Marilyn McEntyre

A Handbook for Building Beloved Community

Ethics, Culture & Social Issues

“More than a valuable handbook and guide, this little volume bears witness to decades of courageous resistance and community building. Timely, inspiring, and practical, this encouraging guide will be a gift to any group trying to meet this historical moment with informed imagination and a shared understanding that everyone does better when everyone does better.”

A Heart Lost in Wonder

History & Biography

“Readers who have long cherished Hopkins’s luminous, strenuous poetry and readers who are discovering it for the first time will alike appreciate Catharine Randall’s informative biographical reflections. Focused on how his life of faith informed his poetry, this book invites us, as well, to recognize how word work as a spiritual practice rewards both writer and reader, and leads us, if we let it, into a deeper way of prayer.”

A Primer on Innovation Theology

“The core idea of this remarkable book is timely, inspiring, and potentially revolutionary, especially as regards selflessness vs. self-interest. Lanny Vincent shows how theology and innovation are not at odds, but deeply complementary. Clear, elegantly written, and practical, the book offers specific direction to those who hope to keep their work wise, humane, useful, and will surely enrich readers' understanding of their own purposes.”

Advent

Preaching & Worship

“Replete with rich, mature, vigorous theological reflections on Advent, this book is invigorating—edgy, intelligent, unflinching, and joyful in all it reclaims. A timely, lively prophetic word.”

All Swirling and Weaving

Arts & Literature

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Approaching the Bible as Literature

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Making their way, pen in hand, through this exceptionally helpful, accessible guide, readers will discover that though the biblical writings remain complex, mysterious, and remote in time and culture, they are also richly readable and compelling. Thomas Schmidt provides interpretive tools and introduces literary terms while also assuring those who come from a faith tradition and those who don't that they can enjoy the journey and find in this monumental, much-abused book both the deep pleasure literature affords and an invitation to more substantive reflection on our own lives and times. It serves equally as an exhilarating introduction to or a reinvigorating review.”

Attending Others

“Brian Volck's stories are not just about medical life, though medicine is his profession, his vocation, and a frame and focus of the stories that make up this rich memoir. Attending Others refers to much more than medical care in these stories about learning to live among and love a Navajo community in New Mexico, rural folk in Honduras, and urbanites in Baltimore and Cincinnati. The attention Volck pays is deeply relational, informed by complex, resilient family life and a mindful, openhearted spirituality that draws him to the desert in whose silence he weaves words into life-giving stories about those who have been his teachers as he attended them. He invites his readers into a vision of healing and wholeness that begins and ends in resilient humor and deep humility.”

Encountering Mystery

Philosophy

“Dale Allison offers lovely, theologically informed reflections on how mystical moments, epiphanies, visions, prophetic dreams, and other surprising encounters leave us changed—those of us who experience them directly and those of us who hear about them from others we trust. What we ‘make of’ these experiences, how the church has handled them, the ways they challenge pastors and other people of faith are timely matters to consider. We may, as Allison says, live in a secular age, but more and more of these stories surface as we open hospitable space for them and allow ourselves to be humbled and surprised by the joy they so often bring to us who are finding our way together on this ‘darkling plain.’”

Innovation Theology

Theology

“The core idea of this remarkable book is timely, inspiring, and potentially revolutionary, especially as regards selflessness vs. self-interest. Lanny Vincent shows how theology and innovation are not at odds, but deeply complementary. Clear, elegantly written, and practical, the book offers specific direction to those who hope to keep their work wise, humane, useful, and will surely enrich readers' understanding of their own purposes.”

Lessons and Carols

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“‘This happened,’ John West writes at the end of one chapter. ‘It is also a metaphor.’ His words might serve as an epigraph for his frank, edgy, hopeful story about recovery and slippage and squalor and eruptions of love and sudden epiphanies. These nine memorable ‘lessons and carols’ take us through episodes in an unsettled life interrupted by faith, love and a baby. For those who have struggled with addiction or depression, and those who love them, this is a gritty, gutsy, unabashed and surprising book about hope.”

Listening Hands

Work, Money & Leadership

“Reading these richly evocative reflections, I found myself again and again ‘surprised by joy.’ And gratitude. I was reminded that when people live into their callings deeply and faithfully, they become beacons: they remind us what happens when one says yes to the Spirit’s invitation daily and faithfully.”

Nourishing Narratives

Arts & Literature

“Threading her own stories with rich reflection on biblical narratives and on the novels and poems she has taught and loved, Jennifer Holberg offers here a beautiful way of understanding what it means to live by stories. Nourishing Narratives is a rich celebration of cookbooks, dog walking, Dante, college life, embracing solitude, and living in communities bound together by shared stories that equip them to see one another through whatever life brings. Every page offers food for thought and thanksgiving.”

Practicing God’s Radical Forgiveness

Christian Living

“The idea of forgiveness has a history: human forgiving takes place in cultural contexts, shaped by law and custom. God’s ‘radical forgiveness,’ by contrast, is a shocking idea. Reaching beyond ‘therapeutic forgiveness’ that releases resentment, and social forgiveness that seeks to heal community, divine forgiveness—unconditional, prevenient, and restorative—is a gift. This beautiful exploration of radical forgiveness is also a gift—a book that reminds us to be amazed by grace.”

Rising

Arts & Literature

“Jane Beal's poems draw deeply upon the energies of earth and sky, bearing witness to the ways the life force manifests in birds nesting and flying, in women giving birth, in rivers and wind and song. Reaching across time and continental boundaries, they take the reader to quiet places of encounter with self and others and God. This is a collection to be entered and navigated slowly, accepting its invitation to slow down, see into others' stories and take stock of one's own longing for sacred gifts.”

Seeing Jesus

History & Biography

“Robert Hudson's lively, open-hearted, open-minded reflections on the lives and claims of Christian mystics invite believers to consider what these impassioned, intuitive, Spirit-driven people may have to teach us about how we live in the company of saints, surrounded by clouds of witnesses.”

Stepmother

Marriage, Family & Relationships

“The guidance Bass offers will serve women at every stage of what is not only a social role but a vocation that offers both new challenges and new avenues of grace.”

Still on the Way

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“This clear-eyed, open-hearted account of the hard journey from diagnosis to death and beyond is a gift both to readers who have suffered similar losses and to those who haven’t. Hank Graeser writes not only as a father but as a brother reaching out to all of us as brothers and sisters who know our paths, too, will pass through the valley of the shadow.”

Surprised by Paradox

Christian Living

“Oversimplifications are dangerous. Especially in theology and public life we need and rely on people who are capable of living into the challenging paradoxes we find in the Gospels. Rich with personal stories and reflections, Michel's explorations of what it means to live by 'both-and' rather than 'either-or' offer a vision of Christian hospitality without laxity and theological integrity without rigidity. This is a timely, practical, and thought-provoking book.”

The Beauty of Preaching

Preaching & Worship

“Pasquarello’s emphasis on beauty as a primary dimension of preaching and of God’s self-revelation challenges the flattening of a form of discourse essential to the life of the church. Drawing upon a wide range of Christian thinkers and on the Gospel stories themselves, he reminds readers of how inseparable are God’s word, God’s work, God’s mercy, and God’s great beauty, which we celebrate in worship, led by preachers who, at their best, lift us into praise, gratitude, and delight.”

The Language of the Soul

Christian Living

“Open-hearted, accessible, and drawn from deep wells of reflection, this lovely book about the longings we know but can sometimes barely name offers solace and hope. Worth reading slowly, this book is an invitation to feel and reflect on our own deepest longings and where they may lead us.”