Our Jan/Feb Issue: Words in the Wild

Our books issue offers a jungle of Christian ideas to lose yourself in.

Illustration by Jared Boggess / Source Images: New York Public Library / Getty / cyano66 / Hemera Technologies / George Marks / SerkanBg

As a bachelor, I tended to house my books haphazardly. Browsing my shelves, you might have spied, say, a biography of Winston Churchill next to a John Stott Bible commentary next to a volume of Civil War history next to a Charles Dickens novel next to goodness knows what else. I couldn’t even manage to keep the seven Chronicles of Narnia bundled together.

After I got married, my wife thought it wise to bring some order to this chaos. She reasoned that the pleasures of serendipity ought to give at least some ground to practical considerations, like actually being able to find the book you’re looking for. And so I embraced my inner librarian, sorting and classifying my way toward something better resembling a tidy garden than a teeming rainforest.

But one great thing about bookshelves is that you can’t squelch serendipity, no matter how determined you are to impose rationality or functionality. Apply the rigors of Dewey and his decimal system all you like, but it won’t change the fact that no one book is exactly like its next-door neighbor. As readers, we should savor that kind of irreducible variety. It furnishes our minds. It enlarges our hearts. It stokes fires of curiosity. It testifies that the world is a big, beautiful, fallen, and endlessly fascinating place where, whatever you think you know, you have a thousand times as much left to discover.

This book-focused issue of CT leans into this tension between cultivation and wildness. Alongside our annual Book Awards, it includes a dozen adapted book excerpts covering a range of topics. Featured books were finalists in their respective awards categories, and some were winners. Excerpts were selected based on space considerations and on their capacity, as a collection, to surprise. But all were outstanding examples of Christian writers bringing biblical and theological insight to matters of contemporary concern.

It’s fair to wonder whether the resulting mix of authors and ideas feels like a hodgepodge. How, for instance, does the sun’s divine symbolism relate to the improbable mid-century evangelical influence exercised by Henrietta Mears? And why are stories of lives transformed by the Beatitudes bumping up against Percy Shelley’s poetic foreshadowing of the sexual revolution?

But even the apparent miscellany gestures toward a Christian approach to books. As believers, we weigh our reading choices carefully, doing our best to discern truth from error, wisdom from folly. We also roam freely across the literary landscape, cracking open whatever tickles our fancy, secure in the hymnwriter’s conviction that “This is my Father’s world / He shines in all that’s fair.”

Matt Reynolds is books editor of Christianity Today.

Also in this issue

For all the alarms sounded today over declining reading habits, and for all the fears that social-media shallowness has crowded out serious thinking, people still make a big deal of books. We buy them and read them. We discuss and debate them. And we still sense that the deepest, most enduring truths about God and man, about history and contemporary life, are found not on Twitter threads but on the printed page. This is one reason we’re dedicating the bulk of this issue not only to our annual Book Awards but also to books themselves, in the form of excepts from awards finalists (and several winners) that shine a light on some of the finest Christian thinking happening today.

Cover Story

Christianity Today’s 2022 Book Awards

Excerpt

The Cosmos Is More Crowded Than You Think

Henrietta Mears, the Improbable Evangelical Leader

John Stott’s Global God

Are the Arts a Tool, a Temptation, or a Distraction?

Evangelicals Have Made The Trinity a Means to an End. It’s Time to Change That.

How White Rule Ended in Missions

Blessed Are Those Who Embody the Beautitudes

Testimony

I Entered Prison a ‘Protestant.’ I Left a Christian.

If I Had to Bow to an Idol, It Would Be the Sun

Reply All

How to Disagree Nicely but Not Lose Your Convictions

Excerpt

Black Christians Are Confronting Black Lies About Christianity

Parents Set the Pace for Their Adult Children’s Religious Life

News

As COVID-19 Death Tolls Rise, More Americans Want Religious Funerals

News

How Black Missionaries Are Being Written Back into the Story

News

Illinois Eliminated Parole in 1978. These Christians Want to Bring it Back.

News

Gleanings: January 2022

Learning to Love Your Limits

Review

Well Done, Good and Faithful Missionary

Excerpt

The Poet Who Prepared the Ground for the Sexual Revolution

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