Mark Oakley

Holy Communion in Contagious Times

Preaching & Worship

“The eucharist is the food that makes us hungrier for God. Each time the bread is broken, God unmasks his fidelity and love. Without it, as Burridge shows with his usual contagious love of scholarship and public theology, faith curdles into self-reference and we forget the call to model community life. Read this as a vaccine against a diseased Christianity.”

Losing My Religion

History & Biography

“The Church speaks a lot about truth but isn’t so good at honesty. Here is a priest who has learned the cost of this and who, with courage and imagination, encourages us to join him and to say it as it is. We clergy often know the words of religion but miss the music. William Mills calls us back to the vocation of trying to tune our lives to the harmonies of the eternal but only by recognizing emotional and factual truth and in pursuit of justice. Enjoy it and feel yourself defrost.”

Mirador

Bible Studies & Devotionals

“The church has never offered a definitive interpretation of what was happening when Jesus was the victim of torture and a vengeful death penalty. In the creeds we simply hear that he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. Because of this, an imaginative space opens. Steve Dixon explores this space, not to make God an object of limited knowledge, but celebrating God as the cause of our wonder. His Mirador is a theological and poetic vantage point, asking us to look at horizons at a time when the church is being thinned down by an imaginative bereavement.”

The Farther Away

Arts & Literature

“Roger Wagner is an artist who calls our attention to a world infused with the divine. His poems follow suit: intelligent, neatly metric but often catching us off guard. His poetry, like his images, frames the density of the unignorable mystery and the call of the transcendent to restless hearts. This is a beautiful and spiritually rich book to spend proper time with.”