I
was fortunate to read many books (published in the last twelve months) worth recommending over the last month.
- (5.0) The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder by Lisa Gungor (Zondervan, 2018)
- (4.5) Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith by Mihee Kim-Kort (Fortress Press, 2018)
- (4.5) Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive by Bradley R. Staats (Harvard Business Review, 2018)
- (4.5) The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics by Cyndi Suarez (New Society Publishers, 2018)
- (4.5) Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You by Heidi Grant (Harvard Business Review, 2018)
- (4.0) Transforming Communities: How People Like You Are Healing Their Neighborhoods by Sandhya Rani Jha (Chalice Press, 2017)
- (4.o) Switchers: How Smart Professionals Change Careers – and Seize Success by Dawn Graham (Amacom, 2018)
- (4.0) Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations by Michael J. Arena (McGraw-Hill Education, 2018)
- (3.5) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old by Parker J. Palmer (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018)
So What?
“Divine Mother, grant me eyes to see.” — Lisa Gungor
It seems there will never be an end to writing about the shifting religious landscape. While those contributions offer significant sociological insight, personal stories alone provide the power of lived experience. Two such volumes top this month’s list.
Lisa Gungor’s The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen: Opening Your Eyes to Wonder is an honest, authentic, real, raw, and evolving story. For Gungor, life unfolds in surprising ways as she enters adulthood, gets married, begins a musical career, becomes a mother (and later becomes a mother of a daughter with Down Syndrome). Just as these life events don’t go exactly as planned, neither does her journey away from her childhood faith and into something new that continues to evolve.
Mihee Kim-Kort’s Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith somehow manages to elucidate queerness in a way that resonated unlike anything else I’ve read. Her life began in Seol, Korea before she and her family immigrated to the United States while she was quite young. Reflecting on many of the challenges and clarifying experiences in her own journey, the book is equal parts personal, pastoral, and prophetic. Kim-Kort introduces her readers to queer theory and queer theology masterfully weaving wisdom to both broaden and deepen.
The journey of faith is different for each traveler.
- Think about your own faith story from birth to the present. What are some key milestones and important stories? Who have you shared these with recently?
- When is the last time you listened to parts of the faith story of someone from a tradition quite different from your own? How might you engage in more such sharing in the future?
For additional recommendations of books published in 2018 check out