave them good experiences (including a trip to the National Zoo in DC that, trust me, was a great episode to read about.)

What I lacked in pedagogical skill, I made up for by reading aloud — everything fromThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Huckleberry Finn to Shakespeare. Macbeth was a class favorite — all that gore. I’m sure I skipped and explained airway through several pages of the play, but they had a taste of greatness anyhow.

I choked back tears when she tells of going to visit the little school in Lovettsville years later while passing through the region. It was now a community center so she found the newer building. School had just closed but teachers were there, cleaning up as they do on their last day. Katherine marveled at the well-stocked library. Nobody had time, really, to chat until it became evident that she used to teach there and some old-timer had some recollections of people she had known decades beforehand they realized who she was. Oh, were they pleased, confident that Bridge to Terabithia’s Lark Creek was based on Lovettsville. The current sixth grade teacher said that he tells their students that each year and they never believe him. She assured him that he was right. 

She also taught for a while in a Methodist boys school, teaching the Bible. There’s a great story there about a boy complaining about how all the kings of the Old Testament seemed to be getting killed and how irrelevant that all was. Before she could even answer, the classroom door was thrown open. “The history master was standing in the doorway, ashen faced. ‘The president has been shot,’ he said.”

She comments,

Without a word, we filed out into the common area where there was a large television set and watched in horror until Walter Cronkite finally announced the news that Kennedy was dead. The boys didn’t try to argue about the stupidity of the ancient Hebrew ever again.

This is a typical passage — casually reported yet full of pathos, poignant, even, and sort of sly. There are some fun laughs in the book —her young married life was hard and she had four young children (two of two different races) and yet she and her husband made do and did well. It’s a glorious part of the book, hearing about their married life and her efforts as a parent. 

One of the most moving stories comes at about page 270 as she tells of her son, David, finally getting a good friend; Katherine had been diagnosed with cancer and worried about her children, but David, especially, needed a good pal. And then one day he met Lisa. Who — to cut a tender story short — was suddenly killed, struck by lightning at Bethany Beach. This was, of course, the genesis of the tragic story of a boy/girl friendship and the way youth cope with death that became Bridge to Terabithia. (You may recall that in that story they read The Chronicles of Narnia together.) She hardly wanted to finish writing the story and tells of putting off doing the chapter when Leslie Burke would die. 

And to think Bridge to Terabithia has been maligned and banned! To think we have been criticized for carrying it!  

It is fascinating how Katherine Paterson has often written about serious things. Her story of struggling with her first novel, The Sign of the Chrysanthemum, comes to mind. It is nicely told and she tells us much, but she offhandedly observes that she was doing a juvenile novel set in 12th century Japan (with a storyline of ancient civil strife, poverty, and which included trafficking and a brothel) at the same time that the nation’s number one best seller of adult fiction was a calming, almost silly narrative about a seagull named Jonathan. If you are a baby boomer, you know what she means.

There are fun things to learn while reading Stories of My Life. She has a whole chapter called “Pets” and it involves more than their beloved dogs. Yes, the great Gilly Hopkins is named after Gerard Manley Hopkins. Jacob Have I Loved came out of thorny ground and a difficult time — her editor, the famous Virginia Buckley, had to push and pull to get her to develop it suitably. She missed the first Newbery Award press conference when a plane couldn’t land —Peter Spier was the only one who made it and he “single-handedly charmed the press and the American Library Association, melting the heart of blizzard-bound Chicago.” The story of what she allowed her kids to do with the first Newbery Award check —one thousand dollars was the prize amount and it was the most disposable income they ever had —is cute and made me chuckle. Her “self-effacing humor and extraordinary humility” (as the Publishers Weekly starred review put it) shines through over and over.  

Early on Paterson notes that there were stories she heard growing up as the family did the dishes together. She wondered why many of these stories were not passed on to her own now grown children and grandchildren. You never told us that, they’d exclaim. (The answer is easy — they had a dishwashing machine which eroded such family time.) In a way, this book was written for her own loved ones. She set about finding diaries and letters and researched things in far away courthouses and museums to get more information behind the anecdotal stories she grew up with. She added much from her own life, her writing career, her travels around the world as an internationally known figure promoting children’s literacy and the imaginative arts. 

We still have a copy of Gary Schmidt’s great 1994 biography — her Flip Flop Girl  had just come out, I think — simply called Katherine Paterson. Now, in Stories of My Life we have her own amazing story, told in her own way and in her own voice.

I will not spoil the last two chapters but they are tender and touching. The very last is short but she ponders that one famous reviewer said, looking back over her work, said that she is a writer of hope. Indeed. But there is something behind that, she insists, and it is the Biblical doctrine of grace. She cites the words to the hymn Come Thou Font of Every Blessing. She is now 90, doing well, and active at the First Presbyterian Church in Barre, VT, where, as she puts it, she has “experienced the true communion of the saints.” It is a lovely ending to a marvelously entertaining book.

++++

TO PLACE AN ORDER

PLEASE READ  AND THEN CLICK ON THE “ORDER HERE” LINK BELOW.

It is helpful if you tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders.

The weight and destination of your package varies

but you can use this as a 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 the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but can be slow. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $3.69; 2 lbs would be $4.36.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 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 $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much 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 take longer than USPS. 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.

– DON’T FORGET TO LET US KNOW WHAT SHIPPING METHOD YOU PREFER –

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF