Better than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life
By MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Eerdmans, 160 pages
Published April 14, 2026
Pastor MaryAnn McKibben Dana returns every few years with welcome insights on the life of faith offered from seemingly disparate angles. Yet when her kids from 2012’s Sabbath in the Suburbs reached adolescence and were hit with depression and anxiety, she leaned into her own work on hope and improvisational faith — and still needed more.
Better Than Normal opens with this journey, but as McKibben Dana’s family moved from crisis to a fragile stability, she channeled her hard-earned wisdom into the broader question: “What if life as usual isn’t set up in a way that allows people to thrive?” It’s a straightforward question with endless applicability, and McKibben Dana responds by forging a path from less healthy individual and communal values to ways of being that allow everyone to flourish.
She’s a trusted guide, first because her proposed values (curiosity, courage, presence, authenticity, beauty and community) are rooted in the gospel. By playfully exploring interactions with Jesus and his disciples, McKibben Dana invites us to see the possibilities for our own time. And as she explicitly applies these values to church and community life, she describes the harm of declaring something normative, particularly for those who are neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, racial or ethnic minorities, or with disabilities or chronic conditions. “It’s a matter of kindness, not wokeness, to acknowledge that our experience isn’t like everyone else’s,” she writes.
Families who don’t fit the mold will appreciate McKibben Dana’s warmth and wisdom, while churches eager to become places of true belonging will also appreciate its practicality. Better Than Normal first envisions a better world, and then clearly illustrates how her proposed values make it possible. That’s kingdom work.
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