{"id":19331,"date":"2025-05-27T09:19:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T13:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/?p=19331"},"modified":"2025-05-27T09:19:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T13:19:55","slug":"summer-reads-our-pastors-suggest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/summer-reads-our-pastors-suggest\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Reads: Our Pastors Suggest\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Adult Ed, Circles, and Wednesday Bible Studies are on summer break, but that doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t challenge ourselves to keep learning and growing during this time off from our regular schedules. We asked our Hope Church pastors to give us a few suggestions for our summer reading list. Their responses are below.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">According to Pastor Gordon, picking one or two favorites was a challenge, so he shared several ideas:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We recently read some books together that were meaningful: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wholehearted Faith<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A classic that I love recommending is Nouwen\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Life of the Beloved<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, or how about Bonhoeffer\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Cost of Discipleship<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">?<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Folks may be interested in Richard Rohr\u2019s new book: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jamar Tisby\u2019s new book: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Spirit of Justice<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Poetry is always good! Recent from Padrig O\u2019 Tauma: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">44 Poems on Being With Each Other<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, or Amanda Gorman <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Call Us What We Carry<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pastor Gretchen shared two books that came to her mind right away:\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201c<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To Kill a Mockingbird<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> continues to be my all-time favorite that I can read again and different times with different eyes. And one from the past few years that sticks with me is called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overstory<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: different stories woven together to make a theme around trees. I felt smarter having read this novel, and you can&#8217;t always say that with fiction!\u201d (As a side note, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Overstory<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> would be recommended by Creation Care Ministry as well. You will learn a lot about forests from this weaving together of the stories of nine characters\u2019 experiences with trees.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Finally, Pastor Phil shared this note with his choices:\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI think of the two books we read for Bible Pride this year: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Courage to be Queer<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0by Jeff Hood and\u00a0<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul\u00a0<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">by Rolf R. Nolasco Jr. Those two came to mind first. I\u2019m currently reading a lovely feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ-affirming devotional titled\u00a0<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">God Didn\u2019t Make Us to Hate Us<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,\u00a0by Rev. Lizzy McManus-Dail. Very readable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you get through all those, the pastors would be happy to share more suggestions!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><br style=\"font-weight: 400;\" \/><br style=\"font-weight: 400;\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adult Ed, Circles, and Wednesday Bible Studies are on summer break, but that doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t challenge ourselves to keep learning and growing during this time off from our regular schedules. We asked our Hope Church pastors to give us a few suggestions for our summer reading list. Their responses are below. According to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19332,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifeofhope","category-worship-and-spiritual-formation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19333,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19331\/revisions\/19333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hopechurchrca.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}