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Here at Sojourners, we believe following Jesus means being “creatively maladjusted” to the dominant definitions of success; for us as editors, this means resisting the tyranny of fickle algorithms that have so much power in determining which stories get read and which don’t. We love the 10 stories listed below, but each year we publish hundreds of beautiful and important stories, interviews, columns, reflections, reviews, and poems — and darn it, we aren’t gonna let algorithms tell us (or you!) what stories matter most.
“Find those who tell you, Do not be afraid, yet stay close enough to tremble with you,” writes Cole Arthur Riley in This Here Flesh, “This is a love.” Here are 12 books from 2022 — nonfiction, memoirs, novels, and short stories — that we think are worth keeping close.
Ash and dust. Sorrow and repentance. An invitation to remember our baptism and dwell on our own mortality. The blunt grimness of Lent can be intimidating.
But the solemn, 40-day period of preparation for Easter that begins on Ash Wednesday was never meant to be undertaken solo. “We may—we will—find that we can’t do it alone,” writes Julie Polter. “We need help. We need community. We need a God who is reaching toward us and isn’t afraid of meeting us at the point of our worst sin, a God who knows death intimately, and pulls us toward life.”
The resources in the list below—books, free downloads, email series, audio formats, and other media—aim to accompany us as we accept Lent’s invitation to self-examination, renewal, and yes, good old-fashioned repentance.
I wasn’t really expecting painful things to happen to me.
I knew that pain was a part of life, but — thanks in part to a peculiar blend of “God-has-a-plan” Southern roots, a suburban “Midwestern nice” upbringing, and a higher education in New England stoicism — I managed to skate by for quite some time without having to experience it.
After a handful of traumas in the last five years, things look different now. Trauma upends everything we took for granted, including things we didn’t know we took for granted. And many of these realities I wish I’d known when I first encountered them. So, while the work of life and healing continues, here are ten things I’ve learned about trauma along the way.
In a secularized society obsessed with consumerism, entertainment, and modernization, Christianity is often portrayed as being old-fashioned, irrelevant, and useless, but it still serves some very valuable and profound purposes. Here’s why Americans still need it: