Book 3 of 2021 -- Hope Beyond Pandemic

 A colleague posted that they had just read this one a while back and the title jumped out at me. A year in to the COVID-19 pandemic we are starting to think and talk about what life will look like on the other side. How will it be different? What will go "back to normal"? What will we have learned?

THere was a lot of good stuff in this book. NOt necessarily things that had not come up in the last 12 months but good questions, good reflections on what it means to be the church in these days.

The one flaw is that the book appears to have been written too soon. I did wonder how a book with the words "beyond pandemic" in the title could have come out already. Turns out it was written last spring. At that point there were still so many unanswered questions. There was so much we know now that we did not know then. Still, despite being written too early, in the midst of pandemic, in the early stages in fact, Epperly brings out goo issues for discussion. Many people need to read this book as we discuss how we will be the church in the years to come.

Book 2 of 2021 -- Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal

 This is another recommendation from a congregation member. And another good recommendation it was.

This book is, at base level, a collection of short stories. All are from or based on the author's career as a physician and from her own life. But what a collection of stories it is.

These stories touch the heart and the soul. They point to what is truly important in life. They are grouped thematically but the overall theme of the whole book is, as the subtitle suggests, healing. Not curing but healing. Some of them are stories of patients who died, but in the story of their illness and death something else is healed. There are books that should be very widely read. This is one of them. It is not a book of theology, but is deeply theological, deeply spiritual, it is about the real things of life.