Lots of books for different sorts of pastors and their needs. ON SALE NOW (Hearts & Minds) 20% OFF

If you missed last week’s BookNotes due to the long holiday weekend that some Americans enjoyed, we invite you to check it out here. Although I highlighted a few fairly recent books that are useful for living well as leaders and church workers, I reviewed two significant new books. One was called Metanoia: How God Radically Transforms People, Churches, and Organizations From the Inside Out (by the prolific missional author and Aussie gadfly Alan Hirsch.) The other one called The Scandal of Leadership (by JR Woodward) studies the question of nurturing wise and Christ-like leadership by taking on the principalities and powers (and domineering leadership styles) a theme not explored in any other leadership book I know.

The other day I talked to a pastor about these very books. He wondered if they were for him, heady and well-footnoted as they are. He seemed by his own account a bit lackluster, not burned out, but demoralized by all the things you can imagine might demoralize an otherwise Godly Christian worker.

Which got me thinking.

I figured in this BookNotes I’d just share a bunch of books that might bring refreshment and stimulation for pastors young or old, nothing too heavy. None of these are a silver bullet and none should be the only book a pastor reads for his or her professional development but I sincerely think these could be helpful to any tired leader. The list isn’t comprehensive and tilts towards mostly recent titles. (Although don’t miss the three classics at the end, one dating to 1974.) If you are a minister looking for a nice read, or wondering what book to use in a collegial book group, or if you want to gift your pastor with a book, maybe some of these might help.

All are, as always, available at the Hearts & Minds bookstore here in south central Pennsylvania, or you can easily order them at our website. The links below lead to where you can safely enter credit card digits (or just ask us for an invoice so you can pay later if you’d rather.) Scroll all the way down so you don’t miss anything and see the order link at the end. Thanks.

Again, for the record, some of these are written to and for pastors or other congregational leaders. I’m pitching this BookNotes to the pastors among us, even though I know most readers and customers are not clergy.

 

I do hope everybody realizes that most of these are, in fact, good for anyone wanting some nice reading and while I say these are “for a pastor” you can stretch that a bit with almost all of these. Also, maybe you know a pastor or two. Feel free to share. Thanks.

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO BRUSH UP ON CREATIVE WAYS TO SPEAK ABOUT GOD

Speaking of God: An Essential Guide to Christian Thought Anthony G. Siegrist (Herald Press) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

The back cover asks “Do you ever think you’re forgetting how to talk about God?” Theology is, this author asserts, nothing more or less than speaking together about God. Still, “a lot of us don’t know where to start.”

Siegrist is a Canadian Mennonite who has written for Missio Alliance and reminds us of “common threads of thought and practice across traditions.” His missional vision is savvy, but at heart, he is thinking that the unfolding drama of Scripture — the “sweeping epic” as he calls it — is the “scaffold” for this accessible book. He’s upbeat and clever, and plumbs the depths of all manner of writers, thinkers, mystics, pastors. I like that the back cover blurbs are from a Lutheran (Dorothy Bass), a Wesleyan from West Virginia, and a Kierkegaard guy, the dean of theology at Westminster Theological Centre, an innovative British ministry that tilts a bit charismatic. Something for everyone!

God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of Christian Faith Will Willimon (Abingdon Press) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

Okay, it ain’t Frederick Buechner who was known for several theological alphabet books. It is nearly an homage to him, a good, maybe better, theological handbook written in the form of a deceptively simple ABC book. Grant, Willimon is not an award winning novelist and memoirs, but he is a darn good storyteller (and has, for the record, written both a novel and a memoir.) He’s not Presbyterian, like Buechner was, nor was he quite as urbane, although he was the chaplain at Duke for a while. Down home Southern, Methodist, a Barth scholar and lover of God’s church, this really is an amazing book. A Central Texas Conference bishop said “Reading God Turned Toward Us is like walking through a diamond mine.” Nearly every page is worth the price of the book. As the back cover puts it, “The challenge of the Christian life is learning to talk Christian. Somebody has got to tell us, give us the words that open the door to the faith called Christian. Each of us is due the delight of discovery in submitting to God’s talk to us.”

The book is organized by “the words the church teaches us to use to talk about ordinary life apprehended by a God who is Jesus Christ.” These are short, meditative reflections upon key concepts that guide Christians, new or longstanding.

Kenneth Carder, himself a retired bishop in the United Methodist Church, notes:

This is no ordinary book about Christian belief and practices. Rather, it is a sometimes jarring, always interesting, consistently insightful and persistently provocative invitation to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christian discipleship.

The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of the Christian Faith Trevin Wax (IVP) $24.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

This medium sized hardback is itself a handsome book, and it is well worth having. No matter what theological persuasion you, dear reader, find yourself in, it’s an exceptionally erudite and energetic reminder of the core stuff, paradoxes and all. It invites us to a beautiful orthodoxy, to truth seen and experienced as a grand adventure — think Chesterton, or Lewis, maybe — and what Katie McCoy called “the consuming wonder.” It is, doubtlessly, a clarion call to the historic Christian faith, without being overly narrow.

Trevin Wax shows that traditional orthodox Christianity might not be as glossy and glamorous as Christianity gone worldly, but it is ancient, majestic, global, and glorious. It is a tried and tested alternative to the faddish and fragmentary fakes that masquerade as Christianity in some places. Trevin is not pushing dry doctrine but passing on fresh fire that is thousands of years old.  –Michael F. Bird, academic dean and lecturer in New Testament at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia

The Love That Is God: An Invitation to the Christian Faith Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (Eerdmans) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

When we reviewed this a year or so ago a number of thoughtful customers just raved. They really liked it and one person ordered more. I figured that it was ideal for those interested in Christian theology but not wanting a tome or a text. This small book is poetic and glorious, even if rooted in profoundly serious, ecumenical Christian theology. The author is a renowned Catholic professor at Loyola University in Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral. I have never met him.

Stanley Hauerwas, no slouch himself, says “I cannot help but believe that this book is destined to become a classic.” Wesley Hill says “This book made we want to become a Christian all over again.” For the right kind of reader, this reflection breathing new life into the ancient claim that God is Love can bring new ideas and deep renewal, I’m sure of it.

Sarah Coakley wrote the foreword and she insists that:

This is a book that takes us back to the raw basics of our faith and restores hope in the cruciform God of Love of whom it speaks so eloquently.

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO BE RE-INSPIRED BY THE BIBLE

Re-Enchanting the Text:  Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious Cheryl Bridges Johns (Brazos Press) $22.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

Okay, this, too, maybe isn’t as simple as I’d wish for this list, but it’s a marvelous, new study and I’m convinced it is going to provoke fresh thinking about the Scriptures. Here’s the straightforward thesis of this serious book: “In an age when the Bible has been stripped of its sacredness and mystery and functional biblical illiteracy reigns, this book makes the case that we must work to re-enchant the text in order to return the Bible to its rightful place in the lives of Christians.”

Dr. Johns got her PhD from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary even though she, herself, is Pentecostal. The scholarly Pentecostal icon Amos Yong raves. A professor from Duke eagerly says it provides “a way forward.” Holy smokes, even Walter Brueggemann exclaims, “One can only voice a vigorous ‘yes’ to this wise and welcome book.” Lisa Bowens (of Princeton Theological Seminary says it is “powerful and compelling.” Okay, then. I think it may be just what you need.

This book amounts to a bold Pentecostal intervention in current discussions about the theological interpretation of Scripture. Johns’s vision for a Pentecostal ontology of Scripture is not just for Pentecostals–it is a gift to the church catholic, born at Pentecost.– James K. A. Smith, Calvin University; author of How (Not) to Be Secular, Thinking in Tongues, and You Are What You Love

Sacred Belonging: A 40-Day Devotional on the Liberating Heart of Scripture Kat Armas (Brazos Press) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

Oh my, this brand new book deserves a bigger review, but just know that it is arranged as a set of short readings, but they are unlike nearly any you’ve read before. They are a tad quirky, passionately engaged, deeply transformative, loyal to Christ and His Kingdom, which is to say, written with an out to the outcast and outsider.

You may know her great book Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us about Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength. This new one, Sacred Belonging, is, in the words of Arielle Astoria (a poet, author, and spoken word artist) “an invitation into a deep, expansive, and healing way of encountering Scripture.”  Looks amazing!

Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters Carmen Joy Imes (IVP Academic) $22.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

One of my favorite books this year, and one of the great new friends of Beth and me this year, Being God’s Image by Biblical scholar Carmen Joy Imes is a delight, a provocation, a reminder, a stimulation, a great study of what the founding creation narratives have to say to us today. What does it mean to be human? How does our gender matter? What is our relationship to the Earth itself? Importantly, how does the Bible shape our understanding of our life and times?

The cofounder of the well-loved and widely respected Bible Project, Tim Mackie, calls it “an accessible and profound exploration of this most important Biblical theme.” There is a remarkable forward by J. Richard Middleton, and if he thinks it’s important, you should read it. Hooray.

Harvest of Hope: A Contemplative Approach to Holy Scriptures Mark McIntosh & Frank Griswold (Eerdmans) $22.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I have discussed this in previous BookNotes suggesting it is a great addition to the growing number of books which invite us to a contemplative, prayerful engagement with the Scriptures, a lovely and holy experience by two elder statements (McIntosh died in 2021) within the Episcopalian church. It’s a very special book.  See, also, by the way, the lovely companion volume that they did together, Seeds of Faith: Theology and Spirituality at the Heart of Christian Belief (Eerdmans; $24.99.)

FOR ANYONE NEEDING TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUNGER VOICES OUTSIDE THE CHURCH

Hear Us Out: Six Questions on Belonging and Belief Sue Pizor Yoder and Co.Lab.Inq (Fortress Press) $24.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

I’ve mentioned this before and it is so very interesting, I just have to tell you again. Anyone interested in unchurched young adults will want to hear these narratives describing the bunches of conversations this team had, mostly with folks in the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania. The team found both the nones and the dones (that is, those that have no religious affiliation — as in “none of the above” on the religious survey and those that once did but are “done with that.”)

The book includes a lovely bit of description of the desires and hope and methodologies of the team (made up mostly of pastors) did the research and it tells, often with great eloquence, their own surprise in the things the interviewees told them. The ideas that emerge from the research are generous, and, in a way, points mostly to the need for us all to share our stories, to listen well to “co-create a more just world, and take seriously the call to Love.” Brian McLaren wrote a fabulous foreword and we learn much important stuff for congregations that want to (as he puts it) “learn to welcome emerging generations into their midst.”

FOR A PASTOR WHO IS TIRED AND NEEDING TO DEVELOP SPIRITUAL RHYTHMS

The Weary Leader’s Guide to Burnout: A Journey from Exhaustion to Wholeness Sean Nemecek (Zondervan) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

There is a virtual cottage industry these days releasing often very good books on clergy burnout. There are books about the physical ill-health of many pastors, books about stress and tension and unbearable expectations. From time management to dealing with faith-based conflict, being a Christian leader is hard work. Many of the books are wise and thoughtful.

I highlight this one because it is readable, fairly concise, and really wise. To respond to this epidemic of burnout, Nemecek gives us not only a helpful diagnosis but a guide to recovery (or, better, prevention.) His wife is the acclaimed published poet Amy Nemecek (The Language of Birds) so that’s nice, too. He is a regional director in Western Michigan for “Pastor-in-Residence Ministries, which coaches pastors into recovery from ministerial stress.

Sacred Strides: The Journey to Belovedness in Work and Rest Justin McRoberts (Thomas Nelson) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Okay, first this: I’ve raved about this before, encouraging Hearts & Minds friends of all sorts to buy it. I admitted, though, that it is casual and upbeat with lots of stories, including some very funny ones. Justin is a dear friend, a mentor to many, nearly a spiritual director to artists and leaders and others who are culture-makers maybe a bit off the beaten path. He’s a singer-songwriter, pretty hip, and refreshingly honest about his own journey, his own soul, the stuff he’s learned the hard way. Serious as all this may be, he’s not just an upbeat writer, he is hilarious.

Sacred Strides nicely uses the image of walking, one foot, the next foot, the stride. That is, it is not about an arbitrary “balance” between work and rest. It truly is about rhythms and practices, about the joy of work and the necessity of rest, over together, as we learn to lean on God. All of it moves us to a space where we can know we are beloved, truly so. Unless you like your religious books to be necessarily stodgy or arcane, this book is a must. Love it.

The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World Tamara Hill Murphy (Herald Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This is another book that will surely be on our “best of 2023” list later this year, and is both a simple invitation (“into a life ordered by restful rhythms of listening and love” and a call to develop some sort of a Rule of Life. This is not arcane or weird or overly monastic; she makes a fine case, beautifully, for the ancient Benedictine wisdom becoming a lively and fruitful part of our modern lifestyle.

It could be an uphill climb since some of that language of “rules” is foreign to us, or maybe has been hurtful, if you’ve been a part of an overly zealous rules-based religious background. Trust me, A Spacious Path is just that, spacious, inviting us to the journey, a way, a path. It is a restful and healing journal, a helpful guidebook, a beckoning.

Clergy will hopefully know a bit of this language but the book is beautifully written, mixing personal narrative and solid teaching and ancient sources. There are guided prayers and meaningful reflections. It’s a great tool, a lovely resource to lean into. Highly recommended.

Tamara is a person we respect, a writer whose works have shown up in fabulous places like Plough and Englewood Review of Books (she quotes Joan Chittister and Dorothy Day and Annie Dillard and other top flight writers) and is a trainer of spiritual directors. She is a lay leader in the Anglican Church of North America and a mature, lovely writer.

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO REFRESH HIS OR HER SPIRITUALITY

The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts Jeff Crosby (Broadleaf Books) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I have raved about this before so consider this your reminder that, yes, you really did intend to get this but never got around to it yet. Pastors will love the storytelling stuff that will inspire sermons and the deepest truths that so eloquently open up reflection and spiritual pondering. Of course the book isn’t just for ministers, not at all, but I highlight it here as an easy read that could be truly refreshing for those needing some organization to their teaching, longing, hoping. It’s a great, great book.

There is some stuff, too, about discerning one’s call, about the theme of finding “home” and about learning the language that most deeply resonates with the deepest longings. He famously cites lots of music (of all sorts) since sometimes, ya just need the lyrics of a good ballad, rock songs, or the tones of a jazz piece to capture these sublime things. Again, The Language of the Soul is a treasure, highly recommended for leaders who need to learn, well, this peculiar insight about our heart’s deepest longings. You will find it an invaluable help, I am sure.

Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality David Bender (IVP /formatio) $17.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.60

There are so many good, rich, thoughtful, transformative books on spiritual disciplines and practices one hardly knows where to begin. I often, for meaty readers, suggest Ruth Haley Barton and Richard Foster. This, those, is short and powerful, reminding us beautifully that “Only God deserves absolute surrender because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.” There is a tender forward by M. Basil Pennington, and a nice set of reflection questions.

 

Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can’t Be Taught (and Why That’s Okay) Carl McColman (Eerdmans) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I nearly devoured this book, realizing I needed to slow down and ponder its delightful truths, its powerfully honest stories, its Biblical hints and its call to silence, to trust. McColman is the author of many books on classic church spirituality, contemplative practices, and discovering encounters with God through the mystical tradition. (See, for instance, his Big Book of Christian Mysticism,) Here, as a Lay Cistercian, he tells of discovering a way of knowing God that is beyond dogma, not constrained by perfect doctrine or certainty about stuff, just embracing a God who meets us at every step. (Hey, preacher and teacher — let the provocative title of this book sink in just a bit. Ha!)  Unteachable Lessons is lovely, a bit edgy, but what the extraordinary mystical writer Martin Laird calls “sure-footed.” It is also what Marilyn McIntyre calls “deft and funny.” Did I mention I really, really liked it? Surprisingly so.

James Martin, the funny and prolific Jesuit (who has a brand new big one, by the way, called Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’s Greatest Miracle) says of Unteachable…

Riveting, inspiring, and beautifully written, a moving account of finding God admits both the laughter and tears in life.

Bearing God: Living a Christ-Formed Life in Uncharted Water Marlena Graves (NavPress) $10.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $8.79

A brand new one, written by the author of the award-winning The Way Up Is Down, this little book is slim, and creatively written, offering “stories and teaching about discerning God’s will and discerning a sense of call in the midst of life’s storms.” It’s an extended and playful riff on Mark 4. I’ve just started it and it’s so good.

Graves makes the point that as believers “we are all little vessels carrying Jesus.” Our lives, the boats in which we carry Christ and his gospel, will venture out to sea… How do we respond when the storms come? How imaginative is that?

This book is, one reviewer said, “brimming with keen theological insight and personal stories speaking with a voice for the marginalized.” Drawing on diverse quotes from St. Ireneus and the Desert Fathers and Mothers right up to the likes of Fight Club and Tattoos of the Heart, it is a neat little book. Short and sweet and an ideal little read to refresh you in your task.

FOR A PASTOR NEEDING SOME REASSURANCE AND SELF-CARE

Now I Become Myself: How Deep Grace Heals Our Shame and Restores Our True Self Ken Shigematsu (Zondervan) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Okay, I’d refer you back to my previous rave review of this potent and beautiful self-help book that invites us to grapple with our “true self” and to let go of shame and dysfunction. It does this, though, in the most faithful and spiritually mature way — by inviting us to understand the God who loves us, breath in the gospel itself, and develop intentional practices of contemplative spirituality that can create space for God to do God’s work.

Super-busy pastor John Mark Comer — who wrote the hip and fabulously interesting The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry —  says:

Utterly wonderful. Emotionally attuned, self-aware, thoroughly researched, well written, seamlessly blending theology, spirituality, psychology, rooted in ancient practices and yet culturally engaged: there’s so many good things I could say about this book, but the main thing is: read it.

I could say this for most of the books on this list, but I feel like I should underscore it here: shame-based fears and hurts seem nearly ubiquitous and, pastors, you may want to have a few of these around to share with folks you talk with. Right?

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO BE REMINDED TO KEEP ON THEIR TOES

Keep Christianity Weird: Embracing the Discipline of Being Different Michael Frost (NavPress) $7.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $6.39

I said I wanted to keep my suggestions on this list fairly quick reads, mostly easy stuff. This one is quite short, pocket-sized, and backs an oversized wallop. And it’s a hoot. You know that phrase “Keep Austin Weird”? It seems some other cities have adopted that kooky vision, not making their place just a tourist trap like every other place, but affirming their eccentricities, their edge, not being afraid to let their freak flag fly. So it may be with the best local churches.n Can we, too, “keep Christianity weird?” The back cover puts it allusively, but you’ll get it:

“Jesus Is Different. Go and do likewise.” I know, right?

We are to be off-center, unique, not “of” this world. So let’s resist the allure of acceptability, and “get back to the unsafe roots of our faith.” You’ll be challenged and chagrined. Smile away and get serious.

Why the Gospel? Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose Matthew W. Bates (Eerdmans) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

In an adult Sunday School class in our church last week I was going on about the truest understanding of the gospel. We showed the spectacular, brief, Bible Project video called “What is the Gospel?” and underscored the Biblical teaching that the regime change that has happened in the resurrected Jesus, the creation-redeeming vision inaugurated by Jesus known as the Kingdom of God, is what the very good gospel really is all about. In contrast to more sentimental liberal views or more dogmatic fundamentalist views, this Kingdom vision really helps us frame the “God with Us” new-creation promises of the Scriptures.

Anyway, this small book is as keen on this stuff as any I’ve read, and a quick, but provocative read. It is a book not just asking what the gospel is but why it is so needed. It is a bold reminder that Jesus is King. I wish every pastor and church teacher would wrestle with it.

FOR A PASTOR NEEDING TO PRAY

Morning and Evening Prayers Cornelius Plantinga (Eerdmans) $20.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.79

This hand-sized hardback remains a treasure for those wanting a sets of small prayers, each “expressing some essential Christian longing on behalf of self and others — for faith, hope, love, wisdom, gratitude, peace — and which yet also makes space for any state of heart of mind by rejoicing with all who rejoice and weeping with all who weep.”

Plantinga is a gracious and thoughtful writer, the president emeritus of Calvin Theological Seminary. Very, very nice.

Kneeling with Giants: Learning to Pray with History’s Best Teachers Gary Neal Hansen (IVP) $24.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

I wanted to recommend books on this list that were short and accessible, really useful for busy pastors. This one is meaty and lengthy, so, sorry. Yet, I happily mention it here because it is simply the best book I know of for clergy wanting to deepen their prayer lives. (Or to teach others the same.) The chapters are really interesting, there is some great information about various Christian leaders — from early church folks to medieval saints to Calvin and Luther, up to a few contemporary voices. From each one learns a certain sort of practice — that anonymous Russian monk prayed The Jesus Prayer;  Puritans wrote their prayers, Andrew Murray has much to teach about intercession.

I like that more than once the author invites us not just to study this stuff, but to do it. He’s an excellent, gracious teacher — he was a much-loved seminary prof for years — and knows the hearts and lives of pastors well. Highly recommended.

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO THINK ABOUT HIS OR HER LITURGICAL WORK

A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship W. David O. Taylor (Baker Academic) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

This is a bit scholarly but is invigorating. There is nothing like it in print — nothing! So this, dear brothers and sisters, is a must.  It is exactly about what the subtitle says. And everybody who does anything in worship — from planners, leaders, liturgists, preachers, or in-the-pew worshippers — needs to ponder all of this.

I like this for a bunch of reasons, in part because it explores the body in such a sound and interesting way, offering a foundation not just for understanding worship, but so much of our life in the world. In a sense it is one of those handful of essential studies on what it means to be human and how Christ’s own bodily resurrection might impute righteousness (and, sometimes, healing) to our own. Taylor shows well that all of this is not (as Joel Scandrett of Trinity School for Ministry) puts it, “merely about having a body, but being embodied.

The endorsements are by remarkable thinkers and practitioners, from Rowan Williams to Constance Cherry, from Singapore lecturer and scholar Simon Chan to Northern Seminary’s Beth Felker Jones.

As I’ve indicated, I think this is important for anyone, anytime, but for pastors “wrestling with the long-term impact of the pandemic on our worship practices” it is, as Rowan Williams insists, “an indispensable resource.”

Earth Filled with Heaven: Finding Life in Liturgy, Sacraments, and other Ancient Practices of the Church Aaron Damiani (Mood Press) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

This is a lovely little book, easy to read, handsome to hold, fabulous in style, quick and clarifying. Here’s the thing: Damiani serves as the lead pastor of Immanuel Anglican Church in Chaco. Which is to say, he didn’t used to be an Anglican, so is a recent convert to all things liturgical. (I’m thinking, like, what Anglican or Episcopalian church has a “lead pastor” and not a rector, huh?) So he’s speaking as a newbie, sort of, which makes it ideal for those of us not deeply familiar with or rooted in the sacramental tradition. He raises up the centrality with a lovely zeal and clarity that some books on liturgics seem to miss. He is, after all, a nearly charismatic evangelical.

Soooo, with pastoral warmth, Father Damiani offers “an engaging glimpse into the ancient practices of the historic church — into rhythms that quietly nourish us with the life of Jesus.”

There is stuff in here on the eucharist and baptism, liturgical prayer, and the church calendar, There’s lots of insight about living the Christian life once shaped by profound worship — for instance, how to see the “fallen broken world crammed with the beauty and glory of God.”

I suppose Earth Filled with Heaven isn’t mostly about worship skills, so to speak, but for worship leaders, this “sacramental” worldview may help you take seriously the formative work you do as a liturgist, no matter how informal or contemporary your worship style may be. Nice.

Living Under Water: Baptism as a Way of Life Kevin Adams (Eerdmans) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I did a lengthy review of this months ago and it strikes me that it would be nice to list it here, again. It is one of the great books from the “Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies “ series (edited by the great John D. Witvliet.) There’s a foreword by Cornelius Plantinga, and, if that doesn’t inspire you, you might know that Adams has written other lively and clever books (The Gospel in a Handshake: Framing Worship for Mission, for instance) and this, now, is as interesting as any book I’ve read on the subject. Hooray.

It is at once a theology of baptism, and a story about his own liturgical and worship and congregational practices, a delight to read for anyone who cares about church life and mission outreach. Also, it is a wise and generative rumination on the implications of “living under water” once the baptized comes to know what the heck it is all about. It is pastorally wise, exciting, and ecumenical in the best sense. Covering all sorts of stuff, it is, as counselor Chuck DeGroat says of it, “a happily grounded book.”

I adored Living Under Water, learning of his casual church planting efforts, his sensible gospel appeal to seekers, his discussion of baptism in the setting of the messy, local church, and its great implications for us all. No matter what sort of baptismal practices you and your church promote, this book is really interesting.

What Language Shall I Borrow? The Bible and Christian Worship Ronald Byers (Eerdmans) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

This book now sells for considerably more, but we have some at the earlier price and since it was one of the first in the aforementioned “Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s Liturgical Studies” series, I wanted to name it here. Byars is, shall we say, a fairly conventional, Presbyterian Church guy (professor emeritus of preaching and worship at Union in Richmond) who worked on the wording of the beautiful, PCUSA Book of Common Worship and, decades ago, wrote wisely, if a bit firmly, about the likelihood of an erosion of reverent worship practice with the rise of contemporary and seeker-driven services. With many of our biggest evangelical church worship programs arranged with a bunch of songs from a stage of performers and a cool talk, he is, doubtlessly right.

Many need this book that came out 15 years ago more than ever, I’d say.  It is an important conversation to have. He is asking how worship “soaked in the deep wells of Scripture” can be nourishing to believers and he asks what sorts of communal speech most honors God and communicates wisely to the gathered community.

As it asks on the back, “What language is most appropriate for worship? Should it lean toward the colloquial, perhaps targeting those attending a worship service for the first time? Or should it be a language with deeper roots, the language of a community that, for the most part, already loves the God to whom worship is offered?”

And, I might add, what do we do when many long-time members, who indeed love God passionately, don’t know the Bible, the Biblical language, the lingo and theological meanings of words, stories, phrases?

This is a remarkable study asking important questions but, on its own, is nearly a (scholarly) devotional, with pages of word studies and Bible reflections. It is instructive, eloquent, and a guide to building bridges between ancient words that communicate today.   Leanne Van Dyk of Western Theological Seminary says it is “an indispensable encouragement for pastors and worship leaders.”

By the way, if you don’t know the rich, famously exquiste, very old hymn from which this book takes it’s title, maybe you really should consider it. Ya dig where I’m comin’ from?

FOR A PASTOR INTERESTED IN SHARPENING HIS OR HER PREACHING

Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us Mark Yaconelli (Broadleaf Books) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Okay, this amazingly moving book isn’t about preaching. It’s not a homiletics text. This really is about the amazing gift of storytelling, and reports how Yaconelli has gotten people into rooms to listen to, to receive one another’s deepest stories. He uses this openness to other’s hearts in hard places, actually, even in war-torn militarized zones, and the writing here is exceedingly powerful.

I think I suggest it here because it affirms the power of words, the influence of language, the significance of our human communication. For Yaconelli, himself theologically trained (he was a Presbyterian pastor for a long while) this is holy ground. He gives some advice and tells some stories. It might remind some preachers that, yes, this stuff can really make a difference. What a book.

Preachers Dare: Speaking for God Will Willimon (Abingdon Press) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I know, I know, not every preacher is going to want to read a homiletics text. As much as I’m geeky enough to enjoy any number of them — some are fantastic! — I realize that, oddly, as important as preaching is for most preachers, they generally don’t read up much on the art of preaching. Some want to just trust God, some feel they are too busy writing the darn thing each week and have no time to read about it. And some just trust their own human charm and communication skills to carry them through. I get it.

Preachers Dare is a fascinating book and highly recommended (taking its title, we are told, from a hint by Karl Barth who said “Christian preachers dare to talk about God.” Yup. And with God’s help!

This book is a dissent against homiletics as an exclusively human endeavor (call it, rhetoric) or homiletics as a taxonomy of effective sermon forms and sales (poetics.) Willimon says “The only good reason to bother people with a sermon, the sole rationale for investing a life in this vocation, is theological.

Blurbs on the back of Preachers Dare are really strong. Joni Sancken says it is “a splash of cold water, waking preachers up to the generative power of God’s own triune speech.” The great Paul Scott Wilson says it is written with “sparking wit and deep spiritual insight.” The clever Jason Mitchell makes you want to read it, unless, maybe you’re scared to. You might be “haunted by the truth that the only good reason for someone to show up for your sermon is, that, in it, there will be a word from the Living God.” Wow.

If you are bold enough to have this conversation with your people, you may want to order from us a copy or two of the companion volume by Willimon called  Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon. It’s $16.00; OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59.)

FOR ONE CONCERNED ABOUT THE LOCAL CHURCH

The Church: God’s Word for Today John Stott (IVP) $14.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $11.20

You want short and sweet and solid and stimulating? This is, as award-winning historian Mark Noll says, “a book to a new generation of readers.” This is vintage Stott, drawn from his large book The Contemporary Christian, which has now been broken down into sensible small volumes. This is the center of that big book, less than 100 pages on the value of the church. I think it is more spot on than it was decades ago.

There are four succinct chapters and no pastor will be unmoved by this clear-headed thinking. They are, firstly, the secular challenges to the church, then a section on evangelism through the local church, and then an excellent chapter on dimensions of church renewal, and finally a good piece about the church’s pastors. Kudos to Tim Chester for editing this, bringing it just a bit more up to date. The original preface to the big remains, a wise rumination on time, and living in the middle of the “now but not yet.” A great little resource.

Delighted: What Teenagers Are Teaching the Church About Joy Kenda Creasy Dean, Wesley W. Ellis, Justin Forbes, Abigail Visco Rusert (Eerdmans) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

In the eyes of many, certainly in the eyes of many young people, the word “joy” is not one that is associated with the local church. But, of course, it should be.

What if youth ministry (and discipleship for all ages) is somehow connected to God’s joyful delight in us, which — curiously — as this book shows, is something young people seem to know.  Kara Powell, popular young ministry writer from Fuller Youth Institute, says “After reading Delighted, you’ll love young people differently and you’ll certainly view yourself differently, too.

I suppose this book, written by veteran youth works and theologians of and for youth ministry, is not designed to give hope to struggling congregations, but it sure can’t hurt. It is energetic and smart, exploring the difference between happiness and joy. If we can teach our kids that, it just might rub off on the rest of us.

Youthfront leader Mike King notes that we are in the midst of an “emotionally stressful culture of contempt.”Can “Joy” make a difference? Can we find some faithful way to allow our exuberance to sustain us, even through dull or hard times? This is a book about youth ministry, but I think any congregational leader (or parent) would appreciate it immensely.

When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation Beyond More Money, Programs, and Innovation Andrew Root and Blaire D. Bertrand (Brazos Press) $21.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

I’ve highlighted this before but it’s so good, I wanted to bring it to your attention again. Short, accessible, practical, it draws deeply on the previous, profound (and fairly academic) works of Andrew Root, such as Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age and The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time Against the Speed of Modern Life and The Church After Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship.

(The brand new one in this big and important series is due out in the next few weeks from Brazos and you can PRE-ORDER it from us now: The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms: Why Spiritualities Without God Fail to Transform Us; $28.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19.)

Anyway, When the Church Stops Working is not merely a watered-down summary of those bigger volumes, although that would be one easy way to describe it. It has new content, lots of ideas for faithful, adaptable, ministry. If the bigger volumes analyze the problems of church and culture, this offers guidance for what to do about it, in reasonable, if radically Christian ways. As you might expect he says to put away our gimmicks and strategies and programs and learn what it means to wait on the Lord. Beautiful, human, real. You should get this one, for sure!

The Great Dechurching: Whose Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take To Bring Them Back Jim David & Michael Graham, with Ryan Burge (Zondervan) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

This is already a much talked about resource which offers lots of great and useful data, research you need to know about, exploring what some might say is one of the largest and fastest religious shifts in US history.

One person notes that this shift is bigger than the impact of the First and Second Great Awakenings combined, but “in the opposite direction.” Tens of millions of regular Christian worshippers have decided to stop attending church, leaving, too often, little explanation as to why.

Unlike more academic treatises that are strong on data but not so passionate about real answers for local congregations, or somewhat simplistic evaluations, The Great Dechurching offers sober thinking and practical advice.

The book is based on what is said to be the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America, conducted by trusted sociologists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe.

Becoming the Church: God’s People in Purpose and Power Claude R. Alexander, Jr. (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I hoe you know Bishop Claude Alexander, a senior pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina He severs on any number of boards of important, internationally known para-church groups but is most beloved in his large, multi-ethic church. He’s a great black preacher and his writing is clear-headed, moving, and solid. You may recall his lovely little book Necessary Christianity which we highlighted last year.

He starts this book –which is informed considerably by the book of Acts — admitting that people today have given up on the church. Those within and those who are outsiders disregard the local institution. Yet, God has not given up on it, he insists, and he shows here how we have sometimes forgotten what we are to be about. By looking at how Jesus’s first followers served him and how the Holy Spirit shaped their life together, he hold out the possibility of a renewed 21st century church. This is an imaginative study of the early church with a view of how it help us “become the church.”

There are 15 chapters, upbeat and inspirational, some creative side-bars and a power epilogue. You should check it out. There’s a great study guide in the back, too. Yes!

FOR A LEADER WANTING TO UNDERSTAND THE ALT-RIGHT AND CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church Andrew Whitehead (Brazos Press) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’ve highlighted this before but want to simply say that it seems to me to be a must-read for all of us, and certainly for church leaders who have any right-wing members of their church who are involved in this stuff. Which is to say, most congregations.

Granted, it isn’t an uplifting quick read like many on this list. One reviewer did note that it is “crisply written and utterly compelling.” So there’s that.

We need this book, though. As I showed in the last review, it’s really solid, well known, expertly researched but deeply rooted in the faith community.

And many recommend it.

We need this book. Now. With skill and grace, Whitehead explains the dangerous ideologies undergirding Christian nationalism, traces how it has infected the church, and provides practical guidance for those of us fighting it in our own communities. This is a book you should give to your friends, your family, and your pastor.  — Beth Allison Barr, professor, Baylor University; author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Saving Faith: How American Christianity Can Reclaim Its Prophetic Voice Randall Balmer (Fortress Press) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I said I wanted to keep most of these short and sweet. Balmer’s new Saving Faith is small sized, thin hardback; at under 100 pages it shows how we can reckon with the heritage of complicity in racism and, through stories and analysis and Biblical teaching, invite us to get real and get going. As Rob Wilson-Black puts it, it may seem like “a stinging indictment” but for some of us it will read like a blessing, a “long-awaited healing treatment.”

More can and must be said, but any church leader wondering how to weave this stuff of concern into his or her parish ministry will want to have this on hand.

There is, by the way, an appendix of the tremendous and justly famous 1973 “Chicago Declaration of Social Concern” written by the likes of Hearts & Minds friends and mentors, Ron Sider, John Perkins, Richard Mouw, and Jim Wallis. It was nice to see that reproduced. Right on!

FOR A PASTOR WANTING TO THINK THROUGH HOW TO DISCIPLE OTHERS

Go: Returning Discipleship to the Front Lines of Faith Preston Sprinkle (NavPress) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

I don’t know about you but I’ve often been squeamish about recommending books on disciple-making. We don’t need an overly organized strategic plan and we don’t need formulas since mentoring and life-on-life care-giving should emerge organically from relationships and context. Still this is one I highly recommend as it gives some basic data (compiled by Barna) on what ordinary church folks think the word discipleship means, and how, then to begin to mentor others into a more robust, lived-out faith.

There is some indictment here, but also really great stories and tons of ideas to show how we can do what Jesus did with his earliest followers. We need this fun little book.

Discipleship with Monday in Mind: How Churches Across the Country Are Helping Helping THeir People Connect Faith and Work Skye Jethanie & Luke Bobo (Made to Flourish) $8.50  OUR SALE PRICE = $6.80

Maybe you should do something to help adults think through the implications of their faith for their jobs and careers? Maybe you aren’t ready for a full-blown dive into the faith and work movement, but, geesh, there really are a lot of neat things people are doing. This small book is short but potent, loaded with ideas, showing how real pastors have helped their churches connect faith and work.

This little gem is concise and practical and rare. We are really proud to recommend it.

Spiritual Direction: A Guide to Giving and Receiving Direction Gordon T. Smith (IVP) $15.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.00

Again, this little book is potent, if succinct. As always, Smith has a way of writing profoundly — with not a bit of fluff — and always to the point, with grace. This short book reminds leaders that they are to be companions on the spiritual journey with others. Perhaps you need a spiritual director (this book will help you discern if that is the case and what one might do for you) and how to be one yourself, in a general, pastoral manner which doesn’t entail going to a monastery and being a full time mystic.

This is about the spiritual journey, about how we need not be alone in our questions, and how pastors can help make sense of the spiritual growth of others, with them, offering encouragement and discernment, insight about prayer and the process of hearing the Spirit speak into our lives. This really is an excellent, concise guide to being a spiritual guide or friend, especially for pastors, but truly for anyone.

Color-Courageous Discipleship: Follow Jesus, Dismantle Racism, and Build Beloved Community Michelle T. Sanchez (Waterbrook) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

This is a great resource that asks what race has to do with discipleship, and then proceeds to offer a program in mentoring others in faith formation with an eye to forming Christians who see anti-racism work (and multi-cultural sensitivities) as integral to their discipleship in Christ.

I like the solid, evangelically-minded work on being Biblically and proactively involved in racial inequity but I really like how they link it to the gospel, to faith formation in the local church, and the process of forming disciples to become the beloved community. It isn’t super short, but it is accessible and an easy read. Kudos!

FOR A PASTOR WHO HAS YET TO READ THESE SMALL CLASSICS

In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership Henri Nouwen (Crossroad) $14.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.96

Short but remarkably lasting, this is Nouwen’s deeply personal exploration of the three temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness. You will come back to this time and again, despite the awfully bland cover. It’s a gem and a classic. Extraordinary.

 

 

 

Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life Henri Nouwen (Image) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

Written in the mid 1970s and one of the enduring Christian books of the last 50 years, this small but potent read invites us to hospitality and more. There are three sections, about the journey inward to the needy self, outward towards others, and upward to God, under the rubric “from illusion to prayer.” A must-read, lovely and moving.

 

 

Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

This was the first of the four great books in Peterson’s “Vocational Holiness” series, and looks at just three essential aspects of ministry: praying, reading the Bible, and offering spiritual guidance. (Well, one preceded it but was added into the quartet later.) This isn’t super-short, but it’s so refreshing and sensible that it just might transform your paradigm for ministry.

 

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“The Scandal of Leadership” by JR Woodward, “Metanoia” by Alan Hirsch with Rob Kelly and more… 20% OFF at Hearts & Minds

Not all workers have a new, upbeat (or worrisome) season of fresh opportunity come the fall, but for those in education or church work, at least, it sure seems like the turn of the calendar into the fall is something like a new year. Fresh starts, new programming, hopeful feelings about good efforts in the works. Some of us leave the dog days of summer with new commitments about commitments, our prayer lives, our reading habits, our dedication to service projects, our church involvement, or whatever. Welcome to the club. Here we are.

(I often dedicate the Labor Day weekend BookNotes to reflections on books about work but, to be honest, hardly anybody buys them, so I’m going to skip that this weekend, but hope that in church you participate in liturgies and sermons on work. If not, you and your church leaders need this, right here.)

I am of two — or several — minds when it comes to leadership theories and leadership books. I read them and I like them. I don’t know in what ways I’m a leader — I think I am not, really — but I get inspired reading about offering a witness of integrity and influence among others. Whether at work — where most of us spend most of our time — or in para-church ministry or congregational service, almost everybody can benefit from some time spent reading about leadership. Let us know if you want some basic ones for ordinary folks.

For some, leadership is serious business. Really serious.  And some of the books that they’ve produced are important.

I’ll tell you about one recent one that is one of the most serious and provocative and detailed studies on leadership theory I’ve read in recent years. And then I’ll follow up that review with another amazing book from the same indie publishing house. If you read leadership books, especially for congregational and para-church ministry, JR Woodward’s new Scandal of Leadership is a must. In fact, I’d say that even if you are not a formal leader in your church, but you care about leadership in the congregation, you should explore this one. It’s hefty, but exceptional. I enjoyed working through it a lot.

I also enjoyed the new one by Alan Hirsch, JR’s associate in visionary missional work, called Metanoia but we’ll get to that. They are, I think, connected. They are quite a duo to pair this month.  Happy September!

The Scandal of Leadership: Unmasking the Powers of Domination in the Church JR Woodward (100 Movements Publishing) $26.99     OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

I’ve hinted already that this is an important book on leadership, if a bit limited to congregational leadership. For the record, God’s Kingdom is coming in all areas of life and as you well know, we don’t specialize here in books only on the church or professional clergy types. We need an all-of-life-redeemed wholistic vision which honors and equips Christians to be salt and light and leaven in the loaf of their various spheres of influence, at work, in school, in the neighborhood or nursing home, in the lobby, library, or late-night lounge. But leadership in the arts and sciences — although JR wouldn’t disagree — isn’t the focus of this book, but the insights surely can frame thinking about leadership (and dangerously bad dysfunctional leadership) in all zones of life. It is a book about church life, but is so wise and profound, it’s good for anyone, leading (or following) in any sphere or institution or organization. Okay?

There are a few vital things to know about Scandal of Leadership that I’ll list, making this review a bit less charming, perhaps, but hopefully clear. I want you to know what it is about so you can determine if you need it (or if you need to buy it for a friend, pastor, missionary, or person you may know.)

FIRST. It seems to me that this book is mostly a PhD dissertation, perhaps gussied up a bit for popular readership, but it is, for better or worse, a scholarly tome with lots of fabulous and provocative rabbit holes and tangents and excursions. These are helpful, carefully arranged to make important points and he circles back to the primary narrative, over and over. So it’s just a good, serious, fairly dense study, covering this, that, and the other. It’s a Hobbit journey, there and back again. You’ll want to spend some time with it, and you’ll want to take notes. And you’ll be richer for it, believe me, even if it might have been popularized just a bit. That said…

SECONDLY. Ahh, how to say this without pigeonholing the book? I’ll just blurt it out, as the sub-title hints and as the back cover states boldly: it is about abusive leaders, dysfunctional leaders, about domineering and domination systems, about sin and scandal.

Please don’t think, well, that’s a problem in some unfortunate churches, but not in my church. Maybe not. But this book, still, is remarkably profound and good for anyone.

The title of the book is a doubly-whammy play-on-words, I think: there is the scandal of Christian leadership these days — you’ve heard of the macho wack job out at Mars Hill and you’ve heard of the shady millionaire televangelists, disgraced, the cover ups and the weirdness; even seemingly good pastors swept up in disconcerting patterns of abuse and pride — but there is also the scandal (to use a Biblical phrase) of the gospel itself. There is a righteous way to be a scandal as we imitate the “scandalous way of Christ.” That is really what this book is about, countering the tragic scandals that have hurt so many (and turned many folks away from the gospel and away from church) with the scandal of the upside down Kingdom where following Jesus flips the script and redeems even the most awful human realities.

This is the heart of the book, developing common sense, Biblical approaches to leadership as expressed by the likes of Eugene Peterson, say, or spelled out systematically in Arthur Boer’s powerful Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership. One of his big themes (and this is rich and serious) is showing how missional leadership must be rooted in a practice of imitation.

THIRDLY.  If you’re aware of some of the philosophical literature about all this you’ll guess where this is going (if not, I don’t blame you; I am unschooled in this myself.) For Woodward, at least in this book, he finds the language from Rene Girard (“mimetic theory”) as a way to open up the Biblical mandate to imitate Christ. He has two strong chapters in Section Three — one of those big rabbit trails I mentioned — that are worth the price of the book for those who need a clear and useful appropriation of Girardian theory. It offers (as he puts it in another chapter) a “theology remedy” pushing us towards the scandalous practice of our imitation of the crucified Lord.

But why dig so deep for such admittedly heady tools to understand our call to serve others by following Christ? Haven’t pastors always had this pretty simple — if difficult — vocation and task? On one hand, sure. Obviously. Lucky you if your pastor is good at it and is helping her flock in the ways of Jesus.

However, this secular age, and the facts of the eroded sense of authority and the nature of twenty-first century institutions and the challenges of modern leadership make pastoring well — let alone leading multi-staffed congregations, multi-site churches, Kingdom groups, para-church ministries, mission teams, and Christian organizations  — that much more difficult. We live in dizzying times and while I tip my hat to my favorite pastors who try to imagine their work in simple Peterson-esque ways, the forces and expectations of robust (and often conflicted) organizations make it harder than ever. JR gets this. His own leadership capacities have been shaped in the trenches of missional church organizations, edgy church planting, fresh expressions of Kingdom communities, and consulting with bunches of creative church types. He has seen some things. And he’s done his homework.

(That he doesn’t deal with the important set of books on ministry, church leadership, pastoring all in “the secular age” by Andrew Root — there is yet a new one coming soon! — is unfortunate.)

FOURTH. This third feature (the nature of the times and how they impinge on even the best leaders) leads me to the fourth big point that makes The Scandal of Leadership utterly essential for anyone serious about reading well in the leadership genre. This book not only says — as the best do, these days — that times are more complicated and we must nurture a deeper spirituality (that is, the interior lives of the sustainable leader and his or her character, below the surface) and the capacities for adaptive change and such (the skills of “canoeing the mountains” as Tod Bolsinger puts it.) It also says that there are what the Bible calls “principalities and powers” that have deformed (demonically, perhaps) the very structures in which we lead and serve. Whoa! This is new in leadership studies.

You see, we can be people of great depth and have great, congenial skills for adaptive change the the like, and we may be fully aware that times are tough and we can be a non-anxious presence in our organizations, but — damn! — things are not just hard and they are not just broken, they are captured, tyrannized, occupied; demonic.

To explore this serious state of affairs, Woodward studies the best theologians who have grappled with the provocative texts about what the Bible calls the principalities and powers. Hendrikus Berkof, of course. Yoder.  Marva Dawn. Obviously, he interacts with Walter Wink; it has been a while since anyone (let alone a vibrant evangelical) has worked with Wink’s remarkable teaching —  Naming, Engaging, Unmasking the evil powers. As I mentioned, Woodward draws on Rene Girard. And, surprisingly (and a delight for me, since I’m a fan of this under-appreciated scholar and activist) he uses William Stringfellow as a conversation partner. (Ya gotta love scholarly dissertations, eh? Who woulda thunk a modern, missional evangelical would introduce us to this radical Episcopal lawyer of Block Island?) Hooray for this important trio of important thinkers (Wink, Girard, Stringfellow) who engaged the powers in their own heroic lives and who become vital teachers for JR.

The Scandal of Leadership brilliantly puts all of this — the deeper diagnosis on why we have an epidemic of failed leaders and failing church structures — in conversation with the near classic literature on the missional church and on contemporary missional leaders. From Darrell Gruder to Craig Van Gelder to David Fitch, from Roxburgh and Romanuk to Goheen and Newbigin, he knows the best books and authors and shows much fluency in bringing each into the evolving discussion. He is laying out his argument in organized fashion, building from why we need missional leaders to where it all went wrong to what we can do about it.

Chapter Three is called “Domineering Leadership in the First-Century Church” which illustrates that this problem of failing leaders is not new. He cites everybody from Bonhoeffer to N.T Wright to James K.A. Smith to Alan Kreider and helps us understand so much. It may be different in our post/hyper-modern culture, and the church is not what it once was, but as that excellent chapter shows, questions of misshaped desire (and the “subversive work of the powers”) are perennial. And one thing the ancients had that we do not is a cosmic or mythical sense of the Powers. He shows that all of this is a “hermeneutical challenge.” We have some work to do.

Whenever a book is published by an indie-press you can expect some eccentric touches. There are a few more graphs and charts than a typical publisher might have allowed. He uses phrases like “leadership matrix” and brings up some obscure articles (the Ford/Frei Scale). At moments, it seems a bit much; the print is a nice size and there are beautiful graphic design touches, but, well, it’s a big book, filled with a whole lot.

And most of it is very good. Is there a new way of “being and belonging”? Can we embrace being scandalized not by foolish abuse of power but by imitating the One who was himself a scandal? Is that how we subvert and resist the Powers? There is no other book that asks these kinds of questions about the ubiquitous task of leadership. I have a few small complaints, but, man, this is a leadership book unlike any I’ve ever seen. Theologically rich, culturally profound, spiritually alive, systematic and visionary, both, JR Woodward has given us an amazing, near masterpiece. It shouldn’t surprise, us, really. I raved about his excellent IVP volume produced with Forge, Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World. (IVP; $25.00; OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00.)

Check out his stuff near the end of Scandal on “selfless leadership in the praxis of mission” and (in light of 2 Timothy) his riffs on “kenotic living.” He wisely invites us all, and certainly leaders, to the “formation of desire through local exemplary models.” (He explores “distant models”, too, which I liked a lot and is necessary for many of us.) We can learn the way of “humble obedience” which, as JR shows, is actually revolutionary. To make the point he writes a bit about Oscar Romero! He offers vivid, practical teaching, even as he opens up the Scriptures with the help of a rising batch of Biblical scholars, from Nijay Gupta to Timothy Gombis, and older scholars like Sarah Coakley. What a book!

If you aren’t sure of my recommendation, consider these, just three of the many who have raved:

This book is a sensation! Every Christian leader should read this. — Michael Frost, Keep Christianity Weird: Embracing the Discipline of Being Different

This deep spiritual investigation will disrupt the forces of domineering leadership and help us name our temptations, transforming us from the inside out and restoring integrity to individuals and systems and to our missions.  — Mandy Smith, The Vulnerable Pastor and Unfettered

The Scandal of Leadership is not a screed but rather an engaging exploration of leadership for Christian communities. Churches and other Christian organizations would do well to read and engage with  Woodward’s analysis  — Dennis Edwards,  Might from the Margins: The Gospel’s Power to Turn the Tables on Injustice

Metanoia: How God Radically Transforms People, Churches, and Organizations from the Inside Out  Alan Hirsch with Rob Kelly (100 Movements Publishing) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.88

I’m a big fan of Alan Hirsch and hopefully many of our readers will think of his many books on vibrant wholistic discipleship, cultural analysis, the missional church, and upbeat books about leadership and change. While he isn’t the same (he’s Australian, for starters) as the every-witty and often brilliant semiotic evangelist, Len Sweet, there are some similarities — beside the penchant for clever wordsmithing, there’s the deep stuff made accessible, his connecting the dots of culture and social trends, his beautiful loyalty to the church of Christ even if serving as a contemporary prophet calling God’s people to more relevant faithfulness. I guess he’s an organizational consultant or praxis leader or something with some cool letters and one-man, live missional incubator, and, like Sweet, Hirsch calls us over and over — in the context of the cool cultural studies — to love God by following Jesus in the power of the Holy Ghost. In this, Hirsch is unflinching and steadfast. He combines philosophy and theology, Biblical studies and spirituality, social and political evaluations, in a way to help us rethink “unfruitful patterns and systems” so we can “experience the person, church, and organizational transformation we so desperately desire.” When he talks about transformation, he’s not kidding around.

His buddy JR Woodward’s book — which, similarly is a wild ride covering lots of ground and released by their hybrid publishing ministry — is easier to place in our store, though. It goes under congregational leadership. Got it.

Hirsch, though, is bursting at the seams a bit more, making his book about any number of things. It is about spirituality and formation, about discipleship and service, about church life, and about how serious transformation will lead to significant change in our lives and lifestyles, in our work and goals, in our organizations and institutions; it’s about social reformation. Hooray for books that are hard to pigeon-hole and hooray for interdisciplinary authors who don’t “stay in their lane.”

Yet, despite the breathy passion for understanding big things and despite the many fruitful pages exploring the nature of real change — inside out, personal spiritual transformation that bears fruit in galvanizing and mobilizing missional networks and movements for reformation and renewal — the thesis of the book is fairly focused. In a foreword by the important Dennae Pierre (she of Redeemer City to City) and in Alan’s own preface, they suggest that this book is ground-breaking, radical, vital, new, needed. This might seem a bit presumptuous, but I get it; in most of the churches I know about there is to be found one of two general vibes — a certain sort of lifelessness, as if they are good folks trusting God, but still nearly in the ho-hum doldrums or a certain sort of peppy enthusiasm that seems almost a caricature of Biblical zeal, as if they have to keep on the happy face and keep the juggled plates from fallen because, well, ye gads, if we stop, if we ever stop, who knows what will happen.

Into these kinds of institutional cultures and churchy attitudes, we need a word from God, a true truth that can be grace-giving, healing, and yet transformative, empowering. The Biblical word for all of this, as Hirsch and his co-author Rob Kelly (who serves as a catalyst for city networks that “unite the church for the flourishing of cities” and who works for the Charlotte Network and the City Leaders Collective) point out over and over, is the greek word metanoia. It means something like to change one’s mind, but also to turn around, to change one’s direction. It was a word used in Greek and Roman culture and was often on the lips of our Master. If we are serious about following Jesus, we have to come to terms with all that is implied (indeed all that is expected and promised) with this notion of metanoia. What’s a first century paradigm shift mean for us today?

As the authors plumb the depths of this realignment, we learn a lot. Even if you have studied the kind of words related to this born-again phrase — words like repentance, say — I am sure that you will find much of this jam-packed volume quite compelling. I sure did. For what it is worth, I’m confident that many of us across the theological and congregational spectrum, have some confusion about the radical nature of the paradigm shift and reorientation that “invites us to perceive the world through God’s eyes” which can bring about “transformation in our own lives, the organizations we lead, and the world around us.” We need this book on repentence and change and, well, metanoia.

You know this is going to be a wild ride when the first chapter (under the section “Why Metanoia” starts with the title, “The Apocalypse of the (Ecclesial) Soul: Glimpses into the Problems and Potentials of the Church.”  You may not fully resonate with his evaluation of churches (and what kind of churches he is referring to) but mostly, you’ll know in your gut that he’s speaking truth. We indeed need — as the next chapter puts it — “the spiritual art of re/turning and re/tuning.” One might think Len Sweet came up with that bit of clever wordplay. It’s an important chapter that lays out a lot of important terms and you won’t want to miss it.

I love the later chapter that calls us to a “Christo-logic” which “sees the world from inside the mind that created it.” Oh my. His later reflection on what some might call epistemology (how we know) points us towards what he calls wholeheartedness — activating the mind, soul, and will (and, he’d say, too, I’m sure the body.) This is rich.

Hirsch has written before about this re-orienting paradigm shift that affects all that we are and all that we do and the way in which inward conversion leads to our influencing transformed churches and organizations. In a sense, Metanoia is a sequel to the very lively book co-written with our friend Mark Nelson (that I raved about at BookNotes) called Reframation: Seeing God, People, Mission Through Reenchanted Frames. In fact, in the opening “briefing for the (metanoic journey” that opens the new Metanoia book, Hirsch mentions this previous book. With the “ideological swirl” of the Trump years and the implications of the global pandemic, now, he thinks, the notion of a conversion to see through a Jesus-lens, is as urgent as ever.

I love the practical tone of the second portion, but it’s still some fun, wild stuff. The last half is about “learning to unlearn to relearn” (yes, let that sink in) and the last three chapters are entitled:

  • Paradigm: Blowing the Collective Mind
  • Plat/formed: Shaping the Collective Soul
  • Practice/s” Engaging the Collective Will

Our brave authors suggest that we have to work this out in our own place and context, but creating opportunities to nurture real encounters with God — not just talking about God — is foundational. Out of our raw encounter with the Holy One, we will be transformed and called into metanoia and the ongoing work of “reframation.” They note that it is sort of like those “choose your own adventure” books. God is with us. God will transform us. We can then transform the world. Carry on.

The endorsements recommending this are mighty. Here are a couple:

Compelling, hopeful, and unflinching, Metanoia is a masterful book that every Christian leader should read. — Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, national director Misso Alliance

This book is a master class, a philosophical tour de force — a profound, transformative, and luminous work. — Brian Sanders, The 6 Seasons of Calling: Discovering Your Purpose in Each Stage of Life

This book is inviting people to open their minds and soften their hearts to receive the precious, life-altering, beautiful, good news of Jesus. — Danielle Strickland, The Other Side of Hope: Flipping the Script on Cynicism and Despair and Rediscovering Our Humanity

The church is living in the midst of a tectonic shift in American religion. Needed more than ever is a theology for navigating this cultural paradigm shift. This book provides a theology for embracing change through a biblical analysis of metanoia. This is an essential read for aspiring church-based change makers. It is both inspirational and practical, while maintaining missional faithfulness This is a book about hope, not despair. — Dr. David John Seel, The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church

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While we’re thinking about big books about serious Kingdom transformation, organizational change, leadership and the like, I’ll quickly remind you of just four other great reads (one brand new this week) that I think would help equip anyone — and certainly church leaders — to be about God’s work in God’s ways. Each of these are very good reads. Here ya go:

Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture Scot McKnight & Laura Barringer (Tyndale Elevate) $22.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

One of the truly lovely and happily much-discussed books of the last few years around cultivating healthy, Christ-like church cultures was 2020’s A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scott McKnight & Laura Barringer. (“Tov” is, we learned, a Hebrew word suggesting goodness and beauty and health.) What would a church shaped by “tov” look like? How might this “goodness” concept help us resist toxic cultures and abusive leaders?  It was, in many ways, groundbreaking and a great read.

Now, here, we have a practical guide to help you build a culture in your church or organization that resists abuse and cultivates goodness. This is, as Danielle Strickland puts it, a “prophetic invitation to move.” It is a guide, a manual, an imaginative conversation starter and practical stimulant. There is wisdom and clarity and tons of helpful checklists and insightful ideas to help actually process the Church Called Tov book and initiate change in our congregation or workplace. There are lots of case studies and examples of church leaders who pivoted. There are good discussion questions at the end of each section. Pivot shows leaders how to unleash a culture of goodness in their ministry. And, yes, it offers insights for readers who sense something wrong in the culture of the congregation of which they are a part. This is a fabulous resource, for all of us. It’s highly recommended.

A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World Will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders Mark Sayers (Moody Press) $15.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

Our younger readers, at least, who pay attention to podcasts like the one Sayers used to do with John Mark Comer (This Cultural Moment) and the one he now co-hosts called Rebuilders, most likely know the hyper-cool Sayers has this recent book out. Others may need to be reminded — he is a prolific and somewhat edgy cultural critic, non-nonsense, full of stories and hope, offering insight about the nature of our times, our worldviews, our social trends, and offering faithful pointers for navigating these times, such as they are. I love his thinking (and how accessibly he writes, making often complicated stuff pretty fun.)

In this, Sayer’s suggests that history shows that renewal is often preceded by crisis. And we are in a current epoch-changing crisis — a shift away from technocratic solutions and pragmatic policies and trust in vision-casting and planning and execution. There are great weaknesses to these “supposedly solid strategies” which bring to light myths and idols we maybe didn’t even know we had.

This is a book of hope, showing how individuals and corporate renewal can happen, especially if we change our posture, our relationship to the world, our own capacity to move from our comfort zones into adaptive change. It’s a sweet and solid little book.

Listen to what our friend Tish Harrison Warren — author of the brand new little volume Advent — says; she’s read it carefully and commends it to you:

Mark Sayers has a unique and profound ability to understand culture and, in particular, our cultural moment — how we got here, where we are going, and how Christians might seek to live faithfully amid the tectonic shifts of our age. In A Non-Anxious Presence, Sayers casts a vision for pastors and other Christian leaders that allows us to offer hope in a quickly changing and ever-anxious world. Sayers vividly describes the disorienting ‘gray zone’ we now find ourselves in, as well as helpfully interpreting this cultural shift as a ‘wilderness’ of testing in which leaders are called to be refined and purified as we seek the presence of God in our world, our churches, and our lives. Sayers is a faithful, studied, and remarkably insightful guide in this time of upheaval and transition, a time where we find ourselves often befuddled and fearful, a time when God is yet at work redeeming all things.  –Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk & True Flourishing Andy Crouch (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I could write about this at length — and I have — but the short version is that, like all of Mr. Crouch’s eloquent books, it is a must read. He did a major work — one of our most regularly recommended titles in the last 15 years — called Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (look for a new updated edition very soon; we’re taking pre-orders!) which was followed up a few years laster by one of the very best books ever done on the notion of power. (It is a must-read for culture-makers, entitled Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power.)

I don’t recall if I’ve heard Andy say this, but it is my sense that this nicely-done compact paperback came out of his reflections on the book about power. In a way, it is a case study, a short and provocative look at ways to make a difference by embracing our weaknesses, aligning ourselves with the Christ who suffers, and moving from too much power (or power poorly stewarded) to give ourselves away in trust and vulnerability. It is good for anyone, of course, who wants to live a free life, a life of abandon, following the Lord Jesus in culturally helpful ways. But it is exceptionally poignant for leaders. The title and subtitle don’t directly allude to leadership but if Woodward and Hirsch are right that we need a converted vision, a paradigm shift about leadership, this graciously thoughtful book is going to be very, very helpful. Beth and I commend it often.

The publishers summarize it nicely:

Two common temptations lure us away from abundant living — withdrawing into safety or grasping for power. True flourishing, says Andy Crouch, travels down an unexpected path — being both strong and weak. Regardless of your stage or role in life, here is a way of love and risk so that we all, even the most vulnerable, can flourish.

The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry Austin Carty (Eerdmans) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Again, this is a book I’ve highlighted time and again, and have done live announcements about whenever I’ve been with (live or over zoom) clergy this past year. I do not tire of promoting it, enjoy gushing about it, and will continue to express how grateful I am for Carty’s lively prose, visionary reading plan, and incredibly wise (and fun) stories about growing into a love for reading.

I know. For busy pastors, as it says on the back, “time spent reading feels hard to justify, especially when it’s not for sermon prep.” Right?

But what if reading felt less like a luxury and more like a vocational responsibility — a spiritual practice that bears fruit in every aspect of ministry?

I am so sure this will benefit you and that you will enjoy it that, besides offering our 20% off discounted price, I will offer an unconditional guarantee. If you don’t love this book, we’ll give you your money back. (I was going to say “no questions asked” but that may not be true. I’d love to hear it if you don’t appreciate this book.) How’s that? It’s on sale but if it isn’t as great as I’ve often said, we’ll refund your dough. I want to get this book out there, cultivating and spreading a love of books and the value of book buying, even. I think Karen Swallow Prior is right when she says that “pastors who read and live by the wisdom of this book will be changed, as will their ministries and the people to whom they minister.”

As the exquisite neurologist and scholar of reading, Maryanne Wolf (of the great Reader, Come Home), wrote:

I am gobsmacked by this book’s three-fold beauty, its writing, its erudition, and the author’s deep commitment to what true reading can give not only pastors, but us all.

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TO PLACE AN ORDER 

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

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

The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a quick, general guide:

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options (who just raised their rates again) 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 a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s $4.12; 2 lbs would be $4.87.
  • United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, 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 so let us know. Just saying “US Mail” isn’t helpful because there are those two methods, one cheaper but slower, one more costly but quicker. Which do you prefer?

BookNotes

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SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

ALL BOOKS MENTIONED

+++

order here

this takes you to the secure Hearts & Minds order form page
just tell us what you want to order

inquire here

if you have questions or need more information
just ask us what you want to know

Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown  PA  17313
read@heartsandmindsbooks.com
717-246-3333

Sadly, as of August 2023 we are still closed for in-store browsing. COVID is not fully over. Since few are reporting their illnesses anymore, it is tricky to know the reality but the best measurement is to check the waste water tables to see the amount of virus in the eco-system. It is bad; worse than it was two years ago, even. It’s important to be aware of how risks we take might effect the public good as those at risk, while not dying from the virus, are experiencing long-term health consequences. (Just check the latest reports of the rise of heart attacks and diabetes among younger adults, caused by Covid.) It is complicated, but we are still closed for in-store browsing due to our commitment to public health (and the safety of our family, staff, and customers.) Our store is a bit cramped without top-notch ventilation, so we are trying to be wise. Thanks for understanding.

We will keep you posted about our future plans… we are eager, but delayed, for now.

We are doing our curb-side and back yard customer service and can show any number of items to you if you call us from our back parking lot. It’s sort of fun, actually. We are eager to serve and grateful for your patience as we all work to mitigate the pandemic. We are very happy to help, so if you are in the area, do stop by. We love to see friends and customers.

We’re happy to ship books anywhere. 

We are here 10:00 – 6:00 EST /  Monday – Saturday. Closed on Sunday.

DVD – Share the Dream: Shining a Light in a Divided World through Six Principles of Martin Luther King, Jr. hosted by Matthew Daniels & Chris Broussard – 20% OFF NOW

I’m going to make this BookNotes column short, and, hopefully, sweet. I’m going to solve your problem about how to commemorate the 60th anniversary of one of the great events in American history — the 1963 March on Washington.  Yep, we have you covered.

Actually I had hoped to include this one item in the previous BookNotes (our store newsletter) which featured a number of mostly recent books about race, racism, and the grand and glorious (if troubled) civil rights movement. You may recall I highlighted what I said was one of the best books I ever read, a remarkable, informative, page-turner walking you through the tumultuous year of 1966. Saying It Loud: 1966–The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement by Mark Whitaker, is simply a must-read. I’m picking it up a second time and enjoying it so much; it is at once oddly sobering and quite inspiring. It usually sells for $29.99 but at our BookNotes 20% off sale price we have it at $23.99. I hope you saw the others I reviewed and the three that I invited you to consider pre-ordering. You can do that by clicking on our order tab, below.

Like any store, we can pre-order nearly anything and we have a number of little waiting lists for any number of anticipated forthcoming books. But for our purposes in the last BookNotes I very highly recommended that you pre-order The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy by Robert P. Jones, the memoir How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCaulley and The Gospel According to James Baldwin by Greg Garrett.

The item that I wanted to add to that list, but it just wasn’t out yet — it arrived today! — is a video curriculum that we’ve been waiting for for, well, for decades. This is an excellent, informative, inspiring, and very well made introduction to and Christian exploration of the vision and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was so very excited to learn of it, thrilled to watch the first episode a while back, and delighted to share it with you here, now. (See the link to the first episode, below.)

Share the Dream: Shining a Light in a Divided World through Six Principles of Martin Luther King, Jr.  DVD and Participant’s Guide  hosted by Matthew Daniels and Chris Broussard

(K.I.N.G. / Harper Christian Resources) $50.99     OUR SALE PRICE = $40.79

 

 

This pack includes a DVD and an excellent participant’s/leader’s workbook. It also includes an access code that allows you to stream the video content if you’d rather play it that way. There are discussion questions, reflection points, chapter summaries and a leader’s planning guide. There are nice graphics in the interior design and there are 18 small Bible studies to do between the sessions, or to draw from in your sessions. It’s fantastic and easy to use.

Here is how they describe it:

EMBRACE A LIFE OF LOVE FOR ALL HUMANITY

Share the Dream is a six-session video Bible study based on the life and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. You will look at six biblical principles that shaped Dr. King’s life and motivated him to speak on behalf of African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement: love, conscience, freedom, justice, perseverance, and hope.

The best way to Share the Dream is to follow in Dr. King’s footsteps and embrace his vision. You can help a new generation better understand, live, experience, and ultimately form a community around the unifying principles at the heart of the dream to which Dr. King dedicated his life.

Sessions and video run times:

  1. Love (24:00)
  2. Conscience (16:00)
  3. Justice (17:30)
  4. Freedom (14:30)
  5. Perseverance (15:00)
  6. Hope (17:00)

While there are several good folks interviewed in each episode the hosts are two well-known and very fun black Christian leaders in both historic black churches and in the American sports scene. Dr. Matthew Daniels has been a sports chaplain and  Chris Broussard (who I met years ago when we were both speaking at Taylor University)  is an American sports analyst and commentator for Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports Radio. Best known for his coverage of the NBA, he is now a co-host on FS1’s afternoon show First Things First, as well as co-host of The Odd Couple with Rob Parker on Fox Sports Radio. Previously, he worked for The New York Times, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, and made appearances on ESPN’s SportsCenter, NBA Countdown, First Take, and NBA Fastbreak as an analyst.

Matthew Daniels, J.D., Ph.D. teaches human rights and law on four continents and is the creator and Executive Producer of the Human Rights Network, an educational video network promoting universal rights through digital media. He is Chair of Law & Human Rights at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and founder of the Center for Law and Digital Culture at Brunel School of Law in London. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Handong International Law School in Pohang, South Korea — small world, I know his Dean, there — and at the University of Costa Rica. Professor Daniels is the creator of the nonprofit organization Good of All, which is committed to educating people around the world about human rights and freedoms.

In 2019, Good of All launched a Universal Rights Scholarship Program at four historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., as a joint project with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Advisory Council of Georgia. Dr. Daniels also served as the Executive Producer and Educational Advisor for the human rights documentary A Higher Law on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

So, these lively leaders know their stuff and are joined by Lecrae, Ambassador Andrew Young, Linsey Davis, and U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black, some who have studied Dr. King’s legacy their whole lives. This six-part series is fantastic and we would be honored if you ordered a “study pack” (a DVD and Participant’s Guide) at our sale price.

If you are unsure, watch this first episode so you can get a feel for the quality of the program. It’s interesting, upbeat, Biblical, but not too heavy. Good for all sorts of church fellowships, community classes, small groups, adult ed options as well as college and youth ministry settings.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FIRST SESSION — then come back to order from Hearts & Minds.

Thanks.

https://watch.studygateway.com/share-the-dream-matthew-daniels-and-chris-broussard/videos/share-the-dream-daniels-s1

 

 

+++

TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN AND 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 quick, general guide:

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options (who just raised their rates again) 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 a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $4.12; 2 lbs would be $4.87.
  • United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, 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 so let us know. Just saying “US Mail” isn’t helpful because there are those two methods, one cheaper but slower, one more costly but quicker. Which do you prefer?

BookNotes

Hearts & Minds logo

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

ALL BOOKS MENTIONED

+++

order here

this takes you to the secure Hearts & Minds order form page
just tell us what you want to order

inquire here

if you have questions or need more information
just ask us what you want to know

Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown  PA  17313
read@heartsandmindsbooks.com
717-246-3333

Sadly, as of August 2023 we are still closed for in-store browsing. COVID is not fully over. Since few are reporting their illnesses anymore, it is tricky to know the reality but the best measurement is to check the waste water tables to see the amount of virus in the eco-system. It is bad; worse than it was two years ago, even. It’s important to be aware of how risks we take might effect the public good as those at risk, while not dying from the virus, are experiencing long-term health consequences. (Just check the latest reports of the rise of heart attacks and diabetes among younger adults, caused by Covid.) It is complicated, but we are still closed for in-store browsing due to our commitment to public health (and the safety of our family, staff, and customers.) Our store is a bit cramped without top-notch ventilation, so we are trying to be wise. Thanks for understanding.

We will keep you posted about our future plans… we are eager, but delayed, for now.

We are doing our curb-side and back yard customer service and can show any number of items to you if you call us from our back parking lot. It’s sort of fun, actually. We are eager to serve and grateful for your patience as we all work to mitigate the pandemic. We are very happy to help, so if you are in the area, do stop by. We love to see friends and customers.

We’re happy to ship books anywhere. 

We are here 10:00 – 6:00 EST /  Monday – Saturday. Closed on Sunday.

Reviewing one of my favorite books this year and this: PRE-ORDER “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy” (Jones) “How Far to the Promised Land?” (McCaulley) and “The Gospel According to James Baldwin” (Garrett). AND MORE

Thank you so much. Truly, Beth and I are very grateful for those who helped us spread the word and for those who tuned in to the on-line conversation last week that we hosted with Dr. Paul Metzger of the New Wine/New Wineskins Institute out at Multnomah College in the grand Pacific Northwest. IVP Academic, who published his excellent, hefty study of personalism called More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture put the tech piece together and Paul and I had an invigorating and fun — at the very least for us, but we’ve heard that others liked it, too — discussion on personhood, a Trinitarian theological basis for caring about the dignity of humans made in God’s image, and a whole host of pressing ethical questions in various social spheres. From abortion and end of life issues to creation-care and climate change, from personal and institutional racism to gender and human sexuality, from medical ethics to drone warfare (and even on to “The Last Frontier”, space exploration) Paul carefully offers perspective and insight and Biblically-informed reading on a personalist emphasis.

The live video conversation was recorded. You can watch it HERE. We hope we were personal and welcoming to all, somehow redeeming a bit of this too often polarizing and inhumane technological space. Check it out, please.

One of Paul’s early mentors was the great evangelical hero who has taught many about race and grace, about injustice and public righteousness, John Perkins. Paul’s chapter on race in More Than Things is a major contribution to serious thinking about such matters and I very highly recommend it. As with the other topics Metzger addresses, our society (not to mention most churches) really needs a re-think and a re-do. We’ve got to learn from the past, denounce idols and reductionisms, forge a Biblically-shaped ethic, and offer a “new song” from the Lord, paving the way to reconciliation and restoration and hope. Metzger has been at this work on racism a long time and we honor him for it.

In this big BookNotes I want to offer a reminder to PRE-ORDER a couple of important soon-to-be-released books (scroll down) about race that should be on your list of must-reads this fall. First, I  highlight a few current books that are very, very good, in this field. I’ll try to be succinct. We really hope you enjoy this BookNotes. Share it with others if you can.

One of the ones I’m listing this week, with which I will start this list, is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Read on!

Saying It Loud: 1966 – The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Yes, indeed, this is not only one of the very best books about the history of the civil rights movement, it was so captivating, so gripping, so informative, that I’d say it was one of the best page-turners I have ever read. And I’ve read a lot about the civil rights era and a lot of investigative reporting and popular history. I’ve been wanting to tell BookNote friends about it for months now, and it seems now the time is right. We are approaching the grand 60th anniversary of the legendary March on Washington (1963) that even school kids know about. What happened before that and after, is legendary. Saying It Loud jumps back and forth sharing the whole big picture of the movement from the early 60s to the early 70s, but its structure is simple. It unfolds month by month in one pivotal year. I would bet that all but the most rare scholar of the movement will know all this stuff and it has now become my go-to book for anyone to read who wants to understand the virtues and faith and struggles and tragedies — and, yes, the huge ideological differences that came to the fore — during this most remarkable era of American history.

If you, like me, came of age in the late 60s or so, you will want to read this book. Come on, despite all the names that you heard on the news — Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seal, just for instance, not to mention the larger backdrop of music and art and war and protest that was simmering in that era — I bet you don’t know the backstory of each of them. And what stories they are! You have got to read this book!

And if this new to some of you, great. It’s a part of American history you have to know. This book is a great starter. No matter your age or era, this will teach you well.

As you probably know, there was among most civil rights leaders (and the rank and file folks who were involved) a profound commitment, guided by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (and others) to faith-based, even Biblical, nonviolence.  From King’s Christian personalism and Gandhian training in direct action and profound loyalties to American civic principles, the movement, radical as it was, was rooted in this vision of law and order and goodness and truth. King and John Lewis and others from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or “snick” as it was often called) were Christians, after all, and the black church served as the hub of most campaigns of protesting segregation and, then, eventually voter registration drives. That changed in 1966.

And what a lot of trouble it was, inside the movement. Young activists were increasingly influenced by the vibrant Malcom X and they increasingly insisted that there needed to be more teaching about black self-regard (and self-protection.) Black Is Beautiful became a slogan and the Black Panthers rose up with guns, famously in Oakland, California. There were meetings and debates and councils amidst murders and jailings, visits from government officials and heoric entertainers and donors. There was prayer and politics and personality squabbles and more.

Of course the Panthers — one of the most ubiquitous names from the news of my youth — did more than the paramilitary training that white media showed. They had excellent feeding projects and after-school programs and taught discipline and self-respect and civic action. The Black Arts movement was starting up in Harlem, too, led by LeRoi Jones, who would soon change his name to Amiri Baraka, which Whitaker explores. This even gave rise to the new holiday known as Kwanzaa. The times they were a-changin’.

By the way, I did not know (I’m a little embarrassed to admit) that the name and mascot of the militant urban, mostly West Coast Black Panther group came first from a rural Alabama voting rights group which actually became a black political movement running as an independent third party later that year. They really were, first, a political party.

(The Lowndes County Freedom Organization emerged after some organizers that were on the famous 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery stopped and stayed with local residences there. The NAACP had been banned in the state at that point and some of Fred Shuttlesworth’s Christian Movement for Human Rights were involved as well, creating a poltical alternative to the segregationist party headed by George Wallace (a Democrat, who literally used the phrase “White Supremacy” in the local Democrat party’s logo.)

These were earth-shaking times and no book that I know of tells the story so boldly, with so many amazing digressions and fascinating rabbit trails with helpful explanations of the past and glimpses, occasionally, to where it all would lead. John Adams had said it in colonial times, and it was true in 1966: these are serious times.

Mark Whitaker is a great storyteller, an excellent journalist, and a very fine writer. Some of you reading this know his marvelous book on the under-reported story of the extraordinary early 20th century experience in black quarters in Pittsburgh, paralleling the famous Harlem renaissance, called Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.The verve and brilliance and detail of that book is shown even more in the fast-paced Saying It Loud. And the issues explored —is nonviolence necessary and effective? how do we make room for activists of various or no faiths? what is the relationship between the arts and social change? how can women and men lead together? does civil rights work look different in the south and north (and rural and urban settings)? and on and on — are with us today. If you care even a little about the voices of BLM, or you want, perhaps, a more traditional approach to faith-based organizing, you need to read this book.

Allow me to note three more quick things about the value of Saying It Loud.

First, as I implied, it covers the history and tone of the civil rights movement so very well. Although it is rooted in the long year of 1966, as Whitaker introduces a character — say, Stokely Carmichael, or Huey Newton, just for instance — it explores their back story, their own biographies, their dedicated (if sometimes contentious) work in the rural towns of Mississippi or Alabama, moving from events in Memphis or Little Rock to Selma or Atlanta, among movers and shakers and among those who could not read or write. The way these men (and many women, too) were beaten and threatened (and some, in the narrative, were murdered) was appalling; reading it again was shocking, even as we all know this is how it was. The reporting is so vivid and the history unfolding so fast and furious that one cannot but gasp, and cry out to God in remorse and repentance. That white folks were so cruel, so vicious, so funded and evil and that young men and women working for change were so brave, so dedicated, so willing to suffer and to serve — what stories! These mini-biographies woven naturally into the narrative of the dedication (often) or personal difficulties (often, as well) of the main players in the drama are excellent. Saying It Loud is the best one-stop read to learn so very, very much and be taken into the heart of the struggles for so many. I very highly recommend it.

Previously, by the way, I have often recommended the excellent, concise abridgment of the world-class, huge, three volume history of the era, America in the King Years by Taylor Branch called The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster; $17.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39.) That is still excellent, and offers a historians overview of key moments, or episodes, in the struggle, but Saying It Loud tells of the people and their bravery, failures, angers, prayers, and accomplishments. Wow.

Secondly, this recent one by Mark Whitaker really does offer a brilliant look into what was, surely, one of the most consequently shifts of thinking in perhaps all of American public life, and while it cannot be (and ought not be) reduced to a debate between Martin King and Malcom X, the occasions of the two men meeting is told wondrously by Mr Whitaker. If only either had lived longer to see how the debate about Christianity, nonviolence, black separatism, and political reform might have played out. The story is tragic but Whitaker tells it with energy and passion. The consequent move away from King’s nonviolent mass movement is a historical reality that needs to be deeply explored and Whitaker gets us towards an understanding of the beginning of a pivotal end of an era.

Thirdly, again, with the thrust of the book being as it must be — the shift away from nonviolence and the leadership of King to Black Power the rise of the Panthers — it nonetheless shows how these differing approaches to civil rights and better lives for black citizens, are still related. Yes, there arises a different strategy, and yes, it is more than a change in tactics (about violence or how to do voter registration, say, or a shift from the rural south to the teeming ghettos of the north) but a new generation’s whole worldview. The times saw an ideological shift and a cultural shift and a political shift. As reviewer Michael Eric Dyson notes, “Whitaker brilliantly tracks the rise and fall of Black Power and how its lessons echo across the decades and thunder in today’s headlines.” Indeed. The book is for today!

Saying it Loud: 1966 is a tour de force, a major contribution, a fascinating page-turner, a great read. Please stick with me, here, and read the following blurbs from the back, which are rich and will perhaps inspire you to order the book.

I was in high school in 1966, and it felt like the edge of history. In his brilliant new book, Saying It Loud, Mark Whitaker has taken me back there, and the journey is both enthralling and a riveting reminder of the tumult, inspiration, and potent possibilities of the Black Power movement. It’s also novelistic in its fully realized human portraits of the movement’s backstory. I can’t say it any louder: this is not only a compelling read; it’s essential for understanding where we started and where we might find lessons in determining where we go from here. — Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

The years that Mark Whitaker chronicles in Saying It Loud were years I well knew as a young reporter and also as a Black Southerner who came out of the Civil Rights Movement when much of the complicated (and yes sometimes disturbing) history he delves into was being made. . . . What Saying It Loud provides, especially for the Black Lives Matter generation, is history that will help them avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors as well as a road map to the more perfect union this country has long promised but has not yet achieved. — Charlayne Hunter-Gault, journalist and author of My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives

At once eloquently intimate and bracingly expansive, Saying It Loud is a tour de force. Mark Whitaker has produced a provocatively eloquent and original work of narrative history that inspires us to look upon the past with new eyes. The heroically flawed lives of the generation that shaped the year 1966 and the rise of Black Power will never look the same after reading this insightful, challenging, and thought-provoking book. — Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy J Russell Hawkins (Oxford University Press) $29.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

This is an important history volume, peer reviewed by the famous and prestigious scholarly press and laden with vital accolades. Dr. Hawkins is the Professor of Humanities and History in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana.

The book offers, as one historian put it, “more complex stories about the interplay of race and politics” within the ranks of evangelicalism. Derek Hick, author of Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition says it is “stylistically unflinching while managing to remain approachable delicate” and that Hawkins “has produced a tour de force that tells an unsettling tale of certain white evangelical’s efforts to maintain a dominant social order.”

Do you recall the classic in the field of civil rights history, the extraordinary and sadly riveting volume God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights by Charles Marsh (Princeton University Press; $37.00) that we often tout? That, too, shows how various folks on different sides of the civil rights battles, used (or misused) the Bible for their own side. The Bible Told Them So shows still more, and it is both perplexing and sad, but important for us to understand. (It is my sense that this is going to become even more important as some on the alt-right are themselves, now, using the Bible to justify their ideological weirdness.)

And listen to this, importantly:

Hawkins convincingly demonstrates how religion framed, informed, and bolstered South Carolina whites’ resistance to racial equality. He further shows how, once the raw biblical justification of segregation acquired a bad reputation, the rhetoric of color-blindness and anti-identity politics carried this resistance forward under a more respectable but deceptive guise. — Carolyn Renée Dupont, author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975

A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them Timothy Egan (Viking) $30.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

I have highlighted this already at BookNotes so won’t say much more other than to remind you that, before the 1950s and ‘60s civil rights movement there was this grand struggle. The KKK arose after emancipation, of course, in the south. It had, most thought, pretty much died out. But the second iteration of the Klan — with its most significant stronghold in the 1920s state of Indiana— was even more viciously racist; devoutly evil, and on the rise. This book, written with what the great writer Erik Larson says is “narrative elan”, exposes their plots of this most sinister period of American history. It shows their not very long march through the institutions of culture, their infiltrations of the courts, and into corridors of power, and it is breathtakingly ominous. Why a book!

That the KKK remains a force to be reckoned with. Similar racist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi type groups are on the rise and even intertwined with the campaigns of Donal Trump and other Republican leaders. This book could not be more fascinating as a gripping historical study and could not be more timely.

Timothy Egan is a meticulous scholar and fine writer. You may know his award-winning book on the dust bowl years (The Worst Hard Times) that was made into a fine documentary by the great Ken Burns. Burns notes that “the influence the KKK wielded over states and policy should put a chill in every American.” Here is what Burns says about A Fever in the Heartland:

Egan has done it again, mastering another complicated American story with authority and surprising detail. The Klan here are not the nightriders of the late 19th century, but a retooled special interest group and unusually potent political power. The influence they wielded over states and policy should put a chill in every American. Bravo. –Ken Burns

Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation Robert Chao Romero & Jeff M. Liou (Baker Academic) $23.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.19

I have written about this before and I have given pleas for folks to buy it at every event this spring and summer wherever I’ve been asked to make up-front book talks. I’ve plugged it as essential reading for pastors, for campus ministers, for thoughtful evangelicals and for mainline church people. Everybody has heard of the controversies around critical race theory (CRT) and most readers of BookNotes will, I suspect, know that the far right fear and their loathsome caricatures are reactionary and almost silly. While there may be a grain of truth is some sophisticated critiques — some CRT scholars may be Marxian in their worldview and may draw without discernment upon worldly ideologies — most religious criticisms of CRT have been woefully ignorant.

That is, until now. This is the first major book to read about CRT, bar none, at this point. As Duke Kwon put it, “This book should be required reading for anyone seeking to explore the intersection of critical race theory and Christian Scriptures.”

This really is the firsts comprehensive exploration from a theologically-informed, Biblically-shaped, discerningly thoughtful Christian perspective and it is a masterpiece of good thinking and good writing. Romero and Liou’s Christianity and Critical Race Theory delivers just what the subtitle promises: “A Faithful and Constructive Conversation.”

Just look at the flow of the book, which offers a good structure for their detailed analysis:

  1.  Introduction: Critical Race Theory in Christianity
  2.  Creation: Community Cultural Wealth and the Glory and Honor of the Nations
  3.  Fall: Sin and Racism–the Ordinary Businesses of Society
  4.  Redemption: Critical Race Theory in Institutions
  5.  Consummation: The Beloved Community
  6.  Conclusion: Made to Be Image Bearers

We need this book, and I hope it is widely read! Although there is angry rhetoric on both sides of this controversy, these authors carefully–and wisely–go after the truth.    — Richard Mouw, Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics, Calvin University, author, How to Be a Patriotic Christian: Love of Country as Love of Neighbor

When tricky questions come up about critical race theory, Romero and Liou are the first people that I turn to. They help readers understand the larger dynamics, orient them in Christian ways, provide helpful insights, and bring clarity to complicated topics. — Nikki Toyama-Szeto, executive director, Christians for Social Action

I Won’t Shut Up: Finding Your Voice When the World Tries to SIlence You Ally Henry (Baker Books) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This book is a fabulous, if haunting and at times (for this white guy reader) a bit off-putting (or at least it made me a little uncomfortable) collection of essays that serve almost as stand alone pieces and yet congeal as a memoir of sorts. Ally Henry is a fiesty and loud writer — her word — and I want to recommend it here again, even though it came out in June. Yes! Edgy and firm as it is, it is one to read.

Ally Henry is a writer, speaker, advocate-minister, and vice president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective (which I hope you know about; it is an organization committed to encouraging, engaging and empowering black Christinas toward liberation from racism.) She has an MDiv from Fuller and has had a long-standing blog called The Armchair Community.

She is serious and funny, frank and witty, and speaks with candor about harm and micro-aggressions and the stress and joys of being a black woman. She is, perhaps surprisingly, an introvert and she says she is shy, but has learned to navigate without compromise the often overwhelmingly white spaces she inhabits. It is a good look at the story and personality and attitude of a young black woman that many white folks need to read, especially if you find yourself wanting to police the appropriateness of some loud black behavior. She is convinced that most white people have this dismissal of certain kinds of black folks who are claiming their place, finding their voices, maybe just doing their thing. (Think of the black bird watcher in Central Park or that family just cooking out in that park out West, both stories that got in the news. Or the poor souls harassed and demeaned every single day in the United States.  Check it out with an open heart, please.

There are stories here, from her girlhood and school days. It got Beth and I talking about our own memoirs of race and class and difference in our own respective schools. We appreciate her call to black women to use their voices, to tell their stories, to be loud and proud and assertive. She is firm, blunt, and in most stories — due to her fine ability as storyteller, even when it is hard — entertaining.

As Danielle Coke (herself an artist, illustrator and entrepreneur) writes in the good, brassy forward, “Your voice has unimaginable power and you have every right to use it. This book will show you how.”

Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World And How to Repair It All Lisa Sharon Harper (Brazos Press) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This is a book that I have highlighted several times — since before it even came out, actually. We highlight it again, here because we want our BookNotes friends and fans to know how we appreciate Lisa and this extraordinary book.  It carries endorsements from some of the most important writers in this whole genre — Ruby Sales, for instance, who calls Harper “a masterful storyteller” and the heroic Rev. Dr. William Barber (the president of Repairers of the Breach) who says the book is simply “Brilliant.” We agree.

Kirsten Powers, CNN senior political analyst and columnist and author, notes that Lisa is one of our nations most critical voices on the issues of race, gender, faith and justice and I agree.

“Harper is one of our nation’s most critical voices on the issues of race, gender, faith, and justice.”

And so we are not alone in our affirmation of this epic story of Lisa exploring her genealogy and telling the story of her grueling and glorious research into finding her family history. From DNA research, oral history, fascinating interviews, and more, she takes us along on her journey — some of it full of pathos as we learn about who enslaved whom, who sold whom. This is hard to read, on one hand, but Lisa is brave and hopes to satisfy her longing to know of her colorful background (she is part Native, as well — you may recall her writing about that in her excellent and popular book The Very Good Gospel) even as she tells the story of “how race broke my family.

Indeed, the brokenness that race has wrought in America is part of this tender, personal story, and her big vision of collective repair is urgent. She calls for us to tell the truth, a prophetic call needed now more than ever! I beg you to read it. It is by a woman we count as a friend who is also a respected, nationally-known Christian leader who has earned the right to be heard.

Here is a great, short, and moving video of Sharon talking about the book. Check out this  trailer: 

AND, there is this fun news. With the soon to be celebrated 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, there is a new song that celebrates her book, putting it within the framework of the important history of the civil rights movement. With the theme of this BookNotes — centered by the must-read Saying It Loud by Mark Whitaker —it seems perfect to share this innovative bit of artful promo of Lisa’s classic book Fortune. Here is how she describes it:

“Fly” (aka “Fortune’s Song”) will be released the week of the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington. Inspired by Fortune and co-written in partnership with Common Hymnal and Andre Henry at the Alex Haley Farm last summer“Fly” shines light on the lies of racial hierarchy that broke the world and issues an epic call for truth and reparation.

Stay tuned for that! I’ll share it at Facebook, for sure. Hooray for “Fly” (aka “Fortune’s Song”).

THREE BOOKS TO PRE-ORDER NOW.

If you happen to be ordering more than one title along with a forthcoming one, please let us know if you want us to send the available ones now and the not-yet-released ones later, when they arrive OR should we hold up and consolidate, sending things together, later. It would be helpful to let us know how you want us to serve you in this instance. THANKS.

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future Robert P. Jones (Simon & Schuster) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99 // ON SALE DATE – September 5, 2023

Oh my, when an esteemed public theologian and respected historian does a deep dive into the roots of American history to suss out ways in which racism and white supremacy has been “cooked into the cake” of our country’s past, we should all pay attention. This has been done a lot lately, from the controversial The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story to Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, to the IVP Academic title We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy by Robert Tracy McKenzie.  A few mail order customers have ordered African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideal by David Hackett Fisher.

Jones stands among these important scholars, a good thinker and passionate teacher himself. He is also a person of deep faith and is concerned about how these things are talked about.

Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and a leading scholar and commentator on religion and politics. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic, TIME, and Religion News Service. He holds a PhD in religion from Emory University and a MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This forthcoming one, releasing early in September, isn’t his first book on all of this. He is the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award, and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

We have long carried these previous two books, and in this forthcoming one, he told a group in central PA this past Spring, he is “going back to the beginning” and exploring the roots of it all. The coveted “starred review” from Kirkus Review noted that it is ”Revelatory. . . . A searing, stirring outline of the historical and contemporary significance of white Christian nationalism.”

Jones makes this narrative historical study particularly engaging (even if it isn’t exactly the very beginning of America’s original sin) because he explores the story of three locations in the United States — in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma — where the indigenous people were driven out by European colonists, where vicious racial killings took place in the last century, and “how these places are coming to terms with the past, creating new organizations dedicated to racial repair and reconciliation as they aspire to a more inclusive, more promising future.”

Read these important endorsements to see if this is a book you should have on your bookshelves:

An essential journey into the origins of America’s current identity crisis, told through the voices of people working across lines of race to create a truer vision of our shared history, and our future. — Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Robert P. Jones has deepened our understanding of how Americans think about religion, justice and oppression. . . . This eloquent volume, by turns personal and analytical, calls us to face up to the past in order to build a more just and democratic future. — E. J. Dionne Jr., senior fellow, the Brookings Institution; author of Our Divided Political Heart 

How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South Esau McCaulley (Convergent) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60 // ON SALE DATE – September 12, 2023

This is one of the most anticipated books of the season for some of our BookNotes readers, I’m sure. McCaulley is the extraordinary speaker and writer and scholar, the author of the best-selling and must-read Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (IVP; $22.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60.)

He is also the editor and curator behind the small “Fullness of Time” book series on the church calendar, such as his own Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal. (Heads up: we now have the brand new ones on Advent by Tish Harrison Warren and Christmas by Emily Hunter McGowan and hope to have soon Epiphany by Fleming Rutledge.)

How Far to the Promised Land is a memoir created within a series of essays that more or less follow his boyhood in the deep south, his coming of age amidst a father who sometimes had a needle in his arm, the rough and tumble of a hard neighborhood, serious poverty, a single mom who did well by him, the complexities of race and racism in Alabama — and elsewhere.

Dr. McCaulley, as you may know, has a fairly classic Black church background, somewhat Pentecostal, and who made his way to Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and, eventually, to St. Andrews where he studied with world-renowned New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright. He is an ordained clergyman, a priest in the Anglican tradition, a New York Times columnist, and a professor at Wheaton College. His hard family background (and the forgiveness that was hard coming, even after his father’s untimely death) is told honestly, with great vulnerability, and always respectfully.  It is quite an accomplishment.

The book starts with a very engaging narrative of going to speak at a largely white college setting where he is asked to share, during the Q & A, the worst example of racism he himself has encountered. Something sort of snaps as it is a question black speakers who address questions of racism are often asked; in this case, he declines from answering. He explains why and it is astute, thoughtful, helpful to hear for white readers, I’m sure, and resonant to hear for people of color reading the book. Yet, he wonders. It seems this whole book is an extended answer to this fair question.

It is pitched as “a riveting intergenerational account of one family’s search for meaning and a place to call home in the American South.”

As the senior editor for the publisher wrote in an advanced copy made available to selected reviewers

At first glance, Esau’s story follows an arc that might seem family: a young black man beats the odds of growing up fatherless and being educated in under resourced schools to escape poverty and achieve a life in the middle class…”  He explains more, noting that we think we know what to do with such narratives. He continues,

But Esau realized that the spotlight in these discussions is too narrow. We are persons, not storylines. And a good narrative — a Black one, at least — is not owned by any single individual; it is, instead, a story of a people, of how the struggle in each life to find meaning and purpose, regardless of its outcome, teaches us something essential about what it means to be human.

Executive Editor Derek Reed concludes his summary of some of the interesting and compelling stories in How Far to the Promised Land that “all of this comes together in an evocative, tender account that complicates the classic American success story while leaving us a hope that a better one can yet be written.” It is a testament, he says, “to what makes Esau one of the most important writers at work today.”

It is a testament to what makes Esau one of the most important writers at work today.

Some of these stories made me laugh, some made me cry, I was shocked to learn some of the hardships he has faced and glad for the way the church has so rooted and inspired him and his wife and four children. It’s a great read and I hope you pre-order it from us today.

The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach us About Life, Love, and Identity Greg Garrett (Orbis Books) $24.00 OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20  // ON SALE DATE – September 15, 2023

I like Greg Garrett a lot. He’s a lit prof at Baylor University and we first discovered him decades ago when he wrote a memoir about leaving fundamentalism to embrace Episcopalianism (cleverly called Crossing Myself.) He has gone on to write other books, studies of film and literature, a good one on “holy superheroes” and a fine study of the gospel seen in the work of U2. And he has done a few good novels (most recently, the widely acclaimed Bastille Day, published by Paraclete, that we’ve recommended.)

The Gospel According to James Baldwin does what you might expect, looking at Christian themes within Baldwin and, more generally, how Baldwin’s life and writing can inform our own views about love and identity. It is, to be sure, quite readable, but it offers a close reading of both Baldwin’s words and his legacy.

I like how the manuscript which I got the publisher to send to me send puts it:

During the reading for and writing of this book, Garrett followed in Baldwin’s physical footsteps — walking with him from his early years in Harlem to his painful journeys to the America South, from the cafes of St.-Germain in Paris to the mountains of Switzerland, where he did some of his more important thinking and writing.

Indeed, he writes of doing some of his own writing while seeing the view that Baldwin had from the Happersberger chalet in the Alps; he knows the “soul-food joints in Harlem.” I don’t mean to draw too many comparisons but I did think of one of my favorite books, the one where Jamie Smith retraces some of the not-yet-Saint Augustin’s journey in Italy. Sort of a travelogue and sort of an embodied study, Smith’s On the Road with Saint Augustine has that very real touch, and it seems some of Greg’s book does as well. You’ll like it, I’m sure. The very first sentence tells of his how-in-the-world-did-I-get-here sense of being high in the Swiss Alps; that first chapter is called “On Pilgrimage, Seeking St James.”

Greg admits to many differences between himself and the great twentieth century writer: Greg is white, was raised middle-class and mostly rural (he’s driven tractors and stacked hay bales, he notes) and while Baldwin was born and raised in black Harlem, still, there are connections. Even this oddly, sort of fascinates:

He officially left the church after early piety; I was a young religious malcontent who became deeply and even traditionally Christian in middle age.

And so the book meanders towards its study, offering writerly biographical glimpses of both men and Garrett’s remarkable experiences of teaching The Fire Next Time or “Sonny’s Blues” or Go Tell It on the Mountain, how it lingers, even among students who contact him later.

He notes a great quote — a quote I might have used in my own review of Nicholas Buccola’s book The Fire Is Upon Us, an amazingly learned and, I think, important book on the monumental University of Cambridge debate between Baldwin and William F. Buckley. Garrett quotes Buccola, saying:

For me, and for many others, Baldwin is the sort of writer who alters your perception of the world and forces you to consider and reconsider your place within it.

Dr. Garrett is conversational in his prose but has done a scholar’s bit of heavy lifting in the archival research, too. (The Baldwin Collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem has been just recently inaugurated.) He even visited the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library — you’ll see why.

The book is very nicely written and thoughtful as it covers Baldwin on culture, faith, race, justice, identity, and so much more. He notes that to address so much of such importance we need “an artist, a saint and a prophet.” The Gospel According to James Baldwin should release September 15th and we are eager to send a few out at our discounted price.

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Sadly, as of August 2023 we are still closed for in-store browsing. COVID is not fully over. Since few are reporting their illnesses anymore, it is tricky to know the reality but the best measurement is to check the waste water tables to see the amount of virus in the eco-system. It is bad; worse than it was two years ago, even. It’s important to be aware of how risks we take might effect the public good as those at risk, while not dying from the virus, are experiencing long-term health consequences. (Just check the latest reports of the rise of heart attacks and diabetes among younger adults, caused by Covid.) It is complicated, but we are still closed for in-store browsing due to our commitment to public health (and the safety of our family, staff, and customers.) Our store is a bit cramped without top-notch ventilation, so we are trying to be wise. Thanks for understanding.

We will keep you posted about our future plans… we are eager, but delayed, for now.

We are doing our famous curb-side and back yard customer service and can show any number of items to you if you call us from our back parking lot. It’s sort of fun, actually. We are eager to serve and grateful for your patience as we all work to mitigate the pandemic. We are very happy to help, so if you are in the area, do stop by. We love to see old friends and new customers.

Of course, we’re happy to ship books anywhere. 

We are here 10:00 – 6:00 EST /  Monday – Saturday. Closed on Sunday.

Join Us on Thursday, August 17th for a free, on-line Book Release event with Dr. Paul Louis Metzger — 1:00 Eastern.

REGISTER HERE.

I mentioned this upcoming on-line event with me interviewing Paul Metzger, author of More Than Things, in the big BookNotes column I did a couple weeks ago reviewing Metzger’s new book, and then alluded to it again in the most recent Booknotes (the one about spiritual formation, personal growth, and learning resilience and joy) a day or so ago. All you have to do is pre-register here.

More Than Things: A Personalist Ethic for a Throwaway Culture is a book that — if you don’t mind working through the exceptionally serious-minded scholarship and the fabulously copious footnotes citing tons of ancient and contemporary theologians, cultural critics, philosophers and ethicists for almost 450 pages — could almost fit in that upbeat post a day ago listing books like Karen Marsh’s recent Wake Up to Wonder and Justin Whitmel Earley’s new Made for People and that great anthology edited by Perry Glanzer called Stewarding Our Bodies. What threads through yesterday’s BookNotes of more than ten recent books about personal growth and spiritual formation is that they all emphasize, in one way or another, the fact that we are all persons and we deserve to be treated well, with dignity and honor, illustrating the inherent worth of people made in the very image of the Triune creator-God. Even the books about resilience or suffering (or Amanda Held Opelt’s brilliant Holy Unhappiness) are, I think, related to and best understood under the umbrella of Metzger’s good theology and subsequent social ethic which he calls personalism.

Paul Louis Metzger does a deep dive in More Than Things into this philosophy of personalism and the fabulous book cover aptly illustrates that we are not just plastic, not just cut-outs. I’m not sure if the plot and message of the Barbie movies fits in here — I’m going to ask him, that’s for sure — but Metzger is a culturally-aware public theologian who wants to show how a distinctively Christian worldview is, at heart, a matter of personalism; alive as we are in God’s world of good but fallen institutions and systems, but always as persons to be treated with dignity. His personal energy for this social ethic is matched by his exceptional kindness and grace. The book is brilliant and our time is going to be interesting.

So, re-read that review if you’d like and, in any event, sign up to be a part of our on-line conversation.

Once you sign up (here) you will then be sent a Zoom invitation, a simple code that gets you into the party. It is free (and there may even be some ongoing perks from IVP Academic, the publisher.)

I’ll interview Paul about the book starting at 1:00 PM in the Eastern time zone (he is out in Oregon, so it’s earlier out there.) We’ll have some friendly discussion about the book and its themes and we’ll take (written) questions from the on-line participants. Naturally, it will be a closed gig — that is, your face won’t be shown to the world and you’ll just see Paul and me — but we have a behind the scenes tech guy who will field questions and comments, creating the possibility of a real on-line conversation of sorts. We are really pleased that InterVarsity Press is hosting this event for us, and Paul and I both tip our hats to them. And to you, interested participants. We can’t do this without you.

It may be recorded and we might be able to share bits and pieces later, but, please, if you are at all able to join in this coming Thursday, please do. (We know it is in the middle of the work day for many but it was the only time our tech helpers could do it.) It would mean a lot to me, and I’m sure Dr. Metzger would be deeply appreciative, as well, if you could join us. He has done a number of books over the years, but this is one that is particularly important to him, the fruit of his years pondering Scripture and social ethics and public justice and coping with some troubles in the life of his own extended family that bring to the fore the very philosophy of life which this book so eloquently speaks. We are both really looking forward to chatting together, having others listen in, and taking feedback and comments from our gathered on-line community.

Won’t you be a part of it?

See you on-line on Thursday, August 17th at 1:00 EST (a bit earlier in other time zones.) Please don’t forget to pre-register so you can get the free code to join in the fun. Just click here and fill out the form from which we can send you the Zoom link. Thanks.

 

10 new books (and 1 to pre-order) to help you grow in wonder and hope, resilience, joy, and more ON SALE at Hearts & Minds

As I was finishing up writing about some of the heavy books I wrote about last time — and thinking about the ones I did before that — I grabbed some brand new books from our new book table that are less directly about the brokenness of our culture, the theological demands of public life, that might be helpful or even fun reading for the dog days of August. I hate to call them self-help books or spiritual formation, exactly, although some are sort of that.  Some are, shall we say, a bit less demanding, maybe more personally engaging and encouraging. They are each really, really good.

Big thanks to those who ordered books from the last few BookNotes. Don’t forget that we will continue to promote the extraordinary (if fairly scholarly and complex) new work by Paul Louis Metzger, the fabulous More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture (IVP Academic) in an on-line event on August 17th. If anybody can make a national Zoom event personal, I’d like to think Paul and I can. We’ll laugh some, chat some, maybe argue some, tell some tender stories, and take questions through the miracle of modern on-line technology. Paul is a great on-the-fly conversationalist and the hour will zoom by. I’ll send out a pre-registration link soon. See my previous review here if you missed it. Even if you haven’t bought the book please plan to join us at 1:00 PM (EST) on the 17th.

For now, though, here’s a fresh BookNotes column that offers something a bit other than analyzing culture and doing socially-engaged theology. We offer 10 new books for your summer reading that offer insights about personal growth. These are really great, and we’d be glad to send some out now.  Plus — hooray! — one to pre-order that is not out yet.

If you order the forthcoming The Deepest Place by Curt Thompson [see below] along with any other items, be sure to tell us if you want us to hold those we have while we wait for the not-yet-released one, or if you want us to send some now, and that one later, when it arrives, later in the month.

TEN NEW BOOKS FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND WHOLENESS + ONE TO PRE-ORDER

Wake Up to Wonder: 22 Invitations to Amazement in the Everyday Karen Wright Marsh (Brazos Press) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If this doesn’t end up on many year’s end best books lists, something is wrong out there. It is utterly delightful, challenging, interesting, informative, glorious, useful. It offers “a life of spiritual depth, amazement, and connection” which, they say, is “within reach — today and everyday.” Okay, that may be a bit of a big promise, but they are on to something here: in our quest to live a vibrant spiritual life, we need, as Karen puts it, “not to follow the perfect plan but people that we could follow.” This approach is grounded in the sensibly Biblical embodied sort of spirituality. This book offers twenty-two playful, simple practices that bring deeper meaning and purpose to everyday life.

You may recall Karen Marsh’s remarkable book Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians Who Transformed My Faith (that nicely sits next to books like Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church by Philip Yancey.) It’s a fabulously designed and wonderfully written hardback that I can’t say enough about.

This new one is similar insofar as it offers mentors and guides, faithful followers who have something to model or teach. The big difference, it seems, is that Wake Up To Wonder has a bit of a lighter touch, inviting us to gap and glory in amazement. It invites us to abundance, truly. (It covers topics as diverse as physical health and prayer, activism and Scripture study, creativity and enjoying nature.) Each brief look at a saint — from Dorothy Day’s delight in a day at the beach to Howard Thurman’s learning to “take a pause” to Martin Luther’s habit of “singing out loud” to Henri Nouwen’s advice of “putting pen to paper”  — not only offers a specific practice, but she has ingenious and creative application prompts to help you ponder and pursue it, engaging, as they say. There are personal experiments anyone can do, and you can start this summer. Highly recommended, for reading pleasure, for deepening faith, for waking to wonder.

There are delightful and compelling blurbs on the back that are convincing. Not every book has a rave from The Most Rev. Michael Curry (presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church) and rock and roller of Switchfoot fame, Jon Foreman, next o James Martin, the popular (and funny) Jesuit, who calls the new book “beautiful.”

I was surprised by how much I needed the spiritual sustenance that Wake Up to Wonder offers. Marsh invites us to nurture our own wellsprings of wonder. — Barbara Homes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

Stewarding Our Bodies: A Vision for Christian Student Affairs edited by Penny Glazer & Austin Smith (Abilene Christian University Press)  $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This is a book that, while designed for student affairs professionals, campus ministers, and others who work with young adults, is so admirably wise and interesting, that I want to promote it here for all Hearts & Minds friends. Yes, numerous issues related to the body seem to nearly plague those in higher education, so this is going to be helpful for any college educator or college kid you know. (Just think — or ask them if you think I’m overstating it — how students struggle with sleep, mental health, eating disorders, sexual identity questions, clothing choices, concerns about body image, alcohol problems and on and on…)

However, this book, written by students and faculty and staff at faith-based institutions, offers more than simple bromide or self help advice they can get from a quick google search. No, it is a one-of-a-kind blessed bit of serious research on a theological framework for such concerns related to embodiment in the real world (these days.)

Each chapter is on a different topic related to bodily life and, while drawing on the expertise and experiences of researchers and practitioners (mostly within the setting of Christian colleges, but not exclusively so), each offers a great bit of tender, wise insight.

There are chapters that themselves are nearly worth the price of the book, offering desperately needed guidance for a uniquely Christian perspective on navigating these topics. Agree or not with the details, this framework is one-of-a- kind and we are pleased to recommend it widely. 

These include (among others) great, thoughtful, chapters such as:

  • Savoring and Stewarding Food by Lisa Graham McMinn
  • Stewarding Our Limitations: Receiving GOd’s Gift of Sleep by Lisa Igam
  • Sabbath Taking by Justin Whitmel Earley
  • Attuning and Attending: Exercise and the Body by Andrew Borror

There are fabulous pieces on fashion (by the amazing Robert Covolo who is the pioneering thinker on this topic) and social media by the brilliantly astute Felcia Wu Son. There are several pieces on sexuality, sexuality identity, and one on pornography use (intriguingly called “Sex with a Person’s Mediated Body.”) As you’d expect there are several helpful chapters about anxiety, about depression, about mental health.

Stewarding Our Bodies is a must-have resource for anyone who works in higher education, and, I think, good for any youth pastor. Naturally, with a bit of understanding of its context, it would be great for nearly any seriously Christian young adult.

Holy Unhappiness: God’s Goodness, and the Myth of the Blessed Life Amanda Held Opelt (Worthy Publishing) $27.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

Okay, friends, this is an amazing new book and I am only part way through, but can’t wait to tell you just a bit about it. It deserves a more thorough review, but for now I can alert you to what is going to be, I trust, an enduring work, maybe someday considered a classic. It is so nicely written, accessible, interesting, fun, even as it is about a somewhat dour topic: why aren’t we happy and, more importantly, why do we expect to be. Ha. What a thesis!

You may know Amanda Held Opelt, who wrote the marvelous (I’m not kidding you — a marvelously interesting and edifying) book on grief practices from around the country, around the world, even. That one was called A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing (we just got the paperback edition) and I was blown away by how good it was.

This one illustrates that Ms Opelt is a very good writer and a thoughtful, balanced, insightful thinker. It is a gift that she shares her concerns with such vulnerability — it isn’t a highbrow research tome or a heady theological discourse. It reads like an engaging memoir as she tells her story of being, shall we say, restless. And why and how she came to be at peace with that.

Two wonderful pieces early in the book captivated me. First, she is so very candid about how she has had a pretty good life, easy by global standards, and, despite the horrible sudden loss of her beloved sister, Rachel, she mostly feels pretty blessed, privileged, even. This recounting of her station in life was so refreshing and won me over that she has a perspective that is rather different than so many self-help books. This is not, she says, a heartbreaking epiphany, being sent “on a journey of self-discovery and rebirth. My unhappiness did not descend on me like some grand revelation. It has been more like a slow drip of disappointment.”

She notes:

It feels like a lack, almost as if I am expecting something out of life that has not yet been delivered. Sometimes the sadness looms large, feels like a boulder I’m carrying. Sometimes it’s as small as a pebble in my shoe. But it is always there, pressing painfully at every step.

She says this is not depression, really, or clinical anxiety. It’s like an “ever-present anticlimax.”

Can you relate, this sense that somehow life has let you down?

Here’s the second big thing: she relates our expectations about what we think we should get out of life from what she calls a “emotional property gospel.” Most of us have heard, and most have rejected, the prosperity gospel promising health and wealth. She, too, has been a part of churches that firmly oppose such heretical nonsense. Yet — and it is a big yet — much of the air many Christians believe in solid and robust churches, is a sense that, emotionally, our callings and vocations and faith and service should bring us some sort of extraordinary feeling of well-being.

Opelt links this to the New Thought movement that swept America in the late 1800s and which resurfaced within Pentecostalism, and then, again, in the Eastern-ish New Age movement. (Yes she nicely draws on Blessed, the academic study of this by Kate Bowler.) Her cultural analysis is not tediously detailed but she has clearly done some very important research that has shaped how she understands our times, her quandary, and how she tells her story. It’s really interesting!

Amanda has worked in the third world and knows well what real deprivation looks like. She worries that even telling this story might be off-putting. She says she “feels the cringe-worthiness of all this even as I type it.” I am grateful that she says this, and how she observes that it is confusing, even to her.

But it is a story that must be told — why do our very blessed lives not often feel like a blessing? It is a matter, I think, that a simple gratitude journal will not fully solve. Her insights about the concept of blessedness (which “has a long and storied history, particularly within religious circles”) make this an informative study, even as it reads like an honest memoir.

There are three main parts to the book and after the three chapters in each of these sections she offers an interlude which she calls, not ironically, a blessing. These “blessing” readings include good, good words on delight, on humility, and on hope. My, my, this is beautiful, rich, honest, good stuff. Just what I needed. You, too, maybe?

Traveling Light: Galatians and the Free Life in Christ Eugene Peterson (IVP) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00

This newly expanded edition of an early book of Peterson is a joy to this old bookseller’s heart and, as a friend and fan of Eugene, it nearly brings tears to my eyes to tell you about it. As I hold this book in my hand — expanded, a handsome, demure cover, a great new forward by Karen Swallow Prior, a new subtitle — I think of the early 1980s first one. It had cool hot air balloons on the cover, and when it too soon began to look dated, I wished and prayed that IVP would reissue it. I’m glad they finally did.

A late dear friend named Mark, who died too early, often told me this was a life-changing, favorite book for him. I argued that A Long Obedience in the Same Direction and its sequel, then called Earth and Altar, (now known as Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms That Summon You from Self to Community) were stronger, but Mark insisted that Traveling Light was genius, the one that clicked for him. As a graphic designer, he didn’t love the happy hot air balloon cover, and eventually got the rare second edition with the Marc Chagall painting on the cover. I wish he was around to see this new one.

It is, as the new subtitle conveys, a study of Galatians. That was one of the early studies that Peterson did in his church basement as he mimeographed his paraphrases, now famously released as The Message Bible. This, my friends, in a way, started it all. Peterson wrote a few other books before this, and, indeed, Long Obedience remains a most beloved classic. But his study of the freedom we have in Christ, the down-to-Earth, gritty sort of fidelity found in knowing grace and loving well, this freedom from fear — it is foundational. Ground zero for Pastor Pete, I’d say.

Karen offers in her tremendous preface a page on one of Peterson’s favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. She says that “Peterson’s approach to freedom in Christ reflects what Hopkins expresses in “The Windhover.” She invites us to read it and re-read it. To read it aloud and read it yet again. Eugene would have liked that, believe me.

Listen to what my friend Winn Collier wrote about it:

Eugene Peterson wrote Traveling Light amid a time of cultural upheaval. This was his Scripture-saturated response to his profound concern for how Christians were growing distrustful of their neighbors, taking on tribal identities, withdrawing from the world’s pain, and holding more loyalty to some vision of America than to the kingdom of God. Eugene believed we were consumed by a constricting, heart-gripping fear–and that we were desperate for a fresh encounter with God’s liberating freedom. Apparently, Eugene was also writing for us, right now.  — Winn Collier, author of A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson and director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination

Now I Become Myself: How Deep Grace Heals Our Shame and Restores Our True Self Ken Shigematsu (Zondervan) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Ken Shigematsu is an author I’ve reviewed before here, highlighting just how wise and right he is about so much, and what a good writer he is. He is not deeply mystical or arcane in his contemplative lifestyle, even though he stands pretty squarely in that tradition. He was a fast-paced, high-profile international business exec who found, nearing burnout, a deeper, classic way to be a Christian, weaving ancient practices into his lifestyle and seeing his soul transformed. That story is told in several earlier books. You might not be surprised to know that Eugene Peterson figured into this guy’s transformation in Christ. Ken is now a pastor of a large and diverse inner city church, Tenth Church in Vancouver, BC.

This new book is a delight to read even as it gently approaches some very hard stuff. It is one of the many (many) books out in recent years on shame. The experience of shame, the back cover states, truly, is more common than we think. “It isn’t confined to those who have failed or gone through trauma or who have been told as children that they would never amount to anything.” Nope. He asserts that “People who are immensely successful also struggle with a sense that they are deficient.”

In this marvelous recent book he draws on a wide range of sources (including Scripture and spiritual-formation classics) as well as psychology and relational-neuroscience. He tells stories of his own life and of those he knows.

The point of the book, as you may suppose, is that a “deep experiential encounter with the love of God” can heal us of our shame, make us whole, and “inspire us to fulfill our purpose by making a unique contribution to the world.” (Did I mention he used to be a major multi-national business exec? His view of vocation and calling is robust and does not assume that spirituality or deep, healing discipleship is disengaged from the rough and tumble or real world jobs and global economics.)

So, this will help readers break free of envy, and “reveal how beauty and the experience of joy can help us overcome shame.” There are ten good, practical chapters. It isn’t too dense, not too self-helpy, but not too mystical either. This is just a great, solid, book inviting us all to sensible, profound, balanced Christian living. I’m sure you’ll like it.

I am not alone in thinking this is so good. Listen to these remarkable blurbs, by authors we trust:

Utterly wonderful. Emotionally attuned, self-aware, thoroughly researched, well written, seamlessly blending theology, spirituality and psychology, rooted in ancient practices and yet culturally engaged; there’s so many good things I could say about this book, but the main thing is: read it. — John Mark Comer, author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

If you’ve ever wondered what really matters or questioned whether you are enough; if you have doubted, failed, feared, questioned, floundered, messed up and thought yourself incapable of real change; if you have succeeded and found acclaim and yet still feel the ache of ‘not enough’ in the pit of your stomach, then please, please, please, read this book. With clarity, humility and courage Ken Shigematsu skillfully breaks open the goodness of Love and the possibilities of discovering our own belovedness. This is the only thing that really matters. As you read this book, what is on offer is Life in all its fullness and an encounter with the only power that can truly set you free to be yourself. — Danielle Strickland, author of The Other Side of Hope: Flipping the Script on Cynicism and Despair and Rediscovering Our Humanity

The universal struggle with shame is so multilayered that we need an integrated, robust approach to be free from it. Ken Shigematsu has offered us just the gift. Ken weaves theology, psychology, sociology and more to help us become our true self. I found myself repeatedly nodding as I felt truly seen in his words. I highly recommend this book! — Rich Villodas, author of Good and Beautiful and Kind

Unexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Women without Children Elizabeth Felicetti (Eerdmans) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

I do not have to say too much about this as the title explains so much. I’ll share that it is very well written, by a woman who is an Episcopal priest (at St. David’s Episcopalian in Richmond, VA.) She has written in venues such as The Christian Century and The Atlantic and, believe me, has some fine writing chops. Her love of the barren landscapes of the deserts of the Southwest — which give a fresh and new meaning to the word, “barren” — gives rise to writing that is delightfully lovely. But she’s shrewd, here, too, seriously deconstructing and reworking the phrase barren. It is a freighted Biblical word and she’s out to reclaim it. Wow.

Obviously (or so it should be) many women live extraordinary and splendid lives without bearing offspring. Some are happy with their reproductive choices while others are heartbroken with the struggles of infertility.  Rev. Felicetti ponders why many in our culture — churched and otherwise, fundamentalist and progressive — seem uncomfortable about all this. She replays a conversion with a (liberally progressive, presumably) female bishop whose hurtful words shocked me. There is no doubt that women without children are seen in an odd light by many.

While reflecting on her own experiences, Pastor Felicetti explores “how childless women make vital contributions in their communities” It is as simple and as needful as that. Here you will meet twenty-five women who “generated life without giving birth.”

The chapters are intriguing, starting somewhat as expected with barren Old Testament matriarchs and New Testament Christians. She describes “barren medieval mystics and writers” and “two English reformers.” There is a chapter on “childless Christian composers’ and one on “childless Christian activists.” There’s a moving section on medical professionals and, naturally, one on childless clergy.  In each she tells moving stories — it brought to mind old missionary anthologies I used to read — and in some she asks, bluntly, if they would have done such great things, or done them differently, if they had had children. It’s a fair question, curious, and, I’m guessing, finally, liberating for many who by choice (or through no choice of their own) have not borne children.

As a woman without children myself, I treasure the cloud of witnesses Felicetti has gathered together in this bold new book to attest to the abundant possibilities of a life aside from motherhood. What wonderful company we find ourselves in! Mary Magdalene, Clare of Assisi, Elizabeth I, Pauli Murray, Dolly Parton, and more. Unexpected Abundance will be a faithful and fierce companion for women who have chosen or are discerning this path. — Heidi Haverkamp, Episcopal priest and author of Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year B

Full of surprising blueprints both personal and historical, this book deftly flips the cultural script that conflates childlessness with something sad, bad, or less than and reminds us that flourishing has never followed a single plot. Even what we call barren bears life.     — Erin S. Lane, author of Lessons in Belonging from a Church-Going Commitment  Phone and Someone Other Than a Mother

Everything Is (Not) Fine: Finding Strength When Life Gets Annoyingly Difficult Katie Schnack (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

You know, for a book about hard times — “when the world knocks us flat on our butt” as it says on the back cover — this book is pretty darn enjoyable. Okay, it’s honest about some anguishing things, but there is an upbeat, even inspirational, feel to some of this. There is no sugarcoating (or “toxic positivity”) when searching for sustenance as she faced a child’s medical challenge and her own difficult season. As a starred review at Publishers Weekly put it, without much charm, her “honest rendering of faith challenges will help readers feel less alone, and her sense of humor added welcome moments of levity.” Oh yeah, there are moments of levity, many moments of levity. She is a character (and fine writer.) If you are young and in your twenties you may have read her The Gap Decade: When You’re Technically an Adult but Really Don’t Feel Like It.

I love the unit headings with titles like — “Don’t make it a thing until it’s a thing”  and “Ghosts, messy T-Shirts, and chickens, because all these things totally make sense together.”

There are some great stories in here, offering advice like “make friendships with a firefighter who buys matching muumuus at Walmart with you” and “listen to your kid’s singing, even if it is obnoxious.”  I like the chapter title that goes: “It might not get easier. Sorry. But! You can get used to it.” I wish I had maybe 30 years ago the chapter simply called “Chill Out About Parenting.”

So, this is fun, serious, wildly imaginative, funny, and at time grave about faithfulness in a broken, hurting world. I’m sure some of you are going to love this, especially if you’re the kind of person who calls their Starbucks drinks “Starbies.”

Made for People: Why We Drift Into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship Justin Whitmel Earley (Zondervan) $19.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I hope you know Justin Earley’s amazing previous IVP book called Common Rule: Habits of Purpose in an Age of Distraction. (It was just re-issued in a slightly expanded edition with a new study guide.) It offers nice graphics and charts and nicely colored ink on creatively designed pages to show how there are things in our lives we need to do less of, and things we need to do more of, daily, weekly, monthly. It is one of the very few self-management books that makes sense to those of us with allergies to such stuff, and its design is a gift for those who like grids and charts to make things do-able. He roots his advice in theories of habits and desires and inner transformation, even as he offers right-on, whole-life advice about Christian maturity. The book is very wise blast.

The second one applied much of this same approach and writerly energy (and nice design) to family life, parenting and whatnot. It was called Habits of the Household and, again, is simply stellar, useful, fun. Give it to any young parents you know!

This brand new one seems to carry a similar edge and elan, written with energy and honesty (and some multi-colored ink on the cleverly designed pages, complete with line drawings and cartoons.) What fun.

The Made for People book, however, is not cheesy nor simplistic, and the topic is deadly serious. It is, as Kyle Idleman put it, “a clarion call to covenant friendship — a deep abiding love that comes from vulnerability.”

Loneliness has become a cultural epidemic and it literally affects the health and happiness of millions. As it says on the back cover, “busyness, fear of vulnerability, and past pain often stop us from developing the deep friendships we long for. But it’s not supposed to be this way. You were made for people.”

God has made us in God’s own Triune image as people to be in relationship. We, these days, for various reasons, need to relearn key habits that “foster a lifestyle of friendship.” Isolation is not helpful and it need not be the story of our lives. Earley — a busy dad and business lawyer — has a lot to tell and a lot to teach. Just the table of contents is inspiring. I’m going to check it out. Maybe you should start a group to read it together, folks who might deepen in Biblical wisdom for deeper relationships.

Finding Freedom in Constraint: Reimagining Spiritual Disciplines as a Communal Way of Life Jared Patrick Boyd (formatio / IVP) $20.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

From the publishing partnership with the Order of the Common Life to the exciting forward by Bishop Todd Hunter (and the stellar endorsements by Episcopalian Bible prof Wesley Hill and Anglican priest and writer Tish Harrison Warren) I knew this was going to be a very special book. I spent hours with it on Sunday and will take it up contemplatively next Lord’s Day, I am sure. It is stunning.

Speaking of relationships (see Made for People, above) Boyd insists that this book must be read with others. He encourages us to find fellow readers, begs us to comply; I get it. He is right. We have privatized and personalized the spiritual practices that make for a rich interior life way too much, and we need the local church (or at least a small group of like-minded pilgrims) to walk the way of spiritual formation with us. He’s right, but whether you have reading companions and conversation partners or not, this book is a rewarding, rich, compelling read.

Finding Freedom in Constraint is, in many ways, a “next level” book if one is familiar with the writings of the likes of Richard Foster or Ruth Haley Barton or Dallas Willard or David Benner; he loves citing Thomas Merton, Roberta Bondi, Thomas Greene, and the like. He draws on ancient church writers (especially the early church mothers and fathers of the desert) and helps us reimagine how all that works in our own lives. He offers intriguing history of the rise of monasticism and the way of life that ensued… He tells contemporary stories and shares much about his own journey. It’s a great read.

Jared is sensitive to those who have been hurt by the church and invites even those who are skeptical into this freedom-seeking life of constraint. He’s been down the road of deconstruction a bit, I gather, not unaware of issues looming large for some. I appreciate his tone and his general direction.

Here’s the big thing, as you can tell from the title. He believes that spiritual disciplines, when practiced together, are enriching even if they teach us to live within limits. To submit, to surrender, to be constrained. I wish he explained exactly what that means early on, but that is part of the fun, reading eagerly, hoping it is fleshed out and made more clear, as it seems to be, chapter by chapter. Will we limit ourselves and thereby be opened up to “make greater room to experience the love of God”? As Wes Hill puts it, it will be for many “a welcome challenge and summons to a holistic encounter with God in Christ.”

Jared Patrick Boyd is a pastor in the Vineyard USA movement and the founder of a missional monastic order, helping think through the nature of religious vocation and calling in our era. He also wrote the tremendous, tremendous book about praying with children and mentoring them into a deeper life called Imaginative Prayer: A Yearlong Guide for Your Child’s Spiritual Formation.

(By the way, while Boyd writes, it seems, to a somewhat younger crowd and those experimenting with new forms of liturgical church and spiritual formation groups, the type font in this book is a nicely readable size, a tad bigger than some. For those needing a bit of help in this area, Finding Freedom in Constraint is a readable choice.)

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

May I suggest this yet again. It came out a few months back and while I did a major BookNotes review, I’m still so fond of it and find myself dipping in over and over. There are bunch of chapters by bunches of people — some who are extraordinary writers, some rather famous, most not, though — and each just shares a short, creatively written piece about how they honor God in their ordinary lives. Each one picks a certain thing, a side of life or thing they do, and explains how, in God’s gracious economy, this thing matters.

As I’ve said before here at BookNotes there are fun chapters. There are inspiring essays on roller skating, raising chickens, drinking wine, doing home repairs. Most readers will enjoy the chapter about going to museums and some will get a kick of the piece on knitting (written by poet Luci Shaw.) Can you dance to the glory of God? Does God care about your choice of briefcase? Hooray for a theologically-informed celebration of comic books. Who knew reading about napping would be so fun. The small talk chapter is a great one. Malcolm Guite even has a piece on smoking pipes.

There are harder things here, too — there is a candid chapter about mental illness, one on grief, one on the sadnesses (among the joys) of grand parenting. There is a God-honoring chapter on resisting porn. The piece on “graying” is good.

Some are not quite funny, but not about hardships. Calvin Seerveld has one on a Biblically-informed way to talk about knowing. Curt Thompson has a really good piece on being present to others. I have one about working in retail. I will forever be touched by Ned Bustard’s piece on making love, knowing that his wife, Leslie, is now awaiting the full resurrection and restoration all things, in love.

From a nice piece on mentoring others to a good introduction to the joy of movies, from Bruce Herman on painting to a nice entry on writing, Ordinary Saints is a treasure chest full of enjoyment and, importantly, examples of, well, ordinary saints. Soli de Gloria, even if you don’t strap on those roller skates.

The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope  Curt Thompson (Zondervan) $27.00  NOT YET RELEASED – DUE AUGUST 29, 2023 // OUR PRE-ORDER SALE PRICE = $22.39

This may soon become one of the most talked about books of the fall, in the religious book marketplace, at least, and should be one of the most anticipated. It comes out in a few weeks or so, but, alas, my fear is that it may not be widely known that it is coming soon. Dr. Curt is a hero for many of us, an articulate, polished, honest, teacherly psychotherapist who has the knack of being able to write profound, serious works that are upbeat, clear-headed, and accessible. He is Biblically-wise and exceptionally thoughtful, theologically informed as he is. We so appreciated his debut release The Anatomy of a Soul, raved about his exceptional sophomore volume,The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves (the best Biblically-informed psychological study of the topic I’ve ever read) and was very deeply moved by his seriously lovely third one, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community. (Mako Fujimura wrote a splendid forward for that one.) The last two were expertly done in hardcover by IVP and they remain essential volumes.

This new one is on a topic that has been mined deeply and covered well — the problem of suffering and the hope for resilience. I almost wondered what even Curt might bring to this well-worn conversation. Could he add something new? I am half way through this extraordinary book and I am sure there is little done that does what this book accomplishes. Who knew that such a standard topic could be so very interesting and how this uniquely Christian approach to neuro-psychology and “interpersonal neurobiology” (IPNB) would be so enlightening. Wow.

There is good Bible study in here, there is provocative, solid theologizing, there is awareness of deep and personal suffering, all woven around themes of how to find hope, rather than despair, how to move through grief, and how God uses it, forming it some sort of redemptive peace. I hesitate to even say that, as it can be exploitive and debilitating, but in Curt’s empathic and experienced hands, hope is within reach — formed in community! — and, through certain sorts of perseverance, can change our brains and reshape our imagination. The Deepest Place builds a slow case, carefully, clearly, delightfully, even.

We can live into a better future, through a faithful understanding of the nature of suffering, some profound Biblical insight (especially from the first few verses of Romans 5 that he unpacks nicely) and help from tools gleaned from attachment theory, neural social engagement systems, EMDR, and the work of scholars such as Daniel Siegel and Bessel van der Kolk. This work is as fascinating as it is helpful.

Seeing Siegel, van der Kolk, and Brene Brown in conversation with the likes of John Goldingay, N.T. Wright and Lesslie Newbigin, is a sheer delight. This book is a stand-out, an instant classic in how it models a fruitful integration of faith and scholarship, and how it offers durable hope for real folks. Curt Thompson’s work is always very highly recommended and this is one of his most urgent. Due out sometime the end of August (but one never knows with this publisher, I must say.) Pre-order it now at our discounted price and we’ll send it the day it comes.

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Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical Christianity (Russell Moore), A Burning House: Redeeming American Evangelicalism by Examining Its History, Mission, and Message (Brandon Washington), American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church (Andrew Whitehead) and The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Karen Swallow Prior) ON SALE NOW

And so I cry sometimes when I’m lying in bed

Just to get it all out, what’s in my head

And I, I’m feeling a little peculiar

And so I wake in the morning and I step outside

And I take a deep breath and I get real high

And I scream from the top of my lungs

“What’s going on?”

Do you remember that one-hit wonder by 4 Non Blondes from the mid-90s? Not every rock ballad in those years was singing about pathos and longing, about praying, about revolution. I wondered if they read Walter Brueggemann.

The first prayer in his new small collection Acting in the Wake: Prayers for Justice (WJK; $17.00 – our sale price = $13.60) starts with an admission: “We are a strange mix of amber waves of grain and rockets’ red glare.”

The prayer offered at his seminary for the National Day of Prayer continues, “We are a people blessed with flourishing land that is marked by beauty and prosperity. We are, at the same time, a people bent on war and domination, violence and torture. We mumble about our ambiguity. And then we notice we are in a free fall.” That was in 2014.

In a much earlier prayer, also written in Acting in the Wake, Brueggemann prays,

“We do not know how a church

     could be shaped after the body of Jesus,

       but you have promised it to us,

         and so we ask for new beginnings.”

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A few years ago I reviewed a few books that asked if the word evangelical was still viable, still a useful indicator of core theological doctrines and a certain “Bible believing” faith. Some felt like this is their theological home and they want to remain steadfast in claiming the name, despite its being sullied. Others thought — out of loyalty to Jesus and faithfulness to the streams of the Spirit that makes up the church — that it was time to distance themselves from the alt-right, Christian-nationalist, MAGA-evangelicals. I knew that some of our BookNotes readers are not all a part of that tradition, and I still recommended the books to them; the honest self-reflection was a good model for self-aware, self-reflection for those in other theological camps or church traditions as well. For those who are (or were) evangelicals, the books were essential. Like that cry of that song title, they ask, “What’s Up?”

Of the several good ones exploring this territory, I recommended Still Evangelical? Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning edited by Mark Labberton (IVP; $24.00 – our sale price = $19.20) with pieces by Soong-Chan Rah, Lisa Sharon Harper, Jim Daly, Shane Claiborne and more. It’s a great collection and offers several different answers to the question. I’ve read most chapters more than once. 

By a single author (a thoughtful and especially articulate one), I can hardly say enough about Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay by Dan Stringer (IVP; $17.00 – our sale price = $13.60.) Richard Mouw wrote the forward to that one and his own mature ruminations are well worth reading, too — we’d love to send out some copies of his 2019 Restless Faith: Holding Evangelical Beliefs in a World of Contested Labels (Brazos Press; $22.00 – our sale price = $17.60.)

Less personal, more scholarly, (and thicker, at 335 pages) but, again, nearly a must to understand the religious landscape of our lifetime, we recommend Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be edited by respected historians Mark Noll, David Bebbington and George Marsden (Eerdmans; $28.00 – our sale price = $22.40.) It’s a very carefully edited anthology with authors from Timothy Keller to Kristin Du Mez, Molly Worthen to Amanda Porterfield, Jemar Tisby to D.G. Hart, and many more.

If you’ve got any of these titles, it might be good to get ‘em out for a re-read. Or order those you don’t have. The crisis which precipitated such volumes is nowhere near over.

FOUR NEW ONES – ESSENTIAL READS

There are many new books exploring what has happened within the evangelical sub-culture.  There are four recent ones that are stand-outs, must-reads. I want to briefly highlight them here. You can order, as always, by scrolling to the bottom of this column, using the link to our secure order page. All of us at Hearts & Minds thank you for your interest and your support of our south-central Pennsylvania bookstore. We’re broadly ecumenical and have very wide reading habits, but this stuff is close to home. We hope you order some at our 20% off BookNotes discount. Don’t forget to tell us how you’d like them shipped — USPS “media mail” (as we explain, below) is cheaper but a bit slower. We can ship any way you’d like or, if your in the area, swing by.

Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical Christianity Russell Moore (Sentinel) $29.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

This is a hugely important book, honest, clear, thoughtful, wise, nearly definitive for this genre of explorations of the religious coherency, complexities, idolatries, blessings and curses of the evangelical movement and Moore’s own Southern Baptist tradition, specially. I’ve met Moore a time or two and we’ve had lovely conversations about faith and books. He’s smart, gracious, kind, and astute. His earlier books were good, but this is significantly more important than anything he has yet done.

As the artful writer and singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson (of Rabbit Room fame) notes, Moore’s voice is “gentle, courageous” and “has a way of cutting through the blame of the age, right down to the marrow of what matters.”

The great civil rights voice John Perkins puts it bluntly: “Russell Moore tells it straight about how the church has lost its way.”  As both reviewers not, for Moore, what really matters is Jesus.

Moore, as you may know, was for nearly a decade the voice of public policy concerns of the SBC, having replaced a retiring guy who was part of the first iteration of the Christian right; Moore said he was going to expand the social vision and public theology of the evangelical SBC to include — as the Bible teaches and as Jesus would want — creation care and racism, poverty and social justice concerns, even as he continued to advocate for classic Baptist policies around the right to life and religious freedom. It did not take long for the controversies to brew. When he spoke out against the logic of conservative Christians supporting a serial sexual abuser and chronic liar with little or no Biblical awareness, he became a target of pretty serious criticism in his denomination.

He hints at only some of this in the powerful introduction to Losing Our Religion but, whew, when he insisted that his denomination behave with compassion and transparency about the bubbling sexual abuse scandals, he became nearly a pariah among their old boy networks; to this day some call him foul names. I am summarizing in my own words, here, but he is candid about it all, and pushes us towards a more consistently Christian vision and a way out of our religiosity. I like how the theme of authentic, evangelical faith, trusting in Jesus — what his mentors and elders taught him, after all — comes across with thoughtful zeal. He doesn’t call us to rancor or power but to a Christ-like posture that lives into a consistent life of discipleship, in private and in public, in church and at work, in our families and in the public squares.

Moore sets out to convince us that the crisis in American evangelicalism is worse than we may think. It is counter-intuitive for some, but he suggests that this just might be good news.

Losing Our Religion has five major chapter titles entitled Losing our Credibility, Losing our Authority, Losing Our Identity,  Losing our Integrity, and Losing our Stability.

The subtitle of each chapter is fascinating (again, whether you see yourself as an evangelical or not.)

    • How Disillusion Can Save Us from Deconstruction
    • How the Truth Can Save us from Tribalism
    • How Conversion Can Save Us from the Culture Wars,
    • How Morality Can Save Us from Hypocrisy
    • How Revival Can Save Us from Nostalgia

Listen to Beth Moore — no relation, except she, too, was a conventional Southern Baptist who was treated viciously when she expressed opposition to the SBC Trumpism, church power-plays, and sexual abuse cover-ups.  Beth writes:

Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion is head-shakingly good. By the time I’d underlined at least one sentence in every paragraph of the first two chapters, I knew I was reading a book I’d keep within easy reach for years to come. Russ writers with a remarkable blend of clarity, color, and candor. More important, the ink on these pages is drawn from a deep well of biblical conviction that drives the author’s decisions. Here you go: a gift of gospel-centered sanity in a culture gone utterly mad.

A Burning House: Redeeming American Evangelicalism by Examining Its History, Mission and Message Brandon Washington (Zondervan) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

If Russell Moore is a sage and thoughtful evangelical leader, balanced and gracious, intellectually engaged but still a preacher at heart, Brandon Washington is nearly similar — but with a local church profit; he is a black pastor of a more contemporary sort of church in Denver, Colorado. A graduate of the Conservative Baptist Seminary there, the flyleaf bears a solid quote from a personal hero, the late, former President of what is now called Denver Seminary, Dr. Vernon Grounds. I think I first met Grounds when he was speaking in a tag-team event with the somewhat younger Ron Sider. The two were socially-active, deeply-evangelical, full-gospel gentlemen with commitments to evangelism and social justice. If Pastor Washington was shaped by Dr. Grounds, I am immediately his fan.

“American Evangelicalism is ablaze” cries Washington,, as he tells the story of how this large swath of American Protestants got to this point. There has been some sort of unity around doctrinal identity, he says, but for too long “divisions along ethnic and cultural lines have tarnished the movement’s witness.”

This remarkable book not only tells the story of how evangelicalism was captured by worldly ideologies and increasingly lost a clear sense of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is not that other authors are unaware of this aspect of the large critique that is needed (more is not unaware of racial issues) but this book highlights this important part of the tale better than any book I’ve read recently about evangelicalism.

You should know this: the book title and its working metaphor comes from Dr. King. With desegregation on the horizon, MLK said, “I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.”

As it says on the back cover, “As with the country, if we hope to fully integrate the American evangelical church, we must do so as firefighters.”

As one reviewer put it, this book is “equal measures hard and hopeful.” It invites us to both lament and repent.

Pastor Washington is a keen observer of history and offers a good overview of much that is important for us all. While he offers his historical and theological appraisal of American evangelicalism, it carries a weighty and appreciative foreword by East Coast black urban leader, Eric Mason. He notes that it is a “labor of love” and “enormously important in our time.” Pastor Mason says,

Brandon has given us a seminal tome for reflecting on the racial-justice issues of our day in a balanced, honest, healthy way and engaging them with godliness, grace, and scholarship.

Moore has quite an inside story to tell and he has been on media venues as diverse as The Trinity Forum and Morning Joe this week.  Pastor Brandon Washington may not be as well known but his book is substantive and, while not scholarly, well researched and vivid. I highly recommend it.

American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church Andrew Whitehead (Brazos Press) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

This brand new book is not exactly a study of evangelicalism but insofar as much of the mainstream, white evangelical movement has identified in one way or another with the advocates of this sort of ideology — that Whitehead identifies as idolatry — then this book is a urgent, key aspect of any wise and faithful assessment of evangelicalism itself. Evangelical historians like Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez, herself a specialist in 20th century evangelicalism, says it is “an essential primer for anyone seeking to understand our current moment so we can chart a path toward a more just and compassionate future.”

Yes, as Whitehead shows, there have been theological and spiritual costs to the church/state problem that undergirds a uniquely Christian nationalism. It is clear that this ideology has infected all sorts of churches, but statistically, mores in evangelical congregations. It is a conversation that we must have and this book, as one advocate says, it is “a book whose time has come.” We need this book.

Here’s two good things you should know. Professor White head is an accomplished scholar in this field. He co-wrote a very important volume (Taking America Back for God) on Oxford University Press, which won the 2021 Distinguished Book Award from the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion. He runs a think-tank and research center of religion in American culture at Indianapolis University – Purdue. His PhD is from Baylor and is himself a devout Christian. As they say down south, he’s got a dog in this fight. So he is quite a well informed and nuanced scholar and a person of deep faith.

Secondly, you may want to know that this is written seemingly for an evangelical or at least a church-related, religious audience (while his previous one for a more general market of interested citizens and civic scholars.) He speaks less academically and is clear about the theological questions of idolatry that undergird any discussion of our views of the state, civil religion patriotism and whatnot. Perhaps not as accessibly simple as the excellent How to Be a Patriotic Christian: Love of Country as Love of Neighbor by Rich Mouw (VP; $17.00 – our sale price = $13.60) it is nonetheless a book that could be used in a church study group, an adult Sunday School class, or campus ministry program. It’s important, solid, helpful, every-so-timely, and inspiring. As one reviewer said, it is “crisply written and utterly compelling.” The Library Journal review called it “heartfelt.” It offers a faithful path forward.

With the precision of a scholar and the passion of a faithful Christian, Whitehead clarifies the difference between Christianity and Christian nationalism. By the end of this book, one discovers that it’s not only Christian nationalists who betray the gospel but also those Christians who remain quiet in the face of it. Required reading for anyone who claims to be Christian in this time of Christian nationalist fervor.  — Kelly Brown Douglas, former dean of Episcopal Divinity School, professor, Union Theological Seminary, author of Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter

We need this book. Now. With skill and grace, Whitehead explains the dangerous ideologies undergirding Christian nationalism, traces how it has infected the church, and provides practical guidance for those of us fighting it in our own communities. This is a book you should give to your friends, your family, and your pastor — Beth Allison Barr, professor, Baylor University; author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis Karen Swallow Prior (Brazos Press) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

While this extraordinary book is less overtly about the ugliness of evangelical nationalisms and political postures that are un-Christlike and the temptations of power that has seduced many evangelicals and charismatics who ought to know better, it does explore the deepest DNA, as we say these days, of the movement. I hope you saw my earlier review, back when we were still taking pre-orders.

As Karen puts it early on in the book,

If evangelicalism is a house, then these unexamined assumptions are its floor joists, wall studs, beams, and rafters — holding everything together but unseen, covered over by tile, paint, paper, and ceilings. What we don’t see, we don’t think about. Until something goes wrong and something needs replacement. Or restoration Or reform.

She thinks that the evangelical house is indeed badly in need of repair. She uses the language of crisis and notes that some parts of the house may be rotten.

Can we shed parts of our make-up that are more cultural and unfaithfully political than fully Biblical? Can we make discerning moves to sort out where we’ve been? This is a delightfully captivating read, full of stuff I bet you didn’t know, with fascinating detours to locations and explorations of people and ideas that are helpful to understand evangelical history and current practice (but which you, like me, maybe didn’t really know.) From brief looks at The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress to the Left Behind franchise — she even gets into Chick Tracts — evangelicals have been linked to publishing, for good and for ill. She has an excellent section on sentimentality — the Evangelical Imagination book cover captures some of the bad art she is concerned about — and explores in a chapter sub-titled “Uncle Tom, Sweet Jesus, and Public Urination.” Yep. You’ve got to read that chapter, believe me!

As I said in my previous BookNotes review, Karen is adept at explaining British evangelical history; she has a thrilling book on Hannah More (who was a poet and novelist in the Clapham movement with William Wilberforce) called Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson; $24.99 – our sale price = $19.99.) She knows her stuff and this new one is a coherent, teacherly, study of the historical forces and contexts that shaped modern American evangelicalism.

(I recently heard a great presentation by two women who were part of the Asbury Outpouring that started in Wilmore, Kentucky, last winter, by the way, and their overview of the history of revivals and renewal was informed by British evangelicalism and the likes of George Whitefield and John Wesley and on to American revivalists like Charles Finney and his abolitionist pals. I wondered if they knew Dr. Prior’s new book which would fill out some of the cultural background.)

Karen Swallow Prior knows this history well and moves from those distinctively evangelical movements in British and American history to insights about former President Trump, connecting the election of 2016 with a rumination on Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt.” Wow – this is really, really interesting.

The book is a broader reflection on the deepest values, rooted in stories and metaphors, that have shaped American religion and, as such, is a book for our postmodern times. It goes a bit deeper and asks bigger questions, so it may not seem as directly urgent to the crisis at hand, but the writing connects the dots, helpfully so.

We just got into the shop The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge (Zondervan; $29.99 – our sale price = $23.99) which takes its place with a handful of other recent studies of “the nones” and the process of secularization within 21st century modernity. As important as knowing the facts about “dechurching” and what many people are thinking regarding religious affiliation these days, to steward the good news well and share the gospel effectively we need more than the data of what is going wrong. We need to do more than wring our hands about the polarizing in our churches by those who, in Russell Moore’s apt phrase, have led us to a church “so identified with Machiavelli-like cruelty and Caligula-like vulgarity.” The subtitle to Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination should be noticed and pondered: “How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis.”

In a way, all four of these major new books could be read in conversation with each other, each having their own unique take on the problems of white Christian nationalism and the corrupted evangelical pseudo-theology that bolsters it. Dr. Prior is right, though: better doctrine and even better public/political theology isn’t enough. We need new stories, better images, rich and faithful metaphors to healer church cultures and to bring hope to our confused era. I hope you will be interested enough to spend some time yet this summer digging a bit deeper into this quandary of a “burning house.” Maybe, as Russell Moore put it, you will respond to a new call to conversion, an invitation, as his tradition calls it.  Perhaps we can lose some of this bad religion and return to the best evangelicalism has taught us.  Of course we need God. We need the resurrected Christ. We need the Holy Spirit. But we must do our part. These books can help.

May I say it again: even if you are not an evangelical or don’t have current affinities to the name or tradition — some readers have been hurt and excluded by this movement, and just want to say “good riddance” — I hear you. I get it. But whether you are disillusioned, or a happy non-evangelically-minded member of a mainline denominational church, I bet you know people who are vexed by the nature of their community churches and para-church ministries and TV preachers and such. We are, as members of Christ’s church (and, honestly, as Americans) in this together. I want to say that everybody will benefit from and may really enjoy these reads. Come on!

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There are generally two kinds of US Mail options (who just raised their rates again) 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 a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $4.12; 2 lbs would be $4.87.
  • United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, 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.

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Sadly, as of July 2023 we are still closed for in-store browsing. COVID is not fully over. Since few are reporting their illnesses anymore, it is tricky to know the reality but the best measurement is to check the waste water tables to see the amount of virus in the eco-system. It is bad; worse than it was two years ago, even. It’s important to be aware of how risks we take might effect the public good as those at risk, while not dying from the virus, are experiencing long-term health consequences. (Just check the latest reports of the rise of heart attacks and diabetes among younger adults, caused by Covid.) It is complicated, but we are still closed for in-store browsing due to our commitment to public health (and the safety of our family, staff, and customers.) The vaccination rate here in York County is sadly lower than average. Our store is a bit cramped without top-notch ventilation, so we are trying to be wise. 

We will keep you posted about our future plans… we are eager, but delayed, for now.

We are doing our famous curb-side and back yard customer service and can show any number of items to you if you call us from our back parking lot. It’s sort of fun, actually. We are eager to serve and grateful for your patience as we all work to mitigate the pandemic. We are very happy to help, so if you are in the area, do stop by. We love to see old friends and new customers.

Of course, we’re happy to ship books anywhere. 

We are here 10:00 – 6:00 EST /  Monday – Saturday. Closed on Sunday.

 

ORDER THE BRAND NEW “More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture” by Paul Louis Metzger ON SALE NOW

More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture Paul Louis Metzger (IVP Academic) $48.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $38.00

We want to invite you to consider this seriously academic treatise; we have it early so you can buy it now at our sale price.

YOU CAN EASILY ORDER BY CLICKING THE LINK BELOW WHICH TAKES YOU TO OUR SECURE ORDER FORM AT THE HEARTS & MINDS WEBSITE. WE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ORDER PERSONALLY. Yep, personally.

Also, we invite you to join us in a very special on-line celebration of the book and the author that we will offer next month, the afternoon of THURSDAY, August 17, 2023 at 1:00 EST. Stay tuned for future info about how to join (for free) this very special on-line, live-streamed  book launch event.

We will advertise more about this opportunity to meet Dr. Paul Metzger as I interview him about this remarkable new book, but for now, we wanted you to know that Hearts & Minds has More Than Things in stock and we are sending them out at our BookNotes discounted price (a little bit more than 20% off.)  It is a major and necessarily complicated book and I want to tell you a bit about it, and share how honored we feel to be able to promote it — at the shop in Dallastown, PA and here through our mail order biz, and at that upcoming Facebook live-type book event on August 17th.

We have long admired Paul Metzger, a philosopher (with a PhD from the prestigious King’s College, London) and professor of the theology of culture at Multnomah University and Seminary. He also directs the Institute for Cultural Engagement, there, popularly known as “New Wine, New Wineskins.” Hooray for that!

We enthusiastically reviewed and continue to take to events where we are selling books his 2011 release, New Wine Tastings: Theological Essays of Cultural Engagement (Cascade Books; $21.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $16.80) when it came out because it captured much of our overall theme of cultural engagement, learning how, as Christians, we can be involved in but not absorbed by, our surrounding secularized culture. In that nice collection he explores First Nations issues, questions of finding Christ among the homeless, climate change, and more foundational themes, like resisting the culture wars, not living in a “Christian ghetto”, and a generative chapter called “Toward a Theologically Conservative, Compassionately Liberal Faith.” You can imagine we like it. We are fans of his work.

I do not say this to scare you away, but, well, this new one, More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture, is fairly expensive and a thick volume. It’s over 450 pages! I don’t often celebrate philosophy books here at BookNotes, even if we have a fairly robust and, I’m told, interesting, philosophy section, with some standard old stuff and personal favorites from Herman Dooyeweerd to Alasdair MacIntyre to Jamie Smith to Esther Meek (see her brand new one, by the way — Doorway to Artistry: Attuning Your Philosophy to Enhance Your Creativity (Cascade Books; $32.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60.)) But I digress: this new Metzger work is scholarly but not exactly a philosophy book, per se. It’s not standard theology, either: perhaps we can call it applied social ethics rooted in a philosophical public theology. It’s hard to explain, but, man, it’s good. And important.

Ron Cole-Turner of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary raves about it, saying it is “sweeping in scope while precise in detail.” Peter Casarella of Duke Divinity School calls More Than Things “an ecumenical tour de force.” 

We just got our copies into the store, so we’re eager to send them out now. Let me tell you what my study of an advanced manuscript has revealed. And why we’re thrilled to have a good virtual conversation on social media next month that we hope you can join.

SETTING THE TABLE TO THIS INVITATION

Let me try to set the table just a bit so you see what sort of book I’m inviting you to consider and what the program will be like when I host an online conversation with him in a couple of weeks. We hope you will find the event hospitable and tasty and substantial. I know the book is hearty, to say the least.

First; Paul Louis Metzger. We’re not dear friends or old pals, really, but I’ve respected his work for years. He’s admired Hearts & Minds from afar, so we’re honored that he reached out to us to see how we might work together to get the word out about More Than Things.

You see, the book is about the philosophy of personalism, which sounds like a prophetic voice in the modern wilderness, inviting us to resist the trend that, as it is sometimes cleverly put, treats people like things and things like people. Obviously, any serious ethic for our day has to turn that around. We’ve got to undo some of the process of commodification of nearly everything.  Let’s start with why we’re involved with the launch of this important book.

With that personalist perspective, Metzger doesn’t want to just download the data to Amazon or let some faceless corporation generate algorithmic orders with robotic tech filling “units of sales” (as they call books these days) stuffing them carelessly into boxes speeding down the conveyor belt and out to Sunday delivery without a smile or a prayer. I think it is fair to say that Paul truly wants a more humane and gracious sort of selling experience for his baby — that would be the buying experience for you, friend — so here we are, trying to do old-school mail-order with a smile and as much of a personal touch as we can muster.  He knows that for a book promoting a more personal approach to the modern world it makes sense to promote it firstly through businesses he is in relationship with. You can get it at any number of indie bookstores who will care about personalized customer service.

And ain’t that an odd redundancy, “personalized” customer service? For anyone who has been on hold for hours on end waiting for some bureaucratic cog to make something right (or not) we might ask, isn’t that what customer service is supposed to be: personal? In our disembodied, efficient world of Amazon transactions, wouldn’t it be nice to be treated like a human?

This, in a nutshell, speaks of Metzger’s integrity and joy in doing this publishing thing. The marketing departments of the publishers of the world may tell him to go to Amazon first and many authors (even friends) hype the Babylonian captivity of their imagination with exclusive links right to the belly of the beast, but he knows better. And we are grateful; so grateful that we are putting our own money where our mouths are, and getting behind this big study of why in God’s sad world, redemptive healing just might come through a philosophical and strategic shift towards personalism. It’s a long, heavy work, but the point is exemplified plainly. Let’s work at a human scale, resisting what Postman called technopoly, and not treat people like things. We once had a marketing slogan where we invited folks to “come be more than a customer.” I think that’s what we meant, somewhat inefficient as it may be. You can imagine that we are thrilled to champion this book.

Personalism is more, though, than a worldview that values human decency and slow, personal care. It is more than a simple “love your neighbor” approach, although one might reasonably think it is mostly that. But, as philosophical works do, the thesis is teased out and explored, compared and contrasted with other systems, constructs, practices. It is carefully argued with exquisite, exceptional detail.

Dr. Metzger is extraordinary at doing just this and it is one of the reasons More Than Things is not merely a sweet spiritual reminder to be humane and kindly. It is a major ethics text and could be called ground-breaking and pioneering; it certainly is theologically audacious. The book offers a world-shaking paradigm shift, rooted in what might be called a visionary metaphysics. I’m not kidding. He uses the “M” word in the subtitle of chapter two — which is on faith, hope and love, actually — offering “Metaphysical and Methodological Conditions for a Personalist Moral Vision.” Metaphysical and Methodological! Yep, it’s that kind of book. You’re going to have to take it slow.

The book, as they say, gets into the weeds. There are profound and lengthy explorations of the implications of personalism in several areas of life and thinking. For instance, there are hefty chapters that go into fastidious detail explaining the uniqueness that a personalist view would bring to topics such as being consistently pro-life, wondering about our lust for genetic perfection (and the value of imperfect bodies), exploring sexuality and marital pleasure; More Than Things proposes ways that personalism might help us live out an “imperative for equality” in our world of gender inequality. He looks at topics as complex as physician assisted suicide and immigration reform and, in a truly exceptional study, modern warfare, specifically, drone targeting. How does a tenderly-imagined, Christian personalism offer a philosophical compass for thinking about market ideology and creation care and even space exploration? This book will keep you thinking and talking and praying and seeking grace to become people enabled to live out a consistent Christian ethic for a very long time.

Many years ago Metzger wrote a book called Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Decisions in a Consumer Church (Eerdmans; now $27.50 — OUR SPECIAL SALE PRICE – $17.00.) We still have some (at the older price) because we really believed in that book. It had a cool Foreword by then-bohemian, then rather anti-capitalist writer Donald Miller and a strong Afterword by the great, black evangelical leader John Perkins. It made the case that a worldview which enshrines consumer preference will, naturally, erode higher and more important ecclesiastical requirements, keeping us stuck in that situation that Martin Luther King called out when he noted that 10:00 o’clock Sunday morning was America’s most segregated hour.

I do not know anybody who has related our cultural ideology/idolatry of consumerism to racial justice and class issues, let alone grounded it in a robust theology of the church.

Listen to William Storrar then the Director of Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry, about Consuming Jesus:

Paul Metzger is a prophetic voice in the American evangelical community. His theological vision of a church consumed by Christ and not by consumerism could not be more timely or helpful. Writing with scholarly depth and human empathy, he exposes the consumerist roots of racial and economic divisions in the body of Christ and shows how faithfulness to the gospel leads to a reconciled evangelical community and witness.

I note this older (and still exceptionally relevant) book to point out that Paul’s early reflections on the ethics of public theology regarding racial diversity and multi-ethnic ministry and class divisions were already, then, pointing to a deeper analysis of the problem and a broader application of Biblical teaching. That book, in retrospect, had the seeds of his stunning racial justice chapter in More Than Things, which, again, is very strong, if scholarly. He explores the use of power, as well (as you might expect) and links his own 21st century ruminations with Dr. MLK’s own personalism. It was King’s preferred philosophical orientation, you know.

Neither King nor other personalists applied this deeply Christian philosophy to so many topics as does the tireless Dr. Metzger. From our throw-away culture that reduces the dignity of the harmed or hurting to our fetish of consumerism that leads to abuse of the creation to our understandings of borders and belonging (you’ve got to read how personalism interrogates meritocracy and offers an ethics of true hospitality for immigrants), from questions about abortion and euthanasia to vegetarianism to questions about the just war theory to our broken modern healthcare systems to genetic engineering and sexual ethics, Metzger takes us on quite a journey.

Interesting enough, More Than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture in fact uses the metaphor of a journey. He invites us on the road, and invites us (as we seek flourishing in our pluralistic society) to use the notion of personalism as a compass. Others have used this talk of compasses and true North casually at the start of a book, but for this one, it is serious and nicely helpful. It’s a fairly long and complicated journey and at least this reader needed a steady compass pointing the way. As circuitous as the pilgrimage may be, Metzger is a good guide, offering clear light as we go, step by step, there for the reader, especially at critical junctures.

In his good chapter on creation care, he cites Martin King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the good line about our “inescapable network of mutuality” which he suggests points to “life as a sacred ecosystem.” He brings in William James Jennings and womanist Delores Williams, in conversation with Moltmann’s God In Creation and Pope Francis’s Laudato Si. I suspect the manuscript was mostly done before the release of Norman Wirzba’s magisterial This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge University Press; $28.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $23.19) and last year’s Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land (University of Notre Dame Press; $29.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20) but I missed the Duke professor and localist farmer as a conversation partner. I gather that Wirzba, even if not quite a personalist, comes close.

This leads to another encouragement to buy this big volume and work with it for a year — it is not (as you might think if you’ve even ever heard of the moral ethic of personalism) the same as anarchism or a pious sort of individualism. It is not unaware that persons are always situated in contexts, shaped by stories and values and embedded in political and economic systems. He serves the poor as Dorothy Day did, it seems clear, but is not opposed to debating public policy and invoking the role of the government, jurisprudence, law, and cultural institutions. There are devout Catholic Workers who, in the spirit of dear Dorothy, want to serve the poor but do not care about government services, do not themselves pay taxes, and are utterly personalistic in a style that evokes the simplicity of Francis of Assisi. This is not the brand of thinking that Metzger is exploring here, even though I kept wondering what Dorothy’s intellectual mentor, the colorful Peter Maurin might have thought. For what it is worth, these are not like his “Easy Essays.” Ha.

I cannot tell you how much I’ve studied this volume and how many lines I’ve underlined. I will note a few random points, which might help you decide if buying this book is worth your time.

I’ll note just three things:

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

First, much of the first two chapters, which are nearly worth the price of the book, is about the nature of the human; what does it mean we are made in the image of a Triune God? (And why does it seem we’ve lost this truth?) He draws on heavy-weight Christian scholars such as Colin Gunton and Hans Urs von Balthasar and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While it should be obvious that each human being is unique and full of inherent dignity/worth, so may not be used or abused, it does, indeed, need saying, and saying with rigor. People seem to be MIA, he suggests. Treating people as people is a central, animating notion within personalism, so he circles around to this often, and it is beautiful to behold a serious scholar sharing such a high esteem for humans.

It is not all heady theologians and philosophers, though. He invites us to think of a deeper understanding of the meaning of our God-given human-ness by way of the movies Interstellar and Her. Near the end, in a chapter on the ethics of space exploration Ray Bradbury is discussed next to Michael Gorman and Karl Barth. Who knew Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles has insight about Freud and Darwin? A quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson even brings in Batman v Superman. Paul brings in David Brooks, again, citing his wonderful “Love and Gravity” piece.

There is lots of Biblical study here, too, intensely so, with lots of interaction with interlocutors. In an intentional way this precious and prayerful Christian project takes up the task of being also inter-faith; that is, in our diverse world there is a need to offer a Christian apologetic that works on the world stage and among many worldviews. Without Biblical compromise or theological muddiness, he winsomely offers his call to fidelity to a Biblical personalism in conversation with Buddhist and Muslims, Jews and secularists alike. What a delight to see him explaining how Christian views compare or contrast with notions, like, for example, karma.

It might be noted, again, that another of his previous good works set the stage for this. About a decade ago he did a thick, serious volume called Connecting Christ: How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse Paths; it was published by Thomas Nelson ($16.99 – OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59) and is a key book in our section about interfaith conversation. Yes!

BUILDING AND APPLYING CHRISTIAN SMITH’S SEMINAL WORK

Secondly, to help place Metzger’s work just a bit, it might be helpful to link him to the Roman Catholic sociologist Christian Smith. I think it was Andy Crouch who first alerted me to the central importance of Smith’s foundational text What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (University of Chicago Press; $35.00 – no discount on this one.) Somewhat different than his research based books on young adults or shifts in belief or church-goers public lives, this heady tome lays out a critique of modern sociology. As the publisher put it, “Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately “capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our ‘souls’ or ‘hearts.’” Smith followed up that important little volume with the 2015 University of Chicago treatise, To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil ($36.00.)

Anyway, I like that Metzger notes that Smith’s work is such a significant contribution to personalist thought and in some ways builds upon it. You might, too.

A GREAT EXAMPLE OF RIGOROUS, DISTINCTIVELY CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP

Thirdly, I might note that, besides all the footnotes, and the many, many names he engages and either shows their strengths or posits his differing view, there is a certain Biblical clarity about things that matter most — Jesus is the Christ, is preeminent over all thing (Colossians 1:18) and is the savior who not only dies an atoning death, and rises in power, but gives his life for the poor and the marginalized.  And through it all, this clearly Christian scholar models a very up-to-date, teacherly sort of approach to the biggest issues and important thinkers/movements of the day. He invites us to ask why we believe as we do. (About, for instance, polygamy.) “Why do most Americans still largely find extramarital affairs repugnant”, he asks, in the chapter on marriage, wondering if the disfavor “points to the lingering echo of an ancient divine decrees (or are) vestiges of the essential nature of things, created or evolved?”

He studiously cites secular sociobiologists and situation ethicists and neuroscientists, alongside nuanced discussions of Athanasius and John Calvin and Sarah Coakley. I guess I mean to assure you that this is distinctively Christian scholarship par excellence. Agree or not— heck, understand it all or not the work is a remarkable witness, a wondrous model for any scholar wanting to integrate their faith perspective with the philosophical movements and thinkers around them and show how the Christian option can be a cultural blessing. Wow.

AND THIS: PERSONAL ANGUISH

I close with a final point: Paul discreetly describes in the forward just a bit about a tragedy in his family; his adult son was in a severe accident, sustaining catastrophic brain injury and is now in need of constant care. Paul speaks to him, and invites others to do likewise, not fully knowing what his son, Christopher, may or may not hear or understand. To minister with such tenderness to a beloved son who cannot not accomplish anything in his current state is a beautiful illustration of the sort of human care that personalism demands. He did not say if this sad event in the life of his family was an impetus for doing the book, if he wrote some of it through tears and gasps, wondering if modern health-care ideologies would make room for honoring the inherent worth of his son in his feeble state. He didn’t really need to, and it is not a testimonial book, but that brief paragraph (and a hint or two elsewhere) remind us how deeply urgent it is to bring an inner reformation to the sciences and a rehabilitation to the practices in various zones of life. From modern warfare to care for the disabled, from immigration policy to attitudes about gender justice, from what we think about abortion to how we honor the hard struggles for racial reconciliation, a personalistic moral framework can help. This is a major ethics text, inviting us to think about the common good, with and for others, in a world that tends to discount and often damage ordinary human people. This stuff really matters.

Even if you think the book is a bit much for your own intellectual capacities these days, do plan to join us for a live-streamed event at 1:00 (Eastern) on Thursday, August 17th for the free event we will host with the help of his publisher, IVP Academic. Stay tuned for more details. We look forward to a good time together — put it on your calendar if you do that sort of thing. We look forward to chatting.

+++

TO PLACE AN ORDER 

PLEASE READ, THEN SCROLL DOWN AND 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 quick, general guide:

There are generally two kinds of US Mail options (who just raised their rates again) 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 a little slower. For one typical book, usually, it’s about $4.12; 2 lbs would be $4.87.
  • United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.50, 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 you don’t want the slowest method, do say so. It really helps us serve you well so let us know. Just saying “US Mail” isn’t helpful because there are those two methods, one cheaper but slower, one more costly but quicker. Which do you prefer?

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DISCOUNT

20% OFF

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order here

this takes you to the secure Hearts & Minds order form page
just tell us what you want to order

inquire here

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just ask us what you want to know

Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown  PA  17313
read@heartsandmindsbooks.com
717-246-3333

Sadly, as of July 2023 we are still closed for in-store browsing. COVID is not fully over. Since few are reporting their illnesses anymore, it is tricky to know the reality but the best measurement is to check the waste water tables to see the amount of virus in the eco-system. It is bad; worse than it was two years ago, even. It’s important to be aware of how risks we take might effect the public good as those at risk, while not dying from the virus, are experiencing long-term health consequences. (Just check the latest reports of the rise of heart attacks and diabetes among younger adults, caused by Covid.) It is complicated, but we are still closed for in-store browsing due to our commitment to public health (and the safety of our family, staff, and customers.) The vaccination rate here in York County is sadly lower than average. Our store is a bit cramped without top-notch ventilation, so we are trying to be wise. 

We will keep you posted about our future plans… we are eager, but delayed, for now.

We are doing our famous curb-side and back yard customer service and can show any number of items to you if you call us from our back parking lot. It’s sort of fun, actually. We are eager to serve and grateful for your patience as we all work to mitigate the pandemic. We are very happy to help, so if you are in the area, do stop by. We love to see old friends and new customers.

Of course, we’re happy to ship books anywhere. 

We are here 10:00 – 6:00 EST /  Monday – Saturday. Closed on Sunday.

“God Speaks Science”, “Love Your Mother: 50 Stories, 50 States, 50 Women”, “Following Jesus in a Warming World”, “The Book of Nature” and more – ALL 20% OFF

After the last BookNotes on questions about masculinity and how culture — both the left and the right, among others— often misinterprets/distorts Biblical visions of human personhood, dignity, and gender roles, I got to thinking about how when I was growing up in faith, we who favored a Christian sort of feminism (inspired in the 1970s by organizations like the Evangelical Women’s Caucus) had much work to do to convince brothers and sisters that fair representation in various fields and arenas was a matter of Biblical justice. Many of the young Christians I knew were not much interested in public justice, let alone feminist questions.

It may have been Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen who was the first Biblically-grounded person I read or heard, in Gender and Grace: Love, Work & Parenting in a Changing World, to describe the cultural mandate (the first command given to Adam and Eve) in ways that were not gender-specific, but all-inclusive. That is, what Al Wolters called “the foundational command”of Genesis 1: 26 – 28 about home-making was a call to both Adam and Eve. The part of the mandate about culture-making (and ecological care for creation, particularly if you take the Genesis 2 rendering) was a call to both Adam and Eve. Whoever began to say that men were to enter the world of society and the marketplace to “work” and shape history while women stayed home to “keep house” simply were not being Biblical. It all seems fairly self-evident, now (despite the strikingly odd growth of viciously retro and unbiblical groups like the Gothard’s IBLP described in the Netflix doc “Happy Shiny People” or the “Quiverfull” and Babywise near-cults.)

I don’t know the stats but I suspect there is much more gender equality in the sciences, now, than there was a few decades ago; I’ve met a lot of great young collegiate science majors who are women. And in environmental sciences, too (just think of the popularity of the evangelical climate scientist, Katherine Hayhoe, say, and the remarkably beautiful Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth by Debra Rienstra, a must-read in my view.) Nature writers include many, many women like Terry Tempest Williams and Annie Dillard and Kathleen Dean Moore (and so many more.) At BookNotes in the last year we’ve promoted the lovely, well-written book Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season and Spirit by Hannah Anderson (published by Moody Press) and I trust that many know the powerful, serious writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the best-selling phenomenon, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom , Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. These proudly stand alongside classic male nature and natural history writers from Robert MacFarlane to Barry Lopez to J. Drew Lanham, who wrote the nearly luminous The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

There are deep and provocative books that make connections, such as the stunning Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths by Melanie Harris (Orbis; $31.00.) I was at an Earth Day event this Spring and a panelist there (a pastor whose church plant is guided by eco-theology) said it was one of the most important books he has ever read!

I thought I’d list a bunch of books by women and men on somewhat connected themes of creation care and science and hiking and nature appreciation, etc. These are all quite new and we are pleased to introduce you to them. They are stacked up in our Dallastown shop in these already packed-to-overflowing sections. I hope you help us out with this space crisis and buy some!! I’ll be somewhat brief so you can get right to it.

BOOKS CAN BE ORDERED BY CLICKING THE LINK AT THE END OF THE COLUMN. From there you can click either “inquire” or “order” from our secure website order page. We’ll be in touch to reply.

God Speaks Science: What Neurons, Giant Squid, and Supernovae Reveal About Our Creator John Van Sloten (Moody Press) $15.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

This is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books in recent months, a great read, a true inspiration, and (honestly) a blast. I don’t read that much popular science let alone serious science (except, I’ll admit, some frightening data on long-Covid and research on the dangers in the wastewater) and while I deeply value the “faith and science” conversation — which are exceptionally important, and I hope your church offers some good space for dialogue on the topic —  I am not captured with delight by that many titles in the vast field. Enter my pal John Van Sloten, a pastor and a heck of a writer. The back cover promises that it is “a joy-filled expedition into experiencing God’s majestic, everywhere presence.” God Speaks Science is just what we need.

You may recall his unique book on work called Every Job a Parable: What Walmart Greeters, Nurses, and Astronauts Tell Us about God. In a sense, this new book is like that one: he interviews a variety of (in this case) scientists (women and men, I might add) who describe their work in great one-page side-bars. From their testimony of the particularities of their work —in the fields of DNA repair, forest ecology, oncology, chemistry, neuroscience, geoscience, and such — he develops insights and preaching points, making this nearly a handbook for deep spiritual formation. He is developing not only a great creation-based foundation for the doing of faithful scholarly work in research and science education but he is going a bit deeper; he is finding God there in that work, underscoring the beauty of finding our creator so very near everything from alpha-particles to deep-sea life. “Knees and trees. Songbirds and supernovae.”

To prove his point elevating this missional vision of the role of scientists in God’s work in the world, he offers what he calls — get this – Lectio Scientia exercises, helping us encounter God by pondering the details of various aspects of creational reality. As a few of them are explained with prompts, “Moving from knowing to knowing” and “Making matter matter more” and ‘Increasing your providential awareness.” These nine chapters are rich and interesting, both wildly informative and deeply spiritual. Can we “engage God through all good things?” Is there a “spiritual discipline of scientific knowing?”

Van Sten draws on all the great sources to inform his worldviewish work on this, from Gordon Spkyman’s Reformational Theology to Jurgen Moltmann’s Creator Spirit to John Polkinghorne, the Anglican priest with several degrees in the hard sciences. He pushes Brueggemann’s phrase about a “prophetic imagination” in generative, new ways. He knows his stuff, but writes with a nice touch, insightfully citing interesting Bible verses and ancient theologians alongside science journals and stories of his own friendship with working scientists.

This book is a winner, not academic or dense. It is designed nicely. I suspect you know somebody who would love it. Pass it on!

Theologians have long described Scripture and nature as two books of God’s revelation; now Pastor John Van Sloten digs deep into this truth. He actively reads the two books together, with ‘the Bible shining light on creation and creation bringing deeper understanding to the Scriptures.’ John introduces fascinating examples from many fields of science and medicine and draws thought-provoking parallels to theological truths. He invites us to engage with more than our reason–to ponder God’s creation in our hearts and turn in worship to the Author of it all. — Deb Haarsma, astrophysicist and President of BioLogos

I’ve met some fine scientists who are decent theologians, but there are precious few theologians who are as comfortable with the world of science as John Van Sloten. And if you think Van Sloten’s approach is to simply see the hand of God at work in the natural world, then you’ve seriously underestimated the insight of this ‘rational mystic.’ Rather, Van Sloten looks much deeper and finds nothing less than God Himself within the very center of scientific inquiry, from ecosystems to atomic forces and everything in between. This work challenges the scientist to experience God’s manifest presence in the ‘doing’ of science and opens the eyes of the theologian to be able to read God’s “other” book–the natural world and its holy complexity. — Gregory A. Kline, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine/Endocrinology, University of Calgary

Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis Annie Proulx (Scribner) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

**Please note: we still have a hardback or two, as well, for 20% off $27.99 (OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39) if you’d rather. Let us know, while supplies last..

Annie Proulx is the sort of writer that one critic called “an irreplaceable American voice.” Born in 1935 she has become an enduring figure in the literary landscape, having been nominated for various awards and having won the Pulitzer Prize. You may know her from Barkskins, The Shipping News, or the short story Broke-Back Mountain.

Proulx is lesser known for her non-fiction but here she has worked her way through often bog-like scholarly literature on the difference between fens and bogs and swamps (you will never confuse them, or casually use the word “marsh”, for that matter, ever again) to make it accessible for us ordinary readers. Indeed, it is interesting and at times fully charming. Besides the natural history of these vital pieces of our literal landscape and other marine estuaries she tells of their current importance and glory and how they are being destroyed. It is a bigger story, in a way, similar to the way that wetlands are under threat, dredged and drained and polluted. This is critical stuff and she makes it fascinating and vital.

And the role these murky, peaty places place in fighting a warming planet. Wow, who knew?

Don’t believe me? Check out these fabulous comments:

An enchanting history of our wetlands… Imbued with the same reverence for nature as Proulx’s fiction, Fen, Bog, and Swamp is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action. — Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

Proulx’s astute and impassioned examinations of all kinds of wetlands, including estuaries, show a new side of the novelist we thought we knew. — Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

A fierce declaration of peat’s importance to climate stability and human survival. Proulx does not imagine she can plug the holes in the peatlands, but she is determined to plug the peatland-size hole in our histories. —The New York Review of Books

Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice Mallory McDuff (Broadleaf) $26.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

To describe this well I’d have to summarize all fifty women — activists, scientists, writers, students, farmers and lots more — who are leading in varied ways to achieve climate justice. One woman is listed for each state and that itself is fun; they are grouped by geographic region. It describes each woman, explains her role in local organizing or bearing witness in her particular state, and offers examples of their many struggles and successes.  The bios are short, but captivating. There are women of many races and ethnic backgrounds, different faiths, and styles of living into their sense of urgency around ecological care. It is, as one reviewer put it, “a mighty collection, a great read for anyone who cares deeply to care about Earth and community.” And it shows a lot of different ways to do that.

Women have always been involved in this work. As Bill McKibben says, praising these remarkable testimonies, “if we have a fighting chance of coming through these decades, it’s because of them.” Once you start reading, it will be hard to stop, believe me. What a great handbook of inspiration and hope.

Through vivid, thoughtful storytelling, McDuff’s profiles emphasize a timely truth: climate leadership isn’t a monolith. Matriarchs, farmers, writers, rebels, scientists, doctors, innovators, influencers, teachers–all of us, in short–have a home in this movement, if we choose to seek it. — Georgia Wright, co-creator of the podcast Inherited

Guardians of the Trees: A Journey of Hope Through Healing the Planet Kinari Webb, MD (Flatiron Books) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This isn’t brand new, although the paperback edition is fairly recent. I just discovered this gem thanks to it being a reading club book among our new friends up at Bayview in Petoskey, MI. (Did you see my sermon on Colossians 1 and the significance of curiosity and reading that I shared in a previous BookNotes, delivered there?) Since the Bayview community is reading this together I naturally picked it up. And what a book! What a wild and thrilling book!

The story isn’t told linearly but it unfolds artfully and with amazing reporting of this woman’s extraordinary work. She and the man who is now her husband have started a series of clinics for indigenous people on several of the islands in Borneo. He is a science researcher and through her med school (Yale) and his post-doc work (Harvard), they ended up returning to this place they served in college, awestruck by the beauty of these rural islands in the south Pacific. Not only, though, were they struck by the land and sea and by the communal processes and goodness of the local people but they were heartbroken by the rainforest destruction they witnessed. It was bad.

The clinics they offered invited folks to free or low cost care if they’d get out of the logging business. Many worked for rapacious corporations in dangerous logging or burning jobs in order to earn enough to pay for expensive health care. It seemed like a win-win, although it is not easy coming up against the powers of greed and technology and progress. Yet, she understood the bigger-picture ecological importance of saving the ecology of this incredible land and worked with the locals to find innovative solutions to their own health care needs and getting away from the gross destructive work ruining their own homelands. A lot goes down in the process.

There is a chapter when she goes to help offer medical assistance among the large international teams that were first responders to the devastation of the massive tsunami on Christmas Day of 2005. Date-lined Sukudana in West Kalimantan, she was astonished to see how little “radical listening” (as she practiced it in her own work) the big agencies attempted, even as each jostled for control of the relief efforts. Sigh…

In a terrifyingly riveting chapter she almost died from a rare box jellyfish sting which caused her to return to the States and spend four full years fighting for her life. The crisis, and some marital anguish, precipitated her rethinking everything — including her serious religious agnosticism.

Dr. Kinari, as the indigenous people call her in Borneo, is now still at it, working on several global projects fighting climate change and she is doing extraordinary medical care in a manner that thoughtful Christian medical missionaries do. She is expanding her work from local to a more global scale. She has told parts of her story all her the world and is friends with luminaries like Dr Jane Goodall. This is a book that is hard to put down as you follow this courageous, relentless woman on her journey to make a big difference. Her chapter on hope is hard-earned and well worth reading.

The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text Barbara Mahany (Broadleaf Books) $27.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is a wonderful book, beautifully written, thoughtful, literary, and capacious in a generous sort of faith. She notes that we “live within a nautilus of prayer — if only we would open our senses and perceive what is infused all around.”

Listen to this description by Scott Weidensaul, author of World on the Wing. He writes:

Barbara Mahany’s The Book of Nature is a deeply rich celebration of the ageless overlap between religion and the many faces of the natural world — the ‘Book of Nature’ to which mystics, monks, and others have turned for insight into the sacred. Best of all, this thought-provoking exploration is wrapped in Mahany’s luscious and luminous writing, which makes every page a delight.

We’ve appreciated Barbara Mahany’s good prose and gracious spirituality in other books she has written; perhaps you know her popular and beautiful Motherprayer, released by Abingdon Press a few years back. In 2014 she did a lovely book called Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door which hinted at her love of nature and her wisdom about the spirituality of the ordinary. Nearly twenty years later she has deepened this passion and learned so much which she gently shares in this new one.

The Book of Nature, though, is richer and deeper and perhaps more broad theologically than her previous ones. There are rave blurbs on the back by the poet Padraig O’Tuama and Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Bill McKibben says it offers “lovely and smart reflections. — the perfect book to slip into a rucksack on a day you’re planning a wander through the larger world.”

You can get a glimpse of the literary style by noting the section titles. There are several chapters in each, starting with The Earthly (including ruminations on Garden, Woods, Water’s edge, and Earth’s turning), The Liminal (including Birds, Gentle Rain, Thrashing Storm, First Snow) and what she calls The Heavenly (with chapters called Dawn, Dusk, Stars, and Moon.) After each there is a “litany of astonishments.” Just beautiful.

There is a great bit of introductory stuff, and a beautifully done “bookshelf of wonder” at the end which you’ll have to take with you to the library the next time you’ve got a good while to browse. It is a spectacularly annotated bibliography of books that have moved her, explaining why she likes each one.

Mahany ends with a long epilogue simply called  “Lamentations for the Book of Nature” that starts with the famous line by Wendell Berry saying, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” This is a moving, beautiful book.

Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions Heather McTeer Toney (Broadleaf) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Oh my, what a book, important, beautiful, rare. It is urgent on many levels and we are honored to carry it. We featured it at a Climate Change Summit earlier in the year and a few folks were glad to see it. I’ve been wanting to tell you about it here.

The short version is simple, even if the topic is complex and painful: neighborhoods mostly inhabited by people of color have been the recipients of a racist sort of environmental abuse for years and there is, like the facts about redlining, say, no doubt about our need for some kind of reckoning about this vile legacy. (It is, as David Axelrod put it, “a shameful history.”) Poor neighborhoods are grounds for (often illegal) toxic dumping, lax enforcement of pollution regulations, defaced standards of water and air quality and more. This large call to name the sins of environmental racism is some of the backstory of this book, but — to be clear — it is not mostly or only about that. It is, rather, a practical and accessible book to guide us towards climate action in and for and with marginalized communities. It invites the broader environmental movement to be aware of the need for multicultural leadership, inviting readers who come from such communities to get fired up.

(Did you know, by the way, that Latino/a and black citizens are the most likely to express concern about climate change? Statistic after statistic in recent years have indicated that, challenging the old image of white hippies and tree huggers. For every Greta Thunberg or Bill McKibben there is a Heather McTeer Toney or Mustafa Santiago Ali, of the National Wildlife Association.)

Tamara Toles O’Loughlin is a black national climate strategist and founder of Climate Critical Earth. She says, “Now is a time for deeper and more diverse public thought about climate and environment. Heather McTeer Toney is taking up the challenge” And so should we all, at least by learning what this book has to offer. It will be valuable for you, I’m sure.

Climate change affects all of us, but it doesn’t affect us equally. All too often, those most affected are already overwhelmed by the cascading impacts of inequity and injustice. Drawing from her vivid life experiences and wealth of knowledge, Heather McTeer Toney sounds a clarion call for immediate climate action in and for marginalized communities. Why? Because if we don’t fix climate change, we can’t fix anything else. — Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action Kyle Meyaard-Schaap (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

When I look at our many, many faith-based books on ecological care and highlight my favorites, particularly those of evangelical orientation and serious Biblical fidelity, there are plenty. Some of the best books on creation care these past decades have been by thoughtful evangelicals — they are inspiring, Biblically-based, clear-headed and persuasive. This short, recent one is among the best. I’ve mentioned it here before but can hardly say enough about it.

One of the cool features of Following Jesus in a Warming World is that it emerged from Meyaard-Schaap’s work as a leader in the national movement of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. (He has spoken on CNN, PBS, NPR, NBC News, and written for U.S. News and World Report.) That organization, created largely of younger evangelical folks, made significant headway in helping [some of] the mainstream media learn that much of evangelicalism is a different faith thing than the right-wing fundamentalism that idolizes Trump and is taken with the odd values of the Q-Anon and MAGA movement. The Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, are largely nonpartisan, trying to honor Jesus and are eager to get stuff done by adhering to faithful civic principles. They worked hard to focus those who were apathetic or cynical towards real activism, especially among religious youth.

Meyaard-Schaap now is the Vice President of the respected Evangelical Environmental Network and in this book he brings us up to date on the latest Biblical and theological reflections on the vocation of creation care and, through stories from the field, tells of how to discover real hope and meaningful action. In fact, he thinks that story-shaping is part of our best calling, since humans live by stories. (Remember Nourishing Narratives by Jennifer Holberg that I reviewed a while back? Or the profound You Are What You Love by Jamie Smith? I gather he digs this kind of stuff. Plus, he cites the fabulous Stephen Bouma-Prediger’s Earthkeeping and Character: Exploring a Christian Ecological Virtue Ethic.) I’m a fan.

Kyle notes, clearly, that we need not be guided by a sense of guilt or drudgery but by the joy of a discipleship that includes caring for creation. There’s a story there. I highly recommend it.

This is a marvelously engaging book about overwhelmingly urgent matters. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap is convinced that we are formed by stories in how we understand reality, and he urges us to approach climate change action in the light of the gospel’s Big Story. I pray that many will be moved to climate advocacy by the compelling personal stories that Meyaard-Schaap tells in making his case. — Richard Mouw, senior research fellow at Calvin University’s Henry Institute for the Study of Religion and Politics, author of How to Be a Patriotic Christian: Love of Country as Love of Neighbor

While fellow Christians remain apathetic or dismissive, Christians concerned about the climate crisis can feel they are walking a lonely journey. For these lonely journeyers, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap is a patient, trustworthy, experienced encourager. His irresistible passion calls us back from deceptive narratives into the real story of God’s redemptive love for all creation. This book is a deeply scriptural call to advocacy for people and planet as both moral necessity and spiritual discipline. What a gift! Finally, Christians can take courage and hand this book to others, saying, ‘This. Read this.’ — Debra Rienstra, professor of English at Calvin University and author of Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth

Christians can take courage and hand this book to others, saying, ‘This. Read this.’ — Debra Rienstra

 

Ordinary Splendor: Living in God’s Creation Lydia Jaeger (Lexham Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I suppose for those longing for the luminous prose of the likes of Barbara Mahany, this may seem a bit, well, prosaic. It is not nearly as charming as it might be but what it misses in loveliness it makes up in excellent theological integrity and Biblical brilliance. In this sense, this is a truly excellent book and one we are happy to recommend.

Lydia Jaeger received her PhD from the Sorbonne, the world famous university in France. She is now the academic dean at Cogent Bible Institute (also in France) and has written academic works, one, for instance, relating Einstein and Michael Polanyi. Okay, then.

An academic work that preceded this one was on the faith and science discussions, entitled  What the Heavens Declare: Science in Light of Creation (Cascade; $29.00) which was a detailed analysis of a theistic approach to the scientific task.

Here is how that one is described:

“As the author explains, despite the common use of the expression “laws of nature” by both scientists and laymen, there is a long-standing tradition of philosophical debate about, and even refusal of, the notion that laws of nature might exist independently of a divine or human mind. This work attempts to account for natural order in harmony with the religious worldview that significantly contributed to the original context in which modern science began: the world seen as the creation of the triune God.”

As you can see from that description of her previous project she is a Biblically-influenced, serious-minded philosopher; she presents the doctrine of creation “in all its practical necessity.”

In this new one, Ordinary Splendor, she “unfolds the majesty of God’s creative work and explores how it shapes and informs everything — from our relationships and the way we pray to how we think about human dignity.”

There is a solid array of Biblical creation passages that provide wisdom for our daily lives, so I suppose this is not exactly about the beauty of the Earth or even about caring for creation. But it is an exceptional bit of useful scholarship reminding us of the implications that we live in a created world. Ordinary Splendor: Living in God’s Creation by Lydia Jaeger is going to be very helpful for those sorting through the Scriptures and looking for a foundation for living in the world God so loves.

Loving Creation: The Task of the Moral Life Gary Chartier (Fortress Press) $39.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $31.20

If the poetic and passionate writers colorfully tell us of their love for nature, and the orderly scholar, like professor Jaeger, carefully tells us of the Scripture’s consistent proclamation of the notion that the cosmos is made and upheld by the Triune God, then, what? Loving Creation by Dr. Gary Chartier (who is also a legal scholar and teacher of business ethics) is a serious, modern, theological voice attempting to answer that in the cadences of love. It is a “theological ethic rooted in love and focused on flourishing.”

I have not read this yet but it looks mature, serious-minded, a bona-fide theological project. Yet, it is said to be a tour de amour in ethics. Theologian and thinker Thomas Jay Oord says of it, that “by taking creation — not just humans or God — as the focus,” Loving Creation “offers an appealing exploration of well-being in our time. Highly recommended.”

This study assumes the centrality of being alive in God’s cosmos but it is not only about care for creation or concern about climate change, pollution and such. Rather, it probes topics as diverse as war and peace and sexuality and church conflict. My, my. As the renowned Boston College scholar Lisa Sowle Cahill puts it, it is “comprehensive and fair-minded” and a “wonderful springboard for theological discussion and learning!”

American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal Neil King, Jr. (Mariner) $32.50  OUR SALE PRICE = $26.00

While this isn’t primarily a hiking book designed to take us into the beauty of the wild, it is a beautifully-written work — what brilliant documentarian Ken Burns has called “a near-perfect book” — and has some lovely nature scenes. The author is deeply aware of the mysteries of the universe that surround him as he travels and he meets several overtly Christian groups and people along the way. One tells him of the importance of Romans 12:1 and some Mennonite high schoolers sing hymns for him.

Ken Burns, again, puts it well:

It’s not just a geographical journey, full of keen observations and thoughtful insights, but also a spiritual one, finding in our complex and sometimes contradictory landscape a mirror in which King’s own inner life awakens as he wanders. Amazing.

Here is what is also really interesting about this volume (that surely deserves a longer review in another BookNotes): by walking the 330 mile trek from Washington DC to New York City, King comes through our area, crossing over the Mason Dixon Line just south of us here in Dallastown, hanging out in Hanover Junction (where Lincoln famously stopped on his way to deliver the Gettysburg Address, and where his funeral train passed through a bit more than a year later.) King spends a day in York, meeting some friends of ours (including the extraordinary former newspaperman and now local historian and churchman, Jim McLure) as he explains much about the important history of York. King makes his way across the Susquehanna River and is notably moved; it’s a very cool portion, an important passage for him and, he notes, very significant in the imagination of early American history. Indeed, the Susquehanna — perhaps one of the very oldest rivers in the world — is more important than some know. Anyway, it’s a great read for anyone, but certainly for those of us in central PA.

He moves across the river and comes to meet Mennonite folk in Lancaster County. Hang on; sooner enough he is in a rare building near Philly doing some extraordinary night-sky gazing with Quakers. What a story.

One reviewer notes that it is a “beguiling journey of forgotten history and unsuspected delights.” (One of the unsuspected delights, it seems, is King’s appreciation of ordinary, rural Americans who are almost (almost!) endlessly helpful. Experiences of common ground seem almost viable while reading his stories and it gives me some down-to-Earth hope.) It is interesting how helpful people are, including those who heard there was some guy walking to New York; not only do people want help in simple ways, some want to talk .And talk they do.

Louis Bayard, who wrote Jackie and Me and The Pale Blue Eye says that King “takes his place in a distinguished travelogue lineage stretching back to Thoreau but, from the start, manages to stake out his own hard-won terrain.”  That is, he has some sort of an agenda, here, glorying in olden ways, discovering something about our land, our people, our heritage.

American Ramble is a warm-hearted story and loaded with lots of colorful folk. It is a different story than one I reviewed here a month or more ago, Where the Waves Turn Back: A Forty-Day Pilgrimage Along the California Coast by singer-songwriter Tyson Motsenbocker ($27.00 – OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60) but it bears reminding you of that terrific, haunting book. Tyson is younger, struggling with questions of evangelical faith, the death of his mother, and, importantly, is hiking not on the East Coast, like King is — encountering Washington’s Crossing, for instance — but is on the West Coast, trekking the old  “El Camino Real,” a 600-mile pilgrimage route up the California coast. I loved that book a lot; I love that guy. As Tyson moves towers the towering cliffs of Big Sur and up to San Francisco he connects with artists and songwriters and hobos and fellow California hikers, each shaping a bit of his own journey towards deeper self discovery.

Neil King is an older gentleman, coping with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and some serious Covid symptoms, and is longing to find a better America, learning about colonial era stuff. He’s walking through Pennsylvania rural land and into north Jersey, eventually finding “rapture on the Bayonne bridge” into New York. Tyson grew ecstatic seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, naturally; it’s fun to compare the two hikers and writers, one a singer-songwriter, the other a former cabbie and world-class journalist.

As Mr. King puts it, the journey started as a whim and soon became an obsession. Neil King, Jr. is a very gifted writer who helped the Wall Street Journal win a Pulitzer Prize for its 9-11 coverage; he has a reporter’s style of being unafraid to snoop around and get the local scoop. Besides some lovely nature writing and fascinating hiking stuff, he does, indeed, get the scoop. It makes for a wonderful read and a very enchanting book. Enjoy!

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“The Toxic War on Masculinity” by Nancy Pearcey and “Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality” by Zachary Wagner and more – 20% OFF

It was the early 1970s and I was trying to be a gentleman, a Christ-like guy, a good person. I had quit the football team in junior high because I didn’t like the vulgar, pushy ways of our macho coach who taught us how to hurt opposing players. I had left a social club when I heard they wouldn’t accept blacks, even though I had not met any black people at that point in my life. I knew God loved me, I knew Christ died for me, I knew I was forgiven and that the Holy Spirit somehow would help us live in God’s ways, not our own. I knew enough, through God’s grace, to know that that meant we had to somehow live in a way different from the culture around us.

(By the way, this was years before I came across Os Guinness’s brilliant book The Dust of Death which critiqued both the alienating, technocratic, middle-class culture and the idealistic, lefty counter-culture, but I intuited that somehow my hippy friends were right to reject the mainstream culture, not wanting to “dream the wrong dreams” as Death of a Salesman put it, even though they had few sturdy principles for a better world.)

For me, the culture that I imbibed was a fairly generic sort of civil religion in a mostly white, conservative town. A hippy pal who I listened to records with cajoled me to smoke pot with him, but I refrained. A lovely girl at church camp wanted, um, to go farther than I thought we should. I tried to live for Christ although didn’t know much of what that meant or looked like, as the kids say today. I know I hurt some people along the way which I think about, still.

With the war in Vietnam still raging and me approaching draft age I was struggling with the apparently radical notion of taking seriously Jesus’s words about nonviolence and Paul’s words about “overcoming evil with good” and what it mean to embrace that Kingdom dream of “beating swords into plowshares.” I took Jesus at his word and believed that peacemakers would be blessed. Nobody I knew seemed to think about such things and I felt weird, if a bit self-righteous.

Upon applying for conscientious objector status (with the proud approval of my dad, a WWII vet, and the support of my older brother, a US Army commissioned officer) I became an official, card-carrying C.O. Or, as we were called in those days, a peacenik.

Here’s the point of my story. Over and over, those who disapproved assaulted my patriotism, (which I expected) and, in a move I hadn’t seen coming, they assaulted my manhood. Being unwilling to bomb and burn and kill because I took the Bible seriously was considered being a sissy. I had thought there would be discussions about war in the Bible, about Jesus, about “love, love, love, love, the gospel in a word is love” as we sang around the church camp campfire. Nope. It was: why was I afraid, why was I a sis, why didn’t I grow a pair, why didn’t I be a man? A real man.

The rightness or wrongness of Biblical nonviolence I’ll let go for another day (although, if you are interested, one of my favorite books is If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence by the late, great, Ron Sider, or the abridged and shorter version, Speak Your Peace: What the Bible Says about Loving Our Enemies.) But this question of the nature of valor and honor and courage and fighting and strength and masculinity continued to be raised. (Quoting Zechariah 4:6 “Not by power, not by might, but by my Spirit saith the Lord,” was a favorite retort, which frankly never moved the needle much on that conversation.)

I hadn’t read any books about it, but I believed strongly that the macho-guy, tough stuff, telling us that “big boys don’t cry”and that true men had to be violent was hogwash. I heard some of the rape jokes used in boot camp training cadences and was repulsed. When a friend later gave me an early book about “men’s liberation” in solidarity with the feminist concerns of the day, it rang true, even if he didn’t cite Jesus as his role model. Even then, I knew that there was something hurtful to men and women when men act poorly, ogling and objectifying women and valorizing and glorifying violence.

Below are five recent books that I very highly recommend — for men and women. The topic is about what has come to be called toxic masculinity. Whether that is a helpful phrase or not, these books offer a critical discussion of what Christians might think and do regarding the allegations that many men are caught in an ideology that seems to justify privilege and power and sometimes even violence.

Given the insights of the #metoo and #churchtoo movements, obviously, these are very, very important matters. As I imply from starting these reviews with the episodes of having my own masculinity questioned over filing for conscientious objector status (and trying to be somewhat gentlemanly around the girls I was with) I suggest that these issues have been with me for most of my adult life. Beth and I are still trying to figure it all out.

(I won’t discuss it now, but the most formative book on this topic for us was the1990 release by Mary Stewart Van Leuween, Gender & Grace: Love, Work & Parenting in a Changing World. She included a line or two about us in her 2002 book, My Brother’s Keeper: What the Social Sciences Do (and Don’t) Tell Us about Masculinity, and both books remain seminal titles in our section on gender roles here in the shop.)

Here are four new ones, with different angles and styles. These books can help, no matter your age or gender.

TO ORDER PLEASE SCROLL TO THE VERY END AND CLICK ON THE ORDER LINKS. ALL BOOKS MENTIONED WILL GET OUR BOOKNOTES 20% OFF DISCOUNT.

The Toxic War On Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes Nancy Pearcey (Baker) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I wish I had time and energy to do an even more detailed study of this extraordinary book. It is quite good, even if sometimes the tone might not appeal to some readers; geesh, endorsements from mostly right-wing types on the back cover will make it unappealing to some. But you should overlook that marketing mishap. She is astute and articulate and analytical; she cites lots of surveys and sociological data, with a big-picture approach to apologetics and cultural criticism. She knows remarkable stuff about history, both the history of ideas and the lived reality on the ground, from the days of the Roman Empire to seemingly last week’s news. I like that a lot and it is a helpful gift from an important writer. You should read her book.

(To be sure, all historical tellings and even the citation of data are always colored and framed by the teller; for instance, she cites Dr. Bradford Wilcox, an important, respected scholar (we’ve long carried his University of Chicago release Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands) whose data shows that conservative evangelicals — those who live their faith and are active in church, that is — have less domestic violence and divorce than anyone, anywhere; why don’t we hear that, Pearcey properly asks? Curiously, though, in another book (see below) the same researcher is cited to show somewhat different realities. Perhaps it is different data sets that are being cited by the two authors? Two interpretations of his data? I’m not sure…)

Professor Pearcey covers lots of Biblical texts, starting with a fabulous, brief overview of the narrative plot of the Bible — creation/fall/redemption —  and how that offers a grid through which to understand everything. She stands firmly on the shoulders of mentors like Francis and Edith Schaeffer whose clear-headed arguments years ago showed the brilliant young Nancy that Christianity was reasonable, compelling, true, and, yes, therefore, life-enhancing. The warmth with which the Schaeffer’s made their arguments for true truth helped win over many a hurting young adult in the years they ran L’Abri in the Swiss alps and their capacity to host the honest questions of even the most skeptical participant in the 60s counterculture was just what Pearcey needed. If anyone can claim the mantle of Schaeffer today, I think it is Nancy Pearcey.

She tells some of that story briefly, here, pointing in the footnotes to a more full account found in her award-winning magnum opus Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. She is unapologetic in using the language of a Christian worldview. [Some of those, you may have heard, who popularized that word decades ago are reluctant to use it, now, since it has, in some circles, been seen as having been co-opted by the alt-right; just think of Marjorie Taylor Green using the “Christian worldview” phrase in her untenable, dominionist way or other dangerous public figures involved with 7M and the like, saying what *the* Christian worldview is.]

Nonetheless, Nancy is fearless, continuing to remind us that a comprehensive, theologically sound Christian perspective on all of life is needed lest we fall for the various ideologies and pressures from the secularized culture. (Think of Romans 12:1-2.) Her previous book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, engaged (among other things) the conservative Catholic tradition of natural law and what Pope John Paul II called “the theology of the body” which, of course, put her on a collision course with the LGTBQ community and others who are criticized by, for instance, Carl Trueman, in his powerhouse, if polarizing, work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. She is not unfamiliar with these sorts of culture warriors and is popular among some on the far right — think Eric Metaxas or Jay Richards at the Heritage Foundation or the podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey — but yet, in this stunning book, she offers a view that, it seems to me, actually transcends ideologies of the left or right. Good for her!

There may be a war on Godly masculinity and in her view, it arises less from the PC, deconstructing left but from more subtle and mainstream forces of sin, given particular dominance in social trends such as industrialization, certain sorts of capitalism, Victorianism, and even revivalism. This is the “secular script” that too often nominal Christians have adopted and which we are called to resist. It’s not men and masculinity that is the problem, but the toxic and secularized worldview that offers a rugged, domineering script for men to follow. And follow it, they do, sometimes with help from their churches. The biggest problem, as she shows in Total Truth, is the “cultural captivity” of the church and the subsequent watering down of the robustly full-orbed gospel. As she often points out, one of the reasons the church has failed to think faithfully about all of life, and therefore has created the possibility for the “cultural captivity” of the church, is because of the heresy of gnosticism. Brilliant!

Pearcey deserves to be read because she is a very thoughtful writer and is accomplished in so many fields, educated in so many topics. Her first book, still in print, is on Christian influences in the history of the philosophy of science and mathematics and is one I still often recommend. She led Chuck Colson’s “Worldview” radio work decades ago and wrote for Breakpoint, even co-authoring a book with Colson on the notion of a Christian approach to all of life, rejecting the dualisms of private faith and public values.

In those years when she was becoming known as a public intellectual and thinker in her own right she drew on scholars such as Herman Dooyeweerd, Lesslie Newbigin, and Michael Polanyi to expose the deep dichotomies that many people live into, that are deeply assumed in their social imaginations. In her studies of science, art, and sexuality, she has shown what Schaeffer taught her about that old split between the upper vs lower story in our thinking, which translates into tensions and dichotomies — personal vs public, faith vs reason, and sacred vs secular, deforming how we think about nearly everything. How can we think of a truthful way of living in the world about anything if faith is necessarily bracketed out to some mysterious “religious” realm or only good for Sunday Christians? She is arguing for a thought-out, practical metaphysics that relates faith to all of life.

What is so very interesting (and makes for a happily enlightening reading experience) about The Toxic War on Masculinity is how she uses social history to tell the story. I know some people would rather just hear preachments on the facts, but she is wise to build a case showing how deformities in our views of things (in this case, about the meaning of gender and the roles of men and women) emerged, often coupled with technological changes and historical shifts. Just think of how industrialization increasingly brought men into factories and away from their families and the subsequent rise of the Victorian era’s views of domesticity. (By the way, the forthcoming Karen Swallow Prior book that we highlighted in the previous BookNotes offering a history of the rise of evangelicals in the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, tracks nicely with Ms. Pearcey’s work and I’m glad I read the two books back to back. You should pre-order that now if you haven’t.)

Pearcey is applying her keen eye for a curious sociological fact and a wild historical detail — even showing etchings or paintings and old fashioned book covers — to illustrate huge changes in the way people thought and thereby lived. Or lived and so thought. (Ahh, the old chicken and the egg question, eh?) She is adamant that the tough-guy, macho-man stuff is not what it means to be a good or Biblically faithful man, even though it is what many think to be a “real” man. She plays on that contrast — the real man vs the good man. Knowing how we got in this mess of what constitutes a “real” man is vital. Given the abuse and sorrow caused by toxic men, it is urgent and a matter of deep lament.

And here’s her plea: we ought not confuse what a “real” man is with what a “good” man is. (Her early explanation of the large, cross-cultural study on this exact matter by Michael Kimmel is quite clarifying.) We need to know how masculinity got so toxic, and insist — in our homes, our churches, and in the public square, she would say — that the toxic version is not the real deal. It is a counterfeit sort of distortion, played out when men and women adopt the secularized script from our post-Christian culture. She is about centering the life-changing power of the gospel and offering a Christian worldview that would make sense of our genders and our sexuality, without adopting goofy gender roles that come more from the culture (from John Wayne, we might say) than from the Bible.

I’ve spoken out about these things often — remember my opening story — so I suppose I should not be surprised that she quotes me a time or two in the book, from an old BookNotes piece where I railed creatively against the super-macho, unbiblical weirdness of the book Wild at Heart. Nancy, you see, wants to reform our churches and public attitudes by recovering a proper view of healthy masculinity but not like that, what with all the foibles of Eldridge’s bad theology and dumb stereotypes. In fact, she has a section pondering the lasting wisdom of churches holding stereotypical men’s events to somehow attract and sustain their men’s ministry (like a church that holds “Fight Clubs” and another that raffles off AK-15s and yet another that had “Cage Fighting” in the sanctuary.) Her exploration of the rise of “muscular Christianity” is great, from the rise of the YMCAs in the 1840s through the “hard-muscled, pick-axed religion” of baseball star turned evangelist, Billy Sunday (as opposed to what Sunday called a “dainty, sissified lily-livered piety.”) The “ultimate symbol of female debauchery” for the fundamentalists of the 1920s became the flappers, she points out, as women became a scapegoat for many social ills. Moody Bible institute, who initially called women to brave and heroic service in the mission field (and elsewhere) by the middle of the 20th century were mostly offering cooking and homemaking classes for the ladies and calling on Godly men to “suppress your wife’s ambition.” Nancy may be a theologically and socially conservative in many ways, but she exposes this claptrap for what it is.

Importantly, by the middle of and later into the 20th century, evangelicals had differentiated themselves from fundamentalists and rejected the “muscular Christianity” ideal. But, still, she observes, “most evangelical churches are puzzled over how to minister effectively to men. The typical US congregation remains unbalanced, with roughly 60 percent female and 40 percent male. The conundrum of how churches can attract men has not been resolved.”

As I read the book twice (once in an earlier manuscript draft galley and once again when the nice hardback arrived) I was somewhat wary. I disagree with some of her views in her previous books and wish she would offer a better nod to the complexity of Biblical interpretation around hot topics such as LGTBQ inclusion and gender justice. Although it is not her fault, some that have endorsed her books are nearly tone deaf about matters such as racism and the harm inflicted by conventional churches on sexual minorities and are bone-headed in their narrow perspectives. But to this wary reader every chapter got better and better and by the middle of the second section — “How the Secular Script Turned Toxic” — I was nodding and underlining. The important third part is under the rubric of a few chapters called “When Christian Men Absorb the Secular Script” and the writing and insights are no-nonsense and compelling, even as she always is careful not to turn off those who are touchy about this topic.

It is her hope, she wrote to me a while back, that fairly traditionalist men who are themselves frustrated about being called toxic and take personally the attack on their traditionalist views from what they consider to be elites, will not dismiss her as another raging feminist who doesn’t honor their dignity or care about their concerns. She is aware of the hostility aimed at men and what she might call “media stereotypes.” I appreciate that she is trying to speak to different audiences and hope that the book will be taken up by various folks across the church spectrum and throughout the cultural divides.

She says in the beginning that she was a bit surprised how controversial her writing about this seemed as she was working on the book. Everybody wondered what she was going to say, whose ox was going to get gored, what side she was on. Culture wars have caused suspicion and polarization; many conservatives hate feminists and most progressives despise traditionalists. In the aftermath of #metoo and church cover-ups and evangelical weirdness like the awful Mars Hill nonsense with Mark Driscoll, etc. this book is needed. While it is poised for a wide readership, it may be misunderstood. Despite her careful writing and her tons of amazing footnotes, I fear some will not give it a fair chance. (The choppy modernist cover doesn’t help any, but that’s another matter.) Whether you tend to tilt left or tilt right in your social and political leanings, I hope you give this thought-provoking volume a chance.

Let me be blunt: I think those on the more progressive and liberal side of the church pews will distrust her traditionalist views and her caution not to scare off ordinary conservative men (including young men, who, she reports, feel attacked in recent years) may not sit well with them. Yet, she is right to be impeccably fair and not overstate things or scapegoat men (let alone blue collar men.) Frankly, some who are pretty traditionalist and who will appreciate Pearcey’s conservative bona fides, are going to be challenged to learn how the evangelical church has adopted too much of the “secular script” and how our deeply ingrained dualisms have framed our approach even to the nature of masculinity and femininity.

I suspect that Nancy attends a church that does not ordain women (I really don’t know) but she is an unashamed advocate for equal rights for women in the public square. She has herself worked in philosophy, public media, the sciences, and is not inclined to take up the typically Southern, evangelical niceties of ladies teas and craft-making retreats. She is a strong, left-brained Christian leader and needs to be heard; she taught the ex-Marine Chuck Colson much of what he knew about a Christian worldview, after all. Her balance and logical approach should appeal to many. Those who want a more progressive sort of manifesto against straight white males without the deeper thinking about it all, really ought to read it, too. Agree fully or not, it is one of the more interesting books on this topic I have seen in quite a while.

I was going to lead with this detail and then considered omitting it. But here’s a fact we learn: she tells it in the first page of her introduction, so it is not much of a spoiler. Nancy was physically abused as a girl, viciously so, by a church-going father. His domestic violence left a life-long mark, to be sure, but one key insight that she learned early on was that she “had two fathers. A Public one and a Private one.”

This book is very important to her. I applaud her bravery in saying it all.

Can we agree that masculinity is a God-given thing, not merely a social construct? Can we at least agree that the sort of masculinity that is now too often on show is defaced, even toxic, as a distortion of some God-given characteristics? Can we appreciate the nuance of her title, the “toxic war on masculinity”? Some will think she means the leftist and feminist attack on traditional values, and I suppose that is hinted at; she is no friend of postmodern deconstruction or the cheaply woke. But more, she is insisting that sin is always like a parasite, distorting that which it claims, and the goal of our sanctification and spiritual formation is to be healed from the distortion of sin’s influence and to embody a Christ-like restoration of original goodness. We need not askew all distinctions between genders, but, in Christ, we can restore the virtues of men and women in healthy, Biblically-warranted and life-giving ways. The toxic script keeps us from doing that. It demeans guys, fathers, and makes it harder to be a good husband. The Toxic War on Masculinity explains in great detail how all of that happened, and offers hope for renewed practices. It all leads to the insights of a deeply moving epilogue, “A Tribute to Manhood.” You’ll have to read it yourself, working through the many pages and pondering the great discussion/reflection questions that are in the back. There’s a lot here.

As always, I am in awe of Nancy Pearcey’s research–from Harriet Beecher Stowe to how Romans really treated women 2,000 years ago. And so much history of American manhood from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that I never knew. It’s sobering to hear how old the battle of the sexes really is. — Julia Duin, Newsweek contributing editor/religion

Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality Zachary Wagner (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I am sure you have heard of some of the recent critiques of what has come to be known as “purity culture.” Such a culture was everywhere in evangelical circles in the 1980s and 1990s and, now, years later, so pervasive was this harsh ethos about staying sexually pure, that many have left the Christian faith over it. The phrase Purity Culture has come to stand for a lot, from the million-selling book by then youngster, Josh Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye to the right-wing, anti-LGTBQ politics of Focus on the Family. This stuff wasn’t harmless then, and we are now seeing the bad fruits from those eccentric, overstated fears of sex and the world, and the authoritarianism (for men) embedded is much of that subculture.

Zachary Wagner grew up in that world and he is honest about how it harmed his view of his masculinity, his sexual desires, and his view of the relationship of Christianity to the world. He assures us that important books by women on purity culture must be read (he recommends several that we have reviewed, from across the ideological spectrum, which is good and brave and rare, actually, affirming books that he doesn’t fully agree with.) However, as much as many of us have read historian Kristen Du Mez’s take down of all of this in her must-read Jesus and John Wayne and as clear-headed and important as Rachel Joy Weltner’s Talking Back to Purity Culture is, we have not yet seen a book like this. On almost every page or so, I stopped to marvel at his great care for others, his own vulnerability as an author, and for the wisdom of his evangelical publisher for doing such a book within that subculture’s expectations.

In a way, this is a good follow-up to Pearcey’s aforementioned The Toxic War on Masculinity. I wonder how to explain the power and distinctions of Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity. I do not mean to pitch this as a more progressive, open-minded view versus her more conventional, if surprisingly feminist-friendly, take. That isn’t quite it. I pondered if there are generational differences between the two authors — the writing style is more casual, here, the personal anecdotes more central (and heartbreakingly tender.) It has a lot of footnotes, too, but isn’t as historical or quite as sociological as Pearcey’s. Yet, it is honest and thoughtful and I really, really liked it a lot.

Wagner is asking how we might rethink masculinity, given how toxic it sometimes is. He doesn’t do the deep dive into the sociological history of how gender roles and assumptions about our respective virtues developed but he is keenly aware of how church culture — especially the purity culture promoted within evangelicalism in recent decades — has harmed many. And, man, this is tough stuff. He is really honest, shares lots of stories, and is thoughtfully engaged in the cutting edge conversations about sexual integrity in a post-purity culture world.

Three things make this an exceptional work, a valuable resource for anyone wanting to explore human sexuality.

First, Wagner, while a fairly conventional and theologically astute evangelical, goes out of his way to consider the different views and experiences of his readers. He names LGTBQ+ friends and invites those who don’t fit the typical cisgender descriptions to bear with him. He is an ordained minister and has worked for the very thoughtful Center for Pastoral Theologians (led by the excellent Todd Wilson) and is now pursuing a PhD in New Testament studies at the University of Oxford. But he wears his learnedness lightly and has offered us a kind and gracious sort of book. Come to think of it, it is rare in my experience to have a few asides and comments and footnotes inviting readers who are different to read along with him. I liked that.

Secondly, while it is about toxic and unhelpful way the Purity Culture stuff influenced his strict fundamentalist sort of faith (and he reports horrific stories of others) is not only a critique of the dumb and patriarchal views of Josh Harris and Mark Driscoll, et al. Rather, he is digging more deeply into normative sexuality, wondering how male sexuality, itself, can be refined and reformed and renewed. To do this, he reads widely (again, citing some sex-positive authors that he admits to appreciating, while disagreeing with some of their work, such as his comments about a particularly provocative section of Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber.)

In this part of the book he is exceptionally honest about his own struggles with a sense of privilege and rights about sex, even as he came to grapple with that when his wife was herself struggling with hardships that kept her from enjoying sexual intimacies. I had tears in my eyes through some of these pages — I’ve never read anything like this so candid and complicated and finally gracious about one’s marital intimacies and struggles. His writing about sexuality is not singular — there really are others who explore in egalitarian ways about mutually-pleasing sex, but few evangelical writers have done so. Wagner himself cites Jonathan Grant’s heavy 2015 Brazos Press book Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hyper-sexualized Age and he says very good things about The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended and other books by Sheila Wray Gregoire.

Thirdly, I really appreciate the emphasis, especially in the last half, about how the role of sex itself is not to be overstated. That is, whether we are sex positive progressives or deeply fearful fundamentalists, we can make an idol out of this part of our lives — sex, marriage, and family life, too — and this isn’t Biblically faithful and isn’t helpful for those who struggle, those who cannot have children, those who are intersex, and certainly those who are single. Our siblings in Christ who are not in conventional married arrangements deserve to be included in these conversations as well and his brief story about Christian living arrangements that move towards intentional community, are healthy and wise. (I notice that he thanks his friend Wesley Hill in the acknowledgments page and it is good that he cites Hill’s spectacular book on friendship, Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian.) This is all so tender and real and honest.

From chapters as punchy as “Wake Up, Guys” to “Act Like An Adult” to wise and touching ones like “The Worst Sex You’ve Ever Had” to insightful pieces like “Victims of Our Own Desire?” and the amazingly brilliant chapter on fatherhood, Wagner offers good, good stuff. He’s upbeat enough to keep it lively, and he’s honest enough to come across as humble and nowhere near a macho know-it-all. (That he used to be a Mark Driscoll fanboy is hard to believe given how gracious he now is.) He’s rooted in the Scriptures and confronts harmful teaching (even from the American evangelical church) that distorts desire and sex and relationships. It is very good, the back cover says, for those who “feel disillusioned and adrift.”  Who doesn’t want to resist dehumanization? Read the book. Join the movement. We can offer a better approach. Kudos!

Malestrom: How Jesus Dismantles Patriarchy and Redefines Manhood Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We thought this was an excellent book when it first came out, nearly a decade ago, a wonderful follow up to James’s good work on women in the Scriptures (Lost Women of the Bible) and on women in the global church (Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women.) She’s done a good book on Ruth (The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules) and a smaller Bible study of Ruth as well. Not long ago she wrote a moving forward to a book by a young woman who we touted at BookNotes, Women Rising: Learning to Listen, Reclaiming Our Voice by the young-ish Meghan Tschanz. Carolyn Custis James is a strong and healthy leader and an adjunct professor at Missio Seminary in Philadelphia. We are fans.

What is interesting about this excellent book is that Zondervan saw the importance of reminding book buyers of this kind of resource and re-released it into the marketplace in the hard year after #metoo and #churchtoo. I’m not sure that’s the only reason, but they gave it a sharp, new cover, and showed off a nice blurb from a brand new foreword by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on the front. It says, simply, “This is a message that the church desperately needs to hear, and to take to heart.”

Some of you will appreciate the endorsing recommendation by Aussie Michael Bird (co-author with N.T. Wright) and podcast host with Aimee Byrd (Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood) who says:

The book that every Christian man needs to read. It is a powerful mix of personal story, biblical commentary, and cultural analysis that is hard to put down. — Michael Bird, author of God’s Israel and the Israel of God: Paul and Supersessionism

God’s intention for the appropriate flourishing of human life has been severely thwarted by culturally captive expressions of masculinity that have oppressed both women and men. Malestrom offers us a reminder from Scripture that God’s intention for men was not for a dysfunctional masculinity that devastates the image of God within us. Thank you, Carolyn Custis James, for your historical and theological insights that will reshape how I live out my faith in the world. Thank you for a book that benefits both my son and my daughter. — Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, Professor of Church Growth and Evangelism; author of Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church

Shattered: A Son Picks Up the Pieces of His Father’s Rage Arthur Boers (Eerdmans) $22.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I highlighted this earlier in the summer when I did a BookNotes blog about memoirs. I named a few new ones, important ones, even, and this was among them. I had skimmed it a bit and knew enough to assure readers that it would be a moving read, a look into a complicated life, sharing the memories of a Christian pastor and writer I admired. I noted that his parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada and he was raised in a very strict congregation of the CRC. His father built greenhouses and Arthur learned the work of working with glass as a youth. He has scars to prove it, as the slices from broken glass were an occupational hazard. The title Shattered resonates on many levels in this exceptional book.

I have now finished the book and cannot begin to tell you in a short space how grateful I was to have read it, how enjoyable it was, in a manner of speaking. That is, the way any book of good writing and good storytelling, of tension and agony and goodness and grace, can be enjoyable, even if it at times hard. And it was hard. Did I mention the bleeding slices, the broken glass, the horror?

Arthur — whose parents spoke Dutch as their native tongue and couldn’t pronounce the name they have him, calling him Artur —is, as I’m sure I said last month, a writer and thinker I admire greatly. Raised in a severely strict and insular, immigrant Reformed church that proclaimed the tight dogmas of election and God’s sovereignty and predestination and the like, he always had a deep hunger for the things of God, for spirituality that wasn’t spoken of much amidst the dogma and duties.

His father was a bit cynical about religion (and swore and drank and smoked several packs a day) and as Artur grew up in the 60s and 70s he came to a deeper faith causing him to leave the CRC. Boers became Mennonite, which is, actually, only a small part of the story, yet important, as he learned an evangelical sort of faith that was proclaimed with great grace, reminding the followers of Jesus to be, well, just that: Christ-like followers of the rabbi King. Who knew? His home church was surely shaped in some ways by the fact that many were survivors of the brutal Nazi takeover of their homeland in The Netherlands; his own violent father was surely a PTSD victim from his years in the war against the Nazis and then his further soldiering in Holland’s colonial war in Indonesia that left tens upon tens of thousands of civilians killed. This surely left a mark and this book, in a way, is a life-long processing of it all, being raised by a man who lived with what today we might call injured but still toxic masculinity. Through plain, rich, prose, and really interesting storytelling, the author raises poignant questions of home and safety, of joy and sorrow, of immigration and difference and accommodation, of family love and abuse, of church and spirituality, of calling and obligation, of being a man and of being a Christian.

There is, admittedly in the previous two books I’ve mentioned in this post — Pearcey’s The Toxic War Against Masculinity and Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity — conversations about fathering. (More in the first, where, like Arthur Boers, Nancy Pearcey’s father was violent towards her.) Father hunger is a phrase some use when a father is absent and young women and men feel the loss.

Arthur Boers to this day lives with a sense of remorse, surely regretting that his father would never voice regret. There is father hunger, although his memories are not all bleak. There are tender moments in the book — father and son listening to Dixieland and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong together and Art (dangerously, I’d say) taking his dad to a Stevie Ray Vaughn concert of rowdy Texas blues. His dad was a hard worker in the family business and it is captivating to hear how Arthur came to tell his mother and father that he was interested in going into the ministry, rather than becoming the “and Son” on the lettering on Papa’s work truck.

Shattered works on several levels and would certainly be enjoyable to anyone who grew up in the late 1950s and early 60s, who experienced some of the faith exploding in the 1970s. I loved his casual descriptions of TV shows and songs. (It was nearly a throw-away line but the conflict even over the 1971 pop hit, “Put Your Hand in the Hand” with some in church disapproving of religion in rock, sounded very familiar!)

Arthur is a different kind of parent than the sort that abused him. (And, truth be told, Arthur’s father, his Poppa, was less violent with Arthur than Opa was with Pop back in Holland.) More importantly, he is expressive about his faith, his doubts, his longings, and his hopes. He is a vivid nature writer — the most exquisite writing is in a chapter telling about the creatures found in a rural cottage he uses for solace and retreat. He is a good storyteller — the story of the end of a dramatic few days with Henri Nouwen was cathartic in the most wonderful way.

But yet, lovely as some of this is, it is finally a story about male violence, about father hunger, about the sadness of a boy growing up wondering if he is fully loved and accepted. This goes to the deepest matters behind much of the toxic masculinity we hear about, and, as an artful literary memoir, Shattered: A Son Picks Up the Pieces of His Father’s Rage is a perfect story to compliment the three books above. Highly recommended.

This brave and wonderful book made me feel gratitude, care, and something like quiet awe. And it made me think–about generational inheritance, about the ways violence lingers, about forgiveness, and, most abidingly, about my own dead mother. I think of her, and of myself unto her, differently now that I’ve read Shattered.  –Lauren F. Winner, God Meets Girl and Still

Arthur Boers’s Shattered takes us into the fascinating world of the Dutch immigrant experience. In exquisite detail, we’re given a rich sense of history–cultural, theological, and family–that stands on its own. But more than this, Arthur reckons with a lineage of male anger and abuse. His narrative reflections gesture the way forward for all of us who carry the weight of familial rage. — Leslie Leyland Fields, Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate

Living That Matters: Honest Conversations for Men of Faith Steve Thomas & Don Neufeld (Herald Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I wrote about this a few weeks back, so I need not belabor it again, other than to say it is a great, thorough handbook for cultivating wholesome, Christ-like, masculinity, done by two Mennonite leaders who serve their denomination’s men’s formation ministry. I wonder if Arthur Boers knows either of these two? Maybe so.

This is arranged almost like a devotional but it is more of a manual, a guidebook, a curriculum for many, many great conversations to be had with others. It is what one author called “a beacon of light to guide men through the stormy seas of toxic masculinity toward a more Jesus-centered ideal of what it means to be a man.” If you are a man who doesn’t have somebody to work through this stuff with, read it on your own. Some of it will be life-changing, I’m sure.

There are 10 readings with discussion questions on various topics under each of the seven major sections. These sections are named, Male Formation, Human Needs, Personal Challenges, Sexual Wholeness, Social Practices, Conflict Tools, Life Role. The book has several appendices and good resources for how to invite men into living lives consistent with the will and purpose of God in the world. Talk about shalom? This is it! What a profound, interesting, upbeat, but honest resource for anyone doing serious men’s ministry. Or for anybody wanting a tool for their own growth and reflection.  Hooray.

The authors, I just discovered, edited a few years ago a collection of essays called Peaceful at Heart: Anabaptist Reflections on Healthy Masculinity (Resource Publications; $33.00.) It’s a bit pricey, but with 260 pages I think it sounds so important we’re going to pick it up to stock here.

Here is what the publisher says about Peaceful at Heart and it seems to capture the lovely and useful nature of their new Living That Matters, as well:

While there are plenty of books by men, for men, on the topic of “Christian masculinity,” these books generally fail to address men’s propensities for violence and the traditional inequity between men and women, often endorsing inequity and sanctioning aggressive behavior as an appropriate “manly” response to conflict. Peaceful at Heart cuts through this conversation by offering a uniquely Anabaptist Christian perspective on masculinity. The vision of masculinity presented in this book is more peaceful, just, caring, life-giving for men, and more sensitive to women and children than both traditional images of masculinity and the hypermasculine images promoted by contemporary popular culture and wider evangelical Christianity. Peaceful at Heart addresses men and masculinity using Anabaptist theological themes of discipleship, community, and peace. As a collaborative project by men, for men, this book demonstrates through personal narratives, theological reflection, and practical guidance the importance of collective discernment, accountability, and mutual encouragement regarding how to live as peaceful men in a violent world.

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