And, for some of us, the personal and social problems are so overwhelming, we can hardly imagine what it means to have hope. Are you with me?

A book I intended to list last time but didn’t is a daily devotional for those who are aching about our public life, who are filled with compassion about the threats the poor and immigrant families are facing but who are losing hope in our public institutions. Reading the books I listed last time could be depressing even for the most hopeful, so I wanted to mention this, a small devotional by a fascinating theologian from Princeton Seminary, Hanna Reichel, called For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional (Eerdmans; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) For those who perhaps don’t want to read the excellent titles I reviewed last time (at least not now) and who are in need of short devotional reflections that are meaty and hopeful and deeply aware of the societal and political crisis we are in, it will be, believe it or not, hopeful. Blurbs from folks we admire — Jemar Tisby, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Mariann Edgar Budde — have all raved. As Kristin put it, it is “sparingly written yet conveying remarkable historical and theological depth.”

It’s a good book to segue from last week’s reviews of works of public and political theology and analysis to this one on personal traumas and navigating the hurts in our very selves.

Another segue title, bridging those hefty social concerns from last week towards what some might call the self-help / self-improvement genre, is one I’ve already mentioned here Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics by Sara Billups (Baker Books; $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99.) It’s an amazing book by a talented, tender author, who actually brings into what we might call the personal growth genre some astute social and cultural insights. As the sub-title suggests, our neurological systems are often a-kilter and sometimes (especially these days) it may be because our social and political systems are off.  Even institutions we used to trust, like the church, are experienced as harmful. Anxiety lives in our bodies and in our cultural architectures. This is a practical self-help book that names all manner of concerns and some of us need this kind of culturally-astute advisor. As the excellent therapist / author Aundi Kolber says, “Sara Billups masterfully takes her reader by the hand and honors the deep complexity of what it means to be human and to follow Jesus in a world like ours.” So there ya go, a “bridging” book linking our social analysis from the last BookNotes and a solid intro to this week’s lists of more personal needs.

I have always been inclined towards a public sort of theology, whether it is talking about the integration of faith and work, the relationship of faith and science, Christian approaches to the arts,  caring for the Earth, learning more about racial justice, or advocating for the poor, these are the things (through God’s grace, I’d say) I’m inclined to care about. The Bible says this is as it should be — need I cite chapter and verse? — so that gospel-informed vision of cultural engagement has shaped our bookselling business over these forty-some years. We are glad for those customers who stick with us, life-long learners about all kinds of stuff.

And yet.

There is so much personal grief and pain (emotional and physical) and so many folks sad about relationship ruptures and losses of all kinds. It isn’t easy to live well in this kind of world and tensions plague us all.

 In this BookNotes we will list some books that might be good reads to help you along. If you carry a lot of anxiety or burden (and, really, who doesn’t?) this one’s for you. And if you have the good fortune to not have much illness or fractures in your family and church, if you understand self-care and enjoy the gift of emotional wholeness, then this, too, is for you. You have the strength to care for others and to learn a bit about their journeys and experiences would be a very wise move. Read about what helps now, while you can.

I think I will offer this pattern:

First, a handful of what I’ll call general self-help resources that are good for all, foundational, even, for starters. They might help frame KJ Ramsey’s memoir a bit; in any case, they are wise and sane self-help-styled resources.

Next, my comments about a stunning new memoir about facing deep pain and illness (and a shift in the experience and articulation of faith) just released, The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive by K.J.Ramsey. Painful to read but often witty, hard and joyful; I couldn’t put it down.

Thirdly, I’ll share a random bunch of books that came to mind while reading Ramsey. Her powerful memoir brought up a lot of stuff for me and it might for you, and I just can’t help myself naming some others. I hope you find my random listing of (somewhat) related titles interesting, and maybe you’ll even order some. We’re here.

FIRST: TWELVE EXCELLENT FOUNDATIONAL, PERSONAL GROWTH TITLES

You Are a Tree and Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer Joy Marie Clarkson (Bethany House) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We bookworms here will love this and even if you aren’t a lit freak, that’s okay — she’s really clear about why metaphors matter and how thinking well matters. She is a very fine writer, accomplished in a variety of genres. How many writers who have done books like hers called Aggressively Happy also have a PhD in theology of the respected University of St. Andrews? She is currently a research assistance in theology and literature at King’s College, London.

I will quote the back cover (please don’t skip it as it is so intriguing. After noting Palm 1:5 she writes:

Sometimes we describe ourselves as trees. When we’re thriving, we speak of being rooted and fruitful, in a good season. When we struggle, we might describe ourselves as withering, cut off from friendship and the world. These ways of describing ourselves matter because they shape the ways we live.

But in a world dominated by efficiency, we have begun to use more unforgiving metaphors. We speak of ourselves as computers: we process things, we recharge. In doing so, we come to expect of ourselves an exhausting, relentless productivity.

You Are a Tree examines how the metaphorical descriptions we use in everyday life shape the way we think, pray, and live. Weaving together meditations on our common human experiences, poetry, Scripture, and the Christian tradition, Joy Marie Clarkson explores how metaphors help us understand things like wisdom, security, love, change, and sadness.

This book invites you to pay attention — to your experiences, and to the words you use to describe them. That attention reveals a richly layered and meaningful world, a refreshing perspective that nurtures wonder, gratitude, and hope.

You Were Never Meant to Do It All: A 40-Day Devotional on the Goodness of Being Human Kelly Kapic (Brazos Press) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

In late 2024 Brazos released a magisterial, big Kelly Kapic book that is nearly essential (You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News; $23.99 // $19.19.) It was one I promoted here as a must-have, at least until this shorter one came out last Spring. You Were Never Meant to Do It All is not a repeat of his bigger book, but it is a companion devotional with new content, with quotes from the book (and other authors) giving us a practical guide to dipping into the theology of our self-hood, our limits and our creatureliness, bit by bit. The big one is great, but for many of us, this solid 40-day reader is just what we need. Reading one or the other, or both, you will come away with a happy sense of your human-ness, your need for dependence (on God and others) and will want to nurture relationships that can be fruitful for all. You don’t have to do it all. You can lighten up. Kapic is a pretty serious about helping us get this message of our worth and of freedom. Yes.

This 40-day reader, I’d say, is just the sort of theologically rich but practically useful book that really helps us ordinary folk utilize other self-help books by getting us to think well about who we are as creatures, and how we ought to live in God’s world.

Just so you know, this devotional has insights from Kapic, allusions to the bigger book, lots of other great quotes, sidebars and reflection questions to ponder and process.  It’s very impressive.

Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone Tara Owens (IVP) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

I adore this book and come back to it often. We recommend it for a more embodied approach to our friends who buy spiritual formation stuff (Tara is a spiritual director herself and runs Adam Cara Ministries in Colorado Springs.) I sometimes worry that the important renaissance in mystical writing these days emerges from a dualism between the body vs soul, between the seemingly secular over and against the so-called sacred. Embracing the Body is a good way to help those with an interest in prayerfulness and even monastic lifestyles to not get so lost in their interior castles that they forget that we are flesh and bones. And that that is good.

Sometimes, we’ve shared this with those who are so down-to-earth, missional and incarnational that they hardly care about their interior lives. This fine volume can help bridge that gap for them, too, as it affirms creaturely life, invites us to listening to our bodies as part of our spiritual practice. Can mundane stuff about our bodies lead us to God? Yes, Owens says, deliighfully yes.

I love Lauren Winner’s endorsement; she writes:

This book is beautiful, learned and wise. It will make you think, and it will make you want to say ‘amen’, and, more important, it will enable you more fully to live as a body. — Lauren F. Winner, author of Girl Meets God, Still, Wearing God, Still

And maybe even better, read this great blurb by Gary Moon, director of the Dallas Willard Center at Westmont College:

Tara Owens’s Embracing the Body is a gift for anyone seeking to understand how the body — with all of its twitches, itches and bentness toward false unions — is not an enemy of spiritual formation but an amazing gift from God and the ground for personal incarnation — experiencing the reality of the apostle Paul’s number one teaching point, Christ within. She makes great use of real-life stories and engaging theological reflection. — Gary W. Moon, author of Becoming Dallas Willard: The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower

One of the great things of naming this here as a foundational book is that, in fact, Tara Owens plays a small role in The Place Been Our Pains, the memoir by K. J. Ramsey. She’s a long-time pal and shows up in the new book. Nice.

Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships Curt Thompson (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Curt Thompson has only become more esteemed and appreciated as an author, public speaker and therapist since this first book of his more than 15 years ago. On my must-read suggestion list are his books The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves, The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community both nicely done in hardcover by IVP) and The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope which is now in paperback from Zondervan. None are redundant and you cannot afford to miss them, I’d say.

Despite a cover I don’t particularly like, Anatomy of a Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships is a great, great book, not only for his candor and wit but for how he draws serious connections between the discoveries of neuroscience and lively, Christian faith. He’s honest about the human condition and he’s got a wholistic Kingdom theology that is foundational for him, integrating his science and his faith. I love this guy and really value this solid work.

Blurbs on this book have been from a variety of brain scientists and pastors, theologians and Biblical scholars. To see the late evangelist and social action guy Tony Campolo, spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton, psychologist and counselor Tim Clinton, world class Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, and reformational philosopher Jeffrey Dudiak all chiming in is a real joy and speaks volumes.

The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life Justin Whitmel Earley (Zondervan) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

Justine Earley is known and beloved for his books A Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and a very good one on loneliness and friendship, Made for People. In each, there is deep theory presented with delightfully simple clarity and little charts and graphs helping readers make goals and take steps and access personal growth. I usually don’t like those kinds of books much, but these colorful pages are charming and  really useful. The Body Teaches the Soul is produced with that same blend of theology and spirituality and incredibly practical ideas and lists and take-aways. He looks at exercise and nutrition, rest and work, spirituality and the life of the mind among other embodied habits to cultivate/

This is foundational in that in it, Justin offers a subtle but radical teaching that our bodies are not separated from other parts of our lives and that our body and breath all go together. With this study of ten habits, with lots of stories, The Body Teaches… is a fun way to “reconnect with your whole self and repattern your whole life in the image of the God who made you.”

Good News About Self-Care: How Nurturing Your Soul, Your Self, and Your Sanity Honors God Benjamin Espinoza (NavPress) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

A friend of mind helped a bit in the editorial process of this and told me months ago that I’d really appreciate it. Now that it is here, I see that she is really right. It’s solid, creative, wholistic and very pleasantly written. Espinoza starts off noting that for many of us, “self-care” sounds a bit indulgent, maybe even bougie and shallow. Uh-huh; I get that.

This pastor-theologian offers a “beyond the surface” approach presenting self-care as a deeply Christian practice; valuable and imporant. And he highlights the inter-relationships and crossovers of our own relationship with God, others, and society. Maybe reading this and caring for ourselves can “fuel a mission to love God and neighbor wholeheartedly.”

As the back cover notes, most of us are facing a lot of exhaustion and stress (and even Christian leaders are facing burnout at higher rates than usual.) The framework Espinoza offers is going to be helpful, I’m sure. He has served at Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester, New York, by the way, and is current pastoring a church. There are a lot of great endorsements on the back but one by my friend Marlena Graves is particularly compelling. She says that Espinoza “adroitly highlights that Christian self-care is countercultural, enabling us to resist the culture’s push for productivity and the dehumanization of ourselves and our fellow human beings.” Wow.

To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope Amy Julia Becker (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We’ve highlighted this often and think it is just an excellent read, a very good book to provide insight and encouragement. Amy Julia Becker is a very good writer and has graced us with two previous books, one on raising her disabled child (A Good and Perfect Gift:Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny) and the other called White Picket Fences: Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege. She not only writes wonderfully but she thinks well and, as Sharon Hodde Miller puts it, has written a book in To Be Made Well that “is ideal for those who “are tired of simplistic answers but still searching for hope.” As I have said before, this is particularly good on the interweaving of personal wholeness and society health. It looks at the pain and the hard stuff and invites us to a pathway to healing. This is a self-help / personal growth book for those who have an allergy to simplistic formulas and self-indulgent, self-help. Highly recommended.

Whole and Human: Forty Meditations for Liberating Body + Spirit Rohadi Nagassar (Herald Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

This is brand new and I’m very excited to look through it for a couple of reasons. First, good folks I admire — hospice chaplain J.S. Park, Native writer Kaitlin Curtice, African-American activist Terence Lester — each have enticing blurbs on the back. I would have ordered some anyway but these were good endorsements and make this a solid recommendation..

Secondly, I read his previous book — also on the Mennonite publishing house, Herald Press — called When We Belong: Reclaiming Christianity on the Margins. It is a fabulous book insisting that the gospel must be offered in ways that include the marginalized and outcast and it is both a challenge to those in church leadership and a comfort to those frustrated with the church as it often is. “Don’t give up on Jesus”, I hear that book saying — but don’t let the church fail further. Another one of his that we have is called Thrive: Ideas to Lead the Church in Post-Christendom. He’s a guy to pay attention to.

This very new one, Whole and Human, is about awakening to your senses, moving beyond mere survival and “embracing the truth that each of us deserves to flourish.” In each of these sections, Nagassar guides us in what seems to be really robust (and Biblically-informed) reflections based on each of our five senses. Cool, eh? The categories he works with are land, body, spirit, and justice. Wow.  I like that Terence Lester says he writes with “the clarity of a prophet and the tenderness of a healer.” This is not your grandma’s daily devotional.

Janai Auan, author of Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized says, ”These reflections feed the fire of our spirituality so that we have the strength and compassion we ned to help warm a cold world.” Nice, eh? Again, this seems like a really tender and gentle (if provocative) shift from last week’s BookNotes about the dangers of tyranny and the dysfunctions of right-wing religion, into a lovely embrace of a healing journey living aware and alive in the real world.

Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life MaryAnn McKibben Dana (Eerdmans) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

If I have time and energy later in the summer I might do a longer review of this. While not fully agreeing with every word, every word was a delight, a joy, a challenge, with so much clear, lovely prose and such heart, such honesty, so much hard-won wisdom. Rev. McKibben Dana (a PCUSA pastor) wrote a upbeat memoir-ish book decades ago called Sabbath in the Suburbs, then a fun book several years back how a stint learning stand-up comedy helped her be a better follower of Christ and pastor; then she did one on hope. I”m a fan of her writing and thoughtful, generous orientation that will appeal certainly to mainline church folks.

In the beginning of this new one she tells of the hardship she and her husband were gong through in those years of writing her earlier books as parents of kids with severe mental health disabilities. Her words, told as a mother, in the introduction to Better Than Normal brought tears to my eyes as I nodded in comprehension. She is not at all morose but the book has its heartbreaking moments noting how we are all hurting, all carrying burdens, and if we are not now, we sooner or later will be Life happens. She knows more of these burdens than many and yet she writes without any self-pity.

As I have mentioned before at BookNotes, when I first started this lovely, thoughtful book, the structure follows a pattern: each chapter starts with a normal attitude that our culture endorses — certainty, comfort, productivity, competition, say — and shows how that tends to work, for some, and how it marginalizes and and hurts those cannot or will not conform. From those with neurodiversity to non-binary kids to those with mental illnesses, just for instance, there can be healing and hope and authentic belonging when we shift towards a different approach, what she calls “off-script” virtues. Each chapter in Better Than Normal looks at the strengths and weaknesses of these seemingly normal values and ways of being and then shows that Christ calls us to subvert those conventions and take up contrary values. For each so-called normal thing, she names a different kind of normal, a shift from one unhelpful posture to another more laden with real hope — “From Certainty to Curiosity” for instance. Can these moves empower us, set us all free?

This is a rare book, a stimulating read with a mix of personal stories, philosophical and theological reflection, personal and communal guidance. Some of the chapters are about individual values while others are on communal values (“From Artifice to Authenticity” and “From Blandness to Beauty” are two of the communal moves she explores.) It’s not an academic treatise on what it means to be human, nor a simple self-help handbook, although there are plenty of provocative take-aways. Anti-poverty activist and writer Liz Theoharis calls it “liberating, loving, and deeply prophetic.” It is imaginative. Don’t jump ahead but she ends with a fabulous story from Stephen Colbert about failure and laughter and community. Thanks be to God.

Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself — and to God – When You’re Wounded, Weary & Wandering Chuck DeGroat (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I am such a fan of this author. We still carry his first book, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places about times of transition; he did a widely read IVP release about narcissists in church, another on Eerdmans for anyone (including church leaders) called The Toughest People to Love. Anyway, this recent one is one of the best books in the personal growth and self-help category I have ever read. It is wise and deep, thoughtful without being academic. He cites ancient Christian writers, tells stories, draws on up-to-date psychological insights such as those drawn from neuroscience, attachment theory and the like. There is a chapter on addictions, even, which is good for anyone, highlight the nature of compulsion and the nature of grace. DeGroat promises to help us “discover how to heal the hidden hurt” that stuff that happens to us leaves behind. We can wisely let go of buried pain. We can face whatever is blocking our path to resilience and joy. We can discover real rest and renewal as we connect with God, others, and ourselves.

There are a number of very fine faith-based books on this whole topic these days, and I believe this is one of the very best.  Besides the wise and good writing and the profound insight, it is loaded with exercises, reflections questions, bullet points and helpful tools to help you process the 9 great chapters. DeGroat is a beloved professor of pastoral care and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan and serves as director of a clinical mental health counseling program there. Healing What’s Within is going to be useful for many and is a great book to have on hand. Highly recommended.

Life in Flux: Navigational Skills to Guide and Ground Your an Ever Changing World Michaela O’Donnell & Lisa Pratt Slayton (Baker Books) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I’m telling you what: everybody could use this incredible book. It is interesting and helpful, spiritually wise and vibrant with Kingdom vision, complex and yet easy to read. From “doing the inner work of waking up and letting go” to developing the capacity to “embrace the unknown with confidence” reading Life in Flux is like having two paid life coaches at your side.

O’Donnell made extraordinary contributions in the faith and work space, writing Make Work Matter and developing a whole bunch of life hacks to navigate change with distinctive Christian faithfulness. Her writing partner is the great Lisa Pratt Slayton, a founding partner and CEO of Tamim Partners (that does, in fact, provide coaching and consulting executives, business, nonprofits, and churches.) Lisa did a stint at the helm of the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation and is a long-time friend; she helped steer the fabulous Jubilee Professional conference there in Pittsburgh years ago.. These two women are both impeccably suited to help us think about coping with the changing world we all find ourselves in.

Whether you are doing mostly okay, only moderately unsure about some life stuff or are deeply wounded and truly in serious flux, this book will help. They remind us how to face the pain and uncover the desires and longings under the surface (especially in times of transition.) They remind us of some old adages (knowing your self) and push us to “stay attuned to your rhythms and values” as you move forward. Believe me or not, I hardly know a book like it.

This is a must for leaders, in the corporate world, the nonprofit sector, or churches. Sure. But it is for anyone wanting useful guidance on living well in the world with “practical postures and transformational prayers” as Kara Powell put it in her rave review. Who doesn’t need that?

Mourning God: Grieving Loss, Wrestling with God, and Finding Your Way Tiffany Stein (NavPress) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Any set of books offering a foundation for cultivating a Christian imagination for daily living in this broken world needs to include some reading on the really tough stuff. And we have shelves and shelves here at our shop on theodicy  and coping with hard times. You know the aching questions — why? where is God when it hurts? what the hell is going on? How long, O Lord, how long?

If you’ve cried out to God in near despair, feeling the loss and disorientation of grief, you know that, at that moment, reading a book may be the last thing you want to do (or have energy to, even if you wanted to.) Read some now while you can. Have them ready to read (or share) later. In Timothy Keller’s very good Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering he invites readers to skip the first third if they are in the immediate throes of grief since it may be too abstract and philosophical for that season; he invites readers to jump to the more practical stuff.

There are gripping, raw journals of grief like Lament for a Son by Nick Wolterstorff and heavy but inspiring memoirs like A Grace Disguised by Gerry Sittser — one of our most recommended, nearly a modern classic. There are books that are not Biblically oriented but breathtaking and wise such as one K.J. Ramsey mentions in her memoir (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller) and there are the thoughtful, literary writings of funeral home owner and undertaker Thomas Lynch such as his The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest. From psalms to poems to creative approaches like Looking Up by Courtney Ellis on birding as a way to process grief to My Favorite Color Is Blue: A Journey Through Loss with Art and Color by Roger Hutchison, there is something for everyone. You get my point. Send me an email if you want other suggestions — we have a lot of grief and sorrow.

I list this very new one, Mourning God by Tiffany Stein, because it is new and raw and yet seems to be a very solid (and personal) study of the topic. It especially notes ways our views of God may change when God seems painfully absent during times of loss. She is not wrong. This book is deeply personal, very much aligned with classic Biblical theology, and yet honest about her own transformation — mourning her loss and mourning God in laments — when her infant son died. She doesn’t say too much about it (it isn’t primarily a tender memoir) but it does offer wise and compassionate teaching, admitting “the silence and confusion” that accompany losses of many kinds. There are discussion questions, too, to help readers process it all.

Tiffany Stein is a graduate of Oklahoma Baptist, an ordained non-denominational pastor, and now a fourth-grade educator at a Classical School in Austin, Texas. Her husband is the pastor of The Well, a Christ-centered church community in the city. This book is readable, practical, honest, but remarkably clear about the gospel and the sacred presence of the tender and risen Christ, even when we are mourning.

+++

The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive K. J. Ramsey (Convergent) $29.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

Reading well-written memoirs is always beneficial, I think, seeing how people narrate their lives and make sense of life’s bigger questions helps us with understand others, gaining empathy, and more.  I call it a spiritual practice which can shape us in subtle and not so subtle ways. And it can be like reading a novel, happily getting lost in narrative, prose, character development and the like. I’ve read memoirs that have more twists and turns than your standard fare beach novel or spy show on Netflix. I’ve stayed up late since many are true page-turners.

Memoirs of pain, sorrow, or coping with hard stuff are often particularly powerful, poignant, moving. I think of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story and her award winning, big, messy The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath or Nancy French’s well-told Ghosted or Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss or This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley which we keep trying to press into people’s hands. Memorial Days is a recent memoir by writer Geraldine Brooks about the death of her husband and it has now been released in paperback. Earlier today I sold a copy of Between Two Trailers by Dana Trent (with a gushing foreword by Barbara Brown Taylor) for a person who needed a wild look at Christian faith set in the context of some really broken people.  Nothing beats a good memoir.

Although she doesn’t dwell on it on this new memoir, K.J. Ramsey was once known as a thoughtful, evangelical thinker, mentored, at least in part, by good folks at a generously Reformed Christian college. Her first book, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers, about chronic pain, carried very impressive endorsements by the likes of reliable evangelicals like Brian Fikkert, Karen Swallow Prior, Chuck DeGroat and Todd Billings. Great writers, too, loved her — from Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Shannon Martin, say. The therapist Alison Cook (who wrote Boundaries for Your Soul) loved it, too. KJ blended her own stories of chronic illness and neuroscience and theology into a really excellent book. Dr. Kelly Kapic, an impeccable scholar and Godly leader at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, TN (I mentioned his You Don’t Have to Do It All above) wrote a really good foreword. That was in early 2020.

Her next was even more passionate and creative, an anguished and imaginative Biblical reflection, The Lord Is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love, drawn obviously from her serious study of Psalm 23. She did an edgy/beautiful gift book of poems and photos, too, as a supplemental volume called Common Courage: Prayers and Poems to Find Strength in Small Moments. These two were stunners, amazingly rich and evocative reflections — the Bible study, the poems, the struggle, the hope. Good, good folks have been with her through those, too — Curt Thompson wrote a moving foreword to The Lord is My Courage and artist Scott Erickson did one for the poetry collection; I hope that gives you a sense of her success as a therapist and a Christian writer. I found those books very moving and very helpful. The Lord is My Courage tells more of her story but unpacks, in bits and sad pieces, how she and her husband, Ryan, were dismissed from the church at which he worked. They were big-hearted and seemingly faithful, earnest church planters creating a faith community known for authenticity and care and it ended very badly. They lost financial support, even, and moved into the basement of her parents in another state. Some of you know this sense of betrayal and dislocation. I have never read a book on the twenty-third Psalm writing about that kind of “shadow of the valley…”

Both This Too Will Last and The Lord Is My Courage are ideal for anyone wanting these sorts of reflections on theologically-rich, Biblically-rooted, honest and even courageous laments about physical pain and emotional anguish. She is candid about their lives but the books are still more in the genre of Christian discipleship and faith formation in that they explain and guide us to deeper faith even as her stories ground her (Biblically-informed) guidance in real-world experience. As thoughtful seminary professor Justin Holcomb puts in on the back of The Lord is My Courage,

If you have ever felt like darkness is your only companion, you won’t find yourself blamed in this book. You’ll find yourself pursued and embraced by the patient and compassionate love of a God who meets you in your pain. — Justin Holcomb, author of Know the Creeds and Councils

Marlena Graves, a person who knows a thing or two about some of this, and author of The Way Up Is Down, says this:

As we wind our way through Psalm 23 with Ramsey’s guidance, we are offered grace and direction as we seek to become whole — especially in dealing with pain and shame related to abusive shepherds and churches.

The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive, Ramey’s  brand new one, stands in this same sort of tradition, offering, on one hand, deeply faithful guidance about hard times. But it is different than her other ones in two big ways: firstly, it is a memoir. This does not attempt to be didactic, guiding you, the reader, to what you should think, believe, or do. Her great storytelling talents are on full display here as she recounts so much of her hard, true story.

And secondly, she seems to have shifted from her theological clarity, gracious and open-minded as an evangelical as it was. She has been wounded by the church and found fresh renewal with a broader experience of the Spirit, despite less involvement in the conventional church. She hashes some of this out in the book — even lamenting that some will see this as a book of deconstruction, which she says it is not, really. In any case, for those eager for the same sort of robust theological reflection or Biblical exploration, you should know that The Place Between Our Pains is just not that kind of book. And she may not be that kind of an author anymore, citing Hebrew lexicons, Walter Brueggemann, and New Testament genius Kenneth Bailey.

So, The Place Between Our Pains really is a memoir of her journey into exceptionally dangerous illness, inexplicable pain, dramatic visits to the ER and stays in the hospital. Hospitals, for that matter. I’ve read a number of such autobiographical accounts of illness and the one this most reminded me of — and this is a huge compliment! — is Seleika Jaouad’s spectacular Between Two Kingdoms. You may have heard of that New York Times bestseller (or seen American Symphony, the documentary her husband, Jon Batiste, did about their relationship ) so I hope you know I say this as not only a compliment to Ramsey’s writing style and ability to convey the electricity and drama of the health emergencies, but also to just help you determine if this book is one you should read. If you liked that one, you’ll appreciate The Place Between Our Pains as well. If you like Jaouad’s amazing account, but wished for more Christian spirituality, Ramsey’s story is told in the context of her life of faith in the time she’s telling about, which includes the writing of those previous books. Again, her new book isn’t like the first two in that sense, but it is more related to conventional Christian faith than Between Too Kingdoms. They both are about young women experiencing catastrophic illness and they both include some road trips. So there’s that. What fun.

It is weird for me to say one can enjoy a book about another’s pain, her coping with scary, weird symptoms and an eventual diagnoses of Lupus. I mean no disrespect and I read and recommend these sorts of volumes with care and intention — to embrace another’s story can be practice of hospitality, giving the author (a fellow human, naturally) the space to share her tale. As such, maybe you should take off your shoes, as it is holy ground.

I hope that KJ doesn’t mind me saying this, though: such sacred encounters with another story, even when that story includes moments of deep desolation, can be rewarding and even an enjoyable reading experience. It’s easier with KJ because she is such a colorful character, a wit and comic, even. You will find lively writing and while she’s not quite like Anne Lamott or Kate Bowler or Nadia Bolz-Weber, she can help you gape and smirk and grin and laugh. She’s a delightful piece of work, as they say, and a romantic (lucky for Ryan!) and sometimes her story is almost outlandish — the heartache and the hope. Hard as it is, you will enjoy it.

One of the reasons you will enjoy it so is because she takes delight in little things — seeing a double rainbow on the way home from the Mayo Clinic, the fact that a dreaded stay in a dreaded hospital room has a window facing Pikes Peak, and because she excels in some really beautiful nature writing. “Distant clouds above the mountains contrast above an aquamarine sky like ships in a sea.” Her mention of “fragrant white lilies” and a tree’s “diamond-shaped bark.” Oh, and she can cuss like a sailor, too, which feels about right. And that she can find joy in being open to whatever life brings, including in and to what she has called her “mystifying body.” This becomes a major theme, the discovery of joy. You need to allow her story to touch you in this very quest. With this story, her subtitle about joy speaks volumes.

The Place… begins, in fact, with a road trip trying to revisit places where she once first discovered joy and beauty. That book was not meant to be, as that trip and project was cut short due to intense health emergencies. Later, she notes that, “When I started writing this book I thought I was on a pilgrimage into my past to find the good I overlooked, but now I know it was always a pilgrimage into the present, to greet the good that coexists with grief.”

Even as she continues to face some frightening new symptoms, we wish her well, and celebrate the release of this new memoir.

“When I started writing this book I thought I was on a pilgrimage into my past to find the good I overlooked, but now I know it was always a pilgrimage into the present, to greet the good that coexists with grief.”

TEN RANDOM BOOKS THAT CAME TO MIND WHEN READING KJ RAMSEY

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life Suleika Jaouad (Random House) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

I can’t help but start here since it is by the woman who wrote one of the most known and appreciated memoirs of cancer and hard, hard recovery, and great joy, the aforementioned Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Suleika Jaouad. (Random House; $20.00 // $16.00.) I mentioned her above in my words explaining Ramsey’s A Place Between Our Pains. And it makes sense, since Ramsey’s book is exactly what much of this is about — keeping a journal, writing down the bones, getting it out, telling your story. The Book of Alchemy is not really by Jaouad, but edited and curated as she offers excepts and pieces by famous writers on the art of journalling.

Yep, it’s about the art of journalling. And so much more.

The Book of Alchemy is an edited volume with dozens and dozens of entries and is really a meditation on big questions and curiosity and change — Hanif Abdurraqib says it offers “an entire galaxy” — and it draws on amazing writers such a Pico Iyer, Kiese Laymon, Jon Batiste, John Green, Elizabeth Gilbert, Beth Kephart, Alain de Botton, my friend Lisa Ann Cockerel (of Eerdmans publishing!), Nadia Bolz-Weber, Ann Patchett, George Saunders, Kate Bowler…. The list goes on and on. It is beautiful, historic, even, having all these many writers in one big volume about the practice of journalling. Kate Bowler says of it that it is “the perfect mix of incandescent wisdom and kick-in-the-pants motivation to start your own creative journey.”

Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow Jay Stringer (Convergent) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

Stringer, like KJ Ramsey, did his first book on a legacy evangelical publisher. His book based on research with those facing unwanted sexual desires (Unwanted) advocating that we “listen to our lust” was a bit edgy for NavPress, even (even though they do amazing work on faith-filled engagement with issues around sorrow and trauma.) Like KJ Ramsey, he moved to a more progressive and broadly oriented publisher, known and respected around the country. I do not know what this indicates but it seems right. It is fitting; while Desire may not be brimming with conservative, evangelical preaching about the Bible, it is rooted in generous faith and is lively and in many ways brilliant. I reviewed it before and for some reason, reading KJ’s memoir, I kept being led to think about this question of yearning, longing, desire. And I wonder if KJ knew Stringer.

Because that is what is behind so much of her story.

Jay Stringer (a therapist now in New York City) has done amazing work thinking through this deep theological and anthropological question — are we, as James KA Smith puts it, citing Augustine, “what we love”? And how does that work, even neurologically? Jay has interviewed scores of people about their deepest desires and, without shame and with plenty of grace, invites them to think this through. It’s an amazing book, important for almost any serious memoir — the under-the-hood backstory. Chef Will Guidara, who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality — I noted this the first time I reviewed Desire at BooNotes — says it is “a master class in caring for the human spirit, Desire turns the work of hospitality inward, changing how you understand love, purpose, and what ie Eans to serve those around you and yourself.” It will change how you understand love and purpose. Wow.

Dan Allender has an amazing blurb on the back, as does Sheila Wray Gregoire, who notes that Stringer “gives you permission to stop running; to stop trying so hard; to stop the self-criticism; and most of all, to start desiring again.”

This is maybe what is one of the driving motivations of KJ’s memoir. She says it is about searching for joy, of being taken by beauty. She knows enough psychology to know that this really is, finally, about desire. Jen Hatmaker notes that desire can be “both a miracle and a minefield.” Read KJ’s memoir and then get this one. It’s big and beautiful.

Joyful, Anyway Kate Bowler (The Dial Press) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

In a way, this is a no-brainer to list, a great woman in a similar sort of setting — a more progressive faith than old-school fundamentalism, but still deeply alive to God’s presence and the call to Christ-centered discipleship and with the terrible affliction of life-threatening illness. Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) and No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) are excellent memoirs and offer wise, deeply Christian insight. You should own them both!

This new one, Joyful, Anyway, has a cover full of shiny balloons that I don’t think does the book justice. It is almost compulsively clever and every page has chuckles and head-shaking phrases and pronouncements that will make you smile. But the book, as cheery as the writing is, is deadly serious, and the first portion is intense, about what she called “the ache.” This is about the existential dread one faces if one… uh, is human. Is half-aware. Is honest. Hardly anyone escapes this angst and she is honest enough to name it, like some medieval jester (or a child saying the emperor has no cloths.) She believes that Christian joy is the fruit of all this awe we get when facing this world of wonder (again, a theme explored in KJ’s The Place Between…) but it is, I suppose we can say, given her terminal cancer and more, hard-won insight. Very hard-won. It is not cheap, even if at times it is funny as hell.

I have an old acquaitance who continues to be a fun and feisty evangelical author, Margaret Feinberg. Years ago, Margaret was doing a new book project with an odd-ball experiment of saying yes to everything. She thought living with such abandon might lead to joy or freedom or something alive in her spirit. As she was starting that new, positive, habit she got cancer, seriously. (Seriously? she thought!) She could hardly write the book on positive joy, but on she went, bringing balloons into the waiting room to bring smiles to others at death’s door. I was worried that a book about cancer entitled Fight Back with Joy: Celebrate More, Regret Less, Stare Down Your Greatest Fears would be seen as needlessly glib, maybe even what we now call “toxic positivity.” But Margaret pulled it off, insisting that joy is more than whimsey and can be a weapon in our greatest battles. It’s a good little read and I think of it now in comparison with and in contrast to Kate Bowler’s mighty Joyful, Anyway. I don’t think Bowler cites Margaret, although she might have — even if she’s a professor of theology at Duke — and I am not sure if KJ knows her, either. It’s just one more reminder that Bowler is on to something big and important. Joy, Anyway, is full of stories like her earlier books and is a very great read.

So there you have it: joy, anyway, isn’t just a cute quip by quirky Anne Lamott. It’s a very impressive plea and hope and prayer from a writer who knows more than most of us about suffering and anxiety and, just maybe knows more than most about real joy. Joy Anyway by Kate Bowler is an amazing, even profound gift.

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience Tish Harrison Warren (Convergent) $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I hope you, too, think of Tish Warren’s new book when thinking about all this stuff about resilience and hope and beauty and joy, even when (especially when) one isn’t feeling it. When life is hard, as it is for many of us. What Grows in Weary Lands is simply one of the best books on this topic, certainly one of the great Christian resources for reasonable service in these crazy days. I adore her other books and recommend them widely. If you don’t have this new one, you should. I hope I enticed you in my previous review, but I’ll say it again here, now. This book really does help those of us who want to find solid (usually ancient) Christian practices than can form within us some way to keep on keeping on. To know God in and through our hum-drum (or worse) days and dark nights. Warren did not crank this out quickly or easily; it, too, is a book that emerged from some hard places.

I would love to hear a podcast or round-table conversation with Tish and Bowler and Ramsey (and Margaret could bring balloons and her Holy Spirited passion for finding God in the ordinary, as well.) What conversation these interesting, funny women would have. Each from slightly different corners of the evangelical wing of broad Christian faith, and all maybe shifting a bit here and there, it would be a great discussion. In the meantime, reading their books side by side, bringing them into conversation with each other would be a fabulous experiment. What Grows From Weary Lands is a book of the year (I’m saying now, half way through the year.) I hope you order it from us.

Read this book if you have discovered that you do not get through life without going through a desert; read this book to discover that the desert brings a kind of life you cannot find anywhere else. — Andy Crouch, partner for theology and culture, Praxis, and author of The Life We’re Looking For

So many of us are bone-tired — tired of all the noise, the hurry, the drama, and, at times, even tired of prayer. Into our cultural moment of chronic exhaustion, Tish Harrison Warren offers us a spirituality for the weary. . . . Warren is one of our best living spiritual writers; her ability to blend Christian spirituality and insights from church history with beautifully down-to-earth honesty and raw humor, all while keeping our soul hopeful in God, is a rare gift. —John Mark Comer, author of Practicing the Way and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

The Night Is Normal: A Guide Through Spiritual Pain Alicia Britt Chloe (Tyndale) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I have a friend who said this book nearly saved her life. She’s a solid and mature Christian woman who has read a lot. We knew the book a bit, had it here, realized the writer has done some fine stuff. I liked her 40 Days of Decrease, but these days books about the spirituality of painful times, the experience of anguish, the need for lament, a theology of aloneness are all plentiful. I never read this until I realized how much my friend found it helpful.

Britt Chloe is a fine writer, an evangelical with an honest faith that grapples with hard stuff. Tough answers for tough questions, you know — until there are no evident answers. Until things really fall apart. Until God seems silent. She is smart enough to know she is not the first one to experience a dark night the soul or know what Weber called “disenchantment.” She wants to normalize suffering, help us all not feel so alone when we sense God’s absence, to not feel so fearful, so alarmed. I do not recall if she cited Lauren Winner’s eloquent memoir about a mid-life sense of God’s absence — Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis it was called — but even as I read KJ Ramsey’s memoir, I sometimes wondered if she read these kinds of books. Not super philosophical theodicy texts, but not cheap voices which try to cover-up the pain, either. Sort of in the same ballpark as Tish Warren’s above mentioned What Grows in Weary Lands, Dr Chloe’s work is readable, touching, practical, and wise.

I like her metaphor of night and her insistence that the “night is not your enemy.” I know she does draw on Gerald May who drew on Saint John of the Cross for contemporary experiences, even of depression. Many of us know how Barbara Brown Taylor tried to normalize the night in her brilliant Learning to Walk in the Dark. That was more memoiristic, rooted in her narrative and her Bible reflection. This Night Is Normal has a more “self help” sort of feel, which is why I’m listing it here, now. It is one of those sort of books that can redeem the simplistic and cliched formulas of too many of those sorts of books. It’s really good and without knowing it stands on the shoulders of all of KJ Ramsey’s vital works.

Alisa Britt Chloe’s writing is lovely and comfortable talking about faith even though she went through this hard season of loss; one chapter is called “spiritual frustration” and that it putting it mildly. But she endured and nurtured the sort of faith that grows best in the depth of the dark. The Black author and Bishop, Claude Alexander, says she “has put her ears to God’s heart and mouth to help us navigate the night seasons of disillusionment with God.” Most of the chapters are very short and easy to read. It’s a useful resource for many (and there is a workbook / study guide to help you process it as well.)

Drawn By Beauty: Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life Matthew Z. Capps (B+H Academic) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

There are numerous books about our human capacity to engage beauty, to behold, to imagine, to take in splendor. Some make it a theological thing, writing about God’s own beauty, citing everybody from hefty Catholics like Hans Von Balthasar to Puritans like Jonathan Edwards, while others dig into a theology aesthetics. (See, by the way, the rigorous new IVP Academic book What Is Beauty? An Introduction to Art & Aesthetics by philosopher Dennis Bray.) But I thought of this whole topic, and how Capps gets at it, when reading KJ’s The Spaces Between Our Pains. Because for her, being drawn to beauty — and finding joy — is part of our human wiring, part of our capacity as people made in the image of a Creator-God. For whatever reason, we are drawn to beauty.

And, note the distinction in phrasing: yes we are drawn to beauty, by, as this book puts it, we are drawn by beauty. What do we mean by that? How does the sublime, the sensing of awe that leads to wonder, serve us in our becoming more Christ-like in our discipleship journey? In our human journey?

I do not know if KJ would care much for the theological details of this book which, as the back cover promises, “illuminates a captivating truth: God has enchanted our world to draw us to him, the ultimate source of all beauty.” (This, by the way, is the solid theological thinking undergirding the marvelous little collection of essays published by Square Halo Books called Why We Create: Reflections on the Creator, The Creation, and Creating edited by Brian Brown and Jane Scharl; done through the Anselm Society in Colorado, I thought of this book, too, when reading KJ.)

I guess I mean to say that Matthew Capps is a pastor of a Baptist Church and his book is part of the “Christ in Everything” series done by theologically conservative thinkers at Broadman + Holman. It isn’t a dry treatise or theological textbook or stuck in the culture wars many in the SBC are known for. It is fabulous and meaty without being dense, nicely reflecting on the meaning of experiences of beauty that “draw us out of ourselves toward something greater.” Drawn to Beauty shows how beauty is essential for the deepest sort of spiritual formation and vital for our discipleship and church lives. As Russell Moore says it, “This book will help you in our discipleship and will prompt you to see the things around you in a different way.”  And, yes, Capps nicely cites Mako Fujimura and Calvin Seerveld, who I wrote about a few weeks ago. KJ would agree, awe and wonder and embodied glory are all part of the plan. Indeed, we are drawn to and by that which is good and beautiful.

When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need Rebecca Bloom (Broadleaf) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Yes to joy and yes to beauty. Appreciate creation, love others, fine meaning in the awe of being alive, even when we’re almost not. KJ Ramsey’s book drew me to these big questions and pushed me to ponder how that works. It’s a memoir, a story, an account, and it underscores that quest in her own life.

But it is also a story about a woman who is ill and faces unhelpful healthcare systems and less than perfect professionals in those systems. Let’s face it, joy and beauty are part of this narrative, but it is mostly about her illnesses. Obviously this book came to mind.

More than one friend of ours have raved about this and others, too — like Delia Ephron, a Hollywood screenwriter and author has said, “Trust Rebecca Bloom.” It makes me want to send it to any woman facing hard medical issues. A woman leader from the NYU School of law says it is “a rare mix of legal savvy, practical expertise, feminist perspective, and deep humanity to help us navigate the nation’s unruly trio of healthcare, employment, and benefits systems.” There were moments in KJ’s memoir that I smacked my head in frustration — not really disbelief because we’ve been there — as the paperwork piled up or the chirpy person on the phone says to have a nice day when they put you one hold before denying benefits. Ugh. I’m told this book might help navigated some of that and Bloom may be the health advocate you need.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness Meghan O’Rourke (Riverhead Books) $18.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40

I have written about this at great length a few years ago and it continues to come to mind often, including when reading about KJ’s pain-filled story.  It was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award and was called “remarkable” by Andrew Solomon and “essential” by The Boston Globe. It has been considered nearly a landmark exploration of the rise of autoimmune diseases and of course the rise of chronic illnesses. Naturally, I thought of this when reading abouit KJ’s odd autoimmune disorders. Believe me, it is in our family as well with relatives who have struggled with Lupus and MS and Scleroderma and Celiac Disease. This book captured my interest right away.

O’Rourke is a very fine writer, a journalist and poet and essayist. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and edits The Yale Review. So she is not a blue-collar rural gal, but an urbane New Yorker. I don’t relate to that immediately, existentially, but loved reading about sophisticates and their lives, her story. And then her undiagnosed illness gets worse and worse and the expense and time for appointment after appointment builds up; most readers will be captivated. She “blends lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy.”  More than a memoir, she argues for a “seismic shift in our approach disease.” It is an education and, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “a ray of light into those isolated cocoons of darkness that, at one time or another, may affect us all. “

This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith Darcey Steinke (HarperOne) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is a very new book to which I gave a BookNotes shout-out not long ago. At our BookNotes we like to keep folks informed of important new releases and we told why this one should be noted; some of it is unforgettable. Elizabeth Gilbert says it is “a work of piercing grace… a work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth.” It’s a beautiful book, what another novelist (Steinke is known as a fiction write, herselfr) called “excruciating and holy.”

It has also been called “a love letter to the body in pain” and it really does remind us (it’s odd we need reminded) of our embodied life, the nature of the body’s capacity for pain and ecstasy, too. It moves from memoir to some science writing to reporting. From the history of early understandings of pain to the latest neuroscience research to her own passions and insights, This Is the Door is a major volume that I predict will be around a long time. And I couldn’t help but think of it while reading The Place Between Our Pains. Wow.

Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World Shannan Martin (Revell) $18.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

I hardly know what to say about this. Shannon Martin is a cool, edgy writer, conversational and punchy, deeply Christian but with a generous and gracious openness. I liked her Start With Hello about neighborliness; she works for a nonprofit that serves the hungry in Goshen, Indiana. And she’s a great storyteller.

It isn’t surprising that I’d think of her when reading KJ; she is witty and full of love and life. Counterweights seems to start with the assumption that we are burned-out and broken-down, weary, stressed, fearful. Whether it is the “nervous systems” of our political and cultural life weighing us down or the “nervous systems” of the hurts we hold in own wounded hearts, many of us are a mess and we know it. This almost light-hearted book is a quick ramble through a whole bunch of things to do, practices, gifts and graces, for “holding hope in a heavy world.” Her stories will bring you hope and her ideas will make you smile.

What’s fun — and I suppose what first drew me to this when reading Ramsey’s The Space Between Our Pains — is that the sections here are alliterative and KJ quips that she loves alliteration. Me too. I’m a sucker for a book which starts under the rubric of “Madness + Miracle.” And then moves to “Lament + Longing” to “Poverty + Plenty” and ends with the last quarter about “Barriers + Belonging.” If you’ve read this far you can see the interlacing connections between these themes and the other books suggested here, all fine companions to Ramsey’s memoir. Just those sub-headings of the four sections of Counterweights might catch in your throat if you’re open. It’s no wonder one anonymous reviewer said these counterweights are “a small act of resistance to despair.” Yup.

There is mature and subtle theologizing here, if something so practical and down to Earth can be called theologizing. Her insights about faith formation are good, lively, even. But there are these sidebars that are almost whimsical — “10 Things That Improve with Time” (including cast iron, cardigans, bluejeans, body positivity) and “Things I’ve Changed My Mind About” (which includes everything from oysters to country music to thinking God is disappointed in me) and her own “Top Ten Best Thrift Store Scores” which cracked me up. Her list of ten “Novels I Loved Lately” are intriguing, believe me. Throughout this resource she seems, like KJ, to be drawn to beauty, inviting readers to carve out some comfort and make space for joy and goodness.

If you like chatty, conversational prose, upbeat but raw, honest talk about things that matter, Counterweights might be a fun book for you.