His Way of the Spirit is a great, great read and arranged very thoughtfully. And he is a delightful and very capable conversation partner. Check it out for yourself right here:

And then send us an order for the book — at 20% off, no less. Hooray. You won’t regret it!

Speaking of Hearts & Minds conversation partners and my informal on-line interviews with authors we admire, our next free webinar will be on November 17th as I chat with my much-admired friend, Jeff Crosby. Maybe we’ll touch on his first book about his own spiritual journey (Language of the Heart) and his must-read book about the reading life (World of Wonders) but we will celebrate his recent release Spirit in the Sky: The Power of Music in Our Search for Graceland. I’ve already reflected on this book (twice) at BookNotes, but we do hope you’ll join us for a lively conversation about the power of popular music, the recording and performing artists that have most influenced us, and how people of Christian faith can have their lives enhanced by paying attention to a broad palette of recording artists. I can’t wait to chat with him about Van Morrision and Pink Floyd and Marvin Gaye and Paul Simon and more. Get this down on your calendar now, please, and save the date. You should order the book, too, if you haven’t. We have it at 20% off.

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Last week we made our annual trek across the great Pennsylvania Turnpike to attend the Wee Kirk small church conference. Despite the windshield wipers slapping for hours and hours, we enjoyed the changing leaves (and, oh my, what a glorious trip home with blue sky and even brighter leaves.) We love the PC(USA) sponsored gathering for those in small and often struggling congregations and are appreciative that the leadership of Wee Kirk brings in both practitioners that have experience in small churches — with custom-made workshops on stewardship or worship or hospitality or ministry with the aging — and top-notch, world-class scholars. This year we were struck by the brilliance of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary prof Dr. Tucker Ferda (no greater a Matthew scholar than Dale Allison says Tucker’s book, Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins (Eerdmans; $69.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $55.99) is one of the most important in the field of historical Jesus studies in the last quarter of a century.”  I hope Tucker’s reflections on reading postures and images and attitudes and styles as we approach Scripture might become a book someday. I also liked that he recommended Exploring the Spirituality of the Gospels by Roman Catholic scholar Patrick J. Hartin. In any case, whether you live in a small town or a metropolis, whether you attend a country parish or a megachurch, reading well and widely, especially in the Scriptures, is a core Christian practice.

And so is caring about your place, or locale, your region or watershed. And that’s what I want to write about in this special issues of BookNotes.

Here are some of the best books that we had in that part of our big display for those in small churches. ALL ARE 20% OFF. Use the link shown at the end to order any of these. 

The Power of Place: Choosing Stability in a Rootless Age Daniel Grothe (Thomas Nelson) $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

As I explained in a book announcement up front at Wee Kirk the value of Wendell Berry’s work, his agrarian localism (and the importance of the soon-to-be-released Dispatches from Rural America.) I mentioned this one, as I have before at that gathering, as my favorite introduction to the wonder of stability, the need for roots, how to dig in for the long haul. Pastor Grothe is a fine, fun writer fronm nd this is a great guide to important stuff.

I like how the publisher tells it:

In The Power of Place, pastor Daniel Grothe speaks to the human ache for home and makes a countercultural case for staying put. He calls us to reject the myth of Christian individuality and instead embrace the richness of commitment and community, arguing that we must stay in one place as long as we can, plant our lives, and let roots take hold. Because only then can we experience the deep fulfillment, friendship, and fruitfulness God created us for.

I told one person at least at Wee Kirk that this was the book to start with in all of this. We should all have a few books under our belt that examine this, and this is one of the best.

Sure, maybe you’ll move to bell hooks’s Belonging: A Culture of Place or the magestierial study Beyond Homelessness (about our culture of displacement) by Brian Walsh & Steven Bouma-Predigar, but for starters, this is a grand title, higly recommended. Thanks to Dan Grothe and his The Power of Place.

No Home Like Place: A Christian Theology of Place Leonard Hjmalmarson (Urban Loft) $ // OUR SALE PRICE = $

This is another standard classic in our bookstore’s “place” section.  I’m told most other bookstores don’t carry this. We think this topic is so important we wouldn’t want to be without it. Hjmalmarson has written stuff about service-oriented missional spirituality and lives in Thunder Bay, Canada. He’s a very impressive thinker.

I will lift for you a quote from the PR from the small indie Urban Loft press:

Fragmentation, mobility, dualism — these forces work against our belonging, and work against our richly dwelling in the places we live. Add to these the rise of “virtual” place and relationships, and our sense of displacement only increases. It has been difficult to embrace a call to life as mission in this world under these conditions, and equally difficult to embrace a call to place. Are there “sacred” places? If every place is sacred, does the word lose its meaning? What is it that God loves about place? Can architecture contribute to our ability to engage in a place? How do experiential human questions like “belonging” intersect with a theological lens? Does a biblical view of place imply an ecology and an ethic? How do pilgrimage and place relate? How can the arts assist us in place-making? This book addresses these questions and more, in a lively dialogue between theology and culture.

I appreciate the forward by the great Loren Wilkenson of Regent College. His Earthkeeping (published by Eerdmans in 1980, was simply seminal.)

Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination Ben Norquist & Brian Miller (IVP Academic) $27.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.39

This is another that I highlighted at BookNotes, saying how very important it was; important and urgent, even — almost one of a kind. For anyone deep into this topic and field of study — place, how we imagine notions of landscape, social history and such — this 2026 book really is one of the more significant titles on this topic to come out, perhaps ever!  I’m not kidding.

Norquist and Miller appropriate and wisely unpack the themes of place and a Christian understanding of home and land and space and this necessarily includes how in many locales (and obviously in North America) the land has been occupied if not stolen. It has been viewed as a commodity. Knowing the way sin and ideologies like colonialism and Manifest Destiny have distorted proper, neighborly ways of relating to others and the land makes this study of place particularly important.  (And the case studies are fascinating.) There are a lot of thorough chapters and the book weaves together theology and geography, stories of stolen land and stories of justice and goodness in place. I love the title — every somewhere sacred. Thank about that. Kudos to these two excellent thinkers and their very good work. As one reviewer put it, “this book is a clarion call to people of faith to tell truer, more honest stories about the places we inhabit. Profoundly hopeful, this book will change the way you think about who you are and where you’re from.”

For what it is worth, I’ll be naming this as one of the Hearts & Minds Best Books of 2026. Order it today!

Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place Today Craig Bartholomew (Baker Academic) $35.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $28.00

I get it that this doesn’t sell often when we take it out to book displays (especially at places like Wee Kirk where there are lot of down-home folks that are beyond doing academic work.) But, still, for anybody looking for the premier text on placemaking, based on the Bible and philosophy and theology, this is both compelling and liberating. Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis says it is “unprecedented.” Eric Jacobsen (who wrote Sidewalks of the Kingdom with a foreword by Eugene Peterson) says, “Ever since Walter Brueggemann’s groundbreaking study The Land in 1977 we have been waiting for a comprehensive Christian theology of place.” This, I’d say, is it!

Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind Grace Olmstead (Sentinel) $27.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

I did a long review of this when it first came out, raving about her eloquence and elegance as a writer and her “important work of examining perhaps the most overlooked aspect of American identity: place” (as Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland put it.)

Norman Wirzba notes that Uprooted helps us understand what is lost when people lost their connections to particular lands and communities. It also helps us appreciate what is gained by a patient and enduring commitment to nurture the places and people that nurture us.”

Wirzba continues:

“Reading Olmstead’s book confirms that the need for roots in one of humanity’s universal and essential needs.”

Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World Scott Russell Sanders (Beacon Press) $19.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.96

Oh my, do you know Scott Russell Sanders? His writing is often called luminous or lyrical and so very well crafted that he wins awards for the nonfiction essay. Some liken him to his friend, the late nature writer Barry Lopez. One of my favorite books of Sander’s is his essay collection The Way of Imagination (Counterpoint; $16.95 // $13.56.) The majestic Private Mystery of Awe (from North Point Press) is oddly out of print — we have one left, I think.

In any case, the calm Staying Put is a collection of pieces about his home on a tree-lined street in central Indiana. It would seem to me that any decent human would want to be a better citizen of their locale and a good neighbor to their immediate neighbors. Sanders shows us how it’s done, caring for the low-key and plain, proposing, as one reviewer put it, “a different kind of citizenship.”

Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Paraclete Press) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Some of the best insight about resisting the downsides of our overly-mobile and fast-paced culture and thinking well about what Simone Weil called “our need for roots” comes from the ancient writer now known as Saint Benedict. The Benedictine monastic tradition called participants to the pledge of stability (more colorfully put, above, as “staying put.”) Yep, the monks knew that they could not form communities without the trust of loyalty to place and people, and so their vow… Hartgrove-Wilson has lived in intentional communities and has other books calling the church to a sort of new monasticism that lives together in a world falling apart, with the strength of community nurturing a brave and tenacious sort of solidarity with the poor. This book is less about Neo-monastic practices or social concern and just a wonderful, wise, radical reflection about our rootlessness and the virtues gained by staying in one place for a while. Of course our truest home is found in God, so in a way, we might call this a spirituality of place.

There is a marvelous foreword by Kathleen Norris, who knows a thing or two about all of this. A lovely reflection, a very fine book.

Stability may be the virtue that 21st-century Christians most ignore — and the virtue we are most called to embrace. This fine book will inspire you to look at your own life, asking, ‘Where am I restless? Where might God be calling me to be rooted, to stay put? — Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and the forthcoming The Entangled Word: Keeping Company with Scripture Through the Church Year

Rooted and Grounded: Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship edited by Ryan Harker & Janeen Bertsche Johnson (Pickwick) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

This is part of a series called the Studies in Peace and Scripture: Institute of Mennonite Studies but this amazing, potent collection is not written only by Mennonites, nor is it mostly about peacemaking, as such. It is, as the title says, more broadly about Christian discipleship and what it meets to serve while “rooted and grounded” in our place. We stock it here in the store both in our ecological section with books about land but also in our sociology section with other books about space and place. It is as much about geography as it is about Biblical studies. It’s an amazing resource. Hooray.

Rooted and Grounded includes all kinds of great, random essays, most very, very good (all written specifically for this volume.) There are some very good writers on board. For instance, Winn Collier has a great piece called “Holy Ground: Considering a Sacramental Ecclesiology in Berry’s Port Williams” and Hope College prof Steve Bouma-Prediger has a great contribution entitled “Eschatology Shapes Ethics: New Creation and Christian Ecological Virtues.” I loved the piece by Matt Bonzo (“A Curse More Ancient”) and the one by Laura Schmidt Roberts, “The Theological Place of Land: Watershed Discipleship as Re-placed Cultural Vision.”

Duke professor Ellen Davis has a very good chapter called “Land as Kin: Renewing Our Imagination” and Patricia Tull writes on “Vineyards, Fields, and Trees Among Israel’s Prophets” in a chapter called “Speaking from Ground Level.” From Barbara Rossing to Douglas Kaufman to the great Nathan Stucky (of Princeton’s Farminary) there are so many more authors here — more than 20 pieces in about 250 pages. We are grounded in God and rooted in place and informed by ancient Scripture. As Norma Wirzba notes this “deserves a wide readership.” We are glad to tell you about it again.

Telling the Stories Right: Wendell Berry’s Imagination of Port William edited by Jack Baker & Jeffrey Bilbro (Front Porch Republic Books) $27.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.60

Anyone thinking about the topic of place or small towns or rural life surely knows about Wendell Berry. We are getting pre-orders for his forthcoming Dispatches From Rural America coming next week) which will be his last collection of new non-fiction essays. I’ve seen it, I’d admit, and it is going to be good.

In the meantime we’d all be better if we read some Berry, not only his fiction and poetry but his essays. (Or if you’re into nonfiction, then do read his poetry and novels and short-stories.) In any case, a lot has been written about him. This one, compiled nearly a decade ago, is a gem, a lovely and masterful collection by those who love his stories. Even before his famous Unsettling of American broke into American consciousness 50 years ago, he had already published three novels. These authors are convicted that “any consideration of Berry’s work must begin with his stories.”

And so, this volume was one of the first that studied his characters and the lives of those in Port William, that fictional Kentucky town. “His exquiste rendering of this small Kentucky town” they say, “challenges us to see the beauty of our own places and communities and to tend to their health, threatened though it inevitably is. Amen!

Important voices from Stanley Hauerwas to the aforementioned Scott Sanders have weighed in with nightly blurbs on the back. (Hauerwas says “the next best thing to reading Berry is to read those who write about Berry’s writing.” Again, Amen!)

Here we have important writers from Gracy Olmstead (see above) to Jake Meador to Geneva College historian Eric Miller to the Rabbit Room founder, author and singer-songwriter, Andrew Peterson. Doug Sikkema is here as is Michael Stevens, and others we so appreciate. Don’t miss Kiara Jorgenson’s chapter “Called to Affection: Exploring the Ecology of Christian Vocation in Port William.” Yes!

Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life Jennifer Allen Craft (IVP Academic) $33.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.19

This is part of the great “Studies in Theology and the Arts” series by IVP and, believe me, I adore this one. Alas, we didn’t take it to Wee Kirk this year, but it would have fit in nicely either in our little display of books on creativity and arts, there, or, better, right here among the books about place and small town life. Jennifer Craft, while doing a book on the arts, opens up vistas to understand space and place, giving a book that contends that “the arts place us in time, space, and community in ways that encourage us to be fully and imaginatively present in a variety of contexts: the natural world, our homes, our worshiping communities, and society.”

At the Wee Kirk event I made a quip from up front noting that we had books on nature and creation (like books on birdwatching and fishing and creation-care) right next to our section on AI and tech / digital culture. We need to be embodied, I said, in place, even as we study the concerns and possibilities of screens and more. This book does just that, invites us to embodiment, to a sense of place, and suggests that local art can, in fact, help enhance our sense of our places. It may seem counterintuitive, but looking at a painting of a place or an arts creation about a thing in your town, could help us then see the real thing that much better. Isn’t that the bit from T.S. Eliot, about “knowing the place for the first time.” This lovely, thoughtful book will help you experience just that, and more.

Place Matters: The Church for the Community Coz Crosscombe & Bill Krispin (CLC) $13.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $11.19

This little book is a powerhouse of a resource, helping any church (although it is perhaps aimed at urban congregations) lean into it’s ministry of place and come to know the community in which it is embedded. Crosscombe and Crispin have been legends in inner city Philadelphia and know the unique networks of streets and cultures and folkways and institutions as well as anybody around. (Bill died earlier this year and his loss is felt in the City of Brotherly Love, believe me.)

This book is very accessible and a readable intro to a theology of place and how congregations can step up and learn more about their region and their neighborhoods. Using Bible study and strategic sociological principles (and plenty of real life stories) this fun book is sure to inspire you.

As they say, “if you seek to share the powerful, life-transforming gospel of Jesus Christ in your surrounding community, this book is for you.”

Race and Place: How Urban Geography Shapes the Journey to Reconciliation David P. Leong (IVP) $24.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.20

Another book that isn’t uniquely about smaller towns but could very easily be used in small town settings as it declares that “geography matters.” Yes! And David Leong (a professor of missiology at Seattle Pacific University) knowns much about the “street signs” (the name of his first book, by the way) that indicate space and place in urban settings. The theory works well anywhere.

Race and Place of course shows — in well written prose and compelling storytelling — more about the truths of that well-worn saw about “the wrong side of the tracks.” Yep, there are literally railroad tracks that often divides classes and ethnicities and cultures in many towns and cities across the land. Knowing how this has developed (in your own place) and how to think well about it is crucial for our ongoing local missional presence.

Leong “envisions a future of belonging and hope in our streets, towns, cities, and churches. A discussion about race goes hand in hand with a discussion about place.” As they rightly assert on the back cover, “This book is a welcome addition to a conversation that needs to include both.” Highly recommended.

Good Places for All Mark D. Bjelland (Calvin College Press) $10.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $8.79

This little volume is in the series of small books called Calvin Shorts, little volumes for ordinary readers about the specialty concerns of various professors at Calvin University. I am a big fan of these small books — sharp little books on everything from sports to special education to American history to immigration and diversity — but Good Places for All is especially good. It is, I think, an ideal introduction to this whole sociology of place, a very little bit about urban, town, and rural planning issues, and why we need unique insights about how to care well about neighborhoods in various social locations.

Using the Bible as a lens, Bjelland (a geography and environmental studies prof) looks at urban planning and regional concerns and the nature of suburbs, inviting us to wonder how to love our neighbors as we advocate for thoughtful zoning codes, housing policies, transportation systems, ecological values, real estate issues and the like. We need faith-based advocates for our places and this is a great little book to kick-start your thinking.

The Bees of Rainbow Falls: Finding Faith, Imagination, and Delight in Your Neighbourhood  Preston Pouteaux (Urban Loft Publishers) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

Oh my, what a lovely and sweet book this is, a missional memoir, so to speak, done by the small indie press Uban Loft. You may know them from one of our lead titles (above), No Home Like Place. They get the daily texture of ordinary life and how people of faith can enter locales and spaces to offer a Godly perspective, to bear witness to creation’s place, and even use that, appropriately, as a form of bearing witness to God’s Kingdom. Can a story about bee-keeping be missional? Can the art of bee-keeping be a way to show God’s care for the local neighborhood? You bet it can.

I rave about this when we first discovered it a few years back, writing:

This book has been called “enchanting” and “captivating” and “charming” and “delightful” and “elegant.” But even as Pouteaux tells his story, it does call us to imagine “living in our neighbourhoods in a way that transforms our whole outlook on faith, hope, and love.” Pourteaux writes about this unlikely journey and how it changed how he saw his neighbors.

As it says on the back cover, “The Bees of Rainbow Falls reminds us that we matter to our community, that goodness is found all around us, and that new life emerges out of the small and sublime.”

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity Charles L. Marohn (Wiley) $26.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80

I know that not every small town church person is going to become an activist for renewing their communities and not every church can advocate for civic policies at the local level. I think sone of the theological books mentioned here would be good starters for church groups and parish book clubs, asking the bigger questions about the role of place in a Biblical worldview and the need for an embodied, local involvement in caring for the flourishing of our places.

Sooner or later, though, one has to ask the big questions of what makes for a flourishing town? Marohn has done the work on this, and his organization (Strong Towns) invites folks of all sorts to take up these orienting features of renewal. What he calls a “bottom-up revolution.” It is what Richard Florida calls “the playbook.”

Here’s how they put it:

American cities of all sizes financially struggle to do basic things: maintain streets, keep public safety workers employed, pay pensions, etc. The conventional response to these struggles is: more growth. If a city can induce more development, more construction, and more infrastructure, then it can grow its way to prosperity. Yet what if the American approach to growth is the problem? What if the wealth generated by all that new investment isn’t enough to support the infrastructure? That is the core premise of Strong Towns, a movement to change the way cities approach growth and development. While modern city development creates a short-term illusion of prosperity, it results in more long-term obligations than the community can handle”…”

Strong Towns offers a different model, a better vision. Few want more sprawl and everyone knows we must learn to be more sustainable. We need beauty and goodness. As Jeff Speck (author of Walkable City) says, “the gem of Strong Towns is our current moment’s most cogent, practical, and necessary response to the problem of urban economics.”

Recovering Abundance: Twelve Practices for Small-Town Leaders Andy Stanton-Henry (Fortress Press) $22.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.60

You may know I’ve written about this before and I hope you can see why I’d feature it on display at a conference for small churches. Many smaller congregations are rooted in smaller towns — whether rust-belt exurbs or charming villages in the country. Most are in fairly ordinary, not-too-dramatic, mid-sized towns.  This is a very sophisticated study, an invitation for leaders to get involved and, with God’s help, make stuff happen.

The author is a mid-West Quaker and is known for not only pastoring a smaller church but for equipping folks to care about their small-town places. As he researched and listened and travelled around his Ohio locale, Stanton-Henry learned about what he calls “ordinary leaders” who envision co-creating a positive future. He documents one practice demonstrated in a Bible study and then embodied by people he’s observed in small towns and rural settings with leaders and community groups.

As J. Brent Bill puts it, “as a former country-church pastor, I wish I would have had this book when I was starting out. It’s packed with practical wisdom and tools to be a faithful leader in parts of our country too long neglected.”

I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay Matthew Ferrence (West Virginia Press) $21.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $17.59

Less than a year ago I did a large review of Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by the great Beth Macy and a fabulous, riveted memoir by third generation dairy farmer, Ryan Dennis entitled Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm. In the middle of those two reviews I went on and on about I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me. Ferrence grew up in the small town of a rural county where I went to college (Indiana PA, home of Jimmy Stewart.)

After an account of how a hot shot politico did him wrong in his run for a state office (from Meadville, PA, another small college town in Western PA) realizes that there is a disdain for those small small towns and rural spaces (and burned-over rust belt places as well.)

I wrote:

Much of I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me is about how both rural and rust-belt, postindustrial towns (not to mention inner cities) have much in common. They are passed over, mocked, despised and the people, for reasons sociologists are still trying to parse, often vote for candidates that do not have their back. This prophetic rant is the latest, and in some ways, the most tender and compelling, treatise to be read alongside Paper Girl by Beth Macy and, also, her Factory Man, or maybe Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild (not to mention her amazing 2024 book Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.) But his is beautiful and personal.

From lovely writing about the county fair (and great sections about showing animals) and the anguish of polarization between Red and Blue America and the details of running against a do-nothing, blustering right-wing incumbent (who he ungraciously calls every name in the book) I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay is a fabulous, striking, unforgettable read.

Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse Timothy P. Carney (Harper) $17.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $14.39

We appreciate books that are ideologically complex and a bit unpredictable. I wasn’t sure what to think of a book with a rousing quote from Charles Murray on the back. (It does say that “this book transcends politics” and that it can help those who are willing to understand why some people voted for Trump. I’m not sure that is necessarily the reason to read it, but it does offer explanations for healthy places that are not merely material, economic, or demographic. He shows that  (as Arthur Books puts it, “the deepest disparity facing Americans today is one of community. Clear and compassionate, Alienated America offers a road map for the restoration of our nation.”

The provacative question (or at least one of the provocative questions” Carney was trying to suss out was this: should you be more worried about a church closing in your town, or a factory? Through is travels all over the land, his startling good conversations with people and his study of county-level maps and data, his exploring the role of mediating structures and sturdy institutions (including churches) and tries to show that the reality of failing social connections is responsible for much of the great divides in America. The death of the American dream is a social phenomenon, not mostly an economic one.

I enjoyed this book a lot and it gave me better vocabulary and stories to talk about the sociology of American small towns and the ups and downs of rural life. This author reports on some fascinating places (from dim country bars of southwestern Pennsylvania to the bustling Mormon wards of Salt Lake City.)

The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (Basic Books) $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

As we are indicating, we have a number of books about what might be called the sociology of place, books looking at new urbanism as well as small town and rural life titles. At the Wee Kirk conference we displayed some of these right alongside the titles about rural churches and small town ministry. We would like to think that smaller churches in smaller towns are particularly attentive to their social location and care about their often overlooked places.

The Overlooked Americans is considered to be a much-needed reassessment of small town life, done by a major scholar — she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and holds a chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. As an expert on regional planning, she sees the big picture, but knows that the devil is in the details, as they say.

This data this book offers shows that most rural American’s are better educated and have a better quality of life than many will suppose. Rural American’s are not all extremists or politically estranged. This is tremendous stuff to consider, no matter where you live; it is an urgent and much-needed reassessment. I really hope some of our readers order it.

Richard Florida (a name I’ve already mentioned) says that the book reveals “life in rural America to be complex and varied — and in many cases better off than conventional wisdom would have us believe.” Happily, she will make a case that urban, suburban, and rural Americans may have more in common than we think. Currid-Halkett combines both quantitative research and fine storytelling to offer a new understanding of what’s going on — the grit and the grace — among rural and small town Americans. I’ve mentioned this before, and wanted to show it off again, now.

What is America really? Currid-Halkett pierces through the noise and challenges mainstream narratives with this timely, rigorous, and heartfelt analysis. The Overlooked Americans tears down entrenched definitions and stereotypes and builds a new image of rural America that is not hopelessly divided from urban America. Nuanced, cogent, and empathetic, this book deserves attention from politicians, pundits, and the public. —  Jane Harman, USC Presidential Scholar, Former Member of Congress (CA, 36)

The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, Timothy J. Nelson (Mariner) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

One needn’t read too much in the literature about American poverty to know that hunger and being unhoused is not only a problem of the center city or the urban underclass. The fact is that the majority of those who experience what we call food insecurity are white and often rural. That small churches have to ministry to this reality is daunting, but from what we gather, most who attend Wee Kirk are doing valiant service to the poor and forgotten, have gracious people helping where they can, and many have food pantries and clothing closets and other such social service ministries.

For those on the front lines of doing this kind of work —the kind delightfully explored in the memoir-esque Five Loaves, Two Fish, Twelve Volunteers: Growing a Relational Food Ministry by Elizabeth Mae Magill (published by Upper Room Books)  — this solid text will help you understand your context and what you are up against. For those not yet in the struggle, this may be compelling and orienting.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond (you know his Evicted and Poverty, By America, I hope) says, “This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.”

That is, as these researches so passionately show, there are places where fellow citizens and neighbors live and “the places in which we live shape so many aspects of our lives — from our jobs to our health to our children’s prospects.” There’s plenty of big data, here, but also what I suppose we could call ethnography.  One reviewer (a pediatrician) says it is “woven with first-hand counted and bolstered by fresh data, The Injustice of Place convincingly knots present-day disadvantage to the long tail of racism and extractive capitalism.”

Yup. As another scholar of these injustices notes, “there is no book on poverty in America quite like this one” From dramatic reporting to serious analysis to compassionate storytelling this book is both enraging and vital.

American Christians and Poverty Myths: Beyond the Veil of Meritocracy Mark T. Mulder (Fortress Press) $34.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $27.20

Professor Mulder teaches sociology at Calvin University in Grand Rapids and has written a major sociological expose called Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure trying to fairly tell the stories of 1960s and ‘70s “white flight” from urban Chicago into the suburbs. What structural factors drove that and how dit that create other sorts of problems? On the heels of that, Mulder here argues that “evangelical Christians too often misunderstand the fundamental causes of poverty.” (Yet, as the back cover notes, “progressive Christians, who tend to recognize structural factors at hand, often respond much as evangelicals do.’) Either way, even our most sincere efforts are mired and hampered. We’ve got to understand the terrain better, and know where we’ve most often failed to serve effectively.

American Christians and Poverty Myths really does present “a vivid portrait of poverty in the US to help both evangelical and progressive Christians alike to reevaluate how they advocate fora more just society.”

Decades ago I brought in my friend Ronald Sider to lecture on his book Churches That Make a Difference where he documented mainline churches (that generally did good social concern but little gospel proclamation and more evangelical churches that generally did good evangelism but not very good social ministry. A few of the churches he studies (especially Hispanic and black congregations) did it all.

I wonder if over time both mainline/progressive congregations and conservative/evangelical ones have matured in their wholistic vision. I suspect so. But have they grappled with the causes and textures of poverty? Do they still assume certain myths about the poor? This book really offers new insights about what we need to know and how to better serve.

Reginald Smith (whose memoir about urban ministry in Grand Rapids I highlighted a few weeks ago at BookNotes) says that Mulder has “done the hard work of diagnosing harmful stories about poverty and offers a better story of biblical wisdom, along with rigorous scholarship that moves readers to examine their own Christian stories.”

Jonathan Tran, professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School says:

This myth-busting book, full of compassion and conviction and with the data and evidence to back it up, it tells us the truth — with every hope that the truth might set us free.

Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha Gail Gunst Heffner & David Warners (Michigan State University Press) $29.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.96

I have highlighted this here often, and, in fact, help it up and promoted it at Wee Kirk 2025. We sold a number last year, even though only a few folks were from the greater Great Lakes area. Still, who doesn’t live in a watershed? Who doesn’t know the Wendell Berry line about do unto others downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you. Right? This is the story of how a group of leaders at Calvin University in Grand Rapids mobilized college students to clean up one of the most polluted waterways in Michigan. From speaking in churches, learning to work with indigenous First Nations leaders, understanding the chemistry of water pollution and the infrastructure systems of water run-off, the Plaster Creek Stewards started talking about “reconciliation ecology” since even our reconciliation with the Earth is often mediated by our structures of injustice between people groups. Just think of the much-researched topic of “environmental racism” and how racial reconciliation leading to justice is a context for doing environmental work.

Anyway, this is a book about place and while it is about the Ken-O-Sha (the Native Ottawa name for Plaster Creek) it models a decades-long project of intergenerational organizing to care for the local watershed.

Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial Corban Addison (Vintage) $20.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $16.00

I don’t know if CAFAs are a threat to the health of your communities, but the air-born toxins, the industrial-scale water pollution, the environmental racism, the uncaring abuse of land and animals makes these huge industrial centers a blight on the dignity of rural life. I raved about this riveting book about fighting a pig-farming monopoly in North Carolina when it first came out — I cited the rave review by novelist John Grisham (who wrote the foreword), explained its legal “David vs Goliath” plot-line, and suggested it was a page-turner that educates folk about what is so wrong with these ugly and brutal super-farms; I insisted that it will have you cheering when the public interest legal activists put it all on the line to get justice for rural folks so wounded by the very duplicitous bad guys from Smithfield Foods.

As a GoodReads review put it:

With journalistic rigor and a novelist’s instinct for story, Corban Addison’s Wastelands captures the inspiring struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once-invincible corporation to change, and to preserve the rights—and restore the heritage—of a long-suffering community.

This is one of the most unforgettable books I’ve ever read and while I didn’t feature it at our Wee Kirk event — I have, other years, right next to the Wendell Berry titles — it does offer a glimpse into one part of the varied struggles of working for flourishing in rural places these days.

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story Wendell Berry (Counterpoint) $26.00 hardcover // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.80 OR  $16.95 paperback // OUR SALE PRICE = $13.56

Some will be glad to know this, the last novel Berry wrote before his death last month, just came out last week in paperback, at a very affordable price. (As shown above, with our BookNotes sale price it’s $13.56.) Some will also be glad to be reminded that do still have some of the hardcover that I suspect may go out of print sooner or later.

In any case, Marce Catlett is a lovely story (in part, about the power of story and memory) in the grand but gentle Port William series of novels and short stories by the great agrarian storyteller. It is about Andy Catlett’s father and grandfather, the formation of their buyer’s cooperative after being ripped off in the Louisville market. The plight of small farmers — Berry so eloquently put it so succinctly into a fictional format in the middle of his ground-breaking nonfiction book fifty years ago, The Unsettling of America — has never been clearer, although it is firstly a novel, a shorter, poignant tale of the coming of age of a boy as he takes up the family tradition of Kentucky farming.

Marce Catlett, Berry’s new Andy Catlett novel, brings the interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story — one held in place and handed down from one generation to another — can shape our lives beyond all expectation . . . A story remembered in its place exerts a moral force. This is what Berry’s new novel shows us. But its inheritors must decide how they will respond to this force. As this novel narrates the history of this story’s life in this place, the Berry family myth takes on a public life and force, requiring its readers to decide how we will respond. May it inspire the local work that produces local benefits, but even more profoundly, may it inspire gratitude for the divine patience and forgiveness that scripts all our stories, even when they are marked by the loss of beloved goods. —Jeffrey Bilbro, Plough, editor of Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms 

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story seeks to reclaim an enduring, time-honored notion of prosperity by means of a fictionalized account of real Berry family history — and real American history . . . Marce Catlett’s story remains for any who wish to claim it: a story of historic injustice — the ‘unwillingness to pay farmers for their work or the land for its yield’ — and the structurally effective means by which it was, for a time, combated. Marce Catlett offers a path forward.  — Eric Miller, Commonweal; Geneva College history professor, author of Glimpses of Another Land: Political Hopes, Spiritual Longings

Readers, new or longstanding, will be grateful to have read Marce Catlett, and will appreciate it as a conduit once more for Berry’s important perspective and critique on our belonging to community and land. The book deeply implores us to acknowledge the stories that we ourselves live into and that shape our understanding of the world around us. Whether familial, biblical or fictional, we are all shaped by stories, and Berry reminds us through his that tending to them is important work.  — Chris Taylor, The Presbyterian Outlook

Be sure to sell us which edition you want, hardback or paperback. Both are 20% off.

Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home Peter Santenello (Simon & Schuster) $30.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $24.00

This is not exactly about small towns or local places but it is a new travelogue of the sort I really like, (Do you remember the fantastic, thick book called Back Roads and Better Angels by Frances Barry? It remains a favorite for anybody wondering about how ordinary people (along Route 30) view democracy.) Your Fellow Americans seem less overtly political and is just a big collection of a whole lot of front porch stories. Santenello hard this bee in his bonnet to find ordinary folks and, man, he meets a lot of characters. He meets with Amish Snowbirds in Florida and searches for reindeer with Siberian Yupik people in Alaska. He is hosted on a houseboat deep in the Louisiana bayou and visits tiny town in Appalachia and hangs out on the streets of East LA.  I dipped in first to a chapter about the Mississippi Delta.

Your Fellow Americans is written with “humor, exuberance, and reverence for the human spirit” and is a celebration of the people of the United States of American. He says it is an invitation to “sit down, open up, and rediscover the soul of this place we call home.” Nice, huh?

Strip Mine Jesus: Hope for the Rural Church, Small Town & Overlooked Places Charles E. Cotherman (Baker) $22.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.39

This was one of our biggest sellers at Wee Kirk and one I glowed the most about. Charley is a friend and small town pastor in Western Pennsylvania himself, so he knows the social location of many of our Wee Kirk conferees. In fact, he runs a think-tank and study center about rural church life (The Center for Rural Ministry) even as he works on occasion with the Brookings / American Enterprise Institute on US Rural Prosperity. He’s a Vineyard pastor, and this is not his first book.

Strip Mine Jesus is a book every congregant in small towns or rural spaces needs to have in their library. This is a conversation we all must be having, wondering how our often forgotten places can be ripe for important ministry. As the back cover notes, “Jesus hasn’t given up on small, exploited, and overlooked places, and neither should we.”

There are a good handful of titles on rural life and rural churches. (See, for instance, God’s Country: Faith, Hope, and the Future of the Rural Church and Flyover Church: How Jesus’ Ministry in Rural Places Is Good News Everywhere, both by Brad Roth and published by Herald Press) or the fabulous collections from the Rural Church Institute,  The God of Small Places: A Rural Church Institute Resource, edited by Glenn Daman & Jeffrey Clark and Retooling the Rural Church for the Twenty-First Century (both published by Wipe & Stock.) We’ve got ‘em!

I’d very highly recommend starting with this. Strip Mine Jesus is a much-needed book and we are thrilled to help promote it.

Fresh Expressions of the Rural Church Michael Adam Beck & Tyler Kleeberger (Abingdon) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

We’ve got bunches of books on maintenance and congregational health of small churches. From worshipping well in a small congregation to doing education in a small church, there are a number. Write to us if you need more info. But this one is unique and I thought I’d tell you about it again.

Fresh Expressions is an ecumenical movement (rooted somewhat in Wesleyan circles) helping empower congregations to do something in ministry that isn’t (as far as I understand it) not exactly traditional church planting. We don’t need to start fully new congregations, but we can tweak and expand our outreach, maybe even deepening a project we already have going. I know of a church that started offering hikes on a local trails and ended up with a real ministry on their hands. As they learned to worship together at the trail’s end, it was almost like that was a fresh expression of more conventional church. Some of those folks would have never darkened the door of a church so they did ministry — not unlike what campus ministry teams do, or maybe missionaries — finding way to host programing where people can be enfolded into faith communities of sorts. From meetings of a handful of seekers at a coffee shop to random gatherings of specialized groups — quilters, birdwatchers, bread makers, social service helpers — how can these good project becomes inroads to spiritual formation and worship and, maybe, church? I think that is an experimental vision of outreach that is intentional about helping the unchurches feel comfortable with Scripture and praise and worship and service together. Not exactly church planting, but new and creative efforts at starting new worshipping communities.

Beck and Kleeberger have documented in this remarkable book ways the Fresh Expression movement have taken hold in small towns and rural spaces. Can small rural churches really find the energy and people to do such innovative outreach ministries? Can there be Fresh Expression ministries in rural locales? Surprisingly, yes.  We really can, as this book says on the back, “learn to cultivate the extraordinary gifts of Christian community in the countryside.”

This book collects very inspiring stories from diverse rural contexts across the US. It offers a readable, fresh theology for rural life and “offers principles for harnessing the potential of what some consider the forgotten spaces.” Each chapter includes a helpful “Field Exercise” (questions to ponder and suggested actions for teams to work through together” as they think through possible application in their own setting. Beck is co-pastor of two churches in north central Florida and Kleeberger is in small town Ohio. This is a very cool book.

The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry Matthew Erickson (Eerdmans) $26.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

Besides a dozen different books on small church life, and small church leadership, from The Strategically Small Church: Intimate, Nimble, Authentic, and Effective by Brandon O’Brien (published by Baker Academic) to Jason Byassee’s lovely The Gifts of the Small Church (Abingdon Press) to The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation by Allen Stanton (Fortress Press) and so many more, we also had dozens of books for pastors. Lot’s were rather specific — facing burnout, handling adaptive change, being bi-vocational, navigating church conflict, etc.

The Pastor as Gardener is one that I invited everyone to read, whether they are clergy or not. In fact, I suggested it’s a good thing for collegial and supportive congregants to read books about the calling of the minister. And this one is a great, fun, exciting one to read.

As I have said more than once here at BookNotes, this is a splendid, well written book shaped by the metaphor of gardening and informed by the agrarian localism of Wendell Berry. Erickson is a more colorful writer than Berry and he isn’t too deep into the regenerative farming, but he really does imagine pastoring work as a sort of farming, in the fields of the Lord. Alan Jacobs (a fairly sophisticated scholar) says it is a “quietly, deeply, sweetly, meditative book.”  Vincent Bacote says it “will bring great benefit to all who love Christ and his church.”

There is a fabulous, wonderfully written foreword by Winn Collier, director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination and saying that at Wee Kirk (since Peterson has been our speaker there in the past) was a great way to place this good book. Oh yeah, and Winn wrote one of my favorite small-town, small church books, himself. See below.

Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small Town Church Winn Collier (Eerdmans) $25.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $20.79

I did highlight a novel or two in my up-front book promos at Wee Kirk — Alan Levi’s Theo of Golden, obviously, and Guite’s Galahad and the Grail. Some years we pitch Gilead by Marilyn Robinson for obvious reasons and this year we sold a few Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter. Perfect.

This novel is a splendid small work written as a series of letters from a somewhat cranky, no-nonsense pastor who takes a call to pastor a broken-down small church. Jonas is a bit weary (working in a dead end insurance job) and when Granby Presbyterian calls him—- they too are plenty weary — he agrees to be their shepherd, as long as they don’t expect a CEO or manager or coach. He’s going to be an old school pastor and these letters span a handful of years in his ministry, “ruminating on everything from fly-fishing to the Nicene Creed.” Attentive readers will realize that Winn was, while writing this novel, deeply influenced by the style and vision of Eugene Peterson and it makes sense that Winn went on to write the authorized biography of Peterson, A Burning in My Bones. I do not mean to suggest that this is a Peterson-inspired story, altough the earth spirituality and the gentle effort towards a long obedience in the same direction seems about right.

Peterson said:

This book is a tour de force–an angle on understanding the life of both congregation and pastor that exceeds anything I have ever read. No directions, no programs, just an immersion into what really takes place in the life of a congregation and a pastor. Winn Collier’s writing is alive.

 

Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry Andrew Root (Baker Academic) $29.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $23.99

Wee Kirk includes some serious thinkers, laypeople and pastors, even if most prefer reading a bit more on the accesible and practical side. But for those up for it, Baal and the Gods of More seemed to me to be spot on, a serious, heady, contextualized critique of the idolatry of growth. Growth ideologies give us unspoken assumptions that bigger is better and works against the Wee Kirk vibe of “small is beautiful.” I thought this would be one they’d really appreciate.

Appreciate it they did. We had some good conversations next to my stacked up and nicely displayed bunch. But you know what? Small churches in most places know that they can’t grow much. They aren’t going to do zippy programming in their often older buildings and with their own aging demographics, they aren’t on the front lines of edgy evangelism. They do more funerals than baptisms.

And they are mostly okay with that. Some are nostalgic — the older ones remember when their churches were booming — and some wish for innovative ministry of one sort or another. But they haven’t worshipped the gods of more and they didn’t need to read an academic treatise on the American church growth culture and a denunciation of the idols of the age.

But you maybe should. Am I wrong? Most churches are infected one way or another with this drive towards innovation and efficiency and growth. Just the other day we got a new book called Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease by Gabe Bullard (Hanover Square Press; $32.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60.) I can’t imagine a church leader thinking that’s a good idea, but, in the long run, somehow, maybe saying no to the idols of “more” and “bigger” (and cheaper and quicker) will demand some countercultural habits. There is a cost to all the gimmicks to create a frictionless church growth mindset, and Andrew Root is the best guide to help us break free of the spirit of the age. Highly recommended.

Lost, Hidden, Small: Finding the Way of Jesus Where We Never Think to Look Kate Haynes Murphy (Broadleaf) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I started my little up-front announcement about this one noting the Anne Lamott quote on the front cover: “I loved this book for its wisdom, message and welcome, its depth and its many charms, especially the clear and deeply human voice of the author, Pastor Kate.” Not bad, eh?

I could have named Wesley Vander Lugt, a theological and excellent writer — we loved his Beauty is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breath — who has on the back cover these words:

Walter Brueggemann has written about how the true work of ministry is rejecting the dominant cultural script — what he calls therapeutic, technological, consumeristic militarism — and living by the counter-script of God. Kate Haynes Murphy casts a similar vision and invites us to embrace an appropriately uncomfortable counter-script that challenges typical American ways of viewing church. Murphy vulnerably recounts her own faith and leadership journey; the temptation to desire a church that is large, in charge, and the talk of the town; and the humbling discovery that the way of Jesus often leads in the opposite direction. This book is an honest and encouraging saga of how someone who feels like a train wreck can participate in the subversive script and ministry of God. It’s an invitation to find kinship and delight in the league of holy losers.

Who doesn’t want a church that is “large, in charge, and the talk of the town.” But, oh, what if we invited and hosted a different vision among us? What if we found the way of Jesus by exploring his parables about the lost and the hidden. Could a small, quiet, gentle, counter-cultural faith spring forth in the ashes of the recentered gods of more?

With Murphy’s storytelling and honesty and effort to “burn down the illusion we’ve built around our faith” (as Rachel Marie Kang put it) this eloquent book could help us find a refreshing way to live. She asks “what if the abundant life lies in finding what’s been lost, uncovering what is hidden, and learning to hope in what is small?” Lost Hidden Small” Finding the Way of Jesus Where We Never Think to Look is an amazing book, serious and profound, even as it is written with a light touch. We are all lost. This book — written by the  somewhat edgy pastor of The Grove Church in Charlotte NC — could help. Even for those of us who are not in wee kirks or small places. Buy it today!

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