Desert Fathers; Tish Harrison Warren; Jen Hatmaker; Tony 2026 book and movie reviews

Desert Fathers; Tish Harrison Warren; Jen Hatmaker; Tony 2026 book and movie reviews 

What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren was published by Convergent, an imprint of Random House, on May 12, 2026. It is 192 pages long. Warren is 47 years old, married, and the mother of three. For her previous two books, Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night, Warren has won two Christianity Today awards, as well as an Intervarsity Press Readers' Choice award, and an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Book of the Year award.

 

What Grows in Weary Lands argues that the Desert Fathers and Mothers offer guidance to Christians today. These Fathers and Mothers retreated to monastic desert lives in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in the third century AD. Their wisdom is available to modern readers via a collection titled Sayings of the Desert Fathers. In spite of this title, the collection includes quotes by Desert Mothers as well.

 

Convergent Publishing is dedicated to books on "spirituality, personal growth, self-help, relationships, social commentary, memoir, and lifestyle." Convergent's other books include Done for Now; the Lazy Genius Guide to Chores, and Go Quiet on the Mountain, about a bestselling author who "left his new boyfriend and his smartphone in LA" and went to live in a cabin in Colorado. What in the World? A Southern Woman's Guide to Laughing at Life's Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings is by standup comic and TV sitcom star Leanne Morgan. Notes from an Evangelical Reject tells the tale of a black man who discovers that "If you talk about racial justice in white spaces … you will get pushed out" and also that "White Evangelicalism" "captured democracy."

 

Tish Harrison Warren's readers and her fellow authors lather praise on her work. What Grows in Weary Lands has over two hundred Amazon reviews, with an average vote of 4.8 out of 5. Jacket blurbs call the book beautiful, wise, and rich. "Warren is one of our best living spiritual writers," says author John Mark Comer. Weary Lands is "the book we need in this time as believers, as neighbors, and as men and women navigating the modern world," says author Annie F. Downs. "A rich application of ancient monastic wisdom to the burnout tendencies of modern life. You need to read it," says author Justin Whitmel Earley. "Despairing Christians  will be rejuvenated," says Publishers Weekly. "A beautifully crafted weave of both resilience and wonder," says author Martin Shaw. "A modern spiritual classic and another must-read offering from one of the brightest spiritual writers of our day," says Reverand Claude Atcho, author of Reading Black Books.

 

Reader reviews at Amazon are no less enthusiastic than blurbs by Warren's professional writer peers and church leaders. In five-star reviews, readers call Weary Lands "profound," a "thought-changer," "fabulous," and "phenomenal." Weary Lands' premise is a metaphor. The Desert Fathers and Mothers lived in an actual desert. Warren describes her own spiritual discomfort as a metaphorical desert. Amazon reviewer Elkay's review is quoted below. Its metaphorical content and style reflect many reactions to Warren's work. Elkay's review also exemplifies one genre of spiritual writing. Some spiritual writing focuses on concrete, reality-based details. In contrast, Elkay's review is metaphorical.

 

"Long enough have I lived and am I living that deserts not a few have I wandered. And fearsomely grand mountains. And verdant fields. And lush forests. This moment of 'aridity,' this desert is different than others I’ve encountered. Specifically, it is not at all without … an occasional flash flood. Dangerous to be sure. And reviving. I feel a reawakening happening around me … unlike … earlier (not a few) encounters with God …The craft of faith. My cell. A train ride through the ever-surprising desert. Life as was instituted from the foundation of creation."

 

I'll talk more, below, about Elkay's review.

 

A few months ago. I stumbled across a radio interview with Tish Harrison Warren. I was intrigued. I share the belief of many a "Christian atheist" or "cultural Christian" – folks like historian Tom Holland, author Douglas Murray, sex adviser Dan Savage, biologist Richard Dawkins, journalist Oriana Fallaci, and philosopher Slavoj Zizek – that Christianity has had a massive, positive impact on Western Civilization and the world, and that the current trend away from belief and religiosity presents us all with an unpredictable and potentially much worse future.

 

As historian Tom Holland says, we are all swimming in Christian waters, and we don't realize it, any more than, as the old saying goes, a fish knows that it is in water. The fish has never known anything but water, so it has no basis for comparison. We have not lived in the pre-Christian world, so we can, without extensive reading, remain ignorant, as Holland, again, puts it, of how "radical" and "strange" Christianity is. What I gathered from that half-heard radio interview with Warren was that she is a successful priest and author who is introducing her readers to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and insisting on their value for twenty-first-century America.

 

Too many self-identified Christians have no idea of the richness of their own heritage. One of my favorite books is Robert Ellsberg's 1997 All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. Each one- or two-page biography introduces the reader to Christian men and women who lived exemplary lives. There are strident spinsters and humble housewives, world class scientists, famous authors, power-wielding popes and Saint Alphonsus, a doorman. There are Europeans and Americans and also Native Americans, Asians, and Africans. There are warriors and pacifists, world travelers and anchorites who never left one tiny location.

 

Ellsberg writes in a journalistic style. That is, as if in a newspaper obituary, Ellsberg introduces the reader to the who, what, where, when, why, and how of each saint's life. For example, in his entry on Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Ellsberg writes that Seraphim told a "rich man to give away everything he possessed" and "free his serfs … the rich man complied." The Plague Martyrs of Alexandria "nursed the sick, washed the bodies of the dead, and saw to their burial." Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was separated from her husband and in her forties. She turned her back on high society and took a nursing course. She then "found lodging in the squalid immigrant quarter of the Lower East Side … she began inviting cancer patients into her own apartment, where she offered them loving care and companionship until they died … she adamantly refused any payment." She continued to provide free care to cancer sufferers for the next thirty years. In seventeenth-century Cartagena, Peter Claver entered newly arriving slave ships. "He would move among the half dead Africans, treating their wounds and distributing food and drink … he tried to instill a sense of their human dignity and their preciousness in the eyes of God."

 

Ellsberg's biographies are educational, inspirational, and mind-expanding. It is not towering prose that renders them so, nor clever metaphors. It is Ellsberg's concrete nouns and action verbs. There is a temptation, when writing about spiritual matters, to write, as Elkay does, above, entirely in metaphor. Elkay writes of a desert, a train ride, and a flash flood, but she doesn't write about a single detail from objective reality. What do the desert, the train ride, the flash flood, signify? I suspect that even Elkay herself doesn't know.

 

When I read Ellsberg's brief bio of Saint Peter Claver, I know what "food" and "drink" meant to slaves in the hold of a ship. I don't reach the transcendent through metaphors with no real-world referent. I reach the transcendent through "food and drink." Jesus chose exactly those most earthly of substances to represent his most heavenly nature.

 

Warren's promise, in the interview I heard, was that her book would introduce readers to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and show how their lives were pertinent in our modern technology-heavy lives. Warren doesn't provide much background on the Desert Fathers and Mothers; I'll do so, here.

 

These Christian hermits lived simple lives of self-denial, prayer, and poverty. Some were wealthy; they freed their slaves, gave their money to the poor, and retreated to the desert to seek God. They practiced "mortification of the flesh," that is, denial of bodily needs and pleasures in order to transcend. Not all chose the same disciplines. Some stopped bathing. Some fought off sleep, and chanted the Psalms all night. Some slept on bare stone. They performed their work, for example weaving baskets or rope for sale, to the point of exhaustion. They abjured speech and remained silent and alone. They wore rags or hair shirts.

 

They ate sparingly. Their staple food was paxamatia, a hard bread baked to the point of dehydration. It could, in the desert air, be stored "indefinitely" and then softened with water before being consumed. They also ate legumes and what wild vegetables and fruits they could gather. Many were vegetarian. They drank water. Fasting was also a constant, often performed once weekly, twice weekly, or longer. Given the spare foods they ate, fasting doesn't sound like much of a sacrifice. Abba Poemen said that one should eat, but not to the point of feeling satisfied.

 

Some Fathers and Mothers recorded their dreams. Unsurprisingly, they dreamed of fruit. Abba Apollo dreamed that an angel handed him "things which do not grow in Egypt: fruits of paradise of every kind, and grapes and pomegranates and figs and walnuts and honeycombs and a pitcher of fresh milk and giant dates and white loaves still warm." Patermuthius and Macarius "dreamed themselves into Paradise." "The first thing they did was eat, and it was fruit, 'rich and many colored.'"

 

Ironically, given their desire for solitude, the Desert Fathers and Mothers became celebrities, and they had fans, so many that Saint Athanasius said, "The desert has become a city." Saint Barsanuphius needed a secretary and multilingual translator to manage his correspondence; 850 of his documents survive. Biographies became bestsellers and were translated into several languages. One biography recounts the inspirational life of Saint Melania, a name shared by our current First Lady. Saint Anthony's biography contributed to the conversion of Saint Augustine.

 

Even Pagan philosophers sought the hermits out; some went in good faith; others went to test or mock. Pilgrims wanted advice. "Give me a word, Abba!" Or "Speak a word, Amma!" visitors would request. This may be how we came to have their collected sayings. Sayings of the Desert Fathers is an anonymous collection based on oral tradition. One of my favorite sayings is by Amma Syncletica. She said, "There are many who live in the mountains, and behave as if they were in the town. They are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for those who are solitaries to live in the crowd of their own thoughts."

 

Arab Muslims invaded and conquered Christian Egypt in 639 – 642 AD. Egyptians remained majority Christian until the Middle Ages but as is inevitable whenever Muslims invade, Christians in the Middle East and North Africa suffered a relentless Islamic cultural and biological genocide. For example, Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996 to 1021) required Christians to wear crosses weighing several pounds; he required Jews to wear a calf design, symbolizing Exodus' Golden Calf. He also destroyed Christian and Jewish houses of worship. How many Christian and Jewish buildings were destroyed is debated; some historians say thousands. See here.

 

A thousand years later, in Egypt today, Christians are subject to mob attacks when they attempt to repair churches. According to records from the time of the Muslim Conquest, there were tens of thousands of Jews living in Egypt. In 1948, there was an estimated 80,000 Jews in Egypt. There may be only five or ten Jews left in Egypt today.

 

There are some monasteries from the days of the Fathers and Mothers. Looters and the Egyptian government have destroyed some sites; see "Documenting the Vanishing Hermitages of the Egyptian Desert" here. See also "A monastery … demolished by the state in a single operation. Priests struck by heavy machinery" here. Saint Catherine monastery, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world, is "in peril" reports the National Review. In May, 2017, Muslim terrorists murdered defenseless Christian Egyptian pilgrims, including children, traveling to the Saint Samuel the Confessor monastery. In November, 2018, Muslim terrorists again attacked and murdered pilgrims traveling to this monastery.

 

This background material does not appear in Warren's book. Some modern day Christians, including Tish Harrison Warren, cite the Desert Fathers and Mothers as inspirations. That's a wonderful thing. There's another aspect of this story, though, that also needs to be reported, even though it is less about Christians respecting, celebrating, and seeking inspiration from each other, and more about Christians rejecting, hurting, and anathematizing each other, and thereby inadvertently facilitating the Muslim Conquest; see here.

 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers began retreating to the desert two hundred years before the Council of Chalcedon, but that Council would drive a wedge between most Christians and what would come to be called "Oriental Orthodox" Christians, that is some Christians in Egypt, Armenia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, India, Syria, and Lebanon.

 

In Christianity's early centuries, there were passionate debates about Christ's nature. People debated whether Jesus was entirely divine, entirely human, some impossible to understand entity that was both, or, as the Gnostics held, was Jesus a being of light who lacked a physical body? There was a council at Chalcedon in 451 AD. Catholics, most Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox Christians today accept Chalcedonian Christianity, that is, the "true God and true man" dyophysitism position. Copts rejected Chalcedonian Christianity, and insisted on miaphysitism, the belief that Jesus had one unified nature that is both divine and human. What appears to modern eyes to be a big dispute over a minor difference, or even a difference that is impossible to discern or even check for accuracy, resulted in a multipart tragedy that has lasted for centuries.

 

The first tragedy: Christians anathematized and oppressed their fellow Christians. Some subjects of the Byzantine empire were Chalcedonian Christians. Some were Miaphysites. Byzantine Emperors Zeno (reign 474 – 491) and Anastasius (reign 491 – 518) were tolerant of their Miaphysite subjects. These emperors' tolerance caused problems with Rome, which adhered more rigidly and uncompromisingly to the Chalcedonian position. To restore communion with Rome, subsequent Byzantine emperors, like Justin I (reign 518 – 527) and Justinian I (reign 527 -565), were more oppressive of Miaphysites. Justine I, Justinian I, and other Byzantine emperors persecuted Miaphysites. Justinian wanted to take political control of the Western Roman Empire back from Arian Christian Germanic tribes. Arian Christianity is yet a different product of debates about the nature of Christ. Arianism is non-trinitarian; that is, Jesus is not part of a Trinity.

 

While Justinian persecuted Miaphysites, his wife, Theodora, sheltered Miaphysites. Justinian's and Theodora's "good cop / bad cop" strategy reflects Justinian's dilemma. He wanted a unified, Christian, Roman Empire. He tried to please both sides, without alienating either.

 

Just before the Muslim invasion of Egypt, Emperor Heraclius (reign 610 – 641) appointed Cyrus of Alexandria as both official church Patriarch and also de facto governor of Egypt. Cyrus used terror to force Copts to accept the Byzantine interpretation of Christ's nature. This alienated Copts from the ruling Byzantines and played into the hands of the invading Muslim Arabs.

 

In the centuries after 451 AD, Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians repeatedly met in attempts to repair the rift. At first, Egyptian and Syrian Christians could not attend because of the Muslim takeover of Egypt, but Armenians could meet with Chalcedonian Christians from Constantinople, and, in 1439–1445, the Council of Florence included Oriental Orthodox Christians from several Middle Eastern and African countries.

 

Attempts to mend the rift between churches continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1973, Coptic Pope Shenouda III met with Pope Paul VI. This was the first such meeting in over 1,500 years. Paul and Shenouda released a "Common Declaration" documenting how close their positions were. Paul honored Miaphysite Christians. Pope Shenouda, Paul wrote, bears

 

"the traditions of the ancient See of Alexandria, of its apostles, its martyrs, its doctors, its holy monks and the vast army of its people, who have given witness to their faith in periods of great darkness … We do not expect to overcome immediately the difficulties that fifteen centuries of history have created … we strive together to see how we may attain that full unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace which Christ asks of us."

 

This work continues today, with the hope of, as Pope Francis put it in 2023, "full communion."

 

Tish Harrison Warren does not go into this history in her brief, inspirational book. I go into it because, again, it's wonderful that Christians today are rediscovering our ancestors from almost two millennia ago. When we honor them, Christians should also remember the mutual and ultimately disastrous "canceling" that Christians practiced against each other. The Desert Fathers and Mothers retreated to the desert beginning in the third century, two hundred years before the Council of Chalcedon. Once the rift began to develop, our theological ancestors – both the Miaphysites and the Chalcedonian Christians – anathematized each other. Both sides thought they were protecting the truth. From the distance of 2026, the entire fight seems to be over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Laughable, but with disastrous consequences. From our distance, we can recognize, honor, and embrace the Christian gifts of post-Chalcedon desert monks and nuns who were often Miaphysites, that is, different from us theologically. We see past the minor difference to the core truth. I hope and pray we can bring that vision to our current temptation to cancel those with whom we disagree.

 

In What Grows in Weary Lands, Tish Harrison Warren encourages her readers to apply insights from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to day-to-day life in modern America. The book is brief; interspersed in the 192 pages of the book are many blank pages and others with very little text. Warren's message: your life may feel dreary or even painful right now. This dreariness is a metaphorical desert. Just keep at it. Be persistent. Have faith that God is using what feels like empty, pointless moments to mold you into a better person and Christian.

 

Warren is happily married, with three healthy kids. She is a beloved priest for her church, and she was also a columnist for the New York Times. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her good fortune, her life felt like a desert. She retreated to an isolated spot in the Texas Hill Country and tried to start a fire to warm herself. She kept lighting matches unsuccessfully. Eventually the fire did start. "The metaphor was not lost on me," she writes. Persistence pays off.

 

She was in a "spiritual drought" or "desert." Her mother had Alzheimer's. Negative comments from readers on her Times publications upset her. She squabbled with her husband and kids. When she prayed, she didn't feel a connection. As Warren mentions, some memoirists escape to Mexico or reunite with a long-lost lover. As a committed Christian, Warren could not abandon her husband and children. Warren just went for a short, local car ride, and cried. She returned home, reconciled with her husband and daughter, and continued working her jobs and living her life. She says that such moments, of sticking with a difficult situation rather than running away, deserve attention. This reader agrees with her on this.

 

Warren says that "burnout, languishing, exhaustion" are epidemic. People feel overwhelmed by work, relationships, and even the comforts and rewards of civilization including the internet and home entertainment. She quotes Psalm 63. "My soul thirsts … my flesh faints … in a dry and weary land where there is no water."

 

One of the lessons the Desert Fathers and Mothers taught was "stay in your cell." "Persist in your daily habits of prayer and work … stay true to commitments." Don't expect ecstasy or revelation. Just hammer away at what is in front of you. Even if you feel lousy, you can act as if you feel great. Christian author Eugene Peterson says, "You will become that which you do."

 

"We want God to come like a hero in a cape to rescue us from difficulties … We begin to treat faith as a hit or a high … a consumer product." Warren quotes from Abba Arsenius' account of a nameless, struggling monk. Arsenius advised the monk, "Eat, drink, and sleep, only do not leave your cell." The monk followed this advice, doing his work and singing Psalms. "And so by God's help, he went on little by little until he had indeed become what he was meant to become."

 

Warren says she wrote a previous book addressing the question of theodicy, that is, why God allows bad things to happen. She didn't want to write the book, she says, because then people would tell her their tales of woe and she wouldn't be able to handle it. In the end, it's okay, because when people told her their tales of woe, she realized that "there is a deeper goodness at work in the world than I had thought possible."

 

Warren describes her friend Betsy. "Someone whisks away the children," Warren says. In fact, as Warren later clarifies, Betsy pays for a babysitter – that's the "someone" who "whisks away" the children. When you visit her, Betsy "will hand you good coffee and a soft blanket." "I just cry," Warren says, during these visits. Betsy owns Ina Garten cookbooks. She gives Warren "a homemade pumpkin nut muffin." At Betsy's house, "No one is asking me to do anything for them."

 

Warren quotes internet theorists talking about how bad the internet is for you, and talks about her own internet "detox," when she stopped using Twitter.

 

In addition to some material about the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Warren includes many quotes and anecdotes from unrelated authors, like hipster memoirist Annie Lamott, pop singer Taylor Swift, Stoicism popularizer Ryan Holiday, various psychiatrists and internet theorists, and more recent saints like Therese of Lisieux (1873 – 1897).

 

I'm very glad that those who value Warren's work are reading this book and giving it rave reviews on Amazon. I must confess that this book didn't work for me. It offered brief – sentence or paragraph length – generalizations on this or that idea and, to my taste, did not go into depth before hopping to a new idea. Warren's mother had Alzheimer's, she tells us, without providing any details. There was a fight with family members. No details. She's feeling a spiritual drought. Please detail this. I did not like the repetitiveness of the book's main message about persistence and faith that hard times will result in important results. I was not moved.

 

Given how popular and lauded Warren's work is, including as a New York Times columnist, I had to ask myself why I did not respond to her work. It reminded me of another recent memoir by another middle-aged, middle class, Southern, Protestant wife, mother, and author whose husband is also a pastor. In 2025, Jen Hatmaker published Awake. Both What Grows in Weary Lands and Awake have received rave reviews from both professional reviewers and amateur fans. Reviewers insist of both books that they speak for all women or maybe all Christians or all people. Mel Robbins says of Jen Hatmaker's book, "I can’t imagine any woman reading this without feeling seen, inspired, and totally empowered." I'm a woman. In spite of Mel Robbins' blurb Hatmaker's book felt about as alien to me as life on a Martian colony.

 

Tish's book and Jen's book have more in common than that both authors have monosyllable first names and last names that end in a consonant. Part of what didn't work for me in both books was the vagueness, the sweeping generalizations. "We are all experiencing burnout" is a generalization without the who, what, where, why, when, how of an author like Robert Ellsberg. I felt like both books expected me to just nod my head and accept these generalizations and be moved by them, even though the author was not precise enough to give me a picture of what, exactly, I was nodding my head to.

 

Again, I think of Elkay's review. What does that train ride through the desert really mean? I need some concrete facts before I can buy a ticket and get on board. Maybe the vagueness of this genre of Christian writing is not a bug, but a feature. If Jen or Tish had been more specific, perhaps they would have alienated readers. Sweeping generalizations may make it easier for readers to nod along and say, "Oh, this is just like my life," even though what the "this" signifies is unclear.

 

In both books, the authors describes themselves, however subtly, as givers who take care of other people, while being victims themselves. Those they give to don't appreciate them. Tish's columns in the Times receive negative comments from readers. Her husband and kids "squabble" with her. Jen's husband had an "emotional" extra-marital affair and he abused drugs and alcohol. Jen's book is more condemnatory than Tish's. Jen makes her husband out to be a beast. Jen's husband, Brandon Hatmaker, did respond to his ex-wife's book. He said that he had been feeling "invisible" in the marriage for years before his affair.

 

Both Jen and Tish describe personal spiritual crises so severe that it's a struggle to go on. Both Jen and Tish do go on, affording themselves of comforting options like a retreat to the Texas Hill Country, support from extensive, committed and caring family and friend networks, and ample economic resources. Jen kicks out her husband, who passively complies. Her family and friends cater to her every need and desire. She buys a vintage Ford Bronco and takes a hot, new, lover. "My boyfriend is a 6'2" black man with dreadlocks." He's also an author and activist. Jen is a girlboss!

 

In short, other than that we are all Christians, I have nothing in common with these women. I am working poor, alone, and chronically ill. I live in a neighborhood with a relatively high percentage of physically handicapped persons. My life is not easy but just looking out the window I see persons with far fewer physical and mental resources than my own. A young man severely handicapped by cerebral palsy is picked up by a bus every morning just outside my window. An elderly man whose awareness of his surroundings fades day by day stands in front of the building, staring vacantly. Addicts collapse on street corners; school kids pass them. Too many of these kids have no father. The Passaic, that flows through our city, is dubbed a "river of death." Too many floods, too many suicides; too many unsupervised kids drowning; too many bodies dumped after criminal activity; and of course there's all the dioxin and other pollutants from Paterson's proud but toxic days as a textile hub known as "Silk City."

 

Life has taught me that persons far more fortunate than myself, like Tish and Jen, can be crushed by life's burdens. I spend much more time than I would like in health care facilities. I see obviously well-to-do people pushing their wheelchair-bound sons and daughters. Some of these kids are bald – cancer patients. Others are crippled by overwhelming birth defects. All the money in the world can't ease the heart of a parent watching a child suffer.

 

Art also helps me to understand the burdens of more fortunate people. I just saw a first-rate film, Tony. It's about Anthony Bourdain's salad days as a teenage dishwasher in Provincetown. But it's really about how to be a good person. I can't recommend this film highly enough.

 

I have nothing in common with the Anthony Bourdain depicted in the film. I watched Tony (Dominic Sessa) lie, steal, and brag about himself. I watched him make disastrous decisions that hurt people who were good to him. I saw him choose to compensate with cocaine use for the fatigue caused by nights of drinking. In spite of this, Tony made me care deeply about this obnoxious young punk. In scene after scene, where Tony was tempted by Sal, a brawling, womanizing id (Leo Woodall) and invited into a better life by self-disciplined, church-going Catholic Chef (Antonio Banderas – truly wonderful), I was on the edge of my seat. I gasped and talked back to the screen. I almost walked out, the tension was so overwhelming to me.

 

What technique worked this magic on me? Concrete nouns and action verbs. Not metaphors. Not vagueness. Who, what, where, when, why, how storytelling. We saw the thefts. We saw the cocaine. We saw the pathetic, teenage wanna-be lothario braggadocio. In those facts, about someone totally foreign to me, I saw myself. I've also screwed up, in the same way young Tony screwed up.

 

In one of her Times columns, "The God I Know Is Not a Culture Warrior," Warren refers to the "unbridled glee … laughter … tears of joy … giggling … incandescence … joy, kindness, and peace" at her church services. I'm a big fan of unbridled glee. Glee has its place. So does agony. Unlike Warren, I'm Catholic. Our church has a long history of recognizing that there is a lot of suffering in this world. One of the differences between Catholics and Protestants: we use a crucifix; Protestants use a cross. Episcopalians may use either.

 

The crucifixes I have seen when entering any Catholic church remind me that human beings dragged the best man who ever lived through Hell. Warren says that her book on theodicy taught her that "there is a deeper goodness at work in the world." That sounds like something that can sell self-help books like those Convergent publishes. I know from real life experience and from my study of the Holocaust and other atrocities that millions of people have gone, and will go, to their deaths never tasting, in this life, that goodness. Millions have gone to their deaths thinking or feeling something like, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" That human form on the crucifix – that ultimate who, what, where, when, how, why of agony – reminds Catholics that Jesus advised us to "take up your cross." It also reminds each Catholic that his or her personal agony can be addressed in that church.

 

Warren says that "God is not a culture warrior." In fact that's not true. In the Old Testament, God spoke directly to his chosen people, telling them not to engage in the cultural practices of surrounding peoples. God condemns, for example, Canaanite child sacrifice to Moloch. In the New Testament, Jesus warns his disciples repeatedly not to be like "the world." In Luke 22:25-26, he tells his followers not to be like the Gentiles, and lord it over each other, but to serve each other. In Romans 12:2, Paul advises Christians, "Do not be conformed to this world."

 

Convergent doesn't appear to publish books addressing oh, say, the complete history of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, how Muslims all but obliterated Christianity in the lands most associated with their movement, and how Muslims today have committed mob attacks and murder of the tiny remnant of Christians who remain in the Middle East. Convergent does, though, publish books demonstrating how "If you talk about racial justice in white spaces … you will get pushed out" and also how "White Evangelicalism" "captured democracy." Jen Hatmaker's Awake also protests against white supremacy among her fellow Evangelicals. Apparently Convergent's God does fight in some culture wars.

 

Tish's and Jen's Christianity is one Christianity that is tolerant of gay people – a position I share and do support with my own reading of scripture and church history – but it's very much not okay to think too hard or to ask too much of your readership, who prefer pumpkin nut muffins and warm blankets to serious conversations about whether or not taking a nap is the most radical way to emulate the Desert Fathers and Mothers. A more recent renunciate, Mother Teresa, is quoting as saying that to "Love means to be willing to give until it hurts," Daphne Rae, inspired by Mother Teresa, reports, "I have found the paradox that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love." So many of the books in the Mind / Body / Spirit category exemplified by the above-mentioned Convergent publications seem to be more about telling the reader that he or she is a martyr – a martyr to an uninspirational spouse, annoying children, home ownership, even "dream" jobs like New York Times columnist, and they need to recognize how martyred they are, and "take care of themselves" and get massages, designer soaps, retreats to the Texas Hill Country, or publish books, as Jen Hatmaker did, exposing their husbands as dirtbags.

 

I'm glad for the readers of these books that they get so much from them. This reader, alas, did not.

 

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery