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Book Cover for: The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints, Jessica Hooten Wilson

The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints

Jessica Hooten Wilson

Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts)
Midwest Book Review 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction - Religion/Philosophy)

How do we become better people? Initiatives such as New Year's resolutions, vision boards, thirty-day plans, and self-help books often fail to compel us to live differently. We settle for small goals--frugal spending, less yelling at the kids, more time at the gym--but we are called to something far greater. We are created to be holy.

Award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson explains that learning to hear the call of holiness requires cultivating a new imagination--one rooted in the act of reading. Learning to read with eyes attuned to the saints who populate great works of literature moves us toward holiness, where God opens up a way of living that extends far beyond what we can conjure for ourselves. Literature has the power to show us what a holy life looks like, and these depictions often scandalize even as they shape our imagination. As such, careful reading becomes a sort of countercultural spiritual discipline.

The book includes devotionals, prayers, wisdom from the saints, and more to help individuals and groups cultivate a saintly imagination. Foreword by Lauren F. Winner.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Brazos Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 29th, 2022
  • Pages: 240
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.60in - 5.80in - 1.10in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9781587435249
  • Categories: Christianity - Literature & the ArtsChristian Living - Personal GrowthBooks & Reading

About the Author

Wilson, Jessica Hooten: - Jessica Hooten Wilson (PhD, Baylor University) is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She previously taught at the University of Dallas. She is the author or editor of eight books, including Reading for the Love of God, The Scandal of Holiness (winner of a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit), and Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (winner of a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award). Hooten Wilson speaks around the world on topics as varied as Russian novelists, Catholic thinkers, and Christian ways of reading.