Books like Dissident Daughters — picked by fans

I don’t always agree with Bart Ehrman, but I do here. Forgeries, heresies, martyrs, even unfamiliar texts featuring women (who was Thecla and why was she hanging around with Paul?) contribute to an engaging read.

Whereas MacCulloch provides the “big picture” of Christian history, Ehrman targets the first centuries of Christianity—those centuries so critical to current debates about gender and lay roles in churches—to help us understand what we don’t understand about holy texts, especially ones that never made it into Christian Bible.

Ehrman takes us into the thought processes of early Church communities to help us see how Christians made decisions that shaped church policies relevant to gendered and lay leadership today.

Cooke makes us question what we think we know about gender.

MacCulloch makes us rethink what we think we know about Christianity. There are so many books of Christian history on the market it can be overwhelming. Many have social, theological, or political agendas. Not MacCulloch. A scholar of the first tier, MacCulloch unpacks Christianity, but this is no textbook.

With clarity and readability, MacCulloch rejects traditional Eurocentric narratives to explore Syriac churches, Thomist Christians in India, Orthodoxy, and the oft-forgotten Church of the East. He emphasizes how the strength of Christianity in all its different forms hasn’t been its supposedly unchanging nature but its adaptability—an important lesson to take into discussions of gender, lay roles, and religion.

Cooke’s hilarious, spot-on exploration of how we humans create our understandings of female nature and capabilities may seem an odd starting point, but bear with me.

Cooke exposes how scientists and scholars for centuries have mis-reported and normalized views about males and females that have little to do with actual science and much to do with the gendered attitudes of the scientists. We all have presumptions about gender roles we don’t question.

But to explore the intersections of gender and faith we need to become aware of our pre-conceptions and how we got them. From Dick the sage grouse to elder female leadership within orca pods, you’ll be laughing while gob-smacked at the shaky biological foundation of many of our gender presumptions about what is “natural” for males and females.

So many Christian churches struggle over who ought to lead. Do female priests/pastors fulfill or discount God’s intentions? How does one know? Scripture? Tradition?

Macy digs into the long-term history and finds that women were clearly ordained in the early church, but evidence of that ordination has been erased or explained away. Women used to perform many duties that we associate with religious leadership today, including some sacraments.

Furthermore, some were ordained, receiving vestments, staffs, and mitres. Their gradual exclusion from their traditional roles happened over centuries and was virtually complete by the 13th century, as the Church redefined ordination in ways that excluded women and their ministries.

Then we rewrote the history to make it appear women had never been ordained. Again, no agenda here—just the history.

The idea that in the 21st century, we could be having a discussion about the Feminine face of God fundamentally made me feel more welcomed and connected to Divinity, by whatever name you call it. These two accomplished theologians debate how to think about Divinity and what we call sacred.

Their discourse is powerful and thoughtful. They aren’t exposing black-and-white thinking in religion and just pointing out how “bad” traditional religions are at understanding the mystery of divinity. They brought me with them on a deep dive into their own mystical excursions, which, in turn, made it much more safe for me to wrestle with my own conflicts. 

I'm recommending this book because just—wow. Almost a thousand pages of articles that are feminist in their biblical interpretation. Pity this didn't exist in the late 1980s when I wrote my own book. (It was published in 2012.) (Actually, better that it didn't exist back then—I might not have seen the need for my own modest contribution to the field!)

Sticky Church may initially seem like an unconventional choice for business owners looking to improve customer retention, as it focuses on growing a congregation within a church setting.

However, the principles of customer retention remain the same across different contexts and can offer valuable insights to entrepreneurs.

Imagine enticing your customers to visit your business every week and even bringing friends and family with them - that's the power of Sticky Church.

While the book delves into Sermon Based Small Group meetings, which might not directly apply to most businesses, the underlying principles of connecting customers with each other and encouraging them to share their experiences are universal.

These ideas form the foundation of political movements, committed fan bases, and customer groups like Apple fans.

In the context of a church, Sticky Church offers unique customer retention insights that might be difficult to glean from a business-centric book. It's an… show more.

Surrounded by so many generalities regarding the treacherous merging of white supremacy with Christianity, I needed this deep-dive sociological study into the reality of how “whiteness” has become a subconscious but tangibly verifiable idol within white Evangelicalism.

The assumption of white cultural superiority has become so hardwired into the church across centuries that, like a fish in water, as white folks, we can’t see how “normal” gets weighed down with racial consequences.

The wetness of water is felt by everyone but the fish, and in this case, what seems experientially obvious to most non-white people requires in-depth study and argumentation for white folks to see. I appreciated how this book named specifics and compared the answers to racialized questions between different people groups in their study.

This book was my gateway into Christian climate action 16 years ago.

When my older brother came home from a semester abroad in New Zealand and told my conservative Christian family that he was now a vegetarian because of his environmental convictions, he handed me this book to help me understand why.

It was the first time that I was given permission to engage pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change because of my faith, rather than in spite of it. Nothing has ever been the same.

For all you fantasy and sci-fi fans like me who are aspiring or veteran writers looking for good characters of magical supernatural or beings of legend, look no further. It is full of different types of beasts of yore from mythology, monsters and beasts from the ancient world and modern fantasy characters.

It was such a good resource to have when developing a storyline with creatures that will be part of your world-building. The art and illustrations are perfect, along with the descriptions/bios of the creatures, and were an invaluable resource for me to expand my ideas for my books. I absolutely loved it. If you are doing research for your world-building that is entertaining and useful, this is it!