During a season when many people choose to read for spiritual growth, Jessica Hooten Wilson’s book, Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice is a wonderful place to begin. This isn’t just a book about reading edifying books, but it’s a book about how to read almost any good book as a spiritual practice. “For the spiritual reader,” Hooten Wilson writes, “reading may be a practice that increases our capacity to love.” A spiritual reader is not just someone who reads religious or spiritual books, but someone who reads books of any kind with the purpose of growing in virtue. Thus, a great novel or an authentically written memoir, regardless of the author’s own religious background, could be spiritual reading if read with this purpose. One of my favorite aspects of this book are Hooten Wilson’s “Bookmarks,” profiles of spiritual readers as models for us, including Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, Fredrick Douglass, and Dorothy Sayers.

I have one copy of Reading for the Love of God to give away to one of my newsletter subscribers (to enter, subscribe and share your Lent reading in the newsletter chat. Giveaway period ends at 11:59 pm on March 17, 2024).

Purchase Reading for the Love of God from Baker Books | Bookshop | Amazon

If you live in the United States you may have noticed that this year, 2024, is a presidential election year, and the news cycle will not let us forget it. When that happens, it makes it easy for us to get caught in political discussions and ideologies, sometimes at the expense of our faith. Michael Wear’s book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life is the perfect antidote. In this book, Wear asks some very important questions we should all be asking ourselves:

“How many of us would say we’d prefer to lose in our political ambitions if it meant others might draw closer to Jesus? How many of us would say we’d prefer to sacrifice political advantage if it meant we might draw closer to Jesus?”

I’m excited to read more and learn from Wear’s practical thoughtfulness on this topic as we navigate another contentious election season.

Purchase The Spirit of Our Politics from Bookshop | Amazon

Lent is not just a time for fasting and prayer, but also for giving. In the Coptic Orthodox Church, our Lenten refrain during communion says “Blessed are those who have mercy/who give to the poor and fast and pray.” During Lent, mercy and giving come before fasting and prayer. So the publication of When You Give: Ancient Answers and Contemporary Questions by L. Joseph Letendre last year comes at a good time for Lent this year. This is a short but nonetheless useful book for refocusing us on this important discipline for Lent and for our lives more generally. The first sentence states it clearly: “Even a quick and casual reader of the four Gospels could not miss that giving to the poor, helping those in need, and serving others constitute a defining part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.”

Purchase When You Give from Ancient Faith Publishing | Bookshop | Amazon

With a blog entitled “Being in Community,” I could not turn down the offer to review one of Plough publications latest releases, the second edition of Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People. In 2022, I included another collection from Plough, Following the Call: Living the Sermon on the Mount Together, on my Lent reading list, and I have dipped in and out of that book many times since. Called to Community looks like another book I’ll be visiting many times over. Organized by different topics related to living in community, each topic includes selections from various Christian authors of many different traditions. Considering the topic, this collection surprisingly has fewer selections from the Church Fathers and Mothers than Following the Call. St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the Desert Fathers, and the Pachomian Koinonia most certainly have important writings to contribute to the topic of community; still, but the passages and topics chosen for this book are still enlightening. This passage on hospitality by Catholic writer Kathleen Norris tells a beautiful story:

“Not long ago I heard a novice speak of a nun with Alzheimer’s in her community, who every day insists on being placed in her wheelchair at the entrance to the monastery’s nursing home wing so that she can greet everyone who comes. ‘She is no longer certain what she is welcoming people to,’ the younger woman explained, ‘but hospitality is so deeply ingrained in her that it has become her whole life.’”

Purchase Called to Community from Plough | Bookshop | Amazon

My word of the year this year is “Create,” and I’m learning from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work that real creative flow comes from, well, longer periods of focus without distraction. Cue this new/old book out from Princeton University Press, How to Focus: A Monastic Guide in an Age of Distraction by St. John Cassian. As translator Jamie Kreiner notes, distraction is not a new struggle for human beings, but an aspect of the human condition.

Purchase How to Focus from Princeton University Press | Bookshop | Amazon

Deep Work has also led me to another book about focus and attention. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by behavioral scientist Winifred Gallagher is the chronicle of how she rearranged her life after a cancer diagnosis to change what she paid attention to, and making some important discoveries about the good life in the process. In her words, “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

Purchase Rapt from Bookshop | Amazon

Speaking of focus and St. John Cassian, Park End Books has a new children’s board book out based on his spiritual classic, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It is called Little Steps: Climbing the Ladder for Little Ones by Kathryn Reetzke and illustrated by Yostina Kaoud, and it is just lovely in its depth and simplicity.

Purchase Little Steps from Park End Books | Draw Near Designs

My fiction choice for this Lent is a new book (that will begin a series!) by Sarah Arthur, Once a Queen. This book has gotten amazing reviews and I can’t wait to dive in, especially considering what I have learned from Reading for the Love of God. You can listen to an interview with Sarah Arthur on the Read-Aloud Revival Podcast here.

Purchase Once a Queen from: Waterbrook | Bookshop | Amazon

For Our Salvation: Lectures and Readings on Holy Week in the Coptic Tradition by Fr. Arsenius Mikhail (no relation) from ACTS Press looks like excellent preparation for Holy Week. Fr. Arsenius is a scholar of liturgy so I am excited to learn a lot from this book.

Purchase For Our Salvation from: ACTS Press | Amazon

On a slightly more scholarly note, I’ll also be reading Dr. Youhanna Nessim Youssef’s new book The History of the Rite of Holy Week in the Coptic Orthodox Church. This book, also written by a longtime scholar of liturgy, provides some important historical context for the way we celebrate Holy Week in the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Purchase The History of the Rite of Holy Week from: St. Shenouda Press | Bookshop | Amazon