A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance offers an essay for every week in the seasons of the Christian year: From Advent and Christmas to Lent and Easter through the entire calendar.
Other than its major holidays, many people are not familiar with the rhythms of the church year, an ancient spiritual cycle of time. Yet all religions have such calendars — and they shape our understanding of faith. In the West, we live in tension with the secular calendar (mostly an inheritance from the Roman Empire) and the Christian liturgical calendar, a cycle of sacred stories that compose a larger narrative of love, hospitality, mercy, justice, and gratitude.
Bass reclaims and presents fresh perspectives for every biblical text in the church year; from musing on A Wrinkle in Time in Advent, to remembering her father’s old-fashioned blue Christmas decorations, and offering a revolutionary reading of the Last Supper.
Diana Butler Bass is an author, speaker, and independent scholar specializing in American religion and culture.
She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University and is the award-winning author of ten books, including Grounded: Finding God in the World —A Spiritual Revolution (HarperOne, 2015), Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (HarperOne, 2012) and Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (HarperOne, 2006). Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks will be released by HarperOne on April 3, 2018.
Recorded: March 16, 2021; Posted: March 17, 2021
Diana Butler Bass is one of only a few modern Christian writers who can absolutely blow me away with both spiritual insight and beautiful writing. She is a brilliant scholar and a wonderful storyteller, charming and devout, and deeply human.”
Diana’s most recent book is Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, which will be published on March 30, 2021.
Her secular friends often ask her “How can you still be a Christian?” In the book, she explains that her experience of Jesus has changed over the years, viewing him in different ways at different times. And that, though she is still a Christian, she isn’t the same kind of Christian she used to be, or that they may think she is. Freeing Jesus explores the many images of Jesus we encounter and embrace through a lifetime—and how we make theology from the text of our lives in conversation with scripture and tradition. Freeing Jesus invites us to liberate Jesus and free ourselves when it comes to the ever-compelling and yet often-elusive figure at the center of Christian faith.
More Pending
