At the center of What We Owe are critical questions about responsibility: responsibility to country, to justice, to family, and to oneself. Bonde resolutely eschews easy answers. Her prose is lyrical in its crispness. But the narrative is also stark in a heartbreaking way that will gnaw at you for a long while.

In Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, Elizabeth Oldfield uses the seven deadly sins as a framework for exploring practices that can shape character and provide consolation in the midst of global upheaval and troubling times. Oldfield is a Christian and tells her own story of finding and losing and finding faith again, but she claims that whether readers share her faith or not, the concepts connected to the seven deadly sins and the practices for dealing with them can be helpful to anyone who wants to navigate life better. She proposes that in the face of problems that are too big for any individual to solve (like climate change), we retain agency over the kinds of people we are, and it is worthwhile to develop the sort of character that will prepare us to do what is right and good even if it seems the world is falling apart.

Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s latest book begins with a bit of a confession: she doesn’t much like the term calling. It is too lofty, too loaded. An emerita professor of religion and practical theologian at Vanderbilt University, Miller-McLemore has authored, co-authored or edited more than 18 multi-disciplinary books and her latest is all about calling.

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference is an aspirational call to action for young people to pursue meaningful lives of substantive and scalable impact. Moral ambition for Bregman is the commitment to eschew a life oriented around personal gain to focus upon solving the world’s most pressing problems. The book is an extended plea to act.

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (2023) is an eloquently spare and finely observed novel about a middle aged woman’s quest to make sense of her life and the world around her. The Booker Prize short listed novel, framed as a journal, begins as the main character is retreating from her life—her environmental work and her husband--to an isolated religious community in desolate New South Wales close to her family home she left some thirty years prior after the death of her parents. The woman is not religious, thinks little of God and is perplexed by prayer. The odd choice to take refuge in a community of religious sisters focuses her lurking despair. Unreconciled guilt and grief quietly torment her but she finds an unexpected comfort in the secluded and rhythmic nature of daily life in this community. The woman notes, “The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain or endlessly converse.” One reviewer called the novel an extended meditative vigil.