Valerie Weaver-Zercher
Vainglory, by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
If vainglory is about stealing glory from God, it is unintelligible outside the house of faith. This may explain why Rebecca DeYoung's book flows against the current of attempts to reclaim narcissism and pride.
Sober Mercies, by Heather Kopp
One in four American children—seven of my third-grader's classmates—experience something akin to what Heather Kopp describes in her recovery memoir.
Eat with Joy, by Rachel Marie Stone
When Rachel Marie Stone offers homilies of food redemption rather than damnation, it may feel like a lovely if disorienting kind of grace.
Sacrament of friendship
Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith render things – a graveyard walk, a dream about an elevator, a Neil Young song – into something else entirely.
Chaste romance: The lure of Amish fiction
Might Christian nostalgia—wrapped in a cape dress and sealed with a kiss—have an interest in the future as well as the past?
The Book of Mormon Girl, by Joanna Brooks
When people who don’t know a lot about American Christianity hear that I am Mennonite, they sometimes ask if it’s the same as being Mormon. No, I say, and add a stock reply: other than starting with the same letter of the alphabet and being inscrutable to outsiders, the groups are quite different.
After reading Joanna Brooks’s memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, I will no longer answer with such alacrity.
The lure of Jonestown
Julia Scheeres’s unsettling book reminds us that Peoples Temple could have appealed to anyone concerned about racism, sexism and poverty.
Living into Focus, by Arthur Boers
My fifth-grade son used to walk around the house pretending to be texting....
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair and The Reading Promise
Reading is an act of "absorbed
alertness," says Ursula Le Guin. Two reading memoirs record two distinct experiences of such absorption.
A review of In Cheap We Trust and The Cheapskate Next Door
As part of a tradition noted for its thrift, I can be a little sensitive about the word cheap....
A Book of Silence
Introverts who read Sara Maitland’s new book about silence may need to recommit themselves to the commandment not to covet....
Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Having buried close to 200 young people who were killed in gang violence, Gregory Boyle could be pardoned for a lot: despa...
Nightwatch/Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
That an adult convert to a religious community of plain people w...
Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality
Growing up in a Mennonite conference in Pennsylvania that didn’t ordain women, I met plenty of folks like my moth...
The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
"Water to wine” is the image that journalist Greg Barrett uses to describe the transformation in the...
Close quarters: Life in a not-so-big house
We had a new bunk bed delivered recently, and our sons spent a happy afternoon—albeit a dangerous one—wielding socket wrenches and screwdrivers as we put it together....