Accidental Preacher: A Memoir Will Willimon Eerdmans, 240 pages Reviewed by Kay E. Huggins A memoir is an odd read. With the assurance of maturity, a memoir recalls youthful choices, challenges, indiscretions. By a long view, intimacies are treasured. Through favorite stories, a life is told. At the conclusion, questions and assumptions remain. And yet, the reader cannot argue the facts: they belong to the author. Nor can the reader evaluate the reflections — for those also belong, wholeheartedly, to the author. To read a memoir, the reader suspends judgment, follows the flow and acknowledges that the tale belongs to the author. The best memoirs stretch the reader’s capacity to listen carefully. Will Willimon is a gifted storyteller. “Accidental Preacher” will invite your laughter, your tears and your flat-out “Well, I never!” But, as you carefully read, you will also notice echoes of Scripture, common congregational challenges, youthful pastoral foolishness and the well-aged … [Read more...]

Susan Baller-Shepard Finishing Line Press, 102 pages Susan Baller-Shepard’s “Doe” is a striking poetry collection. I was captured by this slender (66 poems) volume’s cover photo of a doe standing in a late autumn field. The doe knows you’re watching her. So do the poems. The sustaining metaphor of this collection is the doe as a figure for the lives and concerns of women, and the world women live in. Though written with particularity, with a poet’s eye for detail, these are not small poems, narrowly confined to the poet’s life experience. In all their intimacy, they move between personal experience and larger questions of living in creation. “Muliebrity” is a literary synonym for “womanhood.” In that one delicious word hides the key to the dual vision of both poem and collection. Doe is a poetic tour de force on muliebrity that refuses to be tamed by grammar. The book has five sections: “Does and Fawns” – about the intimacies of mothers and offspring; “Bucks” – meditating … [Read more...]

David Zahl Fortress Press, 250 pages Reviewed by Rachel Landers Vaagenes Seculosity is a made-up word that aptly articulates a current unspoken truth: even though people are leaving capital-R religion in droves, there are many other systems of belief waiting to fill the gaps. These small-r religions, what David Zahl calls seculosity, are “a catchall for religiosity that is directed horizontally rather than vertically, at earthly rather than at heavenly objects.” The theological word for this is of course “idolatry,” but Zahl cleverly introduces ancient concepts with new words devoid of centuries-old baggage. Chapter by chapter, Zahl lays out how many of us (even Christians!) can substitute food, spouse, child, technology and more as a savior. These days, it can seem that fulfillment is just a Fitbit or a Whole30 away. Zahl points out the obvious (and not so obvious) problems with these pseudo-saviors. Because these things cannot do what we are asking of them (making us whole, … [Read more...]

Dru Johnson Eerdmans, 176 pages Reviewed by Thomas G. Long The great scholar of ritual Catherine Bell once commented on how dramatically ritual has come back into fashion in contemporary society. Rituals, often rejected by industrial society as “primitive, tribal and nonrational,” or attacked by Protestant Reformers as superstitious and unbiblical, are, she said, now increasingly reclaimed, romanticized and viewed as “good for you.” Ritual practices, which in the past were scorned as mindless submission to authority, are now, to the contrary, seen as acts of healthy resistance against the technologizing and secularizing of society. Indeed, if my Scottish Presbyterian forebears should suddenly appear through time travel and catch me in an alb imposing oil and ashes on the foreheads of Lenten worshippers, they would be scandalized. They would surely miss what I understand to be the worshipful power of those actions and could do nothing but assume that I had been captured and … [Read more...]

Jeannie DuBose Beaver’s Pond Press, 112 pages This is a lovely and wise book by a writer who knows the deep things of marriage. The beauty is that Jeannie DuBose is skilled in the art of tenderness and knows how to tell honestly the rugged journey of any marriage. Not only does she speak of what draws two people together, she describes those forces that threaten to tear them apart over time. In short, this is a book of art. One can linger a long time over the author’s finely drawn illustrations that evoke her story of a marriage. What is even more remarkable about this story is the uncanny way it evokes the experience of love’s journey in anyone who is on that path. And it does so in a way that is never maudlin or merely sentimental; the journey of her marriage is an authentic one. That’s why others will recognize themselves in it. Long-term marriages are rare these days. DuBose’s artfully told story will give you a glimpse into the challenges of sustaining love over a lifetime. … [Read more...]