The Best Faith and Justice Books of the Century (So Far)
Since our earliest issues, Sojourners has maintained that culture coverage is just as much a part of our mission to articulate the biblical call to social justice as news stories and commentaries. And after reviewing the list below, we suspect you’ll see why. The books on this list span many genres, but they all circle the same core question: What does our faith call us to do in the face of injustice? Women Talking, the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews that kicks off this list, captures the urgency of that inquiry. “We are wasting time … by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away,” says Greta, a character eager to name and face a great evil happening within her own Mennonite colony in Bolivia. “We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”
The first 25 years of this century have given us plenty of pain — the so-called war on terror, racialized police violence, the surge of white Christian nationalism, greed-accelerated climate change, to name a few. These books, selected by Sojourners’ staff members, are just a few of the many titles from the past quarter century that have helped us process that pain into fuel for change.— Jenna Barnett, senior associate culture editor Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (2003) by Tracy Kidder Written in gripping prose by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder, this book follows Paul Farmer’s passionate pursuit, as co-founder of Partners in Health, to provide quality healthcare to the poorest people in the world. Farmer was a Harvard-educated Catholic who embraced liberation theology and embodied what he called a hermeneutic of generosity: seeing the best in others and their intentions. Kidder traces Farmer’s peregrinations around the world — from Haiti to Peru to Boston — illustrating his unflappable commitment to what Farmer called “fighting the long defeat,” aligning himself with those whose lives are often deemed less valuable than those with more money. Farmer pulls no punches in his critique of white liberals, whom he affectionately called “WL’s.” Yet, despite his critique, he felt it was his Robin Hood-like duty to help people with too much give sacrificially to those with too little. In Mountains Beyond Mountains we are reminded of our shared humanity and the imperative to always place people above profit. Kidder does not make a saint out of Farmer, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 62, but Mountains Beyond Mountains offers a window into the complexity of Farmer’s bright light and inspiration to shine our own.— Josina Guess, associate editor Gilead (2004) and Lila (2014) by Marilynne Robinson Any novel from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author could’ve made this list, but Gilead and Lila are the standouts. The novels, both journeys out of loneliness toward faith and romance, both set in mid-1900s Iowa, essentially tell the same story from different perspectives. Rev. Ames (centered in Gilead) is an old pastor trying his best to love God, his family, and his friends with loyalty and attention. And Lila (centered in Lila) is an impoverished, nomadic day laborer with equal amounts of skepticism and love for both Ames (who she eventually marries) and the divine. In Lila, Robinson writes one of the most tender baptism scenes in all of literature. After Lila shares that she is too ashamed of her past to get baptized in a church, Ames offers to do the baptism in the middle of a field with a bucket, river water, and only a catfish flopping helplessly in the grass as a witness. Later, snuggled up together on the couch, they talk theology. Ames, who always has a sermon on his tongue, says, “Baptism is what I’d call a fact.” Lila replies, “Because you can’t just wash it off.” The Gilead series is full of grace and wonder. — Jenna Barnett, senior associate culture editor
The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (2006) by Obery Hendricks Jr. In a similar vein to the seminal books Jesus and the Disinherited and God of the Oppressed, The Politics of Jesus places Jesus back into his proper social, political, and economic context so we can better and more accurately understand his message, ministry, and yes, his politics. Hendricks, a professor of religion and African American studies and an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, offers a book that is essential for understanding the roots of Jesus’ political consciousness as well as the political strategies Jesus employed throughout his short public ministry. The book debunks the false notions that following Christ means being apolitical or that Jesus only cared about spiritual matters. Jesus of Nazareth was truly a political revolutionary, and Hendricks unpacks the profound social and political implications of following him. “To say that Jesus was a political revolutionary is to say that the message he proclaimed not only called for change in individual hearts but also demanded sweeping and comprehensive change in the political, social, and economic structures in his setting in life: colonized Israel,” writes Hendricks, who then applies Jesus’ revolutionary politics to our contemporary society.— Adam Taylor, president God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (2006) by Jim Wallis So, we are possibly a little biased here, but this New York Times bestseller by Sojourners founder Jim Wallis remains a defining book for Christians who didn’t (and still don’t) see their own faith values represented in contemporary U.S. politics. This book is most famous for Wallis’ explanation of how Republicans and Democrats have both failed to live up to the teachings of Jesus, an idea summarized in the ever-popular Sojourners bumper sticker: “God is not a Republican … or a Democrat.” But the point isn’t just to bash both parties and throw our hands up in despair; as Wallis writes: “Protest is not enough; it is necessary to show a better way.” Wallis spends the majority of the book articulating alternatives that “go beyond the polarized ideological agendas of partisan politics.” Though plenty has changed about U.S. politics in the years since Wallis wrote this book, the longing for policies that more fully live up to Jesus’ teachings — policies that tell the truth about racism, reclaim family values, reject war, uplift the poor, and replace single-issue voting with a consistent ethic of human life and flourishing — remain as important as ever. — Betsy Shirley, editor in chief A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (2009) by Katharine Hayhoe and Andrew Farley When I first read this book some 15 years ago, what struck me most was the gentle, sincere way that evangelical co-authors Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, and her husband Andrew Farley, a pastor, invited even those with fundamentalist theology to engage with the science of climate change. A Climate for Change aims to bypass the politicization of the topic and meet science-skeptical believers with respect and care. While ideological splits have arguably worsened, Hayhoe continues to bring courage and optimism to her award-winning work as a researcher and advocate for collective action to slow climate change, including in Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (2021). — Julie Polter, editor
Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (2010) by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro Liturgy offers the gift of words and structure when our hearts and mouths aren’t sure what to say. Drawing from deep wells of two millennia of Christian witness across denominations and geography, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals is a beautifully curated collection of prayers, quotes, and songs organized around the church calendar and the rhythms of life in community. Compiled by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro, this book offers both prayers for every day of the year and “occasional prayers” like “Prayers for a Workplace,” or the “Death of Someone Killed in the Neighborhood.” These pages include short biographies of both canonized and unconventional saints. The wisdom of Julian of Norwich meets the courage of Septima Clark. Certain days honor the martyrdom of Paul Chong Hasang and early Korean converts or Jean Donovan, one among many killed in the Salvadoran Civil War. Born from the New Monasticism movement, this book is best enjoyed aloud in the company of two or more people eager to meet Jesus and one another at the intersection of faith and justice.— Josina Guess, associate editor The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by James H. Cone For progressive Christians, it has become commonplace to associate the cross and the lynching tree with one another. But before James H. Cone’s seminal text, such comparisons were exclusive to Black communities in the U.S. “If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history,” writes Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. A year after the book’s publication, a Black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a vigilante who thought Martin looked suspicious in his hoodie. The killing of Martin sparked what we now know as the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s hard to over-exaggerate the influence of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, as it provides an explicit connection between the country’s racist past and present that resonates with both religious and secular audiences. At a Black Lives Matter protest for Eric Garner, who was killed after being put in an illegal chokehold by a Staten Island police officer in 2014, I remember someone had written on the sidewalk in chalk: The cross, the lynching tree, the chokehold.— Josiah R. Daniels, senior associate opinion editor Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar who has for decades helped preachers and commentary writers identify and remove anti-Judaism, sexism, and other prejudices from our biblical interpretation. With Short Stories by Jesus, she corrects misunderstandings around the parables, beginning with the idea that they are specific to Jesus’ teachings. In truth, parables appear in the Jewish scriptures and were part of Jewish culture among Jesus’ contemporaries, Levine writes. Interpretations vary for any parable, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t right and wrong: Christians have too-often perpetuated inaccurate ideas about first-century Judaism, for example, in seeing the Levite and priest in the good Samaritan story as adhering to Jewish law in fear of touching a corpse. In fact, they were neglecting duty, as Levine argues the original audience would have understood. And the parable is about loving one’s enemies, not simply being a do-gooder, as in the domesticated version. There and elsewhere, she encourages delving into these provocative stories from Jesus without taming them, instead letting them disturb and challenge us. — Celeste Kennel-Shank, copy editor
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) by Bryan Stevenson In the decade since the release of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson has become something of a household name, and the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., has gained international acclaim. Just Mercy is Stevenson’s telling of the decades of long, often lonely, and harrowing work. As a public defender, Stevenson represented wrongfully incarcerated men on death row, children who were sentenced to die in prison, and men and women denied their rights and human dignity within the U.S. carceral system. By weaving together his personal narrative of loss and forgiveness, his professional legal work, and his abiding Christian faith, Stevenson succinctly traces the path from slavery to mass incarceration and explains how racism is embedded in U.S. history. As local municipalities take on the work of remembering lynching victims, Just Mercy is a field guide to the unfinished work of justice in the U.S. Stevenson’s faith and optimism are dizzying in the face of the brutal inequalities his work reveals. He sees the best in everyone. Reading or re-reading his book or watching the 2019 film adaptation can offer us courage to walk the way of peace, love, and redemption against all odds.— Josina Guess, associate editor Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (2015) by Rachel Held Evans We could probably include any of Evans’ numerous books on this list, but in Searching for Sunday, Evans probes a question that I suspect is familiar to many of us: What happens when the spiritual places that once sustained you cease to feel like home … and what comes after that? With her characteristic insight, humor, and deeply personal writing, Evans describes wrestling with her faith and a longing for a kind of Christianity that doesn’t offer pat answers, a 5-step plan, or “a ladder to holiness to climb.” Instead, she writes, the heart of Christianity is “just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.”— Betsy Shirley, editor in chief Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015) by Kelly Brown Douglas In her book, womanist theologian and Episcopal priest Kelly Brown Douglas looks starkly at the deaths of Jesus Christ and Trayvon Martin (and other victims of police brutality). Douglas, like James Cone, interprets these police killings of Black people as modern-day lynchings. Then she brings this theology of the cross and Christ’s solidarity with the “crucified class” to bear on the U.S. culture of “Stand Your Ground” laws. Narrating the racial history of the U.S., Douglas explains how race influences ideas of guilt, hierarchy, and domination. She defines the justice of God, in the context of our history, as a liberation from “the sin of setting one’s self above or against another.”
“God’s justice means an end to the very culture that has declared war on innocent, young black bodies,” she writes. “This means an end to the systemic, structural, and discursive sin of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, which makes black bodies the target of war.”— Mitchell Atencio, senior associate news editor Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) by Kristin Kobes Du Mez I had assumed that Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne was an “exvangelical” screed and so, I had avoided it — there is a glut of such literature and I typically find that these books contain surface-level criticism or bitter derision toward those of us who’ve left evangelicalism but remain Christian. After finally reading it, I am happy to report it is not a screed but, instead, a well-written and meticulously researched history of evangelicalism in the U.S. Du Mez, who is a historian, offers detailed examples of how “Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by its theology.” For those looking to understand how and why evangelicals have been so successful at establishing and retaining power in the U.S., this book is required reading.— Josiah R. Daniels, senior associate opinion editor Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (2020) by Robert Chao Romero In this expansive and ambitious book, Robert Chao Romero — a historian, minister, and lawyer — explores 500 years of the Latin American church and its consistent role in fighting systems of oppression, including colonialism, racism, and economic injustice. “The failure to recognize the important role of ethnic culture and experience in shaping biblical interpretation can produce damaging results because it can lead a culturally dominant community to insist that its own interpretations of the Bible are ‘objective’ and ‘official’ to the exclusion of all others,” he writes. Romero connects historical advocacy of people like Bartolomé de las Casas — who advocated for the rights of Indigenous people in the 16th century — to modern liberation theology, showing how faith has inspired advocacy and resistance in the “Brown Church” for generations. Brown Church celebrates the history and impact of Latina/o Christians and inspires readers to challenge how culture may have shaped their interpretation of the Bible. No matter what the reader’s cultural background is, this book will inspire them to join Latina/o Christians in acting out their faith through advocacy for the marginalized and resistance of the systems that create marginalization.— Matt Murphy, chief operations officer The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020) by Katherine Stewart In this timely book, investigative journalist Katherine Stewart pokes holes in our common understandings of the Religious Right. “While many Americans still believe that the Christian right is primarily concerned with ‘values,’ leaders of the movement know it’s really about power.” And the movement, as thoroughly dissected by Stewart, is more calculated, ethnically diverse, and well-funded than I’d ever realized. Stewart profiles several current leaders of the movement and also traces today’s brand of Christian nationalism all the way back to slavery. “Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they prefer autocrats to democrats,” she writes. In order to stop Christian nationalism’s surging power, we first have to understand it. Reading The Power Worshippers is a strong place to start.— Jenna Barnett, senior associate culture editor A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church Year (2021) by Wilda C. Gafney Gafney, one of our greatest biblical interpreters, delivers fresh voices and perspectives out of scripture’s ancient texts. As a Hebrew biblical scholar, Black womanist theologian, and Episcopal priest, Gafney fuses the intellectual, prophetic, and pastoral vocations through her monumental work of a new Christian lectionary focused on women. “What would it look like to tell the Good News through the stories of women who are often on the margin of scripture and often set up to represent bad news?” To build her response, Gafney first had to establish “a female canon within the broader canon” of scripture, map these scriptures with the liturgical year, and sort passages with shared themes for each Sunday. And the selected texts were drawn from Gafney’s own highly skilled, probing, and thoughtful original translations. For example, the Good Friday readings pair Jesus’ crucifixion with the brutal deaths of Jephthah’s daughters, revealing themes of a feminine Christ who suffers. An Easter passage from Psalm 18 declares: “The Rock Who Gave Us Birth is my rock!” keying beautifully with the full then empty tomb. Gafney’s lectionary series is strong at every level; it also includes text notes and preaching prompts. “I was (and remain) convinced it ought to be possible to tell the story of God and God’s people through the most marginalized characters in the text,” writes Gafney. More than 1 billion Christians worldwide receive their weekly exposure to the Bible through a lectionary. How different the world would be if those readings centered the experiences of women and girls.— Rose Marie Berger, senior editor We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope (2023) by Steven Charleston If you want to know how to survive the end of the world, ask those who have done it before. Steven Charleston (Ladder to the Light), Choctaw Episcopal bishop, animates the prophecies of 19th-century Indigenous leaders for lessons on surviving the collapse of climate, culture, religion, and community. With a fierce tenderness toward settler Christians, Charleston explores how Native ancestors survived the “greatest human cataclysm in history” by turning to “the prophets who had seen it coming and who, once it arrived with a vengeance, helped their people live through it with courage and dignity.” First Charleston turns to John of Patmos as one example of first-century spiritual thrivance in apocalypse, then he opens the scrolls of Seneca diplomat Ganiodaiio, Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, Nez Perce spiritual leader Smohalla, and Paiute Ghost Dancer Wovoka. But history serves the future. “Prophets do not arise out of a vacuum. They are part of the apocalyptic process.” Charleston believes that all who still claim the ancient spiritual traditions can learn to navigate “the path through apocalyptic fear to the revelation of a new apocalyptic hope.” A brave, original, wise, accessible account for the anxious and spirit-starved generations of the 21st century.— Rose Marie Berger, senior editor Hell Is a World Without You (2023) by Jason Kirk It’s audacious to claim that a book published in the final 13 months of the first quarter belongs on a “best of the century” list. But Kirk’s book, a fiction coming-of-age story told via Isaac Siena, Jr. and his youth group friends, stands out. Kirk’s novel weaves together the wisdom of someone who has found God beyond fundamentalism with the cringe of Y2K evangelical culture. More than a trip down memory lane, Kirk’s characters shine with sass, introspection, kindness, and anxiety as they navigate high school lunch tables, fall in love, and confess their sins in front of the whole church camp. Hell Is a World Without You boldly shows exactly what it was like growing up conservative Christian, down to the cussing that can only be found in the head of an evangelical teen: “Gosh-f—ing-dangit!” followed by the obligatory “Sorry,” to God, who is listening to his every thought. It shines with a sympathy for even the worst of those born into the Religious Right — a sympathy that highlights harms rather than excusing them. The book rallies around the ethos of a generation forced to reckon with their evangelical upbringings: “Anything that can be built, can be rebuilt better.”— Mitchell Atencio, senior associate news editor
