Books like Subversive Witness

As part of the Chronic Joy Thrive Series, President and Co-founder of Chronic Joy Ministry Cindee Snider Re offers a very useful book that consists of part devotional and part workbook. This is not a book to be simply read and passively absorbed; it is a book in which you will fill in the blanks on Bible verses, journal your thoughts, and answer reflection questions as they relate to your chronic illness and walk with Christ. Whether you use this alone or in a group setting, I found it comforting that Cindee walks alongside you, sharing experiences, scriptural insights, and pointing you to whom you can trust. No doubt this will strengthen your faith while dealing with the challenge of chronic illness.  

I met Lianne while writing my dissertation on intersex people and Christian theology. Knowing her, her story, and her faith changed my life forever. We went on to collaborate in educating others about people born outside the male/female binary and eventually created a documentary to share her story and the stories of other intersex people of faith.

Sadly, Lianne passed away in 2021 during Covid. In Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite, Lianne offers her semi-autobiographical story of growing up intersex and Christian. Since her life story changed my life, I think it will change yours, too!

If scholars are still trying to completely understand the Bible, how are we supposed to navigate it?

Inspired steps back and takes a look at Scripture, inviting us to ask questions and know it better, from both a spiritual and literary perspective. While I didn’t agree with everything the author suggests, everything made me pause and think. It’s a rare book that both challenges and encourages, but this one most certainly does both.

My first three book recommendations are by intersex people themselves because their voices have been silenced and unheard for too long. Allies like myself have a place in the conversation, but our platforms should always center the voices of intersex people themselves.

While this book is not written for a specifically Christian audience, the author did grow up Christian and is a strong contemporary advocate for protecting intersex infants and children from non-consensual surgeries on their genitals to make them “appear” more typically male or female.

By sharing her own experience, Pidgeon documents just how wrong these “well-intentioned” interventions can go and why doctor’s attempts to “fix” intersex traits should be outlawed.

You can’t go to the past, but the past can come to you, through a written voice. 

This is a strong and extraordinary woman’s autobiography from the late 1400s and early 1500s. It’s like taking a phone call from the 15th century.

This directness is what I wanted in my own book.

Kempe could neither read nor write, so she dictated her story. She did things women often weren’t able to do back then. She ran a business, travelled to France, Germany, Spain, and even to Jerusalem. And she spoke out against many received medieval opinions.

How brave Kempe was to challenge the patriarchy.

Are you a fan of travel literature? If so, then you will be as amazed as I was to find this remarkable account. In the 1990s, the author, a noted travel writer, undertook a task that would be impossible to duplicate today for obvious reasons. Based upon the contents of a rare manuscript, he decided to trace the footsteps of two eastern orthodox monks who, in the Sixth Century, traveled through much of the Byzantine World, moving from one ancient monastery to another while describing their adventures. Tracing their route, the author relates in a witty, yet always respectful and well-written narrative the many obstacles he and his predecessors 1,300 years earlier faced. “The more things (and people) change the more they stay the same,” if for different reasons, and nothing can point that euphemism out better than this entertaining and informative book of a lost world and a time… show more.

For me, Sheridan’s new book was a riveting read – a mind-opening reminder of how early Christians, unbelievably, converted a good part of the classical world and spread Jesus’ radical teaching of love, forgiveness, human equality, and fraternity in a world in which they were total nobodies, scorned, persecuted, tortured, and killed.

Attractively, the book also shows some modern countercultural Christian lives, based on the same Gospel teachings, still capable of acting as a leaven and a sign of hope in the spiritually disoriented Western world.

I found this book extremely refreshing and encouraging, and I have recently given it as a birthday present to a seventeen-year-old granddaughter to inspire her to set herself challenging and God-oriented goals worth living and dying for.

We all need stories of real women aging wisely and well, and Betters, who is in her seventies, and Hunt, who is in her eighties, live and tell vibrant and inspiring stories. I love the way they share biblical examples of women who aged with grace and real-life examples. This book makes me want to honor older women and to become an honorable older woman. 

We’re all broken in so many ways. This book presents a number of letters to different kinds of broken people. Have you been rejected? Are you scared? Are you alone? There are letters here that will touch your heart. They touched mine! I found someone who could speak poetry into my darkness and make me know that I was not alone. Reynolds also points to real hope, so that even in darkness, I could see a shining light. 

I loved this book! It’s easy to get stuck on being busy with many tasks and responsibilities, and not move forward in our lives and careers.

This book helped me learn systems to become more efficient (in life and work), identify what was holding me back from being more empowered with my choices, and recognize when to say yes, and when to say no. Leaving the military – where “no” isn’t as much of an option, this is a good skill for veterans to embrace.