1st Annual Christmas Book Wish List
The 1st Annual Christmas Book Wish List from the Faculty and Staff of Knox College. I reached out to the great people with whom I am privileged to work and invited them to share their book suggestions for ministry leaders. They didn’t disappoint! Check out these fantastic recommendations. Let us know if you found one of them under your tree this year!
Reimagining Jesus and Faith
Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, 2022
By Diana Butler Bass
How can you still be a Christian?
This is the most common question Diana Butler Bass is asked today. It is a question that many believers ponder as they wrestle with disappointment and disillusionment in their church and its leadership. But while many Christians have left their churches, they cannot leave their faith behind.
In Freeing Jesus, Bass challenges the idea that Jesus can only be understood in static, one-dimensional ways and asks us to instead consider a life where Jesus grows with us and helps us through life’s challenges in several capacities: as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence.
Freeing Jesus is an invitation to leave the religious wars behind and rediscover Jesus in all his many manifestations, to experience Jesus beyond the narrow confines we have built around him. It renews our hope in faith and worship at a time when we need it most.
Buy the book here
Jesus and John Wayne
By Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”
As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.
Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.
Buy the book here
The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, 2023
By Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Esteemed Bible scholars and teachers Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include the creation of the world, the role of Adam and Eve, the Suffering Servant of Isiah, the book of Jonah, and Psalm 22, whose words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” Jesus quotes as he dies on the cross.
Comparing various interpretations—historical, literary, and theological—of each ancient text, Levine and Brettler offer deeper understandings of the original narratives and their many afterlives. They show how the text speaks to different generations under changed circumstances, and so illuminate the Bible’s ongoing significance. By understanding the depth and variety by which these passages have been, and can be, understood, The Bible With and Without Jesus does more than enhance our religious understandings, it helps us to see the Bible as a source of inspiration for any and all listeners.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Buy the book here
Navigating Contemporary Issues
On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, 2023
By Danya Ruttenberg
A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues.
American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides.
For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are.
Maimonides laid out five steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, including systemic racism and the legacy of enslavement, sexual violence and harassment in the wake of #MeToo, and Native American land rights, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward.
Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.
Buy the book here
The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything, 2022
by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
We live in the midst of a crisis of home. It is evident in the massive uprooting and migration of millions across the globe, in the anxious nationalism awaiting immigrants in their destinations, in the unhoused populations in wealthy cities, in the fractured households of families, and in the worldwide destruction of habitats and international struggles for dominance. It is evident, perhaps more quietly but just as truly, in the aching sense that there is nowhere we truly belong.
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The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, 2021 2nd Edition
By Miroslav Volf
Winner of the 2007 Christianity Today Book Award in Christianity and Culture
How should we remember atrocities? Should we ever forgive abusers? Can we not hope for final reconciliation, even if it means redeemed victims and perpetrators spending eternity together?
We live in an age which insists that past wrongs—genocides, terrorist attacks, bald personal injustices—should never be forgotten. But Miroslav Volf here proposes the radical idea that letting go of such memories—after a certain point and under certain conditions—may actually be a gift of grace we should embrace. Volf’s personal stories of persecution and interrogation frame his search for theological resources to make memories a wellspring of healing rather than a source of deepening pain and animosity. Controversial, thoughtful, and incisively reasoned, The End of Memory begins a conversation that we avoid to our great detriment.
This second edition includes an appendix on the memories of perpetrators as well as victims, a response to his critics, and a recent James K. A. Smith interview with Volf about the nature and function of memory in the Christian life.
Buy the book here
Theological Exploration
Jesus and the Forces of Death, 2020
By Matthew Thiessen
"Forces of Death" by Matthew Thiessen is a groundbreaking exploration that redefines our understanding of Jesus's relationship with Jewish purity regulations. In this compelling and wonderfully written work, Thiessen challenges prevailing scholarly views by demonstrating that Jesus did not reject or oppose the ancient Jewish purity laws, as commonly believed. Instead, he argues that the Gospel narratives depict Jesus as dismantling the forces of death that result in ritual impurity, presenting a fresh and convincing exegesis of the Gospels.
Thiessen's meticulous study navigates the distinctions between the sacred and the pure, as well as the morally and ritually impure, shedding light on the significance of blood, skin conditions, and death in understanding how the Gospels portray Jesus of Nazareth. Contrary to previous proposals, Thiessen contends that the Gospel authors insisted that, in Jesus, the God of Israel had released a 'powerfully contagious force of holiness.' By examining the Jewish purity regulations, Thiessen unveils a Jesus whose superior holiness purifies and removes the sources of ritual and moral impurity, introducing the powerful holiness of God into the world and overcoming every source of impurity and death.
The book addresses the pervasive and false view that Jesus opposed the Jewish ritual purity system, offering a clear, elegant, and profound argument that enhances our comprehension of ancient Jewish law and practice. Thiessen's work not only contributes to the recovery of Jesus's Jewish heritage but also makes a powerful case for the ongoing relevance of the Hebrew Bible in understanding the historical context of Christianity and its significance for contemporary Christians.
"Forces of Death" is a thought-provoking and in-depth study that intervenes in historical and theological interpretations, challenging constricted ideas and damaging misinterpretations of first-century Judaism and Jesus's ministry. Thiessen's innovative interpretation of the Gospel stories aligns Jesus's actions wholly with Jewish laws, providing a welcome addition to the scholarship on purity in the New Testament. This compelling book is sure to generate much discussion and debate, offering readers a more faithful portrayal of Jesus in his historical context and highlighting the life-giving aspects of his teaching and healing.
Buy the book here
A Jewish Paul, 2023
By Matthew Thiessen
What was the apostle Paul's relationship to Judaism? How did he view the Jewish law? How did he understand the gospel of Jesus's messiahship relative to both ethnic Jews and gentiles? These remain perennial questions both to New Testament scholars and to all serious Bible readers.
Respected New Testament scholar Matthew Thiessen offers an important contribution to this discussion. A Jewish Paul is an accessible introduction that situates Paul clearly within first-century Judaism, not opposed to it. Thiessen argues for a more historically plausible reading of Paul. Paul did not reject Judaism or the Jewish law but believed he was living in the last days, when Israel's Messiah would deliver the nations from sin and death. Paul saw himself as an envoy to the nations, desiring to introduce them to the Messiah and his life-giving, life-transforming Spirit.
This new contribution to Pauline studies will benefit professors, students, and scholars of the New Testament as well as pastors and lay readers.
Buy the book Here
Paul, Politics, and New Creation: Reconsidering Paul and Empire, 2020
By Najeeb T. Haddad
Paul, Politics, and New Creation: Reconsidering Paul and Empire nuances Paul’s relationship with the Roman Empire. Using rhetorical, sociohistorical, and theological methods, Najeeb T. Haddad reevaluates claims of Paul’s anti-imperialism by situating him in his proper Hellenistic Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts.
Buy the book here
Personal & Communal Growth
Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make--and Keep--Friends, 2022 By Marisa G. Franco PhD
Is understanding the science of attachment the key to building lasting friendships and finding “your people” in an ever-more-fragmented world?
How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? In Platonic, Dr. Marisa G. Franco unpacks the latest, often counterintuitive findings about the bonds between us—for example, why your friends aren’t texting you back (it’s not because they hate you!), and the myth of “friendships happening organically” (making friends, like cultivating any relationship, requires effort!). As Dr. Franco explains, to make and keep friends you must understand your attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant: it is the key to unlocking what’s working (and what’s failing) in your friendships.
Making new friends, and deepening longstanding relationships, is possible at any age—in fact, it’s essential. The good news: there are specific, research-based ways to improve the number and quality of your connections using the insights of attachment theory and the latest scientific research on friendship. Platonic provides a clear and actionable blueprint for forging strong, lasting connections with others—and for becoming our happiest, most fulfilled selves in the process.
Grateful: The Subversive Practice Of Giving Thanks, 2019
Diana Butler Bass
If gratitude is good, why is it so hard to do? In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass untangles our conflicting understandings of gratitude and sets the table for a renewed practice of giving thanks.
We know that gratitude is good, but many of us find it hard to sustain a meaningful life of gratefulness. Four out of five Americans report feeling gratitude on a regular basis, but those private feelings seem disconnected from larger concerns of our public lives. In Grateful, cultural observer and theologian Diana Butler Bass takes on this “gratitude gap” and offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude.
Bass, author of the award-winning Grounded and ten other books on spirituality and culture, explores the transformative, subversive power of gratitude for our personal lives and in communities. Using her trademark blend of historical research, spiritual insights, and timely cultural observation, she shows how we can overcome this gap and make change in our own lives and in the world.
With honest stories and heartrending examples from history and her own life, Bass reclaims gratitude as a path to greater connection with god, with others, with the world, and even with our own souls. It’s time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude—the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.
Buy the book here
Grounded, 2017
Diana Butler Bass
The headlines are clear: religion is on the decline in America as many people leave behind traditional religious practices. Diana Butler Bass, leading commentator on religion, politics, and culture, follows up her acclaimed book Christianity After Religion by arguing that what appears to be a decline actually signals a major transformation in how people understand and experience God. The distant God of conventional religion has given way to a more intimate sense of the sacred that is with us in the world. This shift, from a vertical understanding of God to a God found on the horizons of nature and human community, is at the heart of a spiritual revolution that surrounds us — and that is challenging not only religious institutions but political and social ones as well.
Grounded explores this cultural turn as Bass unpacks how people are finding new spiritual ground by discovering and embracing God everywhere in the world around us—in the soil, the water, the sky, in our homes and neighborhoods, and in the global commons. Faith is no longer a matter of mountaintop experience or institutional practice; instead, people are connecting with God through the environment in which we live. Grounded guides readers through our contemporary spiritual habitat as it points out and pays attention to the ways in which people experience a God who animates creation and community.
Bass brings her understanding of the latest research and studies and her deep knowledge of history and theology to Grounded. She cites news, trends, data, and pop culture, weaves in spiritual texts and ancient traditions, and pulls it all together through stories of her own and others' spiritual journeys. Grounded observes and reports a radical change in the way many people understand God and how they practice faith. In doing so, Bass invites readers to join this emerging spiritual revolution, find a revitalized expression of faith, and change the world.
Buy the book here
Seasons Of Wonder: Making The Ordinary Sacred Through Projects, Prayers, Reflections, And Rituals: A 52-week Devotional, 2022
By Bonnie Smith Whitehouse
Seasons of Wonder is designed to allow you to gather together weekly with your loved ones and expand your understanding of divinity, specifically the radical but faithful idea that everything is sacred. This devotional is designed around weekly contemplative activities as well as interactive and transformative practices that connect us to surprise, awe, and wonder, including:
• uncomplicated crafts that honor creation
• simple recipes to make together
• conversation guides to cultivate the gifts of storytelling, deep listening, mystery, and community
• accessible introductions to liturgical observations and rituals
• plus four additional weeks of activities that you can incorporate whenever they’re appropriate, such as birthdays, sick days, or when you’re traveling together or blessing your home
In February readers might make a hiking stick to embark on a holy pilgrimage (even if it’s just in the neighborhood) and discover the meaning of Ash Wednesday, while in the summer months they can learn how to cherish the Earth’s seasons of holy pause by making prayer cards, bath salts, or family time capsules alongside the reading of peaceful liturgies and ancient prayers.
Bonnie Smith Whitehouse invites us all to consider the life-changing idea that small, intentional moments of wonder are charged manifestations of the grand presence of Christ in me, in you, and in this dazzling, vast—and imperiled—blue planet we call our beloved home. By spending a short amount of time together with Seasons of Wonder every week this year, you can transform an ordinary meeting into a sacred gathering.
Buy the book here
Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us, 2022
By Mark Yaconelli
Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us: Fear is wisdom. Vanity is virtuous. Violence is peace. In the pages of Between the Listening and the Telling, storyteller, author, and activist Mark Yaconelli leads readers into an enchanting meditation on the power of storytelling in our individual and collective lives. We tell stories to remember who we are. We tell stories to savor the pleasure of living. Stories can be medicine, and they can transform entire communities.
Through his work with The Hearth nonprofit, Yaconelli has spent thousands of hours listening to people as they grieve loss, deepen friendships, strengthen families, shed light on injustice, and recover hope. In this moving exploration he shows us how individuals and communities can recover the practice of storytelling to address the despair of climate change, the trauma of school shootings, the tragedy of undocumented immigration, and the daily struggle for meaning.
Between the Listening and the Telling offers an alloy of story, commentary, and meditation. In an era of runaway loneliness, alienation, global crisis, and despair, sharing stories helps us make a home within ourselves and one another. This book offers a hope for unity that we had nearly given up on.
Buy the book here
Cultural Transformation
Early Christian care for the poor, 2018
By K.C.Richardson
Beginning with Jesus’s ministry in the villages of Galilee and continuing over the course of the first three centuries as the movement expanded geographically and numerically throughout the Roman world, the Christians organized their house churches, at least in part, to provide subsistence insurance for their needy members. While the Pax Romana created conditions of relative peace and growing prosperity, the problem of poverty persisted in Rome’s fundamentally agrarian economy. Modeling their economic values and practices on the traditional patterns of the rural village, the Christians created an alternative subsistence strategy in the cities of the Roman empire by emphasizing need, rather than virtue, as the main criterion for determining the recipients of their generous giving.
Buy the book here
The radical Jesus, the Bible, and the Great Transformation, 2021
Douglas E. Oakman
The Radical Jesus offers a companion to the author’s previous article collection Jesus and the Peasants. Even more than in Jesus and the Peasants, these eleven chapters sharpen the focus on the political-economic meaning of Jesus then and the deeper values embodied in him that perhaps are still pertinent for now. Part One considers his activities and aims within the political economy of first-century Galilee. Part Two offers perspectives on the critical hermeneutical task of linking the values of Jesus and the Bible to a world that has undergone what Karl Polanyi called the Great Transformation. Polanyi argued suasively in his 1944 book that economy in the pre-industrial age was embedded in social relations and served necessary social purposes, while society after the Great Transformation became embedded within market capitalist economy to the detriment of social relations. This book finds in sustained critical dialog with the Radical Jesus another transforming force and a guiding light toward a more humane economy and society that will serve human need rather than selfish greed.
Buy the book here
Picture Books
In the Neighbourhood, 2022
By Rocio Bonilla
A silly and sweet picture book about neighbors, community, and making new friends where you least expect it.
A group of neighbors never talks to one another because they've all made assumptions about each other. Camila the chicken's house is too noisy, Mr. Martínez the fox seems so straight-laced, Felipe the mouse is nervous, and Pepe the ogre—well, you know about ogres. But one day, Mrs. Paquita's internet connection goes out. That starts a domino effect of neighbors helping neighbors. Soon, everything changes.
Buy the book here
All Creation Waits (Children’s Edition), 2023
By Gayle L. Boss
Each day of Advent a different animal shows children its own amazing way to meet the dark and cold. Wood Frog freezes into a frog-shaped cube of ice! For six months Painted Turtle doesn't breathe! Woodchuck can't be wakened, even if shaken! With each creature, children hear the refrain: The dark is not an end. It's a door. It's the way a new beginning comes.
Here is the ancient truth of Advent enacted in the lives of 24 common woodland animals and culminating in the birth of the Human One who perfectly lived that truth.
Children open the book's double-page spreads as they would the doors on an Advent calendar--one, and only one, each day. "Animal wonderment" reflection questions at the back of the book help children stay with just one animal, one page spread, each day. In an often chaotic "holiday season," children learn to slow down and wait with all creation.
Written in lilting poetic lines, children ages 5 to 10 will delight in the sounds of the words as well as the vivid descriptions of animals' winter lives. They'll learn the elegant intricacies of creatures as small as honeybees, as large as black bears.
Original watercolor paintings by award-winning artist Sharon Spitz convey the radiance of each creature.
With this beautiful picture book, adults and families who have loved the original edition of All Creation Waits can now welcome younger children into the practice of reflective waiting-with-creation through Advent. Perfect for grounding young ones in the wonder of wild things.