Editor’s Note: This is one of the Top 15 2020 CBE Writing Contest winners. Enjoy!

Theology matters. It shapes the very framework by which we view the world. Who are we? Why are we here?

Most of us could not wait to say farewell to 2020! From the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to COVID-19 with its manifold disparities, we’re eager to see 2020 in our rearview mirrors. We want to forget the events that haunted an annus horribilis (“horrible year”). Yet forget is precisely what we must never do! These tragedies demand we confront our blindness, indifference, and failures as a people, especially as Christians. The path to wholeness and reconciliation requires lament, repentance, and turning to God for deliverance.

As 2020 winds down, the staff at CBE have been thinking back over the books we’ve enjoyed and learned from this year, and we wanted to share those with you. This list comprises CBE staff favorites and some picks from our bookstore that we wanted to highlight. All these books exemplify and elaborate on our conviction that women and men together ought to be free to exercise their God-given gifts to serve God and others. Add these books to your 2021 reading list, and you’ll be off to an empowered and inspired year!

Editor’s Note: This is one of the Top 15 2020 CBE Writing Contest winners. Enjoy!

God gave me a rose,
A delicate thing and beautiful,
Trembling in the breath of God,
Tearful in the showered rain.
 
God gave me a rose,
A bloom to nurture, love, and hold,
So fragile in form and air,
With roots clinging to the Lord.
 
I prayed for a flower,
And God in grace gave me you
To cultivate in loving soil
And steady as a cane in growing.
 
God gave me a rose,
And lo you came in a garland,
Rosy in the summer sun,
Eternal as the written word.

Years back, a close friend candidly shared her intent to befriend only married women with children the same age as hers. At the time I was single and childless. With unshaking confidence and moral certainty, an egalitarian told me, “We’re a church of forty, and we’re all under forty.” Had I been looking for a church family, my age would have been a painful barrier. I wish comments like this were rare, but they’re not.

“Honey, would you come here please? And bring pen and paper with you.” It was 4:30 in the morning and my wife was about to dictate her last words to me.

I met the Reverend Karen Miller in June of 2017 at the end of the first service I attended at Church of the Savior, the Anglican church where Karen is associate rector. During that service, for the first time in my life, I sang a hymn with pronouns revised to include women and men and heard a sermon preached by a woman.

Choosing a marriage partner is hard. Certainty that your loved one will treat you as an equal ought to be a given, but we all know that not every church teaches the importance or even legitimacy of egalitarian marriage, of a true partnership of equals. How could I be assured, a sick wheelchair user at thirty-eight and starting over, that this was as important to the man proposing on his knees in my kitchen as it was to me? 

A friend in college cooed over every stopped stroller. A  group of women bemoaned the gender ratio overseas and researched freezing their eggs. I rolled my eyes at their talk of biological clocks. It sounded like they wanted to use a man to get what they really wanted: a baby.