Best Books
Sometimes broken people break the world around them. Sometimes the brokenness of the world breaks the best of people. Humans are a strange species. We are capable, both individually and collectively, of love and hatred, generosity and selfishness, godliness and wickedness. Virtue and vice reside within all of us, even among people of faith. In it all, in the brokenness and the healing, in the beauty and the ugliness, God is always at work.
Love sometimes means acknowledging and bearing the broken parts of people. In his new book, How Far to the Promised Land – One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Convergent), Esau McCaulley explores his family’s journey through brokenness, pain, healing, and forgiveness. The degree to which individual choices impact the trajectory of life, for both good and bad, is in constant tension with the forces of the world around us. Where is God in the trouble and trauma of life? How can love and hatred so easily reside within us? Why do people of faith exhibit selfishness as well as kindness? Why do those without faith exhibit kindness as well as selfishness? The fact of evil and the hope of godly faith are forever in tension.
How Far to the Promised Land is not a story of uncommon heroics. It is not a story of how one man rose from poverty to become a respected professor, theologian, and author. It is a story that reveals something profound about what it means to be human. It acknowledges that we have a measure of freedom in how we live our lives. But it also exhorts us, in accordance with the Scriptures, to be strong in faith because we don’t wrestle with just our own flesh and blood – our own humanity. We also fight against external principalities and powers, against the darkness of the world and wickedness in high places. Evil isn’t simply an individual problem – it is social and collective power. How Far to the Promised Land is a beautifully written and compassionate exploration of what it means to be a broken people living in a broken world with faith in an unbroken God.
-Darrel Holcombe, Owner
Sanctuary Christian Books and Gifts
Colonial Promenade, Alabaster
www.sanctuarychristianbooksandgifts.com
205-663-2370
