Finding ourselves in the season of Lent forces question of how our practices, our bodily, lived experiences, encourage or distract our spirituality. These two titles explore these questions.
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The Life of the Body, Valerie Hess and Lane M. Arnold (IVP)
While most of us eschew the false dichotomies of secular/sacred, body/ soul and mind/spirit, we still struggle to know how exactly to approach a spirituality that is truly physical. How does nutrition as well as good daily rhythms of work and sleep form us as people following Jesus? In these pages, Hess and Arnold guide us in a holistic understanding of how to “worship with our bodies.”
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The Rest of Life, Ben Witherington III (Eerdmans)
Witherington’s subtitle promises much: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Per-spective. We’re tempted to write off Sabbath as merely an Old Covenant ritual. We’re tempted to believe we can ignore our need to play and laugh without any negative effect. We tend to believe that our sexual lives, insofar as Scripture has anything to say about them at all, simply need to line up with certain moral commands in order to fulfill their spiritual value. Witherington debunks each of these shallow assumptions and leads us to a truly lived spirituality, where the entirety of our days, our energies and our pursuits discover meaning in God’s Kingdom.
Winn Collier
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Winn Collier (winncollier.com) is the author of three book, a columnist and a pastor.