Seeking shalom as creative makers
Review of "Just Making" by Mitali Perkins.
Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives
Mitali Perkins
Broadleaf Books, 2025.
Author Mitali Perkins is well known for her middle school and young adult novels, such as Bamboo People, Rickshaw Girl, and You Bring the Distant Near, as well as her children’s picture books – Home is in Between, Between My Hands and more.
In Just Making, Perkins relates her childhood experiences of immigrating with her family from India to the United States and how what she encountered shaped her perspective as a Christian author with a calling to pursue justice through her craft.
Perkins’ Christian faith is foundational to the advice she offers people who are makers seeking a just world – painters, basket weavers, writers, textile artists, printmakers, classical vocalists, needlework artists and more. She often draws wisdom from scripture. Early in the book, for example, she uses Genesis 3:7 to highlight sewing as one of God’s “first acts of divine restorative compassion after the fall of humanity.” She celebrates the power of this enduring art form, as people continue to upcycle discarded pieces of fabric and use other materials to create “designs of beauty and order.”
This faith-shaped book will not only appeal to readers from a Christian background, however. Perkins believes that all people are God’s image bearers; the counsel she offers is also relevant to adherents of other faith traditions.
With candidness and vulnerability, Perkins shares her struggles as a Christian writer discerning her calling to serve God in today’s world: “Isn’t it selfish to stay in the solitude of my study and generate stories? Why should I keep making art when suffering, injustice, and oppression are wreaking havoc on the planet? Why should you? How does one sustain a creative life given the seemingly selfish investment it takes to make beautiful things? Our gifts could be used to alleviate suffering and fight injustice. How dare we retreat and create?”
Perkins frames her conversation about the “just life” in terms of the Hebrew word shalom, utilizing philosopher Cornelius Plantinga’s definition of the concept: “‘Universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed. … Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.’”
Perkins envisions makers in their studios, workshops, libraries, sewing rooms, offices and other places “seeking to generate goodness … and trying to be compassionate and gracious in your making.” Her hope is that her guide, which includes myriad helpful suggestions, will encourage makers in their efforts “to act justly, love mercy and walk in humility through our shared vocation of making.”
