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We asked our authors to recommend a book they had read over the past couple of years. Here is what they said:
Drawing on the story of the existential threat to the Crow Nation, Lear considers how cultivating radical hope helps people endure the unimaginable. It’s a book for anyone whose life is precarious, which is to say, it’s a book for all. —Lydia S. Dugdale
The Kite Runner is a powerful, emotional novel that shows the complex reality of human existence through the lens of friendship. One of the best stories I have read. —Nooshin Javadi
In his Spiritual Biography (2021), Michael Battle shatters the false binary between the sacred and the secular by making a compelling case that Archbishop Tutu’s political actions for social justice were not in spite of his deep spirituality, but rather because of it. In this regard Tutu’s social spirituality modeled and embodied what The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church, produced by black Anti-Apartheid theologians in 1985, called prophetic theology, i.e. speaking truth to power. —A. Rashied Omar
This book is a hauntingly beautiful, fast-paced story of hope, courage, and everyday resistance during World War II, which seems an apt recommendation for this issue of Virtues & Vocations. It reminds the reader that there is light (and goodness) even in the darkest (and cruelest) of times. —Suzanne Shanahan
It’s rare to encounter an idea that fundamentally reshapes the way you see the world. Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire was such an experience for me. It revealed that most of my desires were not my own, but borrowed; I was unwittingly imitating others. Recognizing how and why this happens is liberating; it allows you to uncover the hidden influences driving your desires, and empowers you to redirect them. Luke Burgis’s Wanting offers the best recent introduction to Girard’s oeuvre and to how mimesis works in all aspects of our lives.
—Brandon Vaidyanathan
In the age of YouTube, sermons are almost never published anymore. But Rev. Barber is a master of the art of preaching in the public square, and this sermon to America, which can be read in a single sitting, diagnoses so much of what ails us as a society and breathes a prophetic Word of hope into our common life. At its best, a sermon can get inside its listener and not only speak to them, but also through them. I love this book because it invites its readers to join a movement that offers real hope to them and the world around them. —Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
This is the most gripping novel I have read in years, with characters hard to forget. It describes how violence undoes the world, and what forms of empathy we will need to live peaceably with each other and with the earth. —Norman Wirzba
