Meredith Sell

The driving question of this book is: How do you foster virtue? Over the the course of 10 chapters, Brooks examines the lives of people like Dorothy Day, St. Augustine, Frances Perkins, George Eliot, and others to understand how they came to embrace the pursuit of goodness — not in the form of religious piety, but in humility, service, honesty, courage, love, and other characteristics that Brooks dubs “eulogy virtues.”

I picked up this book at the recommendation of my pastor and eagerly devoured every page. Fleming Rutledge’s teachings on Advent, a time of preparation not for Christmas but for Christ’s second coming, is a refreshing challenge to live in faithfulness and anticipation. The introduction alone (which is about 30 pages) offers much-needed readjustments to interpretations of Advent and what the season is for.

I finally finished the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. I started reading this book in 2021, after finishing the first volume, but ended up setting it aside. I picked it up again this year, eager to learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt’s fascinating life. This volume focuses on what Cook dubs ER’s “defining years” as she steps into advocacy for her pet political projects, including the Works Progress Administration.

It took me six years to land on my conclusion that women can serve in any role in the local church, and apparently I’m in good company, with folks like Philip B. Payne, whose work as a New Testament scholar changed his mind.

This book is a good place to start if you have questions on what to do with a particular passage. Inerrancy and egalitarianism are not mutually exclusive.

Are women’s bodies anomalies in sports? Does a female athlete’s career end with adolescence, motherhood, or menopause? Christine Yu’s answer is a definite “no”.

Yu has made a name for herself by writing about women athletes and the unique challenges they face. Her first book tells the sports science story of the second sex — a story that shows how a field initially focused on enhancing male physical prowess has only recently started catching up on studying the female body, and still has a long way to go.

The best book I’ve read on gender. Writing from a Catholic Christian perspective, Abigail Favale sets forth a cohesive, nuanced articulation of the dignity of maleness and femaleness, alongside a thoughtful critique of modern gender theory and the feminist thought that paved the way for current understandings of gender. Favale’s personal journey from evangelical Christian to agnostic feminist to an at-first-reluctant Catholic flavors her approach with a depth of understanding and generosity that embodies kindness and compassion without surrendering her heartfelt convictions.

This book caught me in a unique period of homesickness and wrapped me up in a word hug. In it, author Frances Mayes, returns to the place she grew up and writes about her return, as well as her childhood in that place. Rich with nostalgia and the reality that you can never really return home, because places always change.

A beautiful and troubling book about the author’s up-close witness of climate change, though much of the book, honestly, seems to focus more on just the beauty and wonder of nature. Ehrlich writes about her life in Wyoming, how a divorce and being struck by lightning returned her to California, and her time spent in Zimbabwe and on the melting ice of Greenland.

A couple decades out of date, but a good read anyway. Colette Dowling takes a razor-sharp look at what she coins the “frailty myth”, a pervasive idea that women are inherently weak and fragile and helpless. How does this harm women and girls? How does this make us more vulnerable — to sickness, to violence? What can be done about it? These questions guide her exploration.

If you’re raising daughters or are a woman who assumes herself to be weak, I highly recommend picking up this book.

Narrative history of the year, in my humble opinion. Melissa Sevigny tells the little-known story of two women who were the first to (successfully) raft the Grand Canyon — and did so for the purpose of botanizing the plants there. This book is equal parts outdoor adventure, nature writing, and history. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter’s story is interwoven with the history of the Colorado River, Grand Canyon, and botany as a scientific discipline. Set in summer 1938, it follows the women’s trip down the river with a motley crew of unlikely (and sometimes, conflicting) companions.

“In the year 1936, a young writer planted roses.” That writer was Orwell, today known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984 which paint a gloomy picture of life under totalitarianism. But the books are also rich with Orwell’s awe-filled observations of the natural world. This puts him in direct contrast with other socialists or revolutionaries who saw beauty as superfluous and a waste of time.

A heady theological treatise that tackles the question of how the God revealed in the man Jesus Christ relates to women. The author approaches her subject through the story of the incarnation, with a careful look at Mary, and throughout the text, makes much of the gospel. This book is by no means an easy read, but it’s still worthwhile. It’s not just a nerdy, topical deep dive. It’s a fresh look at the gospel that magnifies the goodness of God, while maintaining congruence with orthodox Christian teachings.

While the book needed a better copyeditor, its content is interesting and enlightening. It sparked a few insights for me regarding my Christian faith and grew my appreciation of Judaism. I’m especially struck by how tactile and “earthy” different Jewish traditions are, which makes me curious about how Christian liturgies and the Christian calendar evolved from those same ancient roots.

Essay collections are tough to review. I enjoyed some of these essays and could have easily skipped others. My favorite essays were: The Empathy Exams (the opening essay), The Immortal Horizon, Fog Count, and Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain. My absolute favorite: In Defense of Saccharin(e).