Surrender and a new beginning
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Surrender and a new beginning

“I am in awe of the poetic power of the scriptures, how you can’t approach the subject of God without metaphor.” So writes Bono late in his wide-ranging and engaging memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. The artist cannot tell his story, or the remarkable story of U2, apart from Christian faith, or apart from…

Love in the midst of tragedy
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Love in the midst of tragedy

The parents of 16-year-old Miriam have no income. She enters a relationship with an older man so she will be provided for. She becomes pregnant, but her relationship has given her more than daily provision. It has also given her HIV/AIDs. In order to not pass the virus onto her child, she does not nurse…

Facing the brokenness
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Facing the brokenness

No one else spoke to me about my mother. Not my kindergarten teacher, not the kids in my class, not the neighbors, not people from our church. So begins this memoir, describing the confusion of Jane Griffioen as a four-year old, totally puzzled as to why her mother was taken away on a stretcher from…

‘Big Breath In’ Took my Breath Away
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‘Big Breath In’ Took my Breath Away

I didn’t really want to read George Keulen’s memoir Big Breath In about his journey with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and lung transplant. Don’t get me wrong – I love reading, and I enjoy a good memoir. But there’s something about people sharing their stories of these specific experiences that makes me feel vulnerable. I am…

Extravagant love in the face of finitude

Extravagant love in the face of finitude

Kate Bowler’s new memoir, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), is written in typical Dr. Bowler style. A history professor at Duke, she approaches this memoir with facts from her medical records, journals, and interviews that made up her diagnosis of terminal cancer at age 35. Yet it’s not…

Wolterstorff’s Wonderful Account of Living in Learning and Wonder
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Wolterstorff’s Wonderful Account of Living in Learning and Wonder

In the first paragraph of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s preface to In This World of Wonders, he admits his long reluctance to write about himself as a legacy of his southwest Minnesota Dutch immigrant community’s ethos of self-deprecation, “…[N]ever toot your own horn,” he writes.