A Story of Growth and Breaking Down in an American Church

Active for forty years, Circle of Hope was a web of four interconnected churches in the Philadelphia area. Committed to the causes of justice and service, Circle of Hope became a haven for Christians who were seeking something different from what traditional evangelicalism had to offer, or more ‘countercultural’ modes to follow Christ. Informed by her years of experience in journalism, Eliza Griswold recounts the moment that Circle of Hope approached a pivotal point of breakdown in its history. Met with a pandemic, internal strife, political division, and changing tides of activism, Circle of Hope was forced to reckon with its vulnerabilities as questions about its inner structures of power arose. Tender, respectful, and honest, Griswold’s book acts as a microcosmic view of the things that we love and the things that hurt us in the American Church.

Eliza Griswold is the Ferris Professor and Director of Princeton University’s Journalism program. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2019 book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Griswold is the author of six books and also writes for The New Yorker.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“A compassionate narrative . . . propulsive and immersive . . . An ardent, distinctive work, generous and character-driven, with concerns that speak directly to the current moment and beyond

-Ayana Mathis, The Washington Post

“Eliza Griswold is a dazzling reporter: ever observant, wise, sympathetic, and honest. And in this spellbinding book, she not only immerses herself in a radical religious community but also reveals its fracturing in real time, raising questions about the nature of faith and justice and what binds us as Americans.”

– David Grann, author of The Wager

“Set against the backdrop of race, sexuality, and belief, Circle of Hope is a deeply captivating and sometimes troubling dive into a world of faith and frustrations often hidden by the political, antagonistic, and triumphalist projections of American Evangelicalism.”

– Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism

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A Story of Growth and Breaking Down in an American Church

Known for her evocative poetry, prose, and music, Patti Smith first took to Instagram in 2018 to begin sharing her photography. A Book of Days chronicles a full 365 days in Smith’s life through images she’s taken. These are portraits of grief, celebration, the mundane, and the extraordinary. Smith calls her photos “a glimpse of how I navigate this culture in my own way. It was inspired by my Instagram but is uniquely its own. Much of it I created during the pandemic, in my room alone, projecting into the future and reflecting the past, family, and a consistent personal aesthetic.” Smith’s images are silhouettes of her incredible life, her poetry reverberating through everyday things: “anniversary pearls, a mother’s keychain, and a husband’s Mosrite guitar.” Personally vulnerable, yet never straying from her unique aesthetic, A Book of Days opens readers to Smith’s inner worlds.

Patti Smith is an author, poet, and songwriter. First arriving on the music scene with her acclaimed 1975 album Horses, Smith was eventually inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her book Just Kids, written about her relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, won a National Book Award in 2010. She has released 11 albums and has authored 25 books.

– Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism

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A Memoir of Christianity Via Negativa

Devastated and spiritually diminished by his mother’s declining health, Belden Lane searched for meaning by escaping for hikes in the wilderness. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes documents the worldview that Lane developed through his trips and through deep scholarship. Landing on the concept of Christianity via negativa, Lane found and argues in this work that God appears through absence: silence, desolate spaces, and death. As much as it is a story about emptiness, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes is as much a promise of hope: Lane describes the freedom one can find in giving up the ‘false self’- the version of personhood that is only concerned with appearances- and surrendering to the vastness and holiness of negative space. Lane combines thoughtfulness and emotion by drawing from the works of renowned Christian authors like St. John of the Cross, Simone Weil, and Edward Abbey, as well as his deeply personal experience of questioning and grief.

Belden C. Lane is a professor of Theology at Saint Louis University. He is the author of several books, including Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice and Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. His interests include wilderness backpacking, desert spirituality, and storytelling.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Lane, a Presbyterian minister teaching theology at a Catholic University, makes some of the rich tradition of the Christian people available to us in a uniquely powerful way because he has allowed it to live in his own life and has an artist’s ability to make that experience present to us. This is theology at its most fruitful best and an exquisitely beautiful read.”

-M. Basil Pennington

“This is a beautifully written book in which the author describes and unfolds the mutually illuminating interaction in himself between his profound sensitivity to place, especially the hard places of this earth, and his experience of one of the hardest of life’s losses. Lane uses his wide and deep knowledge of the mystical tradition to interpret this experience in such a way that the reader is enlightened and encouraged. Reading this book is an experience of the human engagement with the Mystery of God as lived by the author.”

– Sandra M. Schneiders. Professor of New Testament and Christian Spirituality, The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley

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Questions from the Church’s Highest Point

Richard Holloway chronicles his life’s journey in Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, from leaving Ireland as a young teenager to train for the priesthood, to resigning from the posts of Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church at age 67. Throughout his book, Holloway recounts the doubt that endured his life of utmost piety, as he wrestled with questions of ethics and authority as they stood in the Church. A champion of progressive causes, Holloway reflects in Leaving Alexandria on his “after-religion” worldview as it appears in the context of his own life and in that of global, constantly-evolving Christianity. Equal parts thoughtful and tender, Leaving Alexandria is Holloway’s compassionate reflection on a life with more questions than answers.

Richard Holloway is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the author of many books, including On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgivable? and A Little History of Religion. In addition, he has written for The Times, The Guardian, and other major publications. He is a patron of LGBT Youth of Scotland and was formerly chair of the BMA Steering Group on Ethics and Genetics

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Full of human wisdom, this is a psychologically acute and absorbing approach to a very important subject.”

-Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy

“I don’t know when I have been more impressed, indeed, excited, by a work . . . It answers the seemingly unanswerable tormenting questions in a completely satisfying way.”

– Ruth Rendell, author of Harm Done

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Forgiveness from Americus, Georgia

Greg Wittkamper, a white teenager in the 1960s, welcomed desegregation at Americus High School, having grown up on a diverse, accepting Christian commune. The same could not be said for his fellow white students, who subjected Greg to endless cruelty as punishment for his lack of hostility toward black students. In The Class of ’65, Atlanta journalist Jim Auchmutey explores Greg’s life in Americus, as well as the moment when a dozen white students reached out to Greg 40 years after graduating high school, seeking his forgiveness for their past behavior. Auchmutey’s book involves Greg unearthing the traumatic abuse he endured in his teenage years, while at the same time taking a complicated path toward radical forgiveness of his peers. As devastating as it is hopeful, The Class of ’65 tells a true story of redemption while recalling chilling details of the racially divided American South during the Civil Rights Era.

Jim Auchmutey is a former journalist at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, with stories focusing on culture and life in the American South. In addition to The Class of ’65, Auchmutey is also the author of Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America and The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook. He is a two-time winner of Cox Newspapers chain’s Writer of the Year award.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Jim Auchmutey set out to write a book about one man’s journey to forgiveness, but The Class of ’65 is truly the story of how one generation discovered its soul. [Auchmutey] takes readers to that reunion and beautifully describes the conflictive feelings that were present.”

-The Columbus Ledger Dispatch

“A spellbinding, deeply sensitive portrayal of the conflicted heart of the South. Through the stories of children who have now become middle age, we see racism crashing into conscience, cowardice transforming into courage.”

– Hank Klibanoff, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Race Beat

“Author Jim Auchmutey, a journalist who worked for nearly three decades at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, expertly tells the story of that student, the Americus community, the larger civil rights struggle and an unexpected reconciliation decades later. The reconciliation that follows in Auchmutey’s compelling narrative is at times tentative and halting, but also filled with emotional power. And it appears to be still in progress. At the time of the reunion, it included only Wittkamper and his white classmates. The closing section of Auchmutey’s book suggests another chapter yet to be written, as blacks and whites together make peace with the past.”

– The Associated Press

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Having Hope in the Darkest of Places

Inspired by her life of ministry and service, Sarah Farmer presents a model for fostering agency and perseverance among incarcerated women in Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons. Examining moments of both suffering and joy amid the circumstances of these women, Farmer platforms their voices and experiences to argue for the value of theological programs in their lives. Honest and with great analytical depth, Farmer approaches the complicated and often tragic circumstances- things like “chronic and infectious disease, reproductive health challenges, substance abuse, sexual victimization, poverty, unemployment, housing insecurity, maternal incarceration, shame and stigma, grief, trauma, diminished faith”- that inform women’s incarceration. With a focus on hope and justice, and written with the knowledge that only direct experience provides, Restorative Hope is an important pedagogy and narrative for serving communities in the most desolate of conditions.

Sarah F. Farmer is the Associate Director at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. She was previously a professor of community development and practical theology at Indiana Wesleyan University and an associate research scholar and lecturer at Yale Divinity School. She also worked with the Youth Hope-Builders Academy at Interdenominational Theological Center and founded Youth Arts and Peace Camp in Chester, Pennsylvania.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“By connecting mobility to hope, Farmer names something fundamental about the prison —restricting movement also restricts hope. As readers learn firsthand how incarcerated women nurture hope in a place characterized by restraint, we are invited into a shared project with them. We may get proximate and cultivate spaces of hope where resilience is strengthened, identities are reclaimed, and meaningful connections are made. Farmer’s book is itself an instigator of hope, moving us to reclaim our own agency in the face of a seemingly unmovable reality.”

-Jennifer McBride, author of You Shall Not Condemn: A Story of Faith and Advocacy on Death Row

“Sarah Farmer listens brilliantly to those who are rarely heard—women who are or have been incarcerated. She listens with a depth of theological analysis and emotional intelligence unmatched by any other text on women in prison that I have ever read. This is one of the most beautiful accounts of a practice of hope that we have. If you read it, you might come to learn how to listen as well as Sarah Farmer. This book will be read for generations.”

– Willie James Jennings, Yale Divinity School

“Read the preface of this wonderfully written and carefully researched book by my former colleague and you will be hooked. As you read further, you will see hope come and spread its wings in some of our most desolate social spaces—prisons. A compelling practical theology and pedagogy of restorative hope.”

– Miroslav Volf, Yale Divinity School

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Untangling a Lie

Grace Elizabeth Hale learned in her early adult life about the heroism of her grandfather: a 1947 sheriff in Prentiss, Mississippi, who courageously protected a black man, wrongly accused of raping a white woman, from a ferocious mob. With the help of a Carnegie Fellowship, Hale endeavors in In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning to investigate the decades-old tale that held deep significance and emotional gravity in her family. The truth she uncovers unravels her own family history as she knows it.

Hale’s mission to uncover the story leads her to a new version of events that occurred on the day that Versie Johnson, the accused, died under the watch of Oury Berry, Hale’s grandfather. Johnson died by lynching, and Berry, as it turns out, sanctioned the attack. Through Hale’s deeply immersive research, In the Pines tells the buried, tortured story of Versie Johnson and examines the institutional and social structures of racism that conceal stories just like it. While grappling with her own family history, Hale seeks to uplift justice and set the record straight.

Grace Elizabeth Hale is a Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. She has received a variety of fellowships including the American Association of University Women, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the American Historical Association. Interested in the topics of white supremacy and the culture of the American South, Hale is also the author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Hale is a phenomenal historian, a dogged researcher, and a gifted writer.” 

-Kevin M. Kruse, author of One Nation Under God

“Intimate, devastating, and historically meticulous.”

– Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prizer winner and author of Devil in the Grove

“Courageous and compelling… essential and critically important.”

-Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

“Remarkable… Hale deftly captures the racial terror of the Jim Crow South.”

– John Grisham, award-winning novelist

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Unifying Symbols in the Face of Oppression

In The Aesthetics of Solidarity, theologian and University of Virginia Professor Nichole M. Flores probes the historical uses of Our Lady of Guadalupe as an aesthetic symbol among Latine Catholics. Reflecting first on the legend of Our Lady and Juan Diego, she goes on to highlight in her work the religious, political, and economic interests that Guadalupe functions to uplift, “ranging from the Chicano movement and United Farm Workers’ movements to contemporary calls for just immigration reform.” Through the course of these observations, Flores tracks the ways in which the symbol serves as a mirror back toward the beholder, allowing them to reflect inward on Guadalupe’s meaning for their own self concept: as a mother, as a revolutionary, or as a believer, to name a few. Making note of many of Guadalupe’s culturally significant ‘little stories’ through a critical and philosophical lens, Aesthetics makes a theologically compelling case for Guadalupe’s value for unification and democracy.

Nichole M. Flores is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Besides authoring The Aesthetics of Solidarity, Flores has written a number of articles and book chapters, including a chapter on Ella Baker for PLT Director Charles Marsh’s book Can I Get a Witness? Her research interests include the relationship between Catholic and Latinx communities and aesthetics to various issues, including (but not limited to) justice, democracy, race, ethnicity, and gender.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“At a moment when society is fraying and politics is polarized Flores provides a rich, ethical conception of democratic solidarity and its centrality to a politics of the common good in a pluralistic context. Arguing against key liberal philosophers, Flores’s theologically and aesthetically sophisticated political theology of solidarity creatively draws on a set of resources rooted in Latine responses to oppression, including movements for social justice, political campaigns, theatre, popular religious celebrations of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and experiences of lo cotidiano. In doing so the book models the best of what teologia en conjunto means both in practice and in scholarship.” 

-Luke Bretherton,  Robert E. Cushman Professor of Moral & Political Theology at Duke University

“The Aesthetics of Solidarity represents a major contribution to the ongoing development of U.S. Latinx theology. Flores has produced a first-rate scholarly monograph in which she carefully develops, and clearly articulates, the intellectual features of an aesthetics of solidarity ― a rich notion that will, no doubt, influence theological conversation in the future, not only among Latinx scholars but in the broader theological community.”

– Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology

“Nichole M. Flores expertly weaves in storytelling and theology to examine the usage of Marian symbols, from the Chicano movement to immigration organizers today. The Aesthetics of Solidarity is a must-read for everyone looking to deepen their understanding of Latinx theology and proves why Flores is one of the most important theological voices in the Catholic Church today.”

-Olga Segura, author of Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church

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Faith in the Aftermath of a Global Crisis

Chris Rice is confronting a world utterly changed by disease, death, and division in From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rice recognizes that things can never go back to the way they once were. However, he believes that such a crisis calls for a renewed relationship between God and humanity. The pandemic brought to light and exasperated various global issues, and Rice considers eight of these in his book with meaningful perspective on their implications to our faith lives. Drawing from his own experience in international and humanitarian relief, Rice offers a tangible vision and advice for redeemed relationships informed by our changing world.

Chris Rice is the director of the United Nations Office of the Mennonite Central Committee, where he promotes peace and reconciliation across the world through advocacy and education. He was the cofounding direction for the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation, and his work has led him to east Africa, Northeast Asia, and the American South. His other works include Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (2009), More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (2021), and his memoir Grace Matters: A Memoir of Faith, Friendship, and Hope in the Heart of the South (2003).

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“For the first time in the eight decades since World War II, the entire world has been affected by the same devastating crisis at the same time.’ These words written by Chris Rice highlight the unique moment we have journeyed through. But this moment―in a culture that quickly and mindlessly moves on―requires sustained reflection on the ways the global pandemic has shaped and continues to shape our lives. With clarity of vision and actionable practices, Chris powerfully explores the ways we are globally connected as well as the opportunities for renewal that are before us. This is a book we all need, every single one of us.”

-Rich Villodas, lead pastor of New Life Fellowship and author of The Deeply Formed Life

“In the midst of crisis, the church finds an opportunity. My friend Chris Rice has written a text that shines the moral lens of our Christian faith on the complex social reality we find ourselves in as a church. Chris offers a compelling and hopeful vision of how spiritual practices can provide the power and opportunity for Christian witness. He offers the possibility of hope even in these challenging times.”

-Soong-Chan Rah, Robert Munger Professor of Evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Prophetic Lament 

“This is a book of honest, truth-seeking stories and practices emerging from and leading to a life of spiritual alertness. In a time when many of us are going numb, with consequences that can only be fatal on a massive scale, Chris Rice is throwing us a lifeline. Read this book slowly, in the company of others, to explore how the personal, relational, political, and structural dimensions of essential change connect for each one of us.”

-Ellen F. Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School

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The Significance of Endings

Reflecting on the retirements of noted writers like Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace, Mark C. Taylor considers the intellectual and emotional importance of reaching the end of one’s career and later, their life, in Last Works: Lessons in Leaving. Careful to reckon with cultural conceptions of retirement, Taylor describes the various attitudes of authors on the edge of life – ranging from deep sadness to exhaustion to resounding joy – and gently leads his readers into a nuanced conversation with death. Ultimately, Taylor argues that the agreement one must come to with dying is deeply valuable to recognizing and appreciating the present circumstance of life. Bursting with creativity and emotion, Taylor employs his masterful knowledge of religion and philosophy’s most prominent figures and works to build a powerful case for the spiritual purpose of leaving.

Mark C. Taylor is currently a professor of religion at Columbia University and also taught at Williams College from 1973-2007. He is the author of many books, including Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left (2014), Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kiregaard (1980), and After God (2007). His research interests include the intersection between religion and art, philosophy of religion, and artificial intelligence. He writes frequently for the New York Times and appears often on NPR.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Last Works is a dazzling tapestry of reflection on the final works of writers Mark Taylor has loved through his many transformations. This is Taylor’s intellectual autobiography, his relentless and moving quest to understand religion in its many engagements with literature.”

-Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia

“As Mark Taylor’s brilliant meditation on last works moves towards its own end, it folds one writer’s life and language into the next to thicken the strange meanings of thought time: knowing that we die.

-Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World

“Modern life is a map of realms or worlds, intellectual and cultural as well as geographic that abut without necessarily connecting. The thinkers whom the larger world needs most are those who have ventured farthest from their starting points without sacrificing intellectual rigor. Such a thinker is Mark C. Taylor.”

-Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

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