The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves Curt Thompson MD (InterVarsity Press)
Where does our shame originate? And how can we loosen its oppressive hold on our lives? Thompson, a psychiatrist and founder of the organization Being Known, looks to Scripture and the field of interpersonal neurobiology for insights. “Shame,” he proposes, “is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity,” including “any area of endeavor that promotes goodness, beauty, and joy in and for the lives of others.” The Soul of Shame gets inside how this process happens—and how it can be reversed.
Knowing Who You Are: Eight Surprising Images of Christian Identity Malcolm Gill (Wipf & Stock)
“One of the ways the Bible helps us think about the Christian life is by providing a series of images from everyday life that reveals truth about our identity,” writes Gill, a minister and lecturer at Australia’s Sydney Missionary and Bible College. “Jesus, along with the New Testament authors, regularly used familiar metaphors in their teaching to illustrate what it meant to be a disciple of Christ.” Knowing Who You Are begins with reflecting on what it means to embrace the label “Christian” before exploring eight metaphors for disciples: pilgrim, citizen, combatant, farmer, steward, soldier, laborer, and sheep.
Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ Rosaria Butterfield (Crown & Covenant)
Once a lesbian and a secular English professor, Butterfield has emerged as a feisty champion of biblical sexual ethics. (CT published her testimony, “My Train Wreck Conversion,” in 2013.) In Openness Unhindered, a follow-up to her memoir The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, the pastor’s wife and popular speaker gets underneath heated debates on same-sex marriage and transgenderism to address real people with real struggles, people who feel “trapped like prey by the predatory nature of [their] own sexual sin.” She shows how rooting one’s identity in Christ liberates those in the grips of same-sex attraction, gender confusion, porn addiction, and a host of guilt-inducing patterns.
