We asked our authors to recommend a book they had read over the past couple of years. Here is what they said:
Two of the organizations on whose boards I have served are spearheading a misleading effort to establish as a principle that “a girl/woman is a girl/woman,” whether she is trans or cis. Such a principle would destroy the category of female competition in many sports because of the biological differences between girls who are female at birth and those who are born as males and transition to being girls/women. This book will be a major contribution to our understanding that sometimes (biological) sex really matters. —James Coleman
I would never have thought that a book of over 400 pages, ostensibly about writing on a plant (!), would hold my interest. But like other great syntheses, it intertwines the invention of writing and books with broader historical trends and with the niche of various media in our own time. —Howard Gardner
Barbara Kingsolver creates characters with human frailty and dignity who are caught in tragic life circumstances. She tells their stories with profound compassion and hope. —James Plews-Ogan
Rumi is my favorite poet. He speaks so deeply about the co-existence of grief and joy, and the stance of welcoming all of life’s experience, even the most painful. —Margaret Plews–Ogan
Erpenbeck is one of the leading contemporary writers in Germany today. The story is set in Berlin in 2015, at the time when African refugees were pouring in and setting up camp in one of the main squares of the city. The protagonist is a recently retired professor from Humbolt University (formerly in East Berlin), and the story concerns his quiet struggle to construct a life of purpose and connection after retirement. Erpenbeck’s writing is spare and elegant, and she conveys the interiority of her main character with subtlety and nuance. One of the best books I have read in the past several years. —Clayton Spencer
Robert Ellsberg, with wit and expert strokes, illustrates how holiness is our calling through the lives of the saints and spiritual masters as they attended to God as their first and abiding love. —Carolyn Woo
Spring 2024
From the Editor
Welcome
Suzanne Shanahan
Part I: Pursuing Virtue
L. Gregory Jones
Sabrina B. Little
Kelli Reagan Hickey
Jesse S. Summers
Blest Be the Ties that Bind: Remembering a Purpose of Religio in Higher Education
Luke A. Powery
Interlude: Purposeful Pursuits
Howard Gardner
Part II: Pursuing Vocation
Clayton Spencer
James Coleman, Jr.
James and Margaret Plews-Ogan
Carolyn Woo
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