Books

On any given night, more than half a million Americans and Canadians find themselves sleeping on the streets, in shelters, cars, and other places not meant for human habitation. Yet as this crisis continues to grow, it remains one of the least talked about—especially in churches. Even where compassion and empathy exist, the complexities around homelessness can make us feel stuck, overwhelmed, or numb to the existence of unhoused people in our cities and neighborhoods.

Reporting back from his work in homeless services, minister and advocate Kevin Nye introduces readers to the Christ he's met in tents, shelters, and drop-in centers. He demystifies homelessness by journeying into complex issues like affordable housing, mental illness, addiction, and more, while reimagining our theological approach to these matters and educating us on how they intersect with homelessness.

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history's unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You'll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made America – and Americans – great. McMahon's cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family s origins as well as MLK s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists.

King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation s most mourned martyr.

How is it that people still work for change after continuously seeing the worst of humanity and experiencing the most demoralizing setbacks? What keeps them going? It is that spirit of justice that rises up "like a war horse," as Myrlie Evers-Williams famously said. It is a sense in the hearts of people who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The Spirit of Justice reveals the stories of the people who fought against racism and agitated for justice—and what we can learn from their example, their suffering, their methods, and their hope.

In this book, award-winning author Jemar Tisby will open your eyes to the "pattern of endurance" in the centuries-long struggle for Black freedom in America. Through a historical survey of the nation from its founding to the present day, this book gives real-world examples of people who opposed racism, how they did it, what it cost, and what they gained for themselves and others.

As David Brooks observes, "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood."

And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?

McCaulley presents a model for biblical interpretation based on his background in the traditional Black church. He demonstrates this model with engaging studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.

As a community, we feel called to follow God's lead in being healers of injustices, a people who right wrongs in our communities, neighborhoods and homes. Last Spring, we embarked on a discipleship initiative to be "Just Neighbors" in an effort to understand God's call to bring justice where we live, to use our property and land for his purposes, and to heal the spiritual and physical effects of redlining and racially restrictive covenants in Seattle and the Eastside.

For people of color living each day surrounded by violence for whom survival is not a given, vocational discernment is more than "finding your purpose" — it's a matter of life and death. Patrick Reyes shares his story of how the community around him — his grandmother, robed clergy, educators, friends, and neighbors — saved him from gang life, abuse, and the economic and racial oppression that threatened to kill him before he ever reached adulthood.