Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us

Rebecca Parker was a young minister in Seattle when a woman walked into her church and asked if God really wanted her to accept her husband's beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. Parker knew, at that moment, that if she were to answer the woman's question truthfully she would have to rethink her theology. And she would have to think hard about some of the choices she was making in her own life.

When Rita Nakashima Brock was a young child growing up in Kansas, kids taunted...