Review of Jesus: A Pilgrimage, by James Martin, SJ

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

coverJesus

A Pilgrimage

by James Martin, SJ

HarperOne, 2014. 538 pages.
Review written June 6, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

Jesus: A Pilgrimage is the story of Jesus’ life as told in the gospels, but seen through the lens of Fr. Martin’s trip to the Holy Land. This makes it a beautifully personal way of looking at the stories.

I know a lot about Jesus’ life – I’ve actually memorized all four gospels. But this book was packed with new insights gleaned from the author being in the actual places where the events occurred. At the same time, I think it would give anyone new to the gospel story an introduction that would draw them in. I’d love to go through this book with my church small group, but the catch is that it’s much longer than most books we use. So I’d probably want to start in the Fall and use it the entire year – but we have already selected a book for next Fall, so we’ll see.

James Martin is a Jesuit priest. I’m not sure how I found this book, but I’ve read some of his others, so I was probably checking if our library had any more books by him and found it. I’m also reading his book Work in Progress that was published this year, so maybe searching for it, I found this one. But however it happened, I have been riveted by this book – mostly telling a tale I already know, but full of the stories of what are in the sites now and what it looks and feels like to be there.

He tells about the places and events in the order they happened in Jesus’ life, not in the order he visited them. So after explaining how he happened to spend time in the Holy Land, he begins with the Annunciation to Mary that she would have a baby – which happened in Nazareth. He ends with the place where Jesus ascended into heaven – or at least where tradition says it happened.

In the Introduction, he explains that this isn’t a scholarly book or a book of theology.

So what is this book?

It is a look at Jesus, as he appears in the Gospels, through the lens of my education, experience, prayer, and most recently a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And through the lens of faith.

He explains his basic approach, as well as how personal it all is.

As we arrive at significant “places” in Jesus’s life, I’ll share stories of what I saw at those sites during my pilgrimage. In this way I hope to bring you into that trip as I experienced it. Also, I’ll offer reflections on what particular episodes in Jesus’s life might have to say to us today.

Each chapter, then, will include some travel narrative, some study of the text, and some spiritual reflection. At the end of the chapters I will include the corresponding Gospel passages, to encourage you to experience these parts of the Bible for yourself.

As someone who already loves Jesus, I feel like Fr. Martin succeeded in bringing me along on his pilgrimage and deepening that love. As he puts it:

So I would like to invite you to meet the Jesus you already may know, but in a new way. Or, if you don’t know much about Jesus, I would like to introduce him to you. Overall, I would like to introduce you to the Jesus I know, and love, the person at the center of my life.

I believe he succeeds in this goal, and I highly recommend this book.

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Review of Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Christian, History, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Jesus and John Wayne

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Liveright Publishing, 2020. 356 pages.
Review written September 25, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

I don’t remember which of many recommendations prompted me to order my own copy of Jesus and John Wayne right around the time it first came out, but I know there were many, and I was happy to order it. Once I had it, I’m afraid it competed with the library books I had checked out, but didn’t have a due date. (This is something I often have to contend with.) This is also a history book, and a little dense. Yes, it’s a history of what Christians were doing, but it didn’t seem right for devotional reading, which often jumps to the top of my queue.

But then after my proposal was accepted and I got to be a co-creator at Wild Goose Festival, I saw that Kristin Du Mez was going to be there, too! And her new book, Live Laugh Love sounded similar, but talking more about “Christian femininity” than the focus on masculinity in Jesus and John Wayne. So I preordered the new book, and decided I really should get the old one read before the festival.

Well, I was halfway through Jesus and John Wayne when I went to Wild Goose Festival and got to hear the author speak twice. She talked about both books, and now I’m all the more eager to read the next one, which arrived on the publication date this week.

This is a history book about white evangelicalism in America, and how the movement got carried away with the idea of rugged masculinity epitomized by John Wayne.

The book starts with the early twentieth century and looks at people like Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and John Wayne. It finishes in 2020 and Donald Trump – who got support from 80% of white evangelicals.

Along the way, we see a turn toward rugged masculinity as the way God designed men and complementarianism as God’s plan for marriage, and overall structures of authoritarianism as God’s design for society.

I grew up pretty deep in evangelical circles. I attended Christian schools through college (I was a little disappointed that my alma mater, Biola University, wasn’t mentioned.), and went to Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts seminars before I was even a teen.

However, I got more and more progressive in my politics after college, and from 1996 to 2006, lived in Germany with my husband in the military – and thus completely missed the rise of Fox News and some of these other developments. Reading this book was fascinating to me, because so much was familiar, yet a lot I hadn’t noticed at all.

Another interesting thing to me was that while I was physically reading this book, a chapter at a time, I was listening to the audiobook version of Ibram X. Kendi’s latest book, Chain of Ideas, about right-wing political parties all over the globe. There were times when I was listening that I thought, “Yeah, they just mentioned that” – and I realized, no, I’d read about it in the other book (or vice versa).

This book also dovetails well with Sheila Wray Gregoire’s writings on marriage and Marissa Franks Burt’s writings on parenting, because both marriage and parenting are affected by the developing teaching that men are to be authority figures in the church and in the home.

It’s also interesting reading for me as someone coming out of evangelicalism, having my eyes opened to some trends I went along with and didn’t see. Sheila Wray Gregoire had already opened my eyes about books like Love and Respect, but this book helped me notice the militaristic background to John Eldredge’s writings that had blown right past me.

Back in 2016, I was incredulous that the same folks who told me that Bill Clinton should not be president because of his immorality were now supporting Donald Trump, who bragged about “not even asking” women before he sexually assaulted them. This book helped me understand the way the culture of evangelicalism and all its trends slowly changed so that Donald Trump epitomized exactly what people were looking for.

At Wild Goose Festival, the author explained that her editor told her she had to end on a hopeful note, but she had trouble coming up with anything. Here’s how the book finishes:

Although the evangelical cult of masculinity stretches back decades, its emergence was never inevitable. Over the years it has been embraced, amplified, challenged, and resisted. Evangelical men themselves have promoted alternative models, elevating gentleness and self-control, a commitment to peace, and a divestment of power as expressions of authentic Christian manhood. Yet, understanding the catalyzing role militant Christian masculinity has played over the past half century is critical to understanding American evangelicalism today, and the nation’s fractured political landscape. Appreciating how this ideology developed over time is also essential for those who wish to dismantle it. What was once done might also be undone.

You’ll find detailed, well-researched history here, supported with 32 pages of small-print citations at the back. As someone who grew up in that world, I gained wider understanding of how it morphed to what it is today. I can’t wait to read her next book, focusing on women!

kristindumez.com

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Review of Work in Progress, by James Martin, SJ

Biography, Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Work in Progress

Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest

by James Martin, SJ

HarperOne, 2026. 352 pages.
Review written June 11, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

I just finished reading a book by the same author about the life of Jesus – in the context of the author’s trip to the Holy Land. It was packed full of spiritual insights and meaningful applications from the Bible and blessed me on every page. This book was completely different.

Don’t get me wrong – Fr. Martin is a great writer, and I enjoyed this book thoroughly. But it’s a memoir about growing up in Philadelphia – and all the different jobs he tried and what he learned from them. Yes, there’s some wisdom along the way (mostly what he didn’t learn as a kid) – but this is a just plain fun story.

The subtitle gives you a hint at the variety of jobs he covers. And he tells about them with a full dose of humor at the kid he was, doing good work, but mainly wanting to have a good time.

I enjoyed the stories – beginning with when the Bicentennial Wagon Train went by the Ice Cream Inn where he was working, he cleared all the tables while the customers were out watching it, not realizing what was going on. Fr. Martin is apparently only a few years older than me, so I remembered being young during those same years.

Honestly, there were few hints that this kid – who he freely admits was partying, drinking, and smoking pot – would end up becoming a priest. He covers that calling in the last chapter, and yes, we get some spiritual insights to go with the fun there.

But mainly this is a story of student jobs in the America of the 70s and 80s – in the hands of a skilled and personable writer. A lot of fun to relive the escapades with him.

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Review of Counterweights, by Shannan Martin

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Counterweights

An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World

by Shannan Martin

Revell, 2026. 238 pages.
Review written July 8, 2026, from my own book, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

Over several years since it was my Sonderbooks Stand-out in 2016, I’ve gone through the book Champagne for the Soul with two of my small groups (as well as on my own) – and both times it set our group spotting joys, looking for things to be joyful about in daily life.

But sometimes I feel a bit guilty looking for joys when there’s so much trouble in the world. When people are being oppressed and injustice is rampant, is it right to take pleasure in a sighting of a great blue heron?

This book fully acknowledges the weight of the world. And Shannan Martin frames finding joys as looking for counterweights.

She begins with a metaphor that she learned as a child that it’s easier to carry heavy weights if you have one bucket on each side.

Abundance isn’t experienced by merely counting our blessings but by countering our weights.

The essays that follow are a collection of some of the weights and counterweights I’ve faced, mostly over a few years’ time, which I believe deserve our sacred attention. Some of my hardships have been uniquely personal, while others have tied all of us in knots. Others have been secondary: the contact burns of paying attention to a world where, most often, trauma lands hardest on those who are already vulnerable. These weights range from mundane to dizzyingly dramatic. But at every turn, goodness has waited for me to take notice and scoop it up, leveling the load of life’s endless dualities.

I love the way this doesn’t dismiss or minimize the weights, but shows that the weights make the counterweights all the more necessary.

This is not a “silver lining” situation, where pain and injustice are minimized for the sake of flimsy optimism or playing nice. It’s not even about hoarding our favorite things. We are not guaranteed to have those things within our reach. The practice of gathering counterweights is about creating moments of sustenance from the raw materials of what we’re given. It is about holding everything in honest tension. Both/and. Our counterweights help us move forward and breathe through the heaviness. At their best, they can’t be bought or sold. They aren’t a matter of luck or reserved for the privileged. They are widely accessible and casually weird, entirely personal and communal to their core. They are their own reward. And they are happening all the time, ready to steady us on our feet.

So that’s what you’ve got in this book – stories of weighty matters, but also counterweights, things that bring joy. And it’s a lovely model for dealing with our own weights.

After all:

Counterweights are everywhere. But it’s up to us to slow down and see them.

shannanmartin.com

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Review of Unclobber, by Colby Martin

Christian, Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Unclobber

Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality

by Colby Martin

Westminster John Knox Press, 2022. 218 pages.
Review written August 6, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

I’ve owned this book for quite some time, and since I am attending Wild Goose Festival this coming September, and the author will be there – I wanted to make sure I finally got it read.

This book would have been helpful to me several years ago when I was thinking through the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality. As it is, I am so glad this resource exists.

My background is similar to Colby Martin’s – I grew up a conservative evangelical, and my life was about my faith. I did not become a pastor – because I was a woman, so of course not. He was a pastor at a large evangelical church, so when he started questioning his church’s blanket condemnation of gay people, he got fired.

This book tells about his journey. And in alternating chapters, he talks about the six “Clobber” passages in the Bible that are used to condemn homosexual people. And he makes a strong case that modern day readers are taking them out of context and not interpreting them in a legitimate way.

He didn’t come to this because of anybody in his life who was gay. He began researching the topic because it seemed like a discrimination issue to not allow same-sex couples to get married, whether or not you think it’s sinful.

I appreciate his approach, because I, too, felt in my heart that it wasn’t right to condemn same-sex couples, but wasn’t sure how to square that with the Bible. I like the way he looks at each passage and lays out the case that they are being misused.

I am at least twenty years older than Colby Martin, and this wasn’t as big an issue (or rather one I could ignore) in the churches I attended when I was young. As an adult, I gradually changed my way of thinking with the help of books like God Believes in Love, by Gene Robinson, and Paul Among the People, by Sarah Ruden.

I didn’t think it affected me, but when Caitlin Jenner came out as transgender, I thought it through and realized that I didn’t believe for a second that’s contrary to Scripture. I was glad I thought it through, because it wasn’t long after that when my own adult child came out as transgender. And a few years later, my home church decided to make it part of their church constitution that LGBTQ people are sinning. I wrote a whole blog series about why I think churches should welcome LGBTQ people, especially transgender people. I called it Transcending. I used some ideas from Austen Hartke’s, a transgender pastor’s, wonderful book, Transforming. My emphasis is similar to Colby Martin’s here. What does the Bible have to say about transgender people?

All of this ties in with a book I recently reviewed, Better Ways to Read the Bible, by Zack Lambert. If you are interpreting the Bible so it can be used as a weapon to clobber people, rather than to build people up with love, joy, peace, and the other fruit of the Spirit – then something is wrong with your interpretation. Colby Martin shows us how we can rightly divide the word of truth and also be more loving people.

colbymartinonline.com

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Review of The Crooked Places Made Straight, by Raphael G. Warnock

Christian, Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

The Crooked Places Made Straight

Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America

by Raphael G. Warnock

Penguin Press, 2026. 187 pages.
Review written July 27, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

I’m going to list this book by the senator from Georgia who is also a pastor with Christian books, but I could just as well put it in the Current Issues section (and that’s where it is on the library shelves). Because yes, Raphael Warnock talks about political issues, but they are also moral issues and issues the Bible speaks to.

This book looks at America as a great cathedral, 250 years into its construction. But like a cathedral, there’s still plenty of work to do. He uses verses from Isaiah to inspire, notably the one in the title, making crooked places straight.

He takes a more specific look at six crooked places that we need to work toward straightening: poverty, voting rights, money in politics, mass incarceration, gun violence, and climate change – and how the initial impacts are hitting minorities the hardest. All of these discussions come from a place of deep faith.

Here’s where he discusses voting rights:

We are in a rough place right now, fighting to save our fragile democracy. As a man of faith, I often say that I believe democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. It is the notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine. Therefore, we ought to have a vote and a voice in the direction of our country and our destiny within it.

He explains his use of Isaiah’s writings to write a political book.

Isaiah’s words are so beautiful, so sublime, that they cut right through the hopelessness of a people awash in despair. How we need this kind of bold vision in a moment like our own! The truth is that the partisan and petty rhetoric of politics today is simply too puny a language for the magnitude of the problems we face. Instead, I urge us to look to Isaiah as a lens through which to view the problems that confront us and the possibilities within and around us. The goal of this book is to lay out that vision clearly so that we can work together to build the America that we want to see.

So despite confronting some difficult problems in America today, Senator Warnock writes a book of hope and vision. He makes the reader want to play our part in building a grand and beautiful cathedral formed by “we, the people.” I hope many will read it and be motivated to take action.

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Review of Better Ways to Read the Bible, by Zach W. Lambert

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Better Ways to Read the Bible

Transforming a Weapon of Harm into a Tool of Healing

by Zach W. Lambert

Brazos Press, 2025. 202 pages.
Review written July 15, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

Better Ways to Read the Bible is full of beautiful wisdom – beautiful in the sense that it promotes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and other fruit of the Spirit, as Zach says our Bible interpretation should do.

He starts by pointing out that everybody who reads the Bible interprets it. We don’t speak the same language or come from the same culture or time as when the Bible was written, so we can talk about “the plain reading of Scripture” – but we’re actually reading a translation during a time far removed from the original writers.

Everyone who reads and interprets the Bible does so with a set of assumptions about what the Bible is and how it’s supposed to work. This set of assumptions functions like a filter or a lens through which the reader attempts to make meaning. Although everyone reads the Bible through a lens (or set of lenses) – there is no neutral or unfiltered way to read it – many people are unaware that they’re doing so and have never stopped to take stock of the assumptions they bring to the text and how those assumptions impact interpretations.

I’m going to insert some of my own comments here. I accidentally learned about this back in the 1990s. I was reading books by George MacDonald and it dawned on me that George MacDonald, a man who clearly loved the Bible and knew it well, believed that hell is not forever. How could he possibly believe that? That’s not what the Bible says! And then I read the whole New Testament removing that filter – thinking Could this possibly be true?, and I saw how I could read passages completely differently. And focus on different passages, which with a fresh filter seemed to plainly say that all will be saved.

Or even when I was a teen and memorized John 9, where Jesus heals a blind man. The religious leaders say to the blind man, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” Even as a teen, I saw that those leaders were “proving from Scripture” – or their understanding of Scripture – that Jesus was not from God. It made me forever after be willing to question my interpretation.

And this book gives the reader tools for questioning their interpretations. He asks the reader to question the lenses they’re bringing to reading the Bible. He starts with lenses that cause harm (and he has plenty of examples from real people): “The Literalism Lens,” “The Apocalypse Lens,” “The Moralism Lens,” and “The Hierarchy Lens.”

And then he talks about four lenses that promote healing: “The Jesus Lens,” “The Context Lens,” “The Flourishing Lens,” and “The Fruitfulness Lens.” And yes! These chapters fill me with the joy of recognition. Back to applying it to where I first diverted from my Evangelical upbringing, I was told that believing in universal salvation was just wishful thinking, too good to be true. But isn’t our faith supposed to be good news? The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And yes, he applies that to people who have been rejected by churches. That doesn’t fit any of the healing lenses above.

The Bible has always been the church’s book. It belongs to the people and is best interpreted within a healthy and diverse community. That’s how I know that the lenses I’ve been talking about promote healing rather than inflicting harm. Not because a scholar said so or because I cracked some code, but because I’ve seen them bring healing, wholeness, and flourishing to our community at Restore for a decade.

So I highly recommend this book. If you’ve ever been harmed by someone’s use of the Bible, there’s healing here. And if you love the Bible, you’ll find reasons to love it more.

zachwlambert.org

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Review of Braving the Truth, by Rachel Held Evans

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

coverBraving the Truth

Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith

by Rachel Held Evans
edited by Sarah Bessey

HarperOne, 2026. 383 pages.
Review written May 17, 2026, from my own copy, ordered via Amazon.com
Starred Review

Rachel Held Evans was a Christian writer who wrestled with her faith in print – and changed people’s lives. She died way too soon in 2019, only 38 years old. She started blogging in 2007, shortly before she started publishing books – and this book collects many of those blog posts.

Editor Sarah Bessey chose the selection of posts to collect in this book, and she also included tributes from 37 other authors – usually after a blog post from Rachel that especially inspired that author when it was first posted.

This book makes me so wish I was following Rachel when she was blogging. [Yes, I was blogging at the time, but I wasn’t reading a lot of blogs because I was so busy with books. I also didn’t have a good feed reader, so attempts to read blogs usually got forgotten. Now that many authors have switched to Substack, my email has blown up with unread emails, so maybe it’s just as well?] Anyway, now that it’s in book form, I can see so much wisdom coming from this young woman. It does make me wish I’d been in on the conversations she got going on her blog.

What is it about? The essays (That sounds more book-like than posts, doesn’t it?) are presented in categories, rather than chronologically, though the book does start with her first blog post and end with her last. The topics covered are Evolving Faith, Patriarchy and White Supremacy, the Church, Gender and Sexuality, and “Life in the Midst of It All.”

This is full of wonderful writing, Braving the Truth is an appropriate title, because Rachel gets real with her readers, and that wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Let me copy a few examples of quotations I marked to give you an idea:

This is from a post on lessons she learned the hard way:

It’s not always right to rock the boat. I get frustrated with Christians who seem to find it easy to believe everything their pastor tells them to believe. It makes me especially angry when my friends refuse to even listen to new ideas because they are either too certain or too afraid to see things from another perspective. But I’ve learned that it is not my job to test other people’s faith. My job is to be a friend to people who are already struggling through tough questions, to offer companionship on the difficult journey through doubt. I am to be a counselor, not a recruiter. It’s not always right to rock the boat.

This is a post about what she’d say if she got a chance years later to redo the commencement address she gave as a graduate of a conservative Christian university:

I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.

I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.

And this is from an essay called, “I love the Bible.”

I love the Bible more now than ever before because I have finally surrendered to God’s stories.
God’s long, strange, beautiful stories.
We asked questions.
God told stories.
We demanded answers.
God told stories.
We argued theology.
God told stories.

And when those stories weren’t enough, when the words themselves would not suffice, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, laughed among us, wept among us, ate among us, told more stories among us, suffered among us, died among us, and rose among us. The Word entered our story and invited us into his.

If you’ve already read any of Rachel Held Evans books, I probably don’t need to tell you that, yes, you’ll want to read this one. If you haven’t read any of her books, this would be a great place to start. Many of the posts (essays!) were written before her books were published, but they also give a great overview of the topics that she wrote about in her other published books. This brings her thoughts together, and the tributes alongside show that she powerfully affected people’s lives in good ways.

You couldn’t ask for a nicer tribute than this lovingly collected volume.

rachelheldevans.com
harpercollins.com

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Review of The Heart of the Psalms, by James C. Howell

Christian, Nonfiction Review 0

The Heart of the Psalms

God’s Word to the World

by James C. Howell

Abingdon Press, 2025. 125 pages.
Review written May 25, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com

I’ll be honest. I purchased and read this book to have a “Competitive Title” on my book proposal for my own Psalms book. (Which is currently being submitted to publishers by my recently signed-with literary agent! I’m so excited!) I heard about it when I had mentioned my book to a friend from church, and they said that their own small group had just begun a study of Psalms, using this book.

So first, the good news is that the books complement each other, taking different approaches to Psalms. So that particular small group won’t need to skip my book because they’ve already studied Psalms. Instead, each book has a different way of showing readers the riches found in Psalms.

James Howell’s deep love for Psalms shines in this book. His Introduction talks about how that love developed and how much the Psalms mean to him. This book isn’t so much a study of the book of Psalms as a riff on six particular Psalms. He has a chapter for each of Psalms 8, 27, 51, 73, 90, and 116. In each one, he dives into that particular Psalm and all the side trails that it may bring up, showing us how rich the Psalms are in emotion and in application.

Here’s a paragraph from the Introduction:

What are the Psalms? Just a long collection of prayers that cry out, give thanks, plead, ponder, praise, and speak with God in surprising and profound ways. Most were sung, and from memory. Thankfully, they landed in the Bible, not because they are about God, but because they are directed to God. And when we read and speak them aloud now, they reveal to us what we’d never noticed or what we’d feared to notice about ourselves. I could deliver a lecture on what the Psalms were and are. But there’s no substitute for reading them, slowly and quietly.

It’s easy to see in this author the same desire I have – to get people reading and savoring the Psalms, knowing they’ll end up loving them, too.

How is my book different? Instead of looking at Psalms individually, I divide the Psalms into ten types and talk about what each type has in common – so the reader can pray their own psalms, using those patterns. So the two books can go together, with my book giving more of an overview, and this book looking at six particular Psalms, giving examples of five of the types.

And both of us hope that you will glimpse God’s heart toward us by taking a closer look at Psalms.

abingdonpress.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Good Soil, by Jeff Chu

Christian, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Good Soil

The Education of an Accidental Farmhand

by Jeff Chu

Convergent, 2025. 317 pages.
Review written March 24, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com

Good Soil is a memoir about Jeff Chu’s time as a student and worker at the Farminary – a farm owned by Princeton Theological Seminary that hosted classes.

The book is meditative about spiritual things and about issues he was dealing with in his life. His parents didn’t accept his husband, but he tried to maintain a relationship with them. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life and was looking for direction, and toward the end of his time there, his good friend Rachel Held Evans passed away, and then the friendly Farminary dog did, too.

I read this slowly, absorbing the lessons as a daily devotional reading. It helped me look at the natural world with fresh eyes. I newly appreciate how compost reminds us that even in death, there is life and nourishment.

I think most of all, I appreciate this story. It’s a story of how when Jeff Chu was at a loss, God showed up and helped him find what he needed and new friends to be with him along the path. I appreciate how working with his hands in the dirt enhanced the work and study he was doing with his mind.

byjeffchu.com
convergentbooks.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/good_soil.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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