Love Letters to God
By Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey
Cascade Books, 196 pages
Published July 29, 2025
I love E.B. White’s collected correspondence with fellow writer Edmund Ware Smith about “chickens, gin, and a Maine friendship.” Studies support my personal experience that heterosexual, cisgender men often form friendships through common activities, like sports or even building chicken pens, while women are more likely to bond through face-to-face conversations.
Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey met for coffee and dove into theology, which became the genesis of a deep friendship that led to a collection of letters unlike any I’ve ever read.
Readers should not anticipate formalities or niceties. There is no warm-up.
We are plunged into a dialogue about death and depression between two thinkers who wrestle sometimes with each other, often with their own thoughts and always with God.
I have long admired Pershey’s prose. She is an astute contributor to national magazines and a brilliant memoirist. In her epistolary contributions, she does not disappoint, blending the personal and abstract and processing her lived experience through years of theology honed as a pastor. Vulnerable and brave on nearly every page, Pershey is the kind of pastor I would trust.
I was even more intrigued by Devon Spencer’s contributions. Spencer, a marriage and family therapist who sings in her church’s worship band, is a terrific writer. She is well-read and interrogates her literary interlocutors, including some of the most prominent names in Christian theology. She is an accomplished professional who gravitated to a form of liberal Christianity. I am fascinated by this dynamic.
As part of a graduate fellowship at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, I’m studying preaching in a “post-Christian age.” We read books by Charles Taylor and Julian of Norwich. We consider case studies and popular novels. We banter theologically, and I enjoy it. Yet, several times I have heard colleagues wonder: why would any progressive decide to attend church regularly? What does the church have to offer such people?
Devon Spencer is a voice to add to this conversation, not because she provides a clear-cut answer (who could?) but because she writes about her struggles with the faith — in particular, her thoughts on theodicy. How can there be a loving God and so much suffering? Is there a purpose to pain? There is no escapism for Spencer; honestly, I worried sometimes that, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, she might become the Void by staring at it for too long.
Credit Pershey, her pastor and friend, that she does not try to resolve such existential angst with, as Spencer writes, a “glance at heaven for a jolt of joy.” In digging their depths, these women elevate their faith and love, which, I believe, is the very paradox at the heart of Christianity.
In the pages of these letters, love is neither saccharine nor flimsy. Love does not avoid hard truths, intimate details or honest confessions.
With so much struggle, I wondered if this collection might be titled “Wrestling with God.” But that would detract from their conviction that love is the foundation. In the pages of these letters, love is neither saccharine nor flimsy. Love does not avoid hard truths, intimate details or honest confessions. Love creates space for self-reflection or staring through a glass, darkly — and love endures, hopes and believes.
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