The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints

by Jessica Hooten Wilson, Lauren F. Winner (Foreword by)

Overview

Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts)
Midwest Book Review 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction - Religion/Philosophy)

How do we become better people? Initiatives such as New Year's resolutions, vision boards, thirty-day plans, and self-help books often fail to compel us to live differently. We settle for small goals—frugal spending, less yelling at the kids, more time at the gym—but we are called to something far greater. We are created to be holy.

Award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson explains that learning to hear the call of holiness requires cultivating a new imagination—one rooted in the act of reading. Learning to read with eyes attuned to the saints who populate great works of literature moves us toward holiness, where God opens up a way of living that extends far beyond what we can conjure for ourselves. Literature has the power to show us what a holy life looks like, and these depictions often scandalize even as they shape our imagination. As such, careful reading becomes a sort of countercultural spiritual discipline.

The book includes devotionals, prayers, wisdom from the saints, and more to help individuals and groups cultivate a saintly imagination. Foreword by Lauren F. Winner.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587435249
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	498,848
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jessica Hooten Wilson (PhD, Baylor University) is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. She has written for The Gospel Coalition, National Review, the Christian Century, Comment magazine, and Englewood Review of Books and is the author of several books, including the Christianity Today Book Award Winner Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wilson speaks regularly around the country and has connections with a broad array of reading communities and classical education forums.

Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword by Lauren F. Winner 
Introduction
1. Holy Foolishness
2. Communion of Saints
3. Creation Care as a Holy Calling
4. Liberating Prophets
5. Virgin, Bride, Mother
6. Contemplative and Active Life
7. Sharing in His Suffering
8. Ars Moriendi
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

01/24/2022

Wilson (Giving the Devil His Due), a University of Dallas humanities professor, probes the intersection of literature and Christian living in her elegant and erudite devotional. Wilson analyzes a variety of novelists—including Willa Cather, C.S. Lewis, and Walter Wangerin Jr.—to show how meditating on their works can assist Christians in their religious lives. “The imagination has everything to do with our faith,” Wilson argues, as “stories convert our desire for well-versed explanations” into digestible narratives. The author studies Zora Neale Huston’s depiction of Hebrews in her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain to provide a template to fight injustice with faith, and examines George Bernanos’s model of self-contemplation set out in his The Diary of a Country Priest to illustrate how to reflect and pray. The unification against evil by the anthropomorphic animal heroes of Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow exemplifies the strength found in interconnectedness and collaboration, even of the meek. Though Wilson spends more time than necessary on plot summaries, she makes a cogent case for Christian readers to incorporate secular literature into their religious devotions. This would make the ideal accompaniment to literature classes and church book groups. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly