One of the events we were honored to host here at the bookstore a few years ago was an author appearance/speaking engagement and celebration of a then just released book by Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books (Brazos Press.) Still enhanced with those fabulous linocuts by our friend Ned Bustard, it just came out in paperback (now $19.99.) At that event, Karen explained the thesis of the book — that reading classic literature can not only be entertaining and interesting and edifying, but can actually help form within us Christian virtues. The book has sold well and many have loved it. In it, she famously linked a certain classic novel with a certain virtue. It’s what I playfully sometimes call a “two-fer” — you learn both about virtue/character formation and you learn a Christian view of reading. You could even call it a three-fer” because you also learn the basic plot lines and themes of a dozen great works, from Austen to Dostoevsky to Melville to Dickens.

One of the questions I asked Karen was how this actually happens. I know some people that have read most of those great books and, frankly, they can nonetheless be real jerks. Heck, I have read some of those books and I have no illusion that I consistently exhibit these virtues. I read all kinds of good books and it hasn’t rubbed off all that well. I wonder why that is and maybe you do, too.

Dr. Prior shows that living with these great stories can deepen our character; she moves beyond what we can learn from them, to what we can become when we read well. But in that book, focused as it is on certain classic virtues cultivated from certain specific books, she seems a bit less interested in exploring how it happens. I’m still haunted by the question.

Now we have two brand new books that continue this conversation and, I think, help answer the question I posed to Karen. Enter Jessica Hooten Wilson and Mary W. McCampbell, with their two new releases, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press) and Imagining Our Neighbors As Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy (Fortress Press.) 

Both help us along by exploring specific stories that can shape us (so it makes perfect sense that Saint Prior endorses them both quite nicely) and both authors tell us a bit of how it happens. They are, I think, perfect for those who read On Reading Well and liked it and are eager for more. They go “further on and deeper in” to this topic, with verve and joy and upbeat relevance. Both are also, I think, good for those who got On Reading Well but didn’t like it as much as they thought they might (if there are any such souls.) Love On Reading Well or not, these are the two to read next. Prior herself says so. They are among my favorite books of this season, and I’m thrilled to tell you just a bit about them. And then I will add two more in the same ballpark, two about the visual arts.

The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints Jessica Hooten Wilson (Brazos Press) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Jessica Hooten Wilson is a very accomplished writer, and super-smart scholar with a PhD from Baylor University. She holds a prestigious position as the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. Her essays, literary criticism, cultural analysis, and spiritual reflections have been published in Comment, The Christian Century, The National Review, and the Englewood Review of Books. She wrote a major (and award-winning) academic book on “demonic authority in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky” which might give you a hint of her interests and tastes. Interestingly, she has another hardback book coming (from Zondervan Academic; $29.99) in May 2022 — we are taking pre-orders now for Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds That Came Before (which introduces about 35 famous writers from various cultures and genres, ranging from Confucius, Augustine, Margery Kempe, W.E.B. DuBois, Simon Weil, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolfe, David Foster Wallace, through Marilyn Robinson and a poem by Wendell Berry.)

This brand new one, though,The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination…, is very much about fiction writers. Like Karen Swallow Prior, is convinced of and passionate about the formative power of reading. Her goal, rather than extolling virtues (a la Prior’s appropriation of Aquinas, say) is holiness, as taught directly in the Bible. Reading great literature becomes a spiritual practice. The foreword is wonderfully crafted by Lauren Winner. Winner’s opening ends with these lines:

I’ll be conversing with, riffing on, and returning to The Scandal of Holiness for months and years to come, because, although it is not fiction, like the best fiction, The Scandal of Holiness prods the imagination. It opens out. It exceeds itself.

This book is about a key aspect of the formation in holiness that Dr. Hooten invites us to — she shows that “learning to hear the call of holiness requires developing a new imagination.” Yes, this book is about the imagination.

By exploring many novels old and new (and citing all sorts of other writers, from Walter Brueggemann to Buechner to von Balthasar, she explains how “God opens up a way of living that extends far beyond what we can conjure for ourselves.” This is really, really good stuff — I speak about this often, myself, in workshops and classes, and can get rather fiery, but seeing it so eloquently described with so many, many respectable case studies and literary examples, reminds me how wonderful and important this line of thought really is.

As Russell Moore (who is quite an amazing reader, himself) writes of it:

This book will spur you to read more and will show you how to do it. Wilson knows the difference between being well-read and being holy as she calls us to strive for holiness even in our reading. This book illustrates how good literature can stir the imagination and how the imagination can stir us toward holiness. The voice of this book is not of an English teacher asking if you have done your reading but instead that of a smart and humble friend who says to you: ‘Let me introduce you to some friends who know exactly what you’re going through right now.’  — Russell Moore, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul

By the way, as Moore noted, this is not just a literature prof (or bookseller) nagging you to read more, but it is a friend and guide to a better life, a more deeply Christian sort of discipleship, beckoning us to more generous and wise vision of the world. She wants to know God and God’s ways.  In fact, there are icon-like drawings to start each chapter (not attributed, which is odd) and an excellent devotional reflection at the end of each chapter which includes a nice paragraph excerpted from one of the novels she discusses, a short Scripture, and a quote or prayer from church history. (There are also great discussion questions making it even a more useful resource for your devotions, and, certainly, terrific for book clubs.) We have only rarely seen this juxtaposition of fiction and Scripture and reflection, so these brief readings are themselves remarkable.

Here are just a few of the novels (or stories) that Wooten tells us about, showing how they can form our imaginative vision, our world and life view, if you will: Lazarus by Vodolaskin, That Hideous Strength by Lewis, Book of the Dun Cow by Wangerin, Man of the Mountain by Hurston, In the Time of Butterflies by Alvarez, Kristin Lavransdatter by Undset, Diary of a Country Priest by Bernanos, The Violent Bear It Away by O’Connor, The Power and the Glory by Greene, A Lesson before Dying by Gaines, and Last Gentleman by Percy. 

Surveying these and many more I kept thinking that I wish Eugene Peterson could have lived to have seen this book in his lifetime. He was an advocate for reading these very sorts of books (and wrote about their impact in his own life and ministry.) Hooten is certainly right about her thesis that spending time with these great authors and their acclaimed stories and draw us more deeply into the story of God, and can make us holy. Peterson would say it just like that and he would have endorsed this breathtaking volume. (Which makes me think of our friend, novelist and biographer of Peterson, Winn Collier, who has founded, at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination. It did not surprise me to hear that he and Jessica are friends and that they are dreaming up some possible collaborations.)

Here, to further entice you to order this wonderful (225 page) book, is the admittedly allusive and suggestion-rich table of contents:

• Foreword by Lauren F. Winner
• Introduction
• 1. Holy Foolishness
• 2. Communion of Saints
• 3. Creation Care as a Holy Calling
• 4. Liberating Prophets
• 5. Virgin, Bride, Mother
• 6. Contemplative and Active Life
• 7. Sharing in His Suffering
• 8. Ars Moriendi
• Conclusion

I love the cover, don’t you —the flame emerging from the book? Yes! The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints is quiet fire.

Imagining Our Neighbors As Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy  Mary W. McCampbell  (Fortress Press) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I think Beth and I first met Mary at her apartment in Grand Rapids a decade ago during the legendary Calvin Festival of Faith & Music, curated by Ken Heffner and his crackerjack team of pop culture savants. I do know she has a very, very nice line about Ken in the acknowledgements, as well as to her friend and colleague, film studies guru Dr. Joe Kikasola, of Baylor’s New York City arts program. These are not inconsequential influences. We love McCampbell’s perspective, her writing style, her wit and grace, not to mention her deep academic knowledge (her PhD is from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. Not bad for a Tennessee gal who has written about distinctively post-secular USA writers like Chuck Palahniuk.)

She ends the book telling of a conversation in a cool coffee shop with indie singer Monique Aiuto, wife of Brooklyn poet and pastor, Vito Aiuto, with whom Monique founded the quirky worship band Welcome Wagon, talking about their song Up on the Mountain which then segues to a line from Dave Eggers What Is the What and ends with a line from a 1957 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church sermon by MLK. It is that kind of fabulous book. 

In a way, Imagining Our Neighbors… is a step even further away from Karen Swallow Prior’s ‘learn virtue from the classics’ approach in On Reading Well than is Hooten Wilson’s The Scandal of Holiness. Yet, as with Jessica’s volume, Dr. Prior likes this one, too. A lot. Here is what she says on the back cover:

Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves will instruct and delight any reader who cares even a little about art, imagination, and humanity. Mary McCampbell is a faithful, loving guide who will teach you things you didn’t even know you needed to know, and this is a book you won’t even realize you needed until you’ve read it.                                          — Karen Swallow Prior, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

Jessica Hooten Wilson, too, has raved about it, understanding as she does, why this volume is so very important, similar to hers, but different:

McCampbell has given us a vision of a flourishing community: one full of art, music, film, and fiction that tells the stories of who we are and the diverse gifts we bring to the table. Her book will have us opening our eyes to more clearly see those who are different from us — either because of gender, skin color, ability, or political opinions — as our neighbors.                                                                                                     — Jessica Hooten Wilson, University of Dallas, author of The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints

As you can pick up from these descriptions, Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves…is, like Prior and Hooten’s books, about the imagination. About deepening it, using it artfully, cultivating the practice of reading so as to enlarge the heart and set loose our imaginative capacities, all for the sake of see as God might want, even cooperating with God’s work in our lives and in God’s world. You know that promise that “glory to glory” promise in 1 Corinthians 3, showing that God is working on us, transforming us into Christlikeness from the inside-out? This is partially how it happens, with literature and the arts being conduits of virtue and holiness and Christlikeness and, yes, glory. She shows how the arts can be prophetic, even, helping us see the image of God in others, helping us understand a bit of what she calls “Divine hospitality” and motivating us, like the Hebrew prophets, to denounce idolatry and injustice. Such good reading and viewing and listening can give us sturdy hope.  As Mako Fujimura puts it, McCampbell, “paints a landscape of mystery, hope, and splendor for our imagination to be fed and to be nurtured toward the New Creation.”

Although the subtitle on the cover of McCampbell’s book says it is about how “the arts” can shape us, it focuses largely on what she calls “narrative art” (that is, fiction writing, music, TV shows, films, graphic novels, even memoir.) And it makes the very powerful case — a case I often try to make but never as thoroughly or as compellingly as Mary does here — that we become more empathic as we enter in, engaging with the narratives of others. 

Which is what makes this book stand out — it is about empathy. It is about learning to love. It is about what the New Testament calls agape. She actually explores a lot about how empathy works and why it is important for human flourishing, for justice, for fidelity to God’s ways in the world. She easily moves from Graham Greene to the Holy Bible, from Lars and the Real Girl to faithful theology, from The Hate U Give to spiritual formation, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Pope Benedict, from The Walking Dead to Rectify to Blankets to Magnolia to Better Call Saul to that movie about Mr. Rogers to a quote from Henri Nouwen. Naturally, in the introduction she has a citation from David Dark’s classic Everyday Apocalypse and she invites us all to ponder how all this popular art can draw us into ways of God’s own mercy.

Please note carefully these words of Christina Edmondson, Christian psychologist and cohost of Truth’s Table podcast and author of the brand new Faithful Antiracism: Moving Past Talk to Systemic Change that we reviewed in a previous BookNotes last week:

McCampbell takes the ingredients of the familiar and invites us on a theological and experiential journey to self and neighbor compassion. In her book, both storytelling and story analysis, from film to Holy Scripture, inspire and equip us to grow what seems so lacking today: empathy. 

I so enjoyed skimming through this quickly (as I did with Jessica Hooten Wilson’s) like a kid in a candy store. But these books are not candy, tasty and fun as they are. Reading these books is important spiritual work; they are good tools for nurturing the Christian mind, resources for our journey towards Kingdom living, opportunities for fascinating faith formation for being thoughtful readers in these days. Christina Edmondson is right about both books when she says of Imagining Your Neighbors, “I’d encourage readers to move through the text slowly, learning from the phrases and insights, and even vicariously from McCampbell’s style of engagement with the arts, to strengthen their empathy muscle.”

Here’s some of your workout if you take up this particular soul-stirring, muscle-building agenda with McCampbell as your coach:

1. Introduction: The Imagination as a Means to Love
2. Art as a Model for the Empathetic Imagination
3. Empathy for the Wretched and Glorious Human ConditionStories as Self-Reflection
4. Who Is Our Neighbor?
5. Structured for Empathy
6. Growing Empathy for Our Enemies
7. Conclusion — Empathy in the Greatest Story

Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith Russ Ramsey (Zondervan Reflective) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

Perhaps you saw this brand new book listed over at our Jubilee Conference special online bookstore, that e-commerce site we set up to correlate with Jubilee 2022. (I explained all that and invited you to that website at a previous BookNotes, here.) Ramsey is a good and clear writer and is pizzzazed, charged up telling us all what he has been learning as he has fallen in love with great art. Like the above books on literature, this one, too, hopes to help us deepen our imagination, live more mindfully aware of the good gifts that artists can bring. He wants to do this “through the eyes of faith,” as the subtitle says, making it ideal for anyone wanting to relate art appreciation with Biblical faith. Because he doesn’t get heavy into aesthetic theory or interact much with the robust conversation that has been going on about faith and art, it is good for, really anyone. There is a very good forward by Makoto Fujimura.

Here is what I wrote about it there at the Hearts & Minds Jubilee bookstore website:

Ramsey is a pastor and preacher and an ideal teacher to help us become acquainted with a handful of the world’s most famous artists and art pieces. Not all of the painters explored here were good people — but all wrestled with God’s goodness and grace and offered stunning visual reminders of the deepest question of life, including matters of faith.

Rev. Ramsey thrills readers with background drama (including a riveting bit about one of the most costly art heists in history, which included Rembrandt’s painting of the disciples of Jesus begging him to calm the seas, which remains missing to this day.) There is Bible study, some basic inspirational teaching, and lots of good info about the artists and their masterpieces. This will appeal to anyone wanting to think about art in relationship to Christian faith — ideal to open up the relevance of our “Jubilee vision” where God can be found everywhere! What a great read!

You know, I read through this quickly (an occupational hazard) and found so much so very interesting. I didn’t ponder the deeper meaning that much (yet!) and still found it fabulously edifying. And then I saw these comments from my friend, novelist Shawn Smucker, who I trust very, very much. Get this:

Russ Ramsey was kind enough to give me an early chapter of this book a few years ago when I was preparing to go on a silent retreat and asked him for a work of art I might spend some time meditating on during my weekend away. Thanks to Russ’s recommendation, I spent hours contemplating Rembrandt’s painting, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. I was shaken by the depiction of this scene and the disciples’ question to Jesus, ‘Do you not care that we are perishing?’ Russ’s gentle shepherding of my understanding regarding the painting and the Biblical story behind it was a balm in my life just when I needed it. I know that this book will be the same for you.                     — Shawn Smucker, author of Theses Nameless Things, The Weight of Memory, Light from Distant Stars

See?

I might add, here, that besides being a helpful spiritual guide, Ramsey is a very fine writer and did a set of three books that are hard to describe — they are rich devotional reading in a series called “Retelling the Story” starting with The Advent of the Lamb of God, The Passion of the King of Glory, and The Mission of the Body of Christ. (Each is quite handsomely done by IVP and goes for $18.00.) If you know them you won’t be surprised that this new art volume is by the same author, a serious Bible guy, a creative himself, a writer who wants us all to grow in our imaginative worldview and live into God’s ways amidst a broken culture that still offers rumors of glory.

Ramsey also wrote a book that moved me very deeply, about his own human emotions and struggles when he came face to face with death. That memorable, award-winning book came out in 2017 and is called Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death (IVP; $16.00.)

In any case, Russ Ramsey is an author we respect, a writer you should know, and we are thrilled to promote Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith here at our 20% off BookNotes special. 

Here’s what I love about Russ Ramsey’s latest project–it understands down deep that Truth is exclusive to no party or sect; that Goodness arrives in the form of the lonely, the ill, and the outcast; and that Beauty, amid the church’s moral twilight, might be the last apologetic that holds. — Leif Enger, author of Virgil Wander and Peace Like A River

The Art of New Creation: Trajectories in Theology and the Arts edited by Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Train, and W. David O. Taylor (IVP Academic) $30.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

I must admit, that although this remarkable book may be just a bit of a niche taste, it is one I”m personally very excited about. It is just exquisitely good for those who care about the deep conversation around faith and the arts, Christianity and creativity, Christians in the world of the contemporary visual arts. Because it not only offers a glimpse into so many different artists and art styles (from modern dance to sculpture, classical music to abstract painting and more ) in dialogue with theology and Scripture and missional envisioning,  it is a book that I just want to press into the hands of almost anyone who reads BookNotes. Really, it is, in many ways, a model for thinking Christianly and witnessing creatively that could inspire similar dreams and visions in other fields and careers. I have anticipated this almost more than any other book this year, and we are wonderfully elated to get to tell you just a bit about it here, now. It’s just so very, very good.

Perhaps you may recall a breathy BookNotes we did last November after we had a book display at the wonderful CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) conference in Austin. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we didn’t get to display most of what we had hoped to at that big gig, so we did this big list here. (The 30% off deal is done, but they are still on sale at our BookNotes 20% off.) We had just heard about this book about that time, so listed it then as a pre-order. And now it is out!  Hooray!

I didn’t know the half of it then, but here is what I wrote about it in that November BookNotes art blog:

This forthcoming volume is going to offer great chapters from the breathtaking DITA10 Conference held at Duke Divinity School exploring how our understanding of the relationship between creation and new creation is informed by and reflected in the arts. I have not read any of it yet, but can’t wait. I know the great African American, Pennsylvania artist Steven Prince has a chapter as does the aforementioned Jennifer Allen Craft, here paired with Norman Wirzba, and loads of what look like breath-taking pieces by dancers and poets and visual artists and musicians.

And I shared this great quote which seemed to capture well the importance of The Art of the New Creation:

From music to painting to film, this volume brings theologians and practicing artists together to imagine God’s new creation that, as Begbie highlights, is ‘before us’ but not yet realized. This mind-bending idea begs for embodied expression, and our cultural moment—rife with fear and injustice—needs those who can transform our imaginations for a new world to come. This collection is an enlivening contribution to the theology and arts conversation, which can often be abstract in its conclusions and outcomes. Instead, we are offered perspectives revealing that the integration of theology and the arts can be a vital nexus from which to imagine God’s new creation in our broken world.  —  Shannon Steed Sigler, executive director of the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Seminary

Isn’t this just remarkable? We don’t hear that many sermons about “new creation”, really, let alone how artists can help us imagine what it means to live towards that vision. And we don’t have that many books, even among all the very, very good ones, about various careers and callings, that ask how this essential Biblical teaching informs our very practices. This really is a stunning idea and our hats are off to the DITA10 folks who put together this event, and the book that happily emerged from it. (DITA, by the way, is the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts and there were a bunch of DITA conferences and symposia, this one in 2019 being the 10th. Hence, DITA10.)

Kudos also to InterVarsity Press (IVP) who did a nice job with both black and white illustrations and pictures and some full color plates in this paperback edition. This is in their on-going, substantive, “Studies in the Theology and the Arts” series and the cover art reflects the uniform design of that amazing series. I don’t know how an indie publishing house can afford to do these kinds of books that will obviously not be featured in the inspirational kiosks and typical big bookstores (too artsy for the Christian bookstores and too religious for the big secular stores, who would love this, but their religion sections are filled with Joel Olsteen and Left Behind novels.) So here we are, trying to champion this rare and vivid example of a fabulous entry into the world of modern art, in light of the restoration and newness that the God of the new Covenant has promised.

That N.T. Wright did the closing sermon makes perfect sense, and it is inspiring. Thanks be to God.

Here is the splendid table of contents. It’s almost as good as being at the event, even better if you are an introvert. Enjoy being a part of DITA10. Without out any travel costs. Order one today.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Natalie Carnes
Preface: Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Train, and W. David O. Taylor

There Before Us: New Creation in Theology and the Arts  Jeremy Begbie
Part I: Soundings
1. In God’s Good Time: Poetry and the Rhythms of New Creation  Devon Abts
2. Sketching the Incarnation: Ephrem of Nisibis on the Theological Significance of the Artist’s Craft  Charles Augustine Rivera
3. Love’s New Creation: Reconciling Two Approaches to Theology and Arts  Daniel Train
4. Transcendence, the Arts, and New Creation: An Empirical Approach  Kutter Callaway
5. The Artist and the Environmental Crisis: A Paradigm for Human Living  Sara Schumacher
6. The White Savior as Diseased Creation: A Theological Diagnosis and Plea Jacquelynn Price-Linnartz
7. Singing Ourselves into the Future: Worship and the New Creation  W. David O. Taylor
8. A Singing Creation: Music Making and Christian Maturity in Colossians 3:16  Amy Whisenand Krall
Part II: Conversations
9. Placemaking for New Creation  Jennifer Allen Craft and Norman Wirzba
10. We Flourish in a Syncopated Peace: Creation and New Creation in Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets  Richard Hays and Micheal O’Siadhail
11. Creation and New Creation in J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis  Malcolm Guite and Judith Wolfe
12. Reflections on Performing: Living into the New Creation  Elizabeth Klein and Shadwa Mussad
Part III: Arts in Action
13. Leah Glenn, Dancer
14. Lanecia A. Rouse Tinsley, Visual Artist
15. Steve Prince, Visual Artist
16. Linnéa Spransy Neuss, Visual Artist
17. Awet I. Andemicael, Musician
The Surprising Faithfulness of God: A Sermon at DITA10  N. T. Wright

Thanks for reading our BookNotes.Thanks for sending orders to our shop in Dallastown. We’d love to get these books known and sent out. We appreciate your support as you help us help you. Like one of Karen Swallow Prior said in one of the quips about one of these books — they will teach you things you may not have even known you needed. We think this is true, and we hope this helps. May be books be a blessing. Enjoy!

+++

TO PLACE AN ORDER

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

It is helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a general guide.

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

• United States Postal Service has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.50.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 if it fits in a flat rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that will take the next size up with is $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may take longer than USPS. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

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

HELPFUL HINT: If you want US Mail, please say which sort — Media Mail or Priority Mail — so we know how to serve you best.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

We are grateful for those who read, and even shared with others, our previous BookNotes, that list of what I take to be some important fairly recent books on race and racism that we’ve stocked in the last year. There were some good ones I missed, some I didn’t list because we had already pushed them a bit, and a few that are forthcoming, soon to be released that we will mention soon enough. But it was still a strong, current list.

I want to add this short addendum to that last BookNotes. I feared getting a bit long and I didn’t want you to lose interest so I wrapped it up prematurely. Here, now, is a quickie shout-out to six more important books about this topic that simply must be mentioned. The one I’ll start with is one I’ve already written about (and I even did a little facebook video announcement the day it came, just one month ago.) It is by Cole Arthur Riley, a friend that Beth and I both admire; it is her debut release, and I hope, not her last.

This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us Cole Arthur Riley. (Convergent) $26.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

Cole Arthur Riley is a very talented writer and has hit a home run with this intergenerational memoir laden with poetic and creative reflections, Bible lessons, personal stories, ruminations on other great literature. It is filled with lament and laughter, too, making it a very compelling read. It do not mean to make it sound cheap like some bodice ripper or pulp fiction but it is a page-turner. She moves from creative reflection to hard, even painful stories of her family, to intimate details from her girlhood — her dad braiding her hair, her ashen knees, her taking up ballet with other little girls but having the wrong color shoes, her weird feelings listening to an overheated and overly graphic preacherman.  She tells of contemporary stuff — eye surgery, her struggle with a chronic illness that has her in a wheelchair during a very special trip to Paris, her husband tying her shoes, her interest in combining a life of spiritual contemplation and rigorous social activism, their re-naming their new property outside of Ithaca which had been named after the owner in 1820 (“we didn’t like the idea of adopting the name of a man who might’ve hated me or my Blackness or our love.”)  

Her gramma is in the book a lot and it is a privilege to get to know her a bit. She treated Cole tenderly and honestly and she has some remarkable spunk. (“Chile, I grew up on Spam and Daniel and the lion’s den” she says when talking about her own abuse and finding some solace in Bible stories. 

In wise lines, Cole reflects on these remarkable insights — not exactly character lessons, but deep wisdom of how things can be — from her gramma; in wondering why God did protect her from hunger (or the abuse from a man in the family, known only as “the man who was not her father”) she writes that “her belief in the existence of God was durable, which did not reduce her anger but enlarged it.” 

Her father is an even more colorful figure than her gramma, and it is worth the price of the book to learn of their relationship. He was a hustler, struggled with some hard stuff, seems to have a heart of gold. The father-daughter stuff here is, in the style good memoir, shown, not told, which is to say she bears witness their life together and the stories — like the stories of her grandmothers abuse (religiously and sexually and socially) — are redemptive. I have post-it notes in my copy of the manuscript citing passages I could quote (or read out loud if I were doing a book talk on it) and many are beautifully told episodes about her dad. I won’t spoil it for you, but you should know that this is curious sort of intergenerational memoir, and one that fiercely believes that stories such as these matter. I made me glad for her vivid memory, for her extended families willingness to tell the stories (it is apparently quite the custom, as many of these tales have been recited often, she notes) and for the hard work (mentioned only briefly at the end) of interviewing family members and getting these oral histories while there was still time. Yes, as she puts it near the stunningly beautiful final page, “stories are our greatest teachers.”

I believe my ancestors knew things about freedom I can’t even begin to articulate myself. Maybe liberation is not as linear as we assume. Each generation may seem more liberated, but there are always new forms of bondage — virtue signals, digital radicalization, activism perfected by a disordered appetite for influence. It is much better, then, to learn what freedom sounds like. Just because you’ve found it once doesn’t mean you will never wander again. We must teach our children and our children’s children what it means to be free. What it feels like to be whole. To exhale. And stories are our great teachers.

This Here Flesh is arranged in a way where each chapter carries a theme. It is not (as with her popular Black Liturgies instagram) primarily a devotional, let alone short quotable for serious inspiration. Nor is it straight memoir. It is a combo of reflection, story, exegesis —of her life, her past, the Bible, her changing faith — and delivered with exquisite lines. 

Most chapters start with what might be considered a creative writing entry. Some will adore these poetic ruminations, these artful word-images that bring to mind what the highbrow lit crit folks call magical realism. Like a good poem, these ought not to be rushed through, and, mystified, I’ve returned more than once to a few. Next comes a story, full of lively lines, great stories, powerful images. But these segue easily into reflections on what Ms Riley seems to think about the world, her faith, her journey towards a deeper, honest sort of spirituality and her own interior life. Much of the book is an interrogation, as the deconstructive scholars say, of standard fare evangelical religiosity.

She has never been a card-carrying, straight-arrow, evangelical theologian (thanks be to God, some of her friends will cry!)  but yet she knows that world well. Some of her most passionate entries — I’d call them tirades but that sounds negative; sermons but that sounds too self-righteous, calling them discourses sounds too aloof — are in reaction to unkind or uncreative ideas and habits she’s noticed within that subculture. (I chuckled when she mentioned hipster guys who use beard oil and read C.S. Lewis. I was less amused when she rightly chastised those in the movement integrating faith and work for being, as most admit, seem to be aligned solely with the well-monied professional class and less interested in poor and blue collar workers or those who are under- or unemployed. And I understood, I think, when she described being in a one-on-one Bible study at McDonalds as a college student and reported that she didn’t want Jesus in her heart, but wanted to meet him in the streets.)

In the pages of this nice hardback there are magically creative moments, very good storytelling, vulnerable self-reflection, and, yes, some rants. She insists — you’ll love it if you agree, but if you don’t, you may be persuaded by her truth telling passion —on much about the value of place, the goodness of the body, the importance of delight, the joy of wonder, the legitimacy of rage, the power of memory, the healing power of joy, the need for lament. I could go on; this young woman is a blessing to behold, as is her fervent commitments to peace and justice, to honesty and dignity, to liberation and freedom.

In a reflection on the story of Hagar (in Genesis 16) — which she admits she doesn’t like as it is mostly cruel — Ms Riley says, after noting that Hagar’s linage would be destined to exist in tension and struggle,

I am learning to attune myself to Hagar’s words in the story. Hagar names God “the God who sees”…Hagar’s story reminds me of the profound healing that can occur when someone is given the liberty to have their story told, their suffering named. To belong to a God who asks, Where have you come from?

Most of us will not have our stories told in such a public way, but reading alongside others, indwelling a bit with them in their own story, so generously told, is a great gift. I think This Here Flesh is just such a gift as we listen in on the family stories shared, as we feel with her her anxiety and regret, as we are offered glimpses into the life behind the popular “Black Liturgies.” We are stimulated as we follow Riley’s sharp mind as she interacts with novelist Alice Walker or theologian Miroslov Volf or mystic philosopher Simone Weil or the well chosen lines of poet Lucille Clifton. It is just such as gift as she tells us of her life, her hopes, her very flesh. 

All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep Andre Henry (Convergent) $26.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

As I write, this book has just released and I have not finished my copy that came a bit early. I  knew a tiny bit about the frustrations (to put it mildly) this guy went through in his short time as the editor of the mostly white Relevant magazine (although there is a story from his time there that so bizarre one wonders what spirit has captured some folks.) I wanted to list this one in that previous BookNotes column, but it was just too new. I can say just the barest bones comments about it, but I believe this much to be true.

This is a powerful, powerful, book. It comes with a “warning” from the author (and from a few of the many who have offered endorsing blurbs.) As an aficionado of back cover blurbs, I sometimes grow weary of those who say a book is going to upset the status quo, that you will never be the same after savoring its pages, warning not to read it if you don’t want to be changed. I am not a cynic, not even about these overinflated endorsements (since, well, I’ve been tempted to be a bit breathy sometimes myself about such things.) In this case, I sense that this is all quite true. This is going to be a book that is easy to read, but hard to handle. He recounts conversation after conversation where white people (and some black friends, too, interestingly) say pretty dumb things, hurtful things. He has grown weary and has become a firm anti-racists with no time for this kind of slander or complicity with racist worldviews. The author, who writes for the Religious News Service, does a newsletter (which you should know about) which is called “Hope and Hard Pills.” He offers hope, to be sure, but there is what we might politely call candor. Or, what some might call some deep shit.

You might catch the theme of the book from the title — it is, in fact, the story of Henry’s decision to stop arguing about racism, to give up the illusion of being nice and forbearing and seeking common ground with gracious civility. (These are my words, not his.) His goal is to offer a proven path forward for people of color and it is not the way of merely getting along. One reviewer, a well known black author, says it is “militant, revelatory, and revolutionary in so many ways the world needs right now.”

Yet, his is not the way of power grabs or violence or inappropriate anger. Henry is, in fact, a student of nonviolence and has deeply considered how state-sanctioned violence (from overbearing police to colonial war-making) must be resisted with unflinching nonviolence. It is unclear to me if he most deeply draws on the traditions and ethics of Biblical pacifism — think of the Mennonites like Yoder or Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, say — or if he is motivated more by the broader movement of moral resistance of black church leaders like MLK, Bayard Rustin, or Vincent Harding. I do not, I’m a little ashamed to admit, know most of the names he cites in his footnotes. (Some of that is a generational thing, I suppose — I’m an old white guy in Pennsylvania, he’s a young, media-savvy LA activist, and is riffing off a dozen important underground journalists, protestors, organizers, artists, and emerging street-level spiritual leaders.) But I’m willing to learn. How this young guy came to a soul-filled political awakening is important to understand, I think, and I am eager to study this carefully.

One very interesting thing about All the White Friends…is how very global Andre Henry is.  Although the book would have been written a year ago, a glance at the footnotes shows that some of his conversation partners are Eastern European — talk about timely when it comes to scheming ways to resist imperial power. One of the scholars he cites is Srdja Popovic of the respected Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (with whom he studied at the Kennedy School at Harvard, btw.)

Listen to this from Erica Chenoweth, author of the Oxford University Press book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know

Poignant, urgent, and spot-on . . . In a narrative that is part memoir, part manifesto, and part how-to, Henry brilliantly weaves together his encounters with anti-Blackness and his political awakening with powerful observations about how nonviolent struggle can confront and transform racism. Don’t miss this profoundly important book.

I know that most of our BookNotes audience is white. I know many tilt towards the center, priding ourselves with our sober balance. This zealous book — although I think written mostly for black folks tired of these draining conversations and experiencing trauma from experiencing the news of the murders of names we all know — will be helpful for readers of all social circumstances and races. Writer Lauren Duca (of Teen Vogue, who has been called “the millennial feminist warrior queen of social media”, says it a mix of “memoir and manifesto.” Right on!

Forgiveness and Reparation, the Healing Journey Mpho Tutu van Furth (Fortress) $12.75 OUR SALE PRICE = $10.20

We have mentioned these small, thin, compact sized books in the recent “My Theology” series, before. There are more than a dozen of them — we are fond of Alister McGrath’s Return from a Distant Country and Malcolm Guite’s The Word Within the Words and I intend to read the recent Spirit Life by Grace Ji-Sun Kim. I look forward to “My Theology” released in May by Scot McKnight and Joan Chittister and John Swinton.

Forgiveness and Reparation may be, frankly, the most globally significant of them all. Mpho’s last book was one co-written with her famous daddy, The late Reverend Desmond Tutu. Like the others in this “My Theology” series, the author tells her story, explores how she got to the theological passions she has, and why her theology has the tone and texture it does.  Here, she offers her principal tenets and her vision for reparations as “rightly engaged is part of a spiritual process of forgiveness and reconciliation.” Of course, this leads to questions of atonement and restorative justice and the need for acknowledgment of the damage done to the enslaved and colonized.  As anyone familiar with her work, or Father Tutu’s, this process includes a “restoration of the lost humanity of the perpetrators and the repair of violated relationships.” You will learn the meaning of “Ndicela uxolo” even as many learned the power of Ubunto as a theological concept.

At under 80 pages (and including original poems and prayers) Forgiveness and Reparation, the Healing Journey is a challenge and a clarion call, short, gracious, Biblically-wise and vital.

Recovering Racists: Dismantling White Supremacy and Reclaiming Our Humanity Idelette McVicker (Brazos Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

PRE-ORDER NOW  NOT YET RELEASED // DUE April 12, 2022.

We wanted to highlight this  now, and invited you to pre-order it —it is due out within the next few weeks. I’ve got an advanced copy of this and I am pleased to tell you that it is an amazing, vibrant, challenging piece of work. My goodness, what a story!

Idellete (the name of John Calvin’s wife, by the way, for those who like historical trivia) McVicker is a white, South African Woman and here she shares her journey away from racism, helping us realize that “grappling with the legacy of white supremacy is a lifelong work that requires both inner transformation and society change.” It is, as she puts it, “a long walk.”

After training as a journalist in South Africa, she lived in Taiwan where she wrote for daily newspapers. I think this gives her a certain style — reporting honestly, yes, delving deep as an investigator, yes, but also writing clearly, passionate but concise. Much of this is memoir as she tells her story, describes her own involvement in racial injustices, and how she has come to work for equity and repair.  

She is the founder of SheLoves Media Society (an online forum for Christian women, a SheLoves magazine and the “Dangerous Women” membership community.) Her name might ring a bell for some who have heard of the “Let Us Be Women Who Love” curriculum which is cited in Sarah Bessey’s book Jesus Feminist.  Bessey, herself a remarkable writer, says, “Idelette is one of my greatest teachers, and I recommend her work with my whole heart.”

“Idelette has done the work,” says Lisa Sharon Harper in the powerful foreword. She certainly has been earning from the best teachers, reading books by African and African Americans and others who have much to teach us. (In fact, she cites Mpho Tutu and Andre Henry, from his “Hope and Hard Pills” column, and authors as diverse as Ruby Sales to Ada Maria Isai-Diaz to Isabel Wilkerson to Anthony De Mello to Abraham Joshua Heschel to Kaitlin Curtice. I admire her learning, her transformation, and her energy to help us all grow into deeper repentance of our racial assumptions, attitudes, and apathies. I love the subtitle of Recovering Racists  — “Dismantling White Supremacy and Reclaiming Our Humanity.” 

A beautiful, honest invitation to a better way of being human in which we embrace each other fully–I hope you’ll accept it.  — Kaitlin B. Curtice, author of Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

A heartbreakingly honest and gloriously transparent account of the other side of racism, the one most of us deny. I hope and pray that everyone everywhere will read this book. — Danielle Strickland, communicator, advocate, and author of Better Together

An absolute must-read for white people seeking to be recovering racists and anti-racists. — Karen González, immigration advocate and author of The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong

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

I wrote this a few weeks ago suggesting that this would be a fine book to study during Lent, a reflective, moving, story, inviting us all to repentance and renewal in the work of restoration. It has to be on any list of the best books about this released in the last year or so.  Here is some of what I wrote:

We have announced this a time or two, first inviting folks to pre-order it (thanks to those who did) and then, again, when it came out. I even mentioned it on that little video I did on facebook, the day This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley released. And yet, I’ve still not done it justice. Fortune was a hard book to read in an odd way. It was not gratuitous about the pain of the whip or the fear of lynching that African Americans have felt in their very bodies and it was not even that detailed about the abuses poured upon people of color in the late 20th and today. No, the brokenness this book describes is plainspoken and informative, passionate, yet, but written in a restrained way, getting at the “way race broke my family” in a way that is inviting to all. Who doesn’t want to know something about their family ancestors? Who doesn’t get a bit touched by those Ancestory.com ads? And who doesn’t cheer for an underdog, facing plenty of obstacles in finding the backstory of family heritage. Those of us older enough to remember recall why Alex Haley’s Roots was such a huge best-seller, before and after the much-watched TV show that exposed all America to the hard history of enslaved peoples here in so-called God’s country.

The title of this book is the name of a relative of Lisa’s, one whose story she traces in one of several chapters, each bearing the name of an ancestor. The book is mostly a family story, but it is grounded in the present as Lisa wonderfully describes her journey to archives and websites and museums and follows old roads to find old homesteads and imagine that this, this, this right here was where some relatives once lived. Most of the book is set in the past but she narrates it through the three decades it took her to explore ten generations.

In this way readers are drawn in, eager to know more, almost as Lisa herself was piecing it together, finding this true story, recalling that anecdote, holding on to that family heirloom, discovering these records or those news clippings. It is common enough stuff, but she tells it well. She has us on the edge of our seats in a few sentences about waiting for DNA results.

But — let us speak honestly, here — most white or even non-white Americans who do their ancestry detective work, do not have to consult purchase orders and billing ladings for the purchase of their ancestors. And for black people in America, this damnable fact is true: most family records are smeared and smudged (metaphorically but perhaps literally) with blood. Lisa does not overstate the horror of this, looking up records of who was purchased by whom, and only hinted at how it made her feel to do this particular kind of detective work. It is, though, what makes Fortune a different sort of book than most others who have told their dramatic story of finding their ancient relatives and where in the older worlds they came from. In this sense, Fortune is gut wrenching, not because Lisa is melodramatic or overstated; again, she is not. Still, it is, as they say, what it is.

And some of what it is, is exciting and lovely, learning about great-greats, marriages, travels, and the birth of little ones. She learns of cousins and stories of creativity and endurance. Lisa weaves her family member’s stories in with her own, placing it all in the context of the unfolding history of modern times. Ms. Harper has been through a lot — we have gotten hints of some of it in her Very Good Gospel. There is more revealed in Fortune. The great Ruby Sales has a blurb on the back simply saying that “Harper is a masterful storyteller.” Amen to that.

I had read this in an advanced manuscript, and when the hardbacks came we were delighted, but I had my spiral bound manuscript all marked up and pages dog-eared. So I didn’t open the hardback right away and then I discovered the bonus — there are photographs of some of the people she writes about (Lee Ballard, born in 1836, Phillip Fortune, born in 1835, Reinaldo and Anita Weekes (wearing a great hat), up through a fabulous picture of Lisa’s mom Sharon Lawrence with Lisa as a baby, a picture taken in 1969.) You will actually lay eyes on Hiram, who you have read about, and Richie Lawrence and Willa Belle Jenkins visiting Junias on a military base in Michigan during WWII. I’m not usually a fan of pictures of people we don’t know in an autobiography but these are the people this book is about. I was so excited to see these, and it drew me back into the book for my second reading.

There is some very good stuff as the story draws to a close about repair. Obviously no simple religious “reconciliation” will do without a full account of truth and justice. She explores the meaning of guilt and the nature of forgiveness. She writes helpfully a bit about reparative justice. She cites a few good public theologians and social ethicists  (and of course, tells of Desmond Tutu’s important work in South Africa, citing his powerful No Future Without Forgiveness.) Her message about the beloved community is moving and compelling and not without a challenge to be more active to the work.

Which makes this, my friends, a great book to read any time, but perhaps especially as a Lenten practice, to enter in to the story of another with such intentionality, to learn what she learns, to care, to be challenged.Is if fair to say this is, in some way, part of all of our stories, for better or worse? We owe Lisa a debt of gratitude. She waded in (as Sweet Honey in the Rock sing it, citing Harriet Tubman.) As one writer put it, “Fortune recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.” 

Redemptive Kingdom Diversity: A Biblical Theology of the People of God Jarvis J.Williams (Baker Academic) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE =  $19.99

When I saw this book first announced last year I was both thrilled and a bit intrigued; what more can be said about this since there are so many books extolling the Biblical and theological value of a multi-ethnic church and how the local congregation, complicated as it may be, should strive for modeling cross-cultural relationships and, obviously, racial justice. Whatever it would bring, I sure liked the title, and any author who thinks of the people of God in that frame — a diverse people, a Kingdom people, needing Biblical theology — is an author I’d want to take seriously.

Well, Redemptive Kingdom Diversity does indeed bring something very helpful to these conversations about diversity in the local parish. Dr. Williams is a professor of New Testament interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and has written some solid, conventional, scholarly works (a commentary on Galatians, a book on the atonement, and one called One New Man: The Cross and Racial Reconciliation in Pauline Theology.) In this book he offers a comprehensive Biblical survey of the diverse people of God (from Genesis to Revelation.) This shows the multiethnic nature of the story of God’s covenant with the people and the multiethnic nature of the gospel itself. As Craig Keener, a New Testament scholar a respected writer (from Asbury Theological Seminary) notes that it “provides a resource for discussing and preaching about Christian interracial unity by explore Biblical questions regarding the identity of God’s people in Christ.”

Here is the Table of Contents so you can see how this unfolds, in under 200 pages:

1. The People of God in the Pentateuch
2. The People of God in the Historical Books, Wisdom and Poetry, and Prophets
3. The People of God in the Gospels and Acts
4. The People of God in Paul’s Epistles
5. The People of God in the General Epistles and Revelation
6. Synthesis: The People of God in the Old and New Testaments
7. The People of God and Orthopraxy

Jarvis has made clear what many lovers of the Scriptures have always known, that God’s desire to create a multiethnic, just, and God-honoring kingdom for his glory is a truth that bursts forth from every page of the Bible. For those who want a guide that traces this theme as it winds its way through the twists and turns of Scripture, this book is for you.– Esau McCaulley, Wheaton College; author of Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Redemptive Kingdom Diversity revisits the multiethnic nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Scripture within the framework of God’s redemptive purpose throughout both testaments. Its call to inclusion of all races in the church is most timely and urgent as the church continues to battle the age-old sin of racism. — M. Sydney Park, Beeson Divinity School, author of Honoring the Generations: Ministry & Theology for Asian North American Congregations

There is, as you can see above, a good final chapter applying his canonical, Biblical overview to race, racism, and ethnicity today. As a gospel-centered, evangelical black man with strong teaching gifts and (besides being an academic professor) a caring pastoral calling, serving in the South in a largely white denomination, Dr. Williams has much to say that is well worth hearing. As a passionate but exceedingly careful Bible scholar we should listen to him for he allows Scripture to shape our views. As Dr. Anthony Bradley of The Kings College in New York says, “This is the first book evangelicals hold read on race in the church.”

TO PLACE AN ORDER

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

It is helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a general guide.

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

• United States Postal Service has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.50.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 if it fits in a flat rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that will take the next size up with is $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may take longer than USPS. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

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

HELPFUL HINT: If you want US Mail, please say which sort — Media Mail or Priority Mail — so we know how to serve you best.

BookNotes

SPECIAL
DISCOUNT

20% OFF

Well, friends, I’ve been wanting to offer this list for a while, bringing you up to speed with some of the fascinating and often very important books on race and racism that we have for sale here at Hearts & Minds. We have always had a dedicated section about diversity, racial reconciliation, the history of the civil rights movement, and the like. Maybe that is why we got a very scary message under our door from the KKK one fine day decades ago, a threat that I wear as a badge of honor. Not many people bought these sorts of books (except, maybe, evangelicals involved in campus ministry through IVCF or CCO who have been on the cutting edge of speaking about this stuff for years.) But, like a few other categories of books we enjoy showing off, we have them because we should. And we wish they sold better.

Who knew that in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic and the quarantining two years ago there would be a huge, nation-wide uptick in interest in books by and about black culture, about white privilege, social justice, racial equity, cultural diversity? For a while we could hardly keep some key titles in stock. In 2020 we sold lots of Reading While Black, Be the Bridge, I’m Still Here, My Grandmother’s Hands, Stamped from the Beginning, White Fragility, How to Be an Anti-Racist, The Color of Compromise, Healing Racial Trauma, The Warmth of Other Suns, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Just Mercy, Me and White Supremacy, Anxious to Talk About It, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and older classics, from authors like John Perkins and Brenda Salter McNeil to Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman and John Lewis to Oscar Romero and James Cone. I could name more. It was an exciting time for booksellers almost everywhere, at least those who cared about these things.

We sold books on the immigrant experience, too — again, we had a section on immigration and refugees since our store opened but interest from publishers and the book buying public and some churches grew noticeably. Within a year or so all sorts of newer authors invited white Americans (including white Christians of all sorts) into their world to read about First Nations/indigenous, Latino, Asian American experience, spirituality, and theology. Non-controversial books like Living In Color: Embracing God’s Passion for Ethnic Diversity or Learning from the Stranger: Christian Faith and Cultural Diversity by David Smith or Gracism:The Art of Inclusion by David Anderson were eagerly studied by church groups who had not previously taken up issues of social ethics or public justice. Those that could, dug a little deeper; some were intentional about framing the conversation by the light of Biblical doctrine while others just wanted to read, listen and learn from others, graciously. We sold memoirs and novels and poetry by people of color. New authors captured our attention — within the religious publishing world, at least; authors like Lisa Sharon Harper, Karen Gonzalez and Chanequa Walker-Barnes and Kaitlin Curtice and Kat Armas and Hak Joon Lee were in demand, and we were grateful.

Those wanting to go deeper worked through Matthew Kaemingk’s Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear or even Willie James Jennings Yale University Press title, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. 

We, here, have much to learn, but we felt like we were somewhat well-positioned to serve a growing interest among our customers. It was a season we will never forget and for which we are grateful.

And, then, the push back began. A few fair concerns and a lot of truly awful nonsense was spread alongside the disinformation about vaccines and the so-called “stolen” election about something called critical race theory. Authors and publishers who should have known better blasted away, often on Fox News or on loud, right-wing websites (although also from more respected sources which did breathy and illogical hit pieces.) These alarmist tirades often came with meager insight and seemingly not much compassion, and the books sold, I’m told, by the tens of thousands.

We’ve been trying to help customers get books they need (and we’ve earnestly tried to serve those on various sides of the culture wars) and we always remind readers to “think Christianly” and to exercise discernment. People of faith should agree in our mutual efforts to be wise and good. We are free, the Bible says, so we can read what we want, but our freedoms should be used for the building up of the community. We should be critical thinkers in generous ways so we can promote the gospel’s healing and hope. As Englewood Book Review founder Chris Smith put it in the title of one of my favorite books, we should be Reading for the Common Good. 

Which brings me back to this new list. We’ve just been too stressed and busy and constrained by the pandemic protocols, and attracted to so many books on so many topics, to get everything done we’ve wanted to. This list is long, but I skipped a lot, knowing I can’t describe all that we have. Here we will share with you a bit about some of the most interesting books in this field to appear in the last year or so. A few are very new.

Forgive me if this seems blunt, but if you, like me, have been properly busy reading widely, and you’ve perhaps fallen away from reading more intentionally into this topic, I invite you to follow through with the stuff you learned two years ago and the commitments you may have made then. Perhaps you feel like you’ve read enough on race and diversity, or maybe you can’t bear any more. I get it. But here ya go, anyway. I invite you to pray and seek God’s face and listen to the Spirit, which may be beckoning you further in. If so, here are some recent titles that might be worth reading and talking about with others who may want to refresh their commitments to learning more about racial justice. As always, thanks for caring.

ALL BOOKS CAN BE ORDERED AT HEARTS & MINDS BY USING THE ORDER LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS COLUMN. 

ALL BOOKS ARE 20% OFF.  

SERIOUS BOOKS THAT STUDY THE HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619 – 2019  edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (One World) $32.00 hardback // $20.00 paperback  OUR SALE PRICES = $25.60 (hardback) // $16.00  (paperback) 

Ibram X. Kendi wrote two of the biggest selling books in the recent renaissance of contemporary work in this field, the 2016 classic, Stamped from the Beginning and the 2019 polemic, How to Be an Anti-Racist. His co-author here, Keisha Blain, has written a number of scholarly books, including Set the World on Fire on the black intellectual tradition and a great book on Fannie Lou Hamer, Until I Am Free.) Here they have compiled “a chorus of extraordinary voices” — 90 passionate and often brilliant writers and thinkers, offering historical vignettes, vivid analysis, personal stories, fiction, and more. It has a startling array of different perspectives offering a “communal history” on 400 years worth of topics. Some of what they episodes and stories and concerns they write about you will have heard about, some maybe not. There is so much to learn. Some of these authors are famous, some are not. This is an amazing resource; I don’t say this often but we recommend the thick hardback, but we are glad for the less costly paperback.

The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America Joshua D. Rothman (Basic Books) $35.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

Much has been written about the international slave trade but less about the uniquely American story told here, about three respected businessmen capturing people from the Upper South and sending them to the cotton and sugar fields of the Deep South. This study of the under-examined US slave trade shows how it was integral to the rise of interstate commerce, the flow of credit, and the establishment of new transportation routes. It is a stunning, devastating, history, essential for anyone wanting to understand  the development of American business, capitalism, or who is speaking about faith in the marketplace. As one reviewer (in Rekon) put it:

In popular culture, we’ve cast slave traders at social pariahs but Joshua Rothman’s book refutes that whitewashed narrative. In many ways, slave traders were celebrated businessmen and he traces the stories of three of the biggest slave traders to show how much the economies of the South and the North relied on America’s original sin.

As Drew Faust of Harvard puts it, The Ledger and the Chain is,

A tour de force of deep research and vivid detail that illuminates big and critical issues. Beautifully written too. Moving, horrifying, unforgettable.

 

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America Clint Smith (Little Brown) $29.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

This has been a significant New York Times best-seller and is being used in book clubs and classes — that a study of how slavery is acknowledged and commemorated has been so widely read is itself fascinating. This new lens for seeing is notable and it is important. Helpfully and gladly, Clint Smith (a staff writer for The Atlantic) is an amazing wordsmith who crafts very moving prose. Matthew Desmond, author of the powerful Evicted, calls it “a work of moral force and humility,” and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author The Heningses of Monticello says it is “beautifully written, evocative and timely.”

It is a vital history, and it once again explores the matter of slavery (and how it is remembered.) But the deep lesson is vital even beyond that. I like these words about it:

How the Word is Passed sheds light on the contested narratives beneath the surface of our collective national identity, inviting us to dig a little deeper, reminding us never to take received histories for granted.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake Tina Miles (Random House) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

This unforgettable book earned the coveted National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for a number of prestigious awards, from the Kirkus Prize to one of Publisher Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2021. The hardback was handsome but the paperback, now out, is very nice. 

I needn’t say much, but folks who have read this study of the humble items in this sack and how it was passed down have just loved it. The bag came from an enslaved woman named Rose who in 1850s South Caroline gave her nine-year old daughter Ashley a cotton bag with a few items as she was being sold away. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered the family history on the sack “in spare, haunting language.” It is a poignant story of resilience and, as one reviewer put it, “a testament to the power of story, witness, and unyielding love.”

The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice  Scott Ellsworth (Dutton) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I do not know if many Americans, at least most white Americans who were not from Oklahoma, knew about the horrific, heartbreaking, gripping story of what Rev. Dr. William Barber has called “one of America’s worst racial atrocities.” Searing as it may be, this is an important bit of ground-breaking research, called meticulous and elegant.  There have been books on this, some folks know about it, but most of us don’t.

Why did it take the death of so many unarmed black citizens at the hands of heavily armed police in recent years, and a brave football player who took the knee, and the formant of the BLM movement to create a space for this sort of storytelling to get a hearing? For this sort of horror to come to light, now? We are grateful for books like this, for the coverage NPR and other outlets gave it, and how this story is now acknowledged. 

The good Reverend Barber continues, noting that Ellsworth “shows us how we can uncover our past and come to grips with our future. His literally groundbreaking research and engaging prose pull us toward the call of justice today.”

America cannot address the crisis in which we find ourselves because we are unwilling to acknowledge the road that brought us here. We are determined to look away… Scott Ellsworth is willing to dig and willing to help us to see who we have been in hopes that we will rise to who we must be. The Tulsa massacre of 1921 is one of the most significant and revealing episodes of American history, and one we must confront in order to find our way. The Ground Breaking will rattle you, and it should. It will move you toward a harder wisdom, and it must.    — Tim Tyson, senior research scholar, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, author of The Blood of Emmett Till and Blood Done Sign My Name

Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution John Archibald (Knopf) $28.00           OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I don’t know if the cover design evokes the early 1960s but this author was born in April 1963 in the white part of Birmingham. As he explains, “I never knew, until much later, that as my mother went into labor, the foot soldiers of revolution gathered across the county line, that at the moment of my birth, Birmingham readied for a battle that was long overdue. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had not yet put his Dream to words, but he had come to this town to change the world with another masterpiece.” 

John Archibald graduated from the University of Birmingham and won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 2018 for reporting. He has a good eye for detail, is an excellent writer, and tells us here about what it was like growing up in the deep south in a long line of Methodist preachers. Can you imagine reading “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, maybe in college, and realizing it was addressed to, among others, your own father? To come to understand the nature of silence and complicity?  It is, as they say, a journey of discovery.

The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era Jesse Curtis (New York University Press) $32.00    OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

Dr. Curtis is a professor of history at Valparaiso and is a significant voice in the conversations about history, memory, and the role of religion in American culture. Blurbs on the back of this powerful volume are from Paul Harvey, Jemar Tisby, and Kristin Kobes Du Muz, all stellar historians and popular writers who have served us well with historical acumen offered for educated and open-minded fellow believers and all citizens wanting to learn about white evangelicalism in these turbulent years, and, especially, what some might call the post-civil rights years — the 70s and 80s. I am very aware of some of the stories he tells, including ‘70s-era conflicts at evangelical colleges, from Calvin College in Grand Rapids to Eastern in Philly; the ministry of leaders I admired such as Bill Pannell and Tom Skinner are described and evangelical church conflicts are explored, even as things like “personal kindness” or a focus on the gospel prevented some evangelicals for adopting a more comprehensive, structural understanding of how institutional racism works.  As Du Mez puts it, this is “religious history at its best.” She insists that it is an “immensely clarifying book.”

This book shows how platitudes about equality and not seeing racial differences actually perpetuated the segregated and unequal status quo in many white evangelical churches, colleges, and institutions. It is vital reading for understanding just how salient race remains in some Christian circles. This is the book on the history of white evangelicalism I have been waiting for. —Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism

Witnessing Whiteness: Confronting White Supremacy in the American Church Kristopher Norris (Oxford University Press) $28.95                   OUR SALE PRICE = $23.16

This is another exceptionally valuable book that came out this year that explores how America’s white churches tend to (in the words of M. Shawn Copeland, Professor Emerita of Theology at Boston College) “sacralize… socially constructed whiteness.” In other words, Norris calls on us to figure out how we got ourselves into this mess.

In the words of Jennifer McBride (herself a Bonhoeffer scholar, by the way, and author of the excellent The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness),

This is a stunning book. In captivating and accessible language, Norris argues that white supremacy is not a force in which white Christians are sometimes complicit but it is an invention of the tradition, defining its theology and practice.

Oh my. Could that be true? David Gushee — who has been immersed in various corners of the evangelical world (from working for Ron Sider to Al Mohler) and within more mainline Protestant and ecumenical circles — says Witnessing Whiteness “is a breakthrough work in the project of diagnosing, understanding, and repenting white supremacism in US Christianity.”

Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America Michael Eric Dyson (St. Martin’s Press) $25.99   OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

If I can get a few Hearts & Minds customers and BookNotes readers to buy a Dyson book or two, I can rest; he has a huge following but it is my sense that he is not well known and under appreciated within most white Protestant circles. He’s a scholar, a public intellectual, a media star (not long ago I linked to his witty piece about the best music on Colbert when they were pushing his big collection Entertaining Race) and pastor. This hand sized hardback is a good read, arranged as a set of letters reflecting on what exploded the previous year after the murder of George Floyd. It is eloquent and powerful — Robin Diangelo calls it “a searing cry for racial justice from one of our nation’s greater thinkers and most compelling prophets.” Yes, some put him alongside the likes of Cornell West, and that is very high praise indeed. I mentioned it before and thought I should highlight it again, here.

In Long Time Coming Dyson offers a “brilliant and fiercely eloquent work that traces the roots of racism.” Naturally, he has to explore slavery and Jim Crow and recent police brutality and ask tough questions about where we are today as a nation and a people. It is stuff we need to know, content we need to read about, and read about again — at least most white readers need to. Dyson is a good teacher and we should listen to him.

Michael Eric Dyson is one of the nation’s most thoughtful and critical thinkers in social inequality and the demands of justice. Long Time Coming, his latest formidable, compelling book, has much to offer on our nation’s crucial need for racial reckoning and the way forward. — Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall  Reece Jones (Beacon Press) $25.95    OUR SALE PRICE = $20.76

This is a book that simply needs to be known, making the case with meticulous research and exceptional history —what Pulitzer Prize winning author Greg Grandin calls a “damning inquiry” — that anti-immigration crackdowns, while often said to be about jobs and workers and respect for legal processes, are deeply intermingled with racist ideas. 

Reece Jones guides us through the long, tangled, and still developing history of how the United States came to know itself as a nation through the increasingly strict control of movement across its borders. Jones demonstrates in this assiduously researched and carefully crafted book that the nation’s borders are in fact central to making the state what it is: a key tool in the maintenance not just of white supremacy but of whiteness itself.  —  Brendan O’Connor, author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right

Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism Jonathan Tran (Oxford University Press) $35.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

I have not read this thick text yet but I have it on my list — serious readers who I admire have ordered it from us and the early buzz has been significant. One person liked its importance to Willie James Jennings’ magisterial The Christian Imagination: Theologies and the Origins of Race. 

Listen to what James K.A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin University (and recent author of The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology)  writes of it:

This compelling book is a singular intervention in our current reckoning with racism and contemporary debates about antiracism. At once provocative and measured, Tran’s book is a feat: a careful argument that is also a bombshell. He shows us the insidious way capitalism breeds competition amongst the exploited, but also how Christian theology, in conversation with Marxism, imagines a hope beyond racial capitalism. I am still reeling from reading this.    

I hope this quote from Sarah Coakley, herself a dense and important theologian, illustrates something about this important scholarly work.

Jonathan Tran’s remarkable book breaks new conceptual ground in the analysis of ‘race’, racism and religion in the United States by providing a fearless critique of how standard scripts about racial ‘identity’, even when enunciated by those who claim to be fighting injustice most emphatically, simply reinstantiate what they are claiming to overcome. The problem is that these well-meaning discourses obscure what most needs exposure: the economic substructure which keeps the problematic core racial binary in place, and at the same time relegates those who do not conform to that binary (specifically, ‘Asian Americans’) into a strange place of collusion or further marginalization. But Tran is no standard neo-Marxist, either: through a rich use of comparative ethnographic studies he is able to show how Christianity’s core meanings, when truly activated politically, can still change these narratives and also their outcomes. — Sarah Coakley, Australian Catholic University

For a really intersting review, check out this one from our friends over at the Englewood Review of Books.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together Heather McGhee (One World) $28.00 hardback // $20.00  paperback $18.00   OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40 (hardback) // $14.40 (paperback)

We named this as one of the Best Books of 2021 and while it is a serious read, really, truly commend it to you. Ibram X. Kendi says, boldly, “This is the book I’ve been waiting for.” Wes Moore (of the unforgettable The Other Wes Moore) says, “The beauty and power of this book is blinding.” The extraordinary George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo) writes that it is “vital, urgent, stirring, beautifully written.” Chris Hays assures us that “Heather McGee is one of the wisest, most penetrating, most brilliant minds to set herself to the Big Problem of American democracy.”

The Sum of Us is an exploration of the nexus of race, class, and politics. It is written with care, with kindness, with insight, and without turning away from the complex matters of economics, racism, religion, and more. It shows in significant ways not only how we got into the mess we are in; it scrupulously tells the story of how public goods –- from parks and pools to functioning schools -– have become private luxuries… And it offers healthy ways to proceed, to move towards new ground. Some of it — the “solidarity dividend,” for instance — can happen, she shows, in houses of worship.

McGhee does not say all that needs to be said and she may or may not be right in all her analysis although with expertise in economics and policy (and a law degree) I wouldn’t want to argue with her. The Sum of Us is a very important contribution, for its insight, her authority, and the power to change that could come if we heed even some of what she proposes.

Here is how the publisher describes her project:

Heather C. McGhee’s specialty is the American economy – and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. As she dug into subject after subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism–but not just in the obvious ways that hurt people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It’s the common denominator in our most vexing public problems, even beyond our economy. It is at the core of the dysfunction of our democracy and even the spiritual and moral crises that grip us. Racism is a toxin in the American body and it weakens us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? To find the way, McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Mississippi to Maine, tallying up what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm–the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she collects the stories of white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams and their shot at a better job to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. 

Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm Robin Diangelo (Beacon Press) $24.95  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.96

Guess what? Maybe folks had had enough of these kinds of books by the time this book released in the summer of 2021 or maybe some had heard (sometimes fairly legitimate, in my view) critiques of Diangelo’s huge seller, White Fragility. I am not sure if it didn’t sell well elsewhere, but my hunch is this is a sleeper — important, slowly gaining respect, a lesser known but significant resource. It shows that good intentions simply are not enough.

Just listen to these serious recommendations:

With the hard-earned insights that come from years of study and leading workshops on racism, Robin DiAngelo captures the strategies often used by well-intentioned white people to avoid the self-examination needed to confront their own unrecognized racism. If you want to get beyond feeling defensive and increase your capacity for effective anti-racist action, do yourself a favor and read this book!  — Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race

In this illuminating follow-up to White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo integrates sharp insight, personal vulnerability, and compassionate guidance with the keen eye of an ‘insider.’ Focusing specifically on the more subtle patterns of white progressives, her work continues to be invaluable to the project of ending white supremacy. — Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Spectacular! With the precision of a social scientist, Robin DiAngelo dissects and puts under the microscope seemingly benign ‘white moves’ — including her own — in ways that make undeniable how each functions to recalibrate white dominance and comfort again and again. A critical tool for white progressives wanting to know better so we can do better. — Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America John McWhorter (Portfolio/Penguin) $28.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40

I have read other books by the provocative, brilliant, black professor of linguistics and have found him exceptionally erudite and entertaining. He has written about language, about truth, about hip-hop and rap, about “words from the gutter.” I am not sure I understand him fully, always, and I know I do not agree with him on some points. Still, for those wanting a thoughtful reply to some of the excesses of lefty woke platitudes, this is a very valuable resource.

He notes, by the way, in the opening pages, what the book is not. It is not against BLM, it is not against protest, it is certainly not against civil rights or the struggle for justice. He is worried about a religion-like ideology that he says, has seduced “New York Times-reading, National Public Radio-listening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism.” He continues that he is “of this world. I read The New Yorker, I have two children, I saw Sideways. I loved both The Wire and Parks and Recreation.” Well, then.

McWhorter has some bones to pick with Robin DiAngelo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi. This is interesting, perhaps serving in a way Shelby Steele did twenty years ago. If your don’t think you need it, you maybe do. If your cheering, fine — but pick up one of the others on this list, too, to compare and contrast. They are all 20% off, ya know! 

Here is a nice summary of an NPR review that explores the book fairly, I think. I suppose Dr. McWhorter might think this critique might prove his point, but this review sees nothing good about it at all.

BOOKS THAT POINT WAYS TO CHANGE, HEALING AND HOPE

Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation  John Lewis (Grand Central Publishing) $22.00    OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

It seems like cultural ages ago when the fine Christian statesman and veteran civil rights leader was honored in DC, resting in state in the US Capitol. We have enjoyed selling the three part graphic novel / comic style autobiographies (March, Parts One, Two and Three.) As a leader in SNCC he was arrested (and often abused) more than 40 times; he served in Congress for 38 years. 

Carry On is a collection of his pithy paragraphs, good words, stories, sermons, speeches, sort of a page-a-day inspirational reader, a keep-sake reader of one of the great men of our times.  A very nice book covering topics from gratitude to humility, mentors to activism, faith, hope, love.

You Are the Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, And the Black Experience: An Anthology edited by Tarana Burke & Brene Brown (Random House)  $27/00 (hardback) // $17.00 (paperback)  OUR SALE PRICES = $21.60 (hardback) // $13.60 (paperback)

Perhaps you will recall our highlighting this when it came out in hardback — what a powerful anthology this is, excerpts of essays, articles, testimonials, studies, and reflections on African American resilience. For years, both Tarana Burke and Brene Brown have been working, writing, and talking about shame resilience and empathy, both in the context of Tarana Burke’s “me too” movement and through Brown’s research. That they have created a space for black writers to explore and process the trauma of white supremacy and offer “a space to be vulnerable and affirm the fullness of black life and black possibility” makes this a fabulous book to have, to read, to share. Burke says she wants this resources “to be a soft place to land.”

Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections Across Cultures Michelle Ami Reyes (Zondervan Reflective) $22.99               OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

This book is outstanding. The rave reviews and commending blurbs by amazingly respected cross-cultural Christian leaders such as Soong-Chan Rah, Osheta Moore, Irwin Ince, Christiana Edmundson and Dorena Williamson indicate that Becoming All Things is one of the most important books of the season.  It is a road map, a guide book, a fine and practical resource from one who is considered, by everyone who knows her, a gifted and talented teacher and impeccable leader.  The lovely forward by Rev. Thabiti Anyabwile illustrates its fine evangelical clarity.

Michelle Ami Reyes, PhD, is an Indian American writer, speaker, and activist whose work on faith and culture has been featured in Christianity Today, Faithfully Magazine, Patheos, and more. She is also the Vice President of the Asian American Christian Collaborative and Editorial Director at Pax. Michelle lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, Aaron, and two kids.

Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism George Yancey (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

Oh my, a new book by black sociologist George Yancey is always notable and this brand new one looks extraordinary. You may know that he has done scholarly work on ideological bias in the culture wars, on the allegations made by conservative Christians about discrimination in the public square, about racial tensions on college campuses, on inter-racial marriages, on multi-ethnic churches. His academic books have appeared on Oxford University Press, Routledge, Baylor University Press and the like. He’s done popular-level work, too, offering wonderful resources such as One Body One Spirit and the very interesting 2006 Beyond Racial Gridlock. He always is a voice to listen well to, a voice that tends not to be easily pigeonholed.

Here is uses an admittedly simple rubric, but it may be generative, a wise call for somewhat of a third way beyond our impasses in this essential conversation and movement. For Yancey’s purposes here, “Colorblindness ignores the realities of race and the history of injustice. On the other hand, antiracism centers racial concerns and in so doing often alienates people who need to be involved in the process.” Here, he offers an approach where “all parties contribute and are mutually accountable to one another for societal wellbeing.”  As he explains, this work is too important to settle for the impasse; we simply have to find ways to talk to and listen to each other for the sake of justice for all.

Listen to his good friend and colleague (and occasional co-writer) Michael O. Emerson, author of the still essential Divided By Faith:

Our racial division and inequality are extreme. In the midst of such challenges, we shout, we accuse, we point fingers, we divide into camps. And we get nowhere. Dr. Yancey proposes an alternative, rooted deeply in Christian understanding and sociological knowledge. He offers hope and clarity for our times. A must-read. — Michael O. Emerson, professor and head of the sociology department at the University of Illinois Chicago and coauthor of Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

There is not a more theologically sound, empirically informed, well-reasoned, or rational voice addressing the complexities of race, class, and culture in America today than that of Dr. George Yancey. In Beyond Racial Division, he navigates nuance and effectively challenges readers to get beyond rhetoric to results in their engagement of diverse others. As did Christ with arms outstretched, Yancey herein seeks to unite motivations and to hold Christ-followers in tension so that we might walk a more productive path for the sake of the gospel, and in so doing lead others away from painful polarization, beyond the crippling distinctions of this world that otherwise divide. — Mark DeYmaz, President of the Mosaix Global Network, author of Building a Healthy Multi-Ethnic Church

If you are well along in this journey, you know this author, I bet, and you will want to get this book. If you are somewhat new to the conversation, perhaps a bit anxious about it all, it is truly a must-read. It is not the final word, but it is a very good start to getting us out of ruts and into an honorable, faithful commitment to deepened responsibility and agency. Why not get this for your next book club or small group or buy it for your church library?

Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations Isaac Adams (Zondervan Reflective) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

When the brilliant Baylor prof and highly respected author and literary critic Alan Jacobs says a book is “sober and strong, wise and practical” what more do you need to compel you to pick it up? Talking About Race is, according to Rebecca McLaughlin (author of Confronting Christianity) a “prayer-soaked, Jesus-honoring, biblically-grounded kick start to better conversations about race.”

Adams had been a pastor at the conservative, DC-area church Capitol Hill Baptist but is now lead pastor of a congregation in Birmingham. He is the founder of United? We Pray, a ministry devoted to praying about racial strife. He offers his call to gospel centered hope with (as Laura Wifler puts it) “gentleness, wisdom, and pastoral care.”

It is always proper and salutary to pray, to root our ideas in the central goodness of God’s grace in Christ, formulated in light of clear Bible teaching. I hope you know what I mean when I say that there are some people who will never enter this conversation — talking about race, as the author puts it — and will be suspicious or dismissive of a public theology with a social ethic unless it is rooted in a piety like this. This is a book to give to folks like that and (who knows?) it could be just the open door they need to learn to care about race and racism and how it violates God’s will.

The New Reformation: Finding Hope in the Fight for Ethnic Unity Shai Linne (Moody Press) $15.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.79

You may know Shai Linne as a hip hop recording artist and his conventional, Reformed Baptist theology which comes through his spoken word work. He has come out of (and has returned to) his hometown of Philadelphia, PA and is known in conservative theological circles and edgy, urban ministry circles.

Here he is riffing off his beloved reformation truths — the back cover assures us he loves the five solas — but invites us to this new, diverse, unified community. He truly lives for the glory of God and he offers this broad vision of ethnic and cultural reconciliation. Nicely co-produced by the record label humble beast.

By the way, Shai Linne’s wife, Blair, recently released a moving memoir full of gospel hope, Finding My Father: How the Gospel Heals the Pain of Fatherlessness (The Good Book Company; $16.99.)

Not So Black and White: An Invitation to Honest Conversation About Race and Faith  Reggie Dabbs & John Driver (Zondervan) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

These sorts of books — honest conversations between a black guy and a white guy — are not uncommon not, and I’ve read several. Some are really raw and honest, some are pretty theological, some not that interesting. This one looks to be really solid, honest and astute, showing, as one reviewer put it, “what real dialogue can look like.” These guys are theologically driven, deeply spiritual within the evangelical church movement, but reaching beyond that context. Reggie Dabbs happens to be a very sought-after public school speaker (sharing his own story of tragedy and redemption and hope) and Driver (who has written bunches of books with others) is a former history teacher who is now a pastor at a church in Nashville. 

In this impressive project they hope to equip black and white Christians to come together and fight the evils of racism “within our heart and within our systems.” They hope readers will hear stories of those who have found ways to reach across the racial barriers by learning to listen well, come to a “simple but robust” history of racism and learn to respond to the challenges of racism in your community. As the back cover promises, they help us “identify practical steps to engage bravely in conversations and actions to end racism.”

This book is an answer to prayer. Reggie and John walk the tightrope between honesty and hope as well as I’ve seen in this conversation. — John Onwuchewka, pastor, Cornerstone Church, Atlanta

Faithful Anti-Racism: Moving Past Talk to Systemic Change Christina Barland Edmondson & Chad Brennan (IVP) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00

I must say that this is one of the books I have been most eager to see, most eager to read, and most eager to promote. If my hunch is right about this, it will be one of the major books in their field for several years to come. The authors have much to teach us and are excellent thinkers and communicators with lots of experience helping Christians of all sorts move beyond talk alone and work to dismantle the deep-seated racism in our lives, churches, and society. Those who feel ill equipped to respond well will appreciate the careful title — this is an invitation to explore faithful anti-racism, that is, a sort inspired by Christ, informed by the Bible, shaped by our best theological truths. They proceed with care but with confidence in the promise of Jesus.

Two very quick comments which I hope help persuade you to pick this up soon.

Firstly, Christian Edmondson is an influential leader, a cohost of the exceptional Truth’s Table podcast and many who admire her have been eagerly awaiting her book. She has several advanced degrees (including in family counseling) and is a mental health therapist; She has served in a variety of roles in higher education including as the Dean for Intercultural Student Development at Calvin University. She is a certified Cultural Intelligence facilitator, public speaker, and a consultant in the areas of ethics, equity, and Christian leadership development. As a strong Christian leader she has written a sophisticated book that her colleague Kristen Kobes Du Mex says “is a gift to the American church.”

Secondly, Chad Brennan is founder of Renew Partnerships, a Christian research and consulting ministry that focuses on diversity and race in faith-based organizations. He is a coordinator of the Race, Religion, and Justice Project founded by Michael Emerson and this new book presents what some are saying is the most comprehensive study on Christians and race since Emerson’s own research that was shared in the 2001 Divided by Faith. This fresh data has immediate use, I am sure, regardless of your context, and we should thank God for Edmondson and Brennan for bringing it to us with such clarity and grace.

Faithful Anti-racism has been called “unparalleled” as it offers what Duke Kwon calls “a brilliant synthesis of current research, scriptural insight, personal story, history analysis, and practical wisdom.”

Called To Reconciliation: How the Church Can Model Justice, Diversity, and Inclusion  Jonathan C. Augustine (Baker Academic) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

This is a brand new title that we are sure will be a good read for nearly anyone — written by an AME pastor with a JD from Tulane and a DMin from Duke) who is a scholar of reconciliation and an agent for helping others care for “the other.” Yes, this is an interdisciplinary study by an amazing, multi-talented preacher and professor who is a nationally recognized civil rights leader, a theologian, and black church minister.

I think one of the things about this title is that the author is not situated (as many books on reconciliation are) within the white evangelical subculture. As a black lawyer from the deep South, he knows well the demands of social righteousness and public justice. As a law school professor (at North Carolina Central University Law School) Augustine stays up to date with the details of the legal aspects of the struggle. But as a scholar and missional strategist at the legendary Duke Center for Reconciliation, he has a passion for God’s Kingdom uniting people who are at odds. This easy to read but stimulating book is a prophetic call to embrace Biblical reconciliation not as a simple, pious platitude shaped by colorblind ideology, but the hard, gospel-based work, the work of redemptive transformation.

That United Methodist Will Willimon and Episcopalian Michael Curry have essays — a forward and an afterword —in Called to Reconciliation is interesting (especially given Rev. Augustine’s role as a clergyman in the AME Church.) 

With a clear-eyed realism about the ways faith has been distorted to justify white supremacy, Augustine invites the church to face the demons that still haunt our public life and to discover the resources in our tradition for a moral witness that offers humanity a future together. God, grant us wisdom to receive the vision and courage to practice it together with our neighbors.  — Bishop William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach; cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

An absolute force of a book, required reading for clergy, lay leaders, and interested citizens alike. Augustine not only makes the case for reconciliation in the church but also lays out a clear road map for anyone who wants to take a step toward inclusion but does not know how. He has done the church, and the world, a great service. — Joshua DuBois, faith-based advisor to President Barack Obama; author of The President’s Devotional

At one of the most divided times in our nation since the Civil War, Augustine pleads with believers from different groups to embrace ‘the Other’ in a mutually beneficial and diverse community. This is truly a must-read.  — Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-convener, the National African American Clergy Network

Diversity Playbook: Recommendations and Guidance for Christian Organizations Michelle R. Loyd-Paige & Michelle D. Williams (Abilene University Press) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We have given this a shout-out on several occasions and remain confident that it will be a terrific resource for those working within Christian organizations, from colleges to para-church ministries, nonprofits and mission groups. Churches, too, frankly. We need a play book to guide us into this diversity work and section one of this one-of-a kind resource offers “wisdom for diversity professionals.” There are bunches of plans and projects, ideas and principles, visions and practices that can be applied within all sorts of social organizations. Loyd-Paige is the Executive associate to the President for Diversity and Inclusion at Calvin University (and the founder of a consulting firs providing diversity and wellness coaching services.) Rev. Michelle Williams is a writer, speaker, former seminary dean, and entrepreneur. He passion and positivity come through. This really is a timely guidebook to equip leaders, towards greater institutional commitments to creating a culture of flourishing for all. 

Subversive Witness: Scripture’s Call to Leverage Privilege Dominique Dubois Gilliard (Zondervan Reflective) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I have not reviewed this extensively but it has been one we have sold well since it came out late last summer. What a good, good, book it is! The author is a leader you should know; the book is remarkable. Latasha Morrison (who I’m sure you know from her bestselling Be the Bridge) says Gilliard is “a gift to the church.” Authors like Soong-Chan Rah and Jenny Yang and Jemar Tisby all rave.

Dominique DuBois Gilliard is a very fine writer — his first book was Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores published by IVP and it was insightful and vital. He is an ordained minister and serves as the director of racial righteousness and reconciliation for the Evangelical Covenant Church. (He is also on the Board of the Christian Community Development Association.) I simply thank God for him and his gracious commitment to Biblical righteousness in all its fullness and his kind (if frank) exploration of the privilege many of us carry and benefit from.

It is well-grounded in a Biblical perspective (and characters, from Esther to Zacchaeus) and calls us to faithful discipleship. 

The forward by Mark Labberton, now President of Fuller Theological Seminary, is itself very good and sets the stage well for hearing from this black brother as he helpfully explores what we mean by privilege, how to steward it well, what it might look like to “leverage it.”

Been in the Struggle: Pursuing an Anti Racist Spirituality  Regina Shands Stoltzfus & Tobin Miller Shearer (Herald Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Well, the work of dismantling racism won’t happen overnight — which is how this realistic and patient book draws you in. It nurtures your sense of this and fosters an attitude that this work is for the long haul. There are no easy answers and we have to open ourselves to new visions and practices. Like anything, it takes time, commitment and… and… God’s help!

This book is unlike many in how it integrates within it’s justice and peace-building, anti-racist work, a tru sense of seeking the Spirit, of being guided by God, of drawing on interracial relationship “to offer a vision for an antiracist spirituality.” 

We have carried and long recommended books by Shearer and we have followed Stoltzfus (a black Mennonite woman with a degree from Chicago but living in Goshen Indiana.) Both are respected anti-racist trainers and mature, wise, followers of Jesus. 

For what it is worth, this truly is an embodied and lively spiritually that they are inviting us towards. It is not primarily one of quietude or contemplation and they are not drawing on sources like Richard Foster or Richard Rohr or Ruth Haley Barton. This is deeply multi-ethnic, Anabaptist, refreshing stuff. 

Giving Up Whiteness: One Man’s Journey Jeff James (Broadleaf) $24.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99

I’m not sure why I first picked this up — I pay attention to most Broadleaf titles, and there is a blurb on the back by Slot Welch (of Global Bridgebuilders and author of the excellent Plantation Jesus.) Also, there is a blurb on the back by young evangelical pastor and writer Jefferson Bethke, who I hadn’t expected to see here. He describes the book simply saying, “Giving Up Whiteness is a very personal and honest journey through how the idolatry of whiteness has influenced one man, but also hold powerful clues for fighting this ongoing evil.”

Who is this “one man”? He is a fascinating guy, and this story is rooted in his own faith, growing up in West Virginia, living around Philadelphia; there is a scene of him visiting Circle of Hope, a funky house church movement where I have visited and even spoken, years ago. (He attends a Damascus Road racial training event in Germantown, which is, by the way, the ministry founded by the aforementioned Regina Shands Stoltzfus & Tobin Miller Shearer.) It isn’t a straight narrative and there are helpful excursions into all manner of things James learns, but he ends up in Nashville. Is whiteness even a thing? Who came up with this stuff, anyway? 

It doesn’t surprise me, but there is a great endorsement for Giving Up Whiteness by Debby Irving, author of the popular Waking Up White. Nice.

Dear White Peacemakers: Dismantling Racism with Grit and Grace Osheta Moore (Herald Press) $18.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I reviewed this earlier and have spoken about it in a few Zoom talks I’ve given — I’m a fan of her wit and passion and her candor. This is stuff a lot of us well-intended folks need to consider. It really is a great read and think it would make a great book for a group read — especially if you. have some sympathies for these concerns already.

As the publisher puts it, “Written in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Dear White Peacemakers draws on the Sermon on the Mount, Spirituals, and personal stories from author Osheta Moore’s work as a pastor in St. Paul, Minnesota. Enter into this story of shalom and join in the urgent work of anti-racism peacemaking.”

Osheta Moore’s good friend, the hip hop artists and writer, Lecrae, says it is a “must read for my brothers and sister in Christ.” If you want to feel more equipped to speak into this tough topic and be faithful as an agent of reconciliation, justice and the recovery of shalom in this arena, Dear White Peacemakers is a great guide, honest and good. It covers so much ground, sometimes with hard-hitting frankness and sometimes with snark and joy. What a read.

Anti-Racism 4REALS: Real Talk with Real Strategies in Real Time for Real Change Sheila Beckford & E. Michelle Ledder (Chalice Press) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Chalice Press is the publishing arm of the progressive Disciples of Christ denomination and has done bunches of upbeat and usable books about public theology and social justice organizing. We have highly recommended their very assessable Anxious to Talk About It: Helping White People Talk Faithfully about Racism (now in its second edition) by Presbyterian seminary prof Carolyn Helsel. This more recent one is perhaps a second (or third) step on this journey. It shouts on the back “How can we dislodge, disrupt, and dismantle racism for real?”

Rev. Dr. Richard Hayes, pastor of the Metropolitan Community United Methodist Church says, “Antiracism 4REALS is an indispensable resource for equipping all who are serious about the work of dismantling racism.” These two women — one black Latina and one white — have years of antiracism training experience. They offer concrete tools to train you to confront racism and bring about real change.

Church in Color: Youth Ministry, Race, and the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Montague R. Williams (Baylor University Press) $44.95  OUR SALE PRICER = $35.96

Although this is one of those academic, peer-reviewed, scholarly books (with the salty price tag to match) the goofy cover maybe suggests it is casual or super-hip. You should know it is a major work, a serious study, a remarkable read by an incredibly talented young scholar. The author is, interestingly, a Church of the Nazarene guy, now a prof at Point Loma, teaching “Church, Culture, and Society.” He’s got a PhD from Boston University and his study in Church in Color of the future of intergenerational youth ministry in our racialized culture, is extraordinary. Strong black voices like Daniel White Hodge rave about it, as does Abigail Visco Rusert, the Director of the Institute for Youth ministry at Princeton Seminary and Andrew Root who says, “this is a book I’ll be assigning for classroom use.”

Can youth help us with our theological projects? Can they bring their “whole, embodied selves to the Beloved Community?” Can we imagine a fresh ecclesial vision that includes post-millennials with their experience of cultural diversity as a given?

Lewis Baldwin, a Vanderbilt prof and King scholar, says Church in Color is a “clarion call to action.” Dr. Williams knows King’s work well, invites us to draw on its wisdom, and apply it to a multi-ethnic vision of the church as it applies, especially to youth ministry and the role of teens in our faith communities. What a book.

Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us About Wisdom, Persistence, and Strength Kat Armas (Brazos Press) $17.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We reviewed this when it came out early in 2021 — it seems like a long time ago — and yet, this book is still growing in popularity as more people discover its fabulous appreoach. A Latina woman inviting us to study women in the Bible alongside testimonies and memoir of the author and her family. She makes the case that mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters have something to teach us all, and have something vital to offer the project of doing faithful, relevant theology. As Sandra Van Opstal puts it, “Kit Armas masterfully integrates biblical truth with social reality.”

In this sense, it sits on the shelf next to Hermanas: Deepening Our Identity and Growing Our Influence by Natalia Kohn Rivera, Noemi Vega Quiñones, and Kristy Garza Robinson (IVP; $17.00) which we have often listen. Hermanas primarily looks at Biblical women in light of the experiences of these women while Abuelita Faith by Armas is a bit broad, more social analysis, more story and moret heological rumination, I think, but they both wonderfully bring the voices of brown women into the foreground.

Armas demonstrates that powerful named and unnamed women, who through the quotidian have affected the outcome of history, fill not only the Bible but also our lives. Let us sit at Armas’s feet that we might gain the wisdom we so desperately need to embody abuelita faith ourselves.
— Marlena Graves, author of The Way Up Is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself

Young, Gifted and Black: A Journey of Lament and Celebration Sheila Wise Rowe (IVP) $18.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

Many BookNotes friends have greatly appreciated Sheila Wise Rowe’s previous book, the honest and very important Healing Racial Trauma. This new one is very interesting and inspiring — even for me, a guy who is neither young nor back, and not all that gifted, either, for that matter.  But I get the reference from Nina Simone. Here Rowe goes beyond the more common story that focuses on the success or struggle of black millennials and young adults and, rather, offers themes of celebration and lament, pointing towards hope, joy, and healing. It is a book quite intentionally written to be of encouragement for younger black readers — although it is helpful for others to listen in, learning from what Rowe has learned over her years as a therapist, listening well to those who have experienced great sadness and great joy.

The title alludes to a famous anthem from the civil rights movement from Nina Simone. Three cheers for Young, Gifted, and Black and praise God for Sheila Wise Rowe. Highly recommended.

Gospel Haymanot: A Constructive Theology and Critical Reflection on African and Diaspora Christianity edited by Vincent L. Bantu (Urban Ministries, Inc.) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00 

You may know Dr. Bantu for his work in the serious IVP volume A Multitude of All People: Engaging Ancient Christianity’s Global Identity. He is a professor of Church History and Black Church Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and has a leadership role in the Meachum School of Haymanot and the Society of Gospel Haymanot. His expertise is brilliant and here he has edited a volume which forges new paradigms for evangelical black theology and public witness.

As it says on the back cover, “Through seven dominant voices in Black academic theology, Gospel Haymanot sheds new light on biblical authority issues, doctrinal orthodoxy, and evangelical theology on justice and liberation, which engage the Black Christian experience.”

If you know any black academics (or anyone in the broader church seeking “biblical orthodoxy and black liberation”) this is an important rare resource. Contributing scholars are Quonekuia Day, Cleotha Robertson, Dennis Edwards, Vince Bantu, Nicholas Rowe, Vincent Bacote and Jacqueline T. Dyer.) The forward, insisting it is a very important book, comes from the honorable Dr. William Pannell, professor emeritus, Fuller Theological Seminary. Bill Pannell was the first black speaker I ever heard, I think, and was transformative for me, at the first CCO conference which I attended as a college kid in 1973, an event that eventually became Jubilee. Dr. Bantu did a special “Jubilee Africana” presentation the Friday night of Jubilee 2022. Our CCO friends were thrilled. 

After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging Willie James Jennings (Eerdmans) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I suppose it is fair to say that there are some of us who found Jennings often cited The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (perhaps alongside Race by Cameron Carter) a bit much. It is serious, dense, and a bit thick. And expensive, on Yale University Press. Granted.

After Whiteness is a short read, colorful and assessable, a study of how seminary education might be construed and re-construed “after whiteness.” It is the inaugural volume of a series started by Eerdmans called “Theological Education Between the Times” (and for or five have come out in the last two years, almost all by people of color, each creative writing about how we might do theology and, specifically, theological education, differently in these times.

If you loved Jennings’s The Christian Imagination you most likely already picked up After Whiteness as soon as it came out last year. We sold a few and it was exciting for us. Perhaps you are one who haven’t gotten around to his bigger volume — if so, this one might serve you well as a way to read something of this important voice and understand his fundamental critique of how there have been great distortions in theology due to whiteness (and its related constructs of masculinity and rugged individualism.)

Drawing on the likes of Saint Augustine and his work on desire (eros) Jennings calls for an erotic theology, for a sense of soul that “denotes the power and energy of authentic connection with God and our fellow human beings.”

This is a powerful little book, potent, provocative, challenging, transgressive, even. 

If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? Black Lives Matter & Biblical Authority Angela N. Parker (Eerdmans) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

For those of us in ecumenical conversations, and certainly for us situated here in our bookstore where we serve all sorts of readers from all sorts of faith perspectives, we know that the discussions about the role and authority and inspiration of the Bible are endless. And, often, not terribly insightful, generating more heat than light. I’m reluctant to add more to those “battles for the Bible” even though I think it is important to read about, to consider and ponder and take the question seriously. I often note — and I will again here — that sometimes those with the most rigorously developed and loudly insisted upon view of the authority of the Bible don’t, in my estimation, live in a way that indicates that they take their Bibles all that seriously anyway. And some who on some days say less than ideal things about the Bible end up being the ones who invite us to stake our very lives upon its vision and promises. Even Jesus warned about this — you remember: the one kid who said he would do the father’s bidding, but doesn’t, and the other, who didn’t say he would, but actually did. So, there’s that.

So it is vexing, but since I’m listing books here that are in many ways knowingly provocative, thought-provoking, challenging and stimulating, let me suggest this, a “challenge to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that questions how Christians are taught about the way of Whiteness than the way of Jesus.”

How Professor Parker (who teaches New Testament Greek, by the way, at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology) deconstructs white evangelicalism is one good thing. How she relates that to her critique of a toxic authoritarianism that is linked to doctrines of infallibility is interesting and will be compelling for many. (The wise Brenda Salter McNeil highly recommends it!) There are those who will insist that if we are to reframe and understand the Scriptures rightly as texts of social righteousness, offering visions of justice and inclusion, we must value them highly as the Word of God that they are said to be and that Parker seems to be unclear about that. If they are not divinely inspired, then why bother to discern if their vision is egalitarian or not?

But, of course, it isn’t that simple — there are ways to honor the holy breath/inspiration of the Bible without holding to a wooden inerrancy; we can come around God’s Word in reformational ways that are not authoritarian or toxic, not essentially connected to white patriarchy. This, generally speaking, is a remarkable urgent project.

Dr. Parker brings the womanist ethic of resisting racism and sexism to her reconsidering the role of Biblical studies and faithful discipleship and it is passionate and insightful. She is, of course, insisting that our lived experience, our embodied identities will shape our hermeneutic, that we (always) engage the sacred texts as real people in real bodies and in real cultures and we need to acknowledge that. It is exciting, stimulating, a bit scary. 

Listen to Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel and, recently, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World — And How to Repair It All, who wrote this in the forward:

What does it mean to follow Jesus when we strip Whiteness and westernness from his skin and the Brown colonized context from which he rose? What happens when those at the bottom read the words of those at the bottom? What suppressed, covered over, hidden, and obliterated meanings rise again? That is the project of the next five hundred years. Angela Parker’s If God Still Breathes takes us one step further on the journey.

I’ve been waiting for this book! If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? brings a fresh perspective to the biblical text that makes it come alive with hope of liberation for all people. Dr. Angela Parker calls us past the superficial into a deep engagement with a contextual theology that is relevant and life-giving. We must rethink how to address the racial and social injustices taking place in the world today, and I am convinced that the way forward is womanist! So if you want to become brave enough to move from being a concerned bystander to an active participant — this book is for you! I highly recommend it. — Brenda Salter McNeil, author of Becoming Brave: Finding the Courage to Pursue Racial Justice Now

Kudos to the publishers and their authors who have brought these sorts of hard hitting and even controversial books to the marketplace. For some, this comes with considerable risk of losing customers, losing limited funds. We feel that, too, sometimes, but — golly, if publishers can spend as much as they do bringing these kinds of voices and topics into the world, the least we can do is try to sell a few. Will you join us in this project, deepening our journey into understanding? Thanks for reading!

TO PLACE AN ORDER

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

It is helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a general guide.

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

• United States Postal Service has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.50.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 if it fits in a flat rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that will take the next size up with is $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may take longer than USPS. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

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

HELPFUL HINT: If you want US Mail, please say which sort — Media Mail or Priority Mail — so we know how to serve you best. If you say USPS or “regular” we’re left scratching our noggins.

For anyone paying close attention to BookNotes, you may note that the last few appeared at our website (where they are forever archived) but didn’t hit subscriber’s email until several days later. There have been tech issues with the service we have that sends these book reviews to those who have subscribed, so we have secured a new (and hopefully more reliable) mail service provider. Not that most people care, but our BookNotes newsletter, from our Hearts & Minds bookstore blog, is now delivered to your inbox by MailPoet. Not a bad name for us to write a check out to each month.

And, more interestingly, you probably noticed some good books for Lenten reading that we shared last week, and some links to older BookNotes that announced other, older devotionals or studies for Lent. It’s not too late to order those at 20% off, ya know.

We realize that not everyone likes the page-a-day sort of devotional format even if you want to take some extra time to read reflectively this season. Not to worry: I’ve put together a list of a dozen or so other books (mostly new or recent) that might be good to pick up now as we shift gears and allow ourselves to be shaped into people that will take Holy Week seriously in about a month. Here are some books to help you on the journey of self reflection.

Please use the link to our order page shown at the bottom of this column. It will take you to our website’s secure order form; just follow the directions, telling us what you want and how you want it sent. We’ll do the rest, including a prompt reply confirming everything. Easy.

 

On Earth As In Heaven: Daily Wisdom for Twenty-first Century Christians N.T. Weight (HarperOne) $29.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Not counting the books of his weekly lectionary resources, not since the 1998 Lenten-themed Fortress title Reflecting the Glory have we had a daily devotional from the prolific N.T.Wright, and never a year’s worth of short readings. This long-awaited anthology is a gem, lovingly curated by Tom’s son Oliver, culling good excerpts from his many Harper-published volumes. This is indeed a daily reader, and is arranged somewhat along the church calendar. Hooray. What a great, wonderful, even rare resource.

Here’s the fun thing: it starts with Easter. Knowing Wright’s large amount of work on the resurrection — its centrality to the Biblical story, its bodily historicity, its truest meanings and its creation-wide restorative power — it isn’t surprising, really, to have this collection start with resurrection. Naturally, if you get this now, you don’t have to start on page 1. I’d suggest opening to page 265 (which has his “Kingdom Translation” rendering of a New Testament text from 2 Corinthians) and then starts in earnest with readings from The Day the Revolution Began and Surprised by Scripture. 

Life Unsettled: A Scriptural Journey for Wilderness Times Cory Driver (Fortress Press) 19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I just had to list this guide for journeying through “wilderness times” since that just shouts “Lent” to many of us. This paperback includes some honest spiritual autobiography and some solid (if creative) Bible reflection. The author is a staff person of a ELCA synod, directing the Transformation Leadership Academy. He spent fourteen years living and travelling in Morocco and Israel to understand how people make sense of living in physical wilderness. If you feel lost or confused and want sometime a bit deeper to help you reflect on this hallmark metaphor, this just might work for you.

I like this little bit from the publisher:

The Hebrew title of Numbers is Bemidbar, which means literally, “in the Wilderness.” In this oft-overlooked book are stories of God’s passionate intimacy and anger, communal formation and struggles, and personal failures and triumphs. The author shows how the wilderness journey in Numbers has deep relevance for our time and personal journeys.

I’ll put it on our shelf by the often-recommended Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places by Chuck DeGroat (Faith Alive; $17.00.)

The Way Up Is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself Marlena Graves (IVP) $22.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

Beth and I have a real appreciation for this author, her writing, her leadership, her insight, and her friendly encouragement to us and so many others. She is the real deal, and it comes across in her prose that is both thoughtful and very significantly informed and yet conversational and approachable. She is an “every day mystic” that draws on the deepest wells of the contemplative spiritual tradition and yet lives it out in even prophetic ways, denouncing the abuse of power and standing with the marginalized. She brings together so many aspects of faithful contemporary discipleship that we are always happy to get a chance to highlight her books.

This title isn’t pitched as a Lenten read, but — whew! — it captures the themes of following Jesus, embracing his adventure of “downward mobility” and becoming a servant to others. (Think of Mark 10, right?) In The Way of is Down Marlena invites us to “the art of self forgetfulness) and promises that in this counter-intuitive way, we just might discover our truest selves.

One doesn’t have to be in the Lenten register to recall how very central to the gospel this upside-down wisdom really is. One doesn’t have to be considering how we follow Jesus to the cross to realize that his call to humility and servanthood is a hallmark of the Kingdom way.

This book won great accolades when it came out a year or so ago; we have announced it and celebrated it, but have been waiting for Lent in order to amplify its presence yet again. We are glad for this author, this book, and, the counter-cultural ways of Jesus. He promises this hard way as the doorway to life abundant. Read this book to be challenged to embrace it.

Read these, among many remarkably positive reviews:

I know of no one who cares less for the superficial ‘worries of this life’ (Mt 13:22) than Marlena Graves. She is a voice calling out in our generation, beckoning us to a vision of Christ that has nearly been drowned out by the rise of self-help pseudo-Christianity. And this book? This book is her heart on paper. If you want to sit under a spiritual giant, and if you want to remember just what kind of freedom we are called to in Christ, do not miss this message. — Sharon Hodde Miller, author of Nice: Why We Love to Be Liked and How God Calls Us to More

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

A new book by Bob Goff is almost a publishing event and while I admit to being just a tiny, tiny bit jaded about his endless enthusiasm and bundle-o-wonder joy, I love the guy and rolled my eyes and picked up the fabulously sky blue hardback. And, not surprisingly, I was hooked within pages and kept reading longer than I should have, wanting to hear his still-enchanting (and often hilarious) stories, and be challenged by his good sense, if risky, challenging, call to faithful, Christian-like living in ambitious pursuit of purpose. Like his previous Dream Big I wondered if I was too hold for this stuff. Beth and I pursued our dreams, too some hits, ended up starting a bookstore, which ended up a pretty good fit, or so people tell us. I don’t want to dream big, to be honest, unless it’s dreams of finding more time to read the books that have been stacking up in every room of the house for decades. I’m not sure I have it in me to dream big enough to get undistracted, since it seems fretting over my distractions have become my way of life.

Which is why I am not ashamed to admit that this upbeat, encouraging, honest bit of optimistic advice, without hardly any footnotes and nothing all that deep, is, well, more than a kick in the pants. It’s a holy call to be serious about one’s calling, one’s priorities and values and lifestyle. He promises a bit of happiness that might “transition into a deep and abiding joy with a longer shelf life.” Counter-intuitive as it might seem, this fun book is one helluva Lenten read.

We are distracted by our own fears and foibles. We are distracted by very real problems and limitations (Goff over and over acknowledges this, although his optimism could feel a bit dismissive if you feel called to lament and sorrow.) We are distracted by others who are intent on tearing us down; Bob gives good advice about not engaging with the cynics. We all have endless to-do lists and most of us scroll on our phones just a bit too much. The list of distractions, big and small, are endless.

Goff has an uncanny ability to make nearly anything a teaching moment. From some major heart problems to dashboard lights going out on a plane he was solo night-flying to the story of a high school wood-shop teacher missing some fingers, this guy can turn anything into a parable. I grate against zippy bromides and chicken-soup-for-the-soul happy thoughts, but, again —  even though Undistracted may seem a bit like that, with its pithy stories, life-lessons, urgent advice, and all those analogies and metaphors (the book is, he tells us, like those rumble strips along the side of the road, reminding you if your drifting off course) and I could not put it down. (And props to him for the never-ending delight of finding lessons in nearly everything!) He has good stuff to say and it is important stuff, even profound, even if he’s too busy having fun and spinning his magic to say it is. It is. As it says on the back cover, “Bob shows you the way back to an audaciously attentive life.” 

And he knows a bit about how this works. As he tells it he lived his youth in what he calls a “low-grade mediocrity.” 

I suppose some of his stories come off better live, spoken, but they are still really good. What fun and delightful wordsmith he is. And he can just add a punchy word or clever line that’s a little unsuspected. 

Speaking to young parents (or older grandparents) he says, 

Change the ringtone on your cell phone to “Cat’s in the Cradle” sung by Harry Chapin. You’ll pick up the phone less and your kids more.

Among other suggestions, he says,

Get some wood and light a fire. Find some chairs and fill them with people you have’t connected with in a while, then watch the flames dance. Go ahead and get some smoke on your, and the next day your cloths will smell like a dozen great conversations.

Do you need reminded who you are, what kind of life you really want to live? It is not too late. Not for an old guy like me, and I’m sure not for you. Maybe you just need to leave behind some unhelpful stuff and learn to not be distracted, find some friends and press on. As he shares some pretty weird stuff from his own family (including hunting down a criminal who ended up being a long-lost relative!) you’ll want to be honest about what stories you tell about your own life.  And you’ll be more generous with others. Maybe reading Undistracted is the Lenten practice you need. Highly recommended.

Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie (Convergent) $21.00  OUR SALE PRICE – $16.80

Okay, I just had to list this one right after Bob Goff’s fabulous call to live well, with joy and adventure, by being undistracted. He’s an optimist and a motivational life coach and he is a joy to behold. But what if you are dying of cancer. What then?

Well, Kate Bowler is more theologically trained than Goff (she teaches at Duke Divinity School) and she is more snarky and cynical before breakfast than Goff will be all week. He had her on his fabulously inspiring “Dream Big” podcast and they are now fast friends. I sometimes wonder if they are somehow related, like some whimsical good cop/bad cop sibs. (If you read Undistracted you’ll learn that Goff does have a bunch of scattered and apparently previously undiscovered relations.) They really do share a child-life joy in living and a simple faith that allows them to live into God’s Kingdom is freeing ways and they both love to laugh. I was kidding about them being related, though. She’s from Canada and he’s from California.

As a scholar of the heresy of the “name it and claim it” prosperity gospel (see her Oxford University Press book, Blessed) Bowler has little time for cliches and simple answers, religious or otherwise. In fact, upon receiving her very dire cancer diagnosis, she wrote two books debunking this harmfully cheery theology, Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear.) There are honest, raw, full of faith, funny, and are very well-written memoirs of her life journey. 

Which you all knew if you’ve followed BookNotes. Although we have announced it briefly, before, you may not know that Bowler’s new more-or-less 40 day devotional is now out. Co-written with Jessica Richie, it is called Good Enough. It embraces imperfection, revels in creatureliness, limitations, pain, suffering and our very human realities The hand sized hardback devotional has readings like “Buoyed by the Absurd” and “Mourning a Future Self and “When You Are Exhausted” and  “Being Honest About Disappointment.” Yep, this is very clever, at times pretty fun, but it is also very serious, about “the burden of love” and what they call “the in-between.” There is a moving prayer for “when God seems absent.” The book opens with “A Blessing for a Joyfully Mediocre Journey.” Maybe this is a devotional you could use this Lent. 

Blurbs on the back are from Sarah Bessy, Cole Arthur Riley, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Jeff Chu. 

Echoing Hope: How the Humanity of Jesus Redeems Our Pain Kurt Willems (Waterbrook) $16.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $12.80

Well, this sure seems like a good thing to consider during Lent. We spend a lot of time leading up to thinking about the horrible last week of Jesus’s life, his saying goodbye to  his friends, their lackluster support, their betrayals, the trial, the interrogation, the torture, the humiliation.  Kurt Willems, a Seattle-based church planter (and host of the Theology Curator podcast) has reflected well, here, on this human-ness of Jesus. Even as the son of God, Jesus was not exempt from suffering — he felt real hunger and thirst, sadness and anger, he endured ridicule and all of this real stuff mattered to him.

This is a book about our own hardships and how, when life hurts, the “radical humanity” of Jesus can point us to hope.  With a good foreword by New Testament scholar Scot McKnight, you know it can be counted on for being Biblically sound, reliable, solid, and creative enough to be interesting. For what it is worth (as McKnight notes) it is not saying that our own pain and suffering, in light of all this suffering of Jesus, is therefore “good” or redeemed. No, this “is not a book about how violence redeems but about the redemption on the other side of violence.”

Contemplative writer Mindy Caliguire says that this “careful look at pain in the context of Jesus’s life” could open up for you “avenues of discovery and healing.” 

Redemptive Reversals and the Ironic Overturning of Human Wisdom G.K, Beale (Crossway) $14.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $11.99

Not all faith traditions use this lingo, but for some there is a distinction to be made between “systematic theology” which studies abstract topics — the nature of God, the effect of sin, who Jesus is, what the atonement is, how we are to do church, the Spirit, ethics, what should we think about the end times, etc. Such theologians work out systems of logic that neatly teach through compilations of truth about these topics. And then there is what some call “Biblical theology”which seems more organic and creative, teaching theological themes as they emerge from the narrative of the Bible itself. Such approaches weave together the very literary structure of the whole Bible study from creation to new creation, seeing how themes unfold in the history of redemption.

I mention this because this book, Redemptive Reversals is part of a series of “Short Studies in Biblical Theology,” and many of them are really great — concise but meaty. I’m a fan of most of these in this series, and this recent one, by an amazing thinker who has written big books (such as one on our mission to “expand eden” and on the glory of God, about mystery, about the role of the temple, about idolatry, about the New Testament use of the Old) here gives us a great study that seems to be a very timely read as you prepare for thinking about Good Friday and Easter. The title says it all, eh? Throughout the Bible there are stories exactly about this, the irony of sensible human wisdom being overturned by the unexpected — even ironic! — victory of weakness over power. Beale unpacks this pattern throughout redemptive history.

The apostle Paul said that the gospel was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. The gospel is just as scandalous and surprising today — or to use Greg Beale’s term, ironic. To encounter that irony is to stumble into strong evidence of the gospel’s divinity. Redemptive Reversals is overflowing with anecdotal illustrations, pastoral cautions, cultural connections, and practical applications. It’s a refreshing, unique, and important book all serious Bible students should have in their library. — J. D. Greear, author, What Are You Going to Do with Your Life?Pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina

Greg Beale is one of the most perceptive and fascinating New Testament scholars of our day. He reads texts in their historical context, but he also illustrates how particular verses and passages fit into the larger storyline of the Scriptures. In this wonderfully accessible volume, Beale helps us to see that God often works in ways that we would not expect and uses unlikely and ironic means to accomplish his purposes. We see from Beale’s work that God is sovereignly working out his purposes and his will and that we can trust him with our lives.
— Thomas R. Schreiner, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, author, The Kingdom of God and the Glory of the Cross

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers Dane Ortlund (Crossway) $19.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We have announced this several times at BookNotes, sharing a bit about it, highlighting why so many have said it is one of the most moving, serious books about the work of Christ they have ever read. It is a slow, meditative, Biblically careful study of the person of Jesus, his humility and kindness. It is about grace and goodness and about his work on the cross. It says it is mostly about His heart.

Dane Ortlund does this, I must say, by studying and reporting on the serious work of  several Puritan preachers and writers (and near mystics, or so it seems to me.) He explores the heart of Jesus and his kind invitation to “come to me, all who are weary” by way of citing Thomas Goodwin and Richard Sibbes and John Owen. Goodwin wrote a book in the mid-1600s called The Heart of Christ. Sibbes most famous work, which we have carried for years, is The Bruised Reed (which alludes to the promise of God in Isaiah 42 assuring us that “a bruised reed I will not break.”) Obviously, if you have been meaning to read this very popular volume, now would be a good time. There’s a study guide, now, and a journal, and, published a few months ago, an intense sequel by Ortlund, simply called Deeper.

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

We have announced this a time or two, first inviting folks to pre-order it (thanks to those who did) and then, again, when it came out. I even mentioned it on that little video I did on facebook, the day This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley released. And yet, I’ve still not done it justice. Fortune was a hard book to read in an odd way. It was not gratuitous about the pain of the whip or the fear of lynching that African Americans have felt in their very bodies and it was not even that detailed about the abuses poured upon people of color in the late 20th and today. No, the brokenness this book describes is plainspoken and informative, passionate, yet, but written in a restrained way, getting at the “way race broke my family” in a way that is inviting to all. Who doesn’t want to know something about their family ancestors? Who doesn’t get a bit touched by those Ancestory.com ads? And who doesn’t cheer for an underdog, facing plenty of obstacles in finding the backstory of family heritage. Those of us older enough to remember recall why Alex Haley’s Roots was such a huge best-seller, before and after the much-watched TV show that exposed all of American to the hard history of enslaved peoples here in so-called God’s country.

The title of this book is the name of a relative of Lisa’s, one whose story she traces in one of several chapters, each bearing the name of an ancestor. The book is mostly a family story, but it is grounded in the present as Lisa wonderfully describes her journey to archives and websites and museums and follows old roads to find old homesteads and imagine that this, this, this right here was where some relatives once lived. Most of the book is set in the past but she narrates it through the three decades it took her to explore ten generations.

In this way readers are drawn in, eager to know more, almost as Lisa herself was piecing it together, finding this true story, recalling that anecdote, holding on to that family heirloom, discovering these records or those news clippings. It is common enough stuff, but she tells it well. She has us on the edge of our seats in a few sentences about waiting for DNA results.

But — let us speak honestly, here — most white or even non-white Americans who do their ancestry detective work, do not have to consult purchase orders and billing ladings for the purchase of their ancestors. And for black people in America, this damnable fact is true: most family records are smeared and smudged (metaphorically but perhaps literally) with blood. Lisa does not overstate the horror of this, looking up records of who was purchased by whom, and only hinted at how it made her feel to do this particular kind of detective work. It is, though, what makes Fortune a different sort of book than most others who have told their dramatic story of finding their ancient relatives and where in the older worlds they came from. In this sense, Fortune is gut wrenching, not because Lisa is melodramatic or overstated; again, she is not. Still, it is, as they say, what it is.

And some of what it is, is exciting and lovely, learning about great-greats, marriages, travels, and the birth of little ones. She learns of cousins and stories of creativity and endurance. Lisa weaves her family member’s stories in with her own, placing it all in the context of the unfolding history of modern times. Ms. Harper has been through a lot — we have gotten hints of some of it in her Very Good Gospel. There is more revealed in Fortune. The great Ruby Sales has a blurb on the back simply saying that “Harper is a masterful storyteller.” Amen to that.

I had read this in an advanced manuscript, and when the hardbacks came we were delighted, but I had my spiral bound manuscript all marked up and pages dog-eared. So I didn’t open the hardback right away and then I discovered the bonus — there are photographs of some of the people she writes about (Lee Ballard, born in 1836, Phillip Fortune, born in 1835, Reinaldo and Anita Weekes (wearing a great hat), up through a fabulous picture of Lisa’s mom Sharon Lawrence with Lisa as a baby, a picture taken in 1969.) You will actually lay eyes on Hiram, who you have read about, and Richie Lawrence and Willa Belle Jenkins visiting Junias on a military base in Michigan during WWII. I’m not usually a fan of pictures of people we don’t know in an autobiography but these are the people this book is about. I was so excited to see these, and it drew me back into the book for my second reading.

There is some very good stuff as the story draws to a close about repair. Obviously no simple religious “reconciliation” will do without a full account of truth and justice. She explores the meaning of guilt and the nature of forgiveness. She writes helpfully a bit about reparative justice. She cites a few good public theologians and social ethicists  (and of course, tells of Desmond Tutu’s important work in South Africa, citing his powerful No Future Without Forgiveness.) Her message about the beloved community is moving and compelling and not without a challenge to be more active to the work.

Which makes this, my friends, a great book to read any time, but perhaps especially as a Lenten practice, to enter in to the story of another with such intentionality, to learn what she learns, to care, to be challenged.Is if fair to say this is, in some way, part of all of our stories, for better or worse? We owe Lisa a debt of gratitude. She waded in (as Sweet Honey in the Rock sing it, citing Harriet Tubman.) As one writer put it, “Fortune recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.” 

Lord, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace: The Complete Prayers of St. Francis, St. Clare, and other early Franciscans Jon M. Sweeney (Paraclete Press) $25.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $20.00

Jon Sweeney has written so many interesting books over the years and we carry much of his work. An early book about the medieval worldview illustrated by studies of cathedrals was fascinating. I loved his memoir The Lure of Saints which pushed to be, as another book put it, “almost Catholic.” He is known as a biographer, and has done books about the lives (or the teachings of) Saint Patrick, Thomas Merton, G. K.  Chesterton, Black Elk, Mary the mother of Jesus, St. Catherine, Meister Eckhart, even contemporaries James Martin and Phyllis Tickle. He has devoted more time and has published more volumes, though, about Francis and Clare. He knows them very well. (Another new book came out that we noted a few months back that, come to think of it, would make a good Lenten read as well: Feed the Wolf: Befriending Our Fears in the Way of Saint Francis [Broadleaf Books; $26.99.]) Again, Sweeney knows this Franciscan stuff very well.

Which is why this prayer book is so amazing. Sweeney has painstakingly found and studied and prayed and compiled great prayers by Francis and Clare and others in their medieval orbit (such as the inimitable Brother Juniper and St. Anthony of Padua.) This volume collects those and prints them liturgically, as litanies and in the style of an office. Yes, the Franciscans served the poor and sang and danced and are not known for Benedictine type prayer cycles or great silences. But here it is. You can pray these for yourself, or in your family or group, or you can just read them for the fascinating historical record. Lord, Make Me An Instrument is a major contribution to this sort of literature, compiling in one affordable (and nicely made) paperback, all these many prayers.

There is much other content in the book, too, lots of interesting chapters about Francis, about Clare, about the other characters who followed them — about their prayer lives, how to “pray alongside” them, and even  a chapter called “prayer in 13th century Europe.” Okay, maybe it isn’t for everybody, but I’m sure some Hearts & Minds customers will find this spell-binding.

Maybe being a bit of a holy fool would suit you well this season, loving God with greater abandon and praying more deeply, even learning to be used “as an instrument of your peace.”

Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks Michael Patrick O’Brien (Paraclete Press) $18.00                             OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I wanted to list at least one spiritual memoir for those who like just watching over the shoulder as one ordinary person narrates his or her life, and how they came to grow in faith and discipleship. This book seems like a good one to suggest here, ruminating as it does about the faith this book experienced as he hung out with monks at a nearby monastery in his rural Utah.

Yep, you read that right: one doesn’t immediately think of Catholics, let alone monks, living in Christian community in the land of Mormons and the great Western landscapes. But, yes, in the mid 1900s some Catholic pioneers — Trappists! — intended to form a contemplative monastery right there (as Jana Riess puts it) “in the unlikely soil of Mormon country.” Riess continues, telling of Patrick O’Brien’s 1970s boyhood in Utah, “O’Brien captures the expansive spirit of late twentieth-century Catholicism in America and the loving warmth of the monks who befriended him.” 

Monastery Mornings has been described as a “love letter to a community of Trappist monks who provided family when a young boy needed it most.”

Humbler Faith, Bigger God: Finding a Story to Live By Samuel Wells (Eerdmans) $22.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

You have heard of people “deconstructing” faith. You’ve heard of the “spiritual but not religious” and now, the “Nones.” Certainly we have highlighted books here about these concerns, recently, the must-read When Everything’s On Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes by Brian Zahnd or After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It by A. J. Swoboda. We are eager to see the soon to be released book by Brian McLaren called Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (coming in May 2022) which will be a sequel to Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It. Although to a more limited audience we have highly recommended Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay by third-culture kid Dan Stringer.

Enter, now, one of the more thoughtful writers of our day, Samuel Wells, vicar of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, London. (You may know him from a stint as the head of the chapel at Duke Divinity School and author of many, many books. And we have most of ’em.) In Humbler Faith, Bigger God, Rev. Wells shows a different way into this conversation, an honest but bracing call to continue on in Christian discipleship without the pressures of certainty and hubris.

As the publisher notes, Wells offers a “reframing of Christianity that portrays traditional belief and the response of skepticism as two rival stories and offers a third story that incorporates doubts and failures into a renewed understanding of Christian faith.”

Wells is replying to the common criticisms that the church has perpetrated injustices and intolerances of all sorts, that religion is a “crutch” and “drug” and full of endless narcissism. Chapter by chapter he takes on one of these popular accusations, and offers an eloquent call to honest, historic faith, but one that is flexible enough to appeal to the cynic and the hurting, this redemptive “reframing.” Wow, what a balancing act!

Does he get it right?

Read these comments for some indication:

A book at once incisive, wise, compassionate, and deeply devout. Wells avoids with equal agility the traps of empty dogmatism and empty faddishness, never forgetting that it is the love of God and neighbor–on which depend all the Law and the Prophets–that provides the proper key to any interpretation of the Christian mystery. — David Bentley Hart, author of Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

I’m not sure who else alive could have written this book. Scholars are not usually this accessible. Pastors not usually this sharp-eyed. Critics not usually this devastating. Advocates not usually so beautiful. This unusual book calls to mind Augustine’s heart, Aquinas’s mind, Day’s activism, Temple’s leadership. You say I exaggerate? Take up and read before you tell me I’m wrong. — Jason Byassee, coauthor of Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age

God has surely heard it all: the complaints, the objections, the silence of a back turned on faith. Samuel Wells asks us — those of us who still believe that God can be found in Christian faith and its expression — if we have taken seriously the protests of our disbelieving neighbors. Now is the time for humility, church. Now is the time to listen. Now is the time for us to put up or shut up. Humbler Faith, Bigger God is here to help.  — Katie Hays, author of God Gets Everything God Wants

Samuel Wells gets right to the heart of real questions people struggle with and the real challenges the church and the Bible raise for thinking people. He addresses all this with honesty, humility, intelligence, and love. This book is for seekers, doubters, questioners, and those who wonder what faith might mean in these days. — Heidi B. Neumark author of Sanctuary: Being Christian in the Wake of Trump

When the Universe Cracks: Living as God’s People in Times of Crisis edited by Angie Ward (NavPress) $16.99  OUR SALE PRICE = $13.59

With the pandemic, the threats of global warming, climate crisis, financial meltdowns, and social polarization, it seems there is strife and trouble everywhere. Do you sometimes wonder what leaders are reliable to help you follow Jesus through this current crisis? Who can you trust? Where can we get some serious help in thinking about all this that isn’t a 500-page philosophical tome or an ideologically driven screed? From women and men doing good work in good ministry with real wisdom to offer?

If you could find such a collection of wise voices, it might be a Lenten practice to slowly work through them, maybe one each week. Who knows? Could this be a Lent book for 2022?

When the Universe Cracks is a sweeping, multifaceted look at the role of crisis in the life of faith from an esteemed gathering of pastors, faith leaders, and experts. You’ll find honest and realistic reflections to help you navigate present trouble or anticipate changes — a skill we’ve all realized these past years that we need to cultivate. Inspired by the global pandemic, these writers examine the whole history of God’s people (and how social crises was handled in the Bible) and offer a fresh perspective for every time the universe cracks. Good accessible reflections, honest, evangelical, engaging.

Scholar and church leader Angie Ward facilitates this energizing and fascinating discussion. Thought leaders Jo Anne Lyon, Efrem Smith, Christine Jeske, D. A. Horton, Kyuboem Lee, Marshall Shelley, Matt Mikalatos, Sean Gladding, Catherine McNiel, and Lee Eclov each contributed a chapter.  We’re impressed and wanted to offer it here with other books that are timely, a bit sobering, maybe useful for a month such as this.

Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross 20th Anniversary Edition Michael J.Gorman (Eerdmans) $40.00  OUR SALE PRICE = $32.00

What could be more Lenten than reflecting upon how the cross of Christ figures into Christian discipleship? About how our spirituality should be cruciform? About how the Bible itself — in this case, mostly Paul — uses this notion as a key to understanding our faith and lives? You may know that I named this one of the Best Books of 2021, but it just seems fitting that for any reader who is used to reading somewhat thick and scholarly prose, that this could be your version of a Lenten devotional. 

Here is some of what I wrote a BookNotes a few weeks ago when celebrating this recent anniversary edition of a contemporary classic of New Testament studies:

Speaking of Best Books and celebrations and Dr. Michael Gorman: it was twenty years ago his profound and game-changing work Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross came out. This past year, Eerdmans released an expanded edition, called the 20th Anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Nijay Gupta (which is fascinating) and a very lengthy new chapter by Gorman, giving a bit of the backstory to his work, how Cruciformity came about and how it was received, and some new updated of things he has considered since 2001 when the first edition came out. Certainly this new edition deserves a special place on any list of important books done in Biblical research this year.

Michael Gorman is that rare scholar who can write for both the academy and the church. Cruciformity is a gift to both. Gorman offers in readable form a thorough study of how the crucifixion of Jesus remakes Paul’s understanding of God and undergirds his views of what it means to be in Christ. In its exploration of how the apostle experienced God’s love and grace through ‘the strange story of Christ crucified, ‘ Cruciformity charts a path for how that story might continue to shape daily lives today, in cruciform faith, hope, love, and power.  — Rebekah Eklund, Loyola University Maryland, author of The Beatitudes Through the Ages

Thanks to Michael J. Gorman, ‘cruciform’ has come to describe the architecture of Christian community even more than the architecture of Christian buildings, with the term becoming an essential lens through which we view the apostle Paul’s pastoral theology. Cruciformity is an indispensable resource because Gorman’s careful scholarship and pastoral concern mirror the apostle Paul’s own efforts to illuminate the implications of Jesus’s ignominious public lynching. Bible teachers and students should keep Cruciformity nearby as a handy reference whenever studying Paul’s writings.  — Dennis R. Edwards, North Park Theological Seminary, author of Might from the Margins

TO PLACE AN ORDER

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

It is helpful if you would tell us how you prefer us to ship your orders. The weight and destination of your package varies but you can use this as a general guide.

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

• United States Postal Service has the option called “Media Mail” which is cheapest but slow and may be delayed. For one book, usually, it’s about $3.50.
• United States Postal Service has another option called “Priority Mail” which is $8.35 if it fits in a flat rate envelope. Many children’s books and some Bibles are oversized so that will take the next size up with is $8.95. “Priority Mail” gets much more attention than does “Media Mail” and is often just a few days to anywhere in the US.
• UPS Ground is reliable but varies by weight and distance and may take longer than USPS. We’re happy to figure out your options for you once we know what you want.

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

HELPFUL HINT: If you want US Mail, please say which sort — Media Mail or Priority Mail — so we know how to serve you best. If you say USPS or “regular” we’re left scratching our noggins.

As the back cover nicely says, “For anyone facing pain of loss, for anyone concerned about the things that divide us, this book goes beyond wellness and beyond miraculous physical transformations to explore how we can — personally and collectively — be made well.” And, as she notes, how, in so doing, we can ourselves become agents of healing.