Call It Grace
Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
"Theology is a place and a story. Theology is the place and story you think of when you ask yourself about the meaning of your life, of the world, and the possibility of God."
So begins Serene Jones's epic work of raw truth, fierce love, and spiritual teaching as muscular as the fractured soul of this century demands. From her abiding Oklahoma roots to her historic leadership of a legendary New York seminary, her story illuminates the deep fault lines of this age--and points beyond them. With a voice that is at once frank and poetic, humble and prophetic, intimate and practical, Jones makes complex teachings around hatred, forgiveness, mercy, justice, death, sin, and grace understandable and immediately applicable for modern people. Excavating the wisdom of great theological voices--Soren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Calvin, James Baldwin, James Cone, Luce Irigaray, Saint Teresa of Avila--she brings them to life with an intimacy and vividness that illumines our lives and our culture now. At the same time, and with great beauty, Call It Grace reveals Serene Jones as a towering voice of a new, and urgently necessary, public theology for this century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jones (Trauma and Grace), president of Union Theological Seminary in New York and former president of the American Academy of Religion, recounts her life history and poses questions about faith, love, and forgiveness in this engrossing memoir. Jones grew up in Oklahoma and was the oldest daughter of a theology professor and a mother who was not gifted with mothering skills. Jones's grandfather was a distinguished judge and sexual predator. She recounts how his sexual abuse became worse and required the family to separate from him. The Oklahoma plains way of life, with its "sodbusting" farmers, outlaws, and "prairie theology" that crisscrossed denominations, made a lasting impression on her. Watching her father's civil rights activism was also a formative learning experience. Jones struggles to understand the amount of cruelty in American history (including racism in her own family's past), most strikingly illustrated by her recollection of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which affected her family, all of whom lived near the scene of the attack. Jones is a plainspoken, talented teacher and this moving memoir illustrates her deeply reflective ethics and eloquently captures Jones's response to her life's trials.
