Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
In my reading, I seek to surround myself with experiences of motherhood that are different from my own. In this memoir, Sarah Sentilles tells the story of fostering a child with the hopes of adopting her while shedding light on the injustices and inefficiencies of the American foster system.
I loved the tender descriptions of maternal love and the way that Sentilles writes about maternal grief. While chronicling her experience of loving a child that isn’t her own, she urges all of us to extend mother-like love beyond our own families, even to the children of strangers.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin
May you always feel at home.
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social…
Many people claim these days that many gospels outside the New Testament are just as old and valuable as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, if not more so.
Simon, a friend who is a professor at the University of Cambridge, analyzes these four books in detail alongside another seven that well represent ancient gospels not in the canon and shows that only the canonical four closely conform to the earliest known Christian creed (1 Corinthians 15:3-5), which stressed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, his atoning death and bodily resurrection, both according to the Hebrew Scriptures.
The depth with which Simon knows these books and all the relevant scholarship is simply stunning, and the book is very faith-affirming.
A robust scholarly defense of the distinctiveness of the canonical Gospels.
Do the four New Testament gospels share some essence that distinguishes them from noncanonical early Gospels? The tendency among biblical scholars of late has been to declare the answer to this question no—that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were grouped together by happenstance and are defended as canonical today despite there being no essential commonalities between them.
Simon Gathercole challenges this prevailing view and argues that in fact the theological content of the New Testament Gospels distinguishes them substantially from noncanonical Gospels. Gathercole shows how the Gospels of Matthew,…
I am a New Testament scholar, with an expertise in Pauline Theology, who has spent my working life trying to make New Testament scholarship more accessible for non-experts. After studying at Oxford University, I taught in two theological colleges before taking a few years to be a freelance writer lecturer. I am a lay theologian and have worked with most dioceses of the Church of England but now am a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral where I oversee Theology, Learning, and Art in the life of the Cathedral. I hope you enjoy reading these books that have had such a big impact on me and my thinking.
One way of opening up the world of the New Testament is through fictional accounts of life in the period; the other way is by doing a deep dive into some of the academic debates that have explored issues from this period. This is an accessible but fascinating book that explores the life, culture, and background of the New Testament and provides a vast array of interesting nuggets that will enhance your reading of the New Testament. This book opens up our imaginations by providing the information we need to imagine the world for ourselves.
What was life like for first-century Christians?
Imagine a modest-sized Roman home of a well-to-do Christian household wedged into a thickly settled quarter of Corinth. In the lingering light of a summer evening, men, women and children, merchants, working poor and slaves, a mix of races and backgrounds have assembled in the dimly lit main room are are spilling into the central courtyard. This odd assortment of gathered believers--some thirty in number--are attentive as the newly arrived and travel-weary emissary from Paul reads from the papyrus scroll he has brought from their apostolic mentor.
But if you were to be…
Understanding history is essential for understanding ourselves as human beings – for recognising where we’ve come from and why we live as we do. What I love about historical fiction is that it can take tumultuous times and show their effects on the individuals who lived through them. As a historical novelist, I try to bring history back to a tangible, human level. These short novels show that if a writer’s prose is fresh, witty, and moving, then historical novels don’t need to be enormous tomes to give us a new slant on the past and allow us to inhabit lives utterly different from our own.
This novel has such a wonderfully bold premise: it’s a retelling of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus through the eyes of Jesus’ mother, Mary. I love how Tóibín takes one of the founding stories of Western civilisation and manages to make it intimate. Jesus is still the Son of God, of course, but he is also the son of a woman, a flesh and blood man, who suffers a torturous death in front of his friends and family.
Using a first-person narrative, Tóibín gives us the world through Mary’s eyes, showing a humble woman caught up in extraordinary events. It’s a tragic story about the impossibilities of protecting your loved ones, but it’s also a story of love, tenderness, and hope.
“Tóibín is at his lyrical best in this beautiful and daring work” (The New York Times Book Review) that portrays Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity—shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel, who are her keepers. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it”;…
No matter how you read it, the Bible is a strange book. It weaves together beautiful narratives and deadly-dull genealogies; uplifting messages with passages that many today find ethically repulsive. Yet it gained an extraordinary authority, in a predominantly pre-literate society. The question of how this happened has been an intellectual and scholarly preoccupation of mine for decades, and as a professor at Brown University I seek to bring my students and readers into this very foreign world in order to open their eyes to new possibilities in the present.
I’m going to cheat here and put this book together with two others, The Jewish Annotated New Testament and The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha. Each of these three books has the biblical text; explanatory notes that include scholarly perspectives; and a lengthy set of essays by well-noted scholars. All of these parts of the Bible were written (primarily) by and for Jews in antiquity—including much of the New Testament—and these books seek to recover how they were read and functioned in antiquity.
First published in 2004, The Jewish Study Bible is a landmark, one-volume resource tailored especially for the needs of students of the Hebrew Bible. It has won acclaim from readers in all religious traditions.
The Jewish Study Bible combines the entire Hebrew Bible-in the celebrated Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation-with explanatory notes, introductory materials, and essays by leading biblical scholars on virtually every aspect of the text, the world in which it was written, its interpretation, and its role in Jewish life. The quality of scholarship, easy-to-navigate format, and vibrant supplementary features bring the ancient text to life.
Lena Einhorn is a writer and filmmaker, with a background in medicine. She has portrayed Greta Garbo’s life before the breakthrough, in the novel Blekinge Street 32, and in Nina’s Journey, she told the story of her mother, one of the last to leave the Warsaw ghetto alive. Nina’s Journey also became a feature film, written and directed by Einhorn. The book received the National Book Award of Sweden, and the film received the National Film Award for best picture and best script, as well as a number of international awards. In 2019 the critically acclaimed autobiographical novel The Thin Ice came out.
The New Testament has been portrayed as a repetitive and largely ahistorical text, except for the presence of the names of certain individuals (Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate, Jewish King Herod the Great, etc, etc). Otherwise, very little fits with known history of first-century Juda and Galilee. But when one reads this religious narrative, The New Testament, next to the narratives of Josephus—written around the same time—one starts discerning certain recurring patterns. And after a while one realizes that The New Testament is anything but boring. It is actually a fantastic text, skillfully written in layers, where the historical layer lies just beneath the surface. The New Testament is full of incomprehensible elements—unknown names just thrown into the narrative, seeming contradictions, etc—but it is in these strange elements that the clues lie. One needs, however, to have Josephus' historical texts (The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities)…
From one of our most celebrated writers on religion, a fresh, bold, and unsettling new translation of the New Testament
"The greatest achievement of Hart's translation is to restore the urgency of the original. . . . It is beautiful."-James Mumford, Standpoint
"This translation is a remarkable feat."-Lucy Beckett, Times Literary Supplement
David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of "etsi doctrina non daretur," "as if doctrine is not given." Reproducing the texts' often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts' impenetrability…
I’ve been a Christian for 30+ years, and have had many questions about the Bible and theology. In order to answer my own questions, I’ve consumed scores of apologetics books, articles, videos, and podcasts, as well as studied the Bible itself, with lexicons and commentaries.
The AMP (Amplified Bible) is a word-for-word translation with additional information in brackets to help clarify the meaning of ambiguous words and difficult passages. This is also an incredibly useful study Bible, and is more convenient than cross-referencing Strong’s numbers.
Updated edition is even easier to read and better than ever to study and understand
You've trusted the Amplified (R) Bible to deliver enhanced understanding of all the rich nuances and shades of meaning of the original Bible languages. For this kind of in-depth study, no working knowledge of Greek or Hebrew is required-just a desire to know more about what God says in his Word. Amplified Bibles use a unique system of punctuation, italics, references, and synonyms to unlock subtle shades of meaning as found in the original languages.
This updated Amplified Bible includes more amplification in the Old…
I have just retired after teaching 35 years in the New Testament department at Denver Seminary. I have authored, co-authored, or co-edited thirty books related to New Testament studies and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles or chapters in multi-author books. I have learned that most of the reasons people don’t believe in part or all of the Bible is because they don’t understand it properly, so my passion is to try to rectify that. The New Testament changed my life for the better, as it has hundreds of millions of other people. I just want to help that number continue to grow.
Nothing has superseded this in the twenty-seven years since it was published. Wenham has spent his entire career returning again and again to the issue of Jesus and Paul, showing that despite many superficial differences, the core messages of these two crucial figures at the beginning of Christianity mesh well with each other. It contains discussions as well of all the places where Paul actually quotes or alludes to Jesus’ teaching, though many scholars have not always recognized these. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Paul is most decidedly not the true founder of Christianity but a faithful follower of Jesus. Now retired, Wenham has been a great encouragement to me at key stages of my scholarly career.
This book provides a broad, popular look at the relationship between Paul and Jesus. Wenham studies the Gospels and Paul's letters, systematically compares the teachings of Jesus and Paul, and reveals the intriguing connections and differences between the two. His conclusions make this volume a ground-breaking work with exciting implications.
I have been an avid reader of historical fiction since I was very young, and I love learning about the life and times of different periods of history. One might describe me as a "research junkie." My desire to know more about the everyday lives of my historical characters has taken me on many wonderful adventures, and my personal library is full of books I use for research. I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and novels. I am currently completing a new novel about a family of downwinders, people who contracted cancer from government-sanctioned radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb tests in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s.
As its title implies, this book is accessible to the entire family and would be a great resource for Sunday school teachers who want to provide their students with a larger understanding of the life and times of peoples in ancient Palestine and Rome. The book is broken down into easy-to-find categories such as "The Home," "Warfare," and "Travel and Communication," to name a few. There are stunning photographs on every page with detailed and clear explanations. The back of the book has timelines of the Bible and a map of Palestine in New Testament times with highlights of key events in the New Testament. There is also an alphabetical index that makes it easy to find information on specific topics.
Discusses historical and cultural topics relevant to an understanding of the Bible, under such topics as archaeology, geography, government, business, education, and health.
The story of a seemingly unremarkable man who sees the eternal in the temporal, and who has the breadth and depth of language to communicate his insight to us.
“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber.
Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty.
He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man…
