The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’d like to do a longer review at some point, but wanted to take a second to recommend this book highly to anyone interested. I first heard Wilson-Hartgrove speak at a conference here in London with Shane Claiborne. His ideas about stability and place remind me (and are derived from) those of Wendell Berry. I found them very compelling and, to the extent that I’ve experienced staying in one place for the last few years, they resonated strongly. Staying in one place, he argues, is like a spiritual discipline. It’s a hard exercise in patience and grace-giving that rewards because it forces us to give God space and time in which to work. Wilson-Hartgrove’s section on “midday demons” is particularly good: boredom, ambition, vainglory… these are all things that I’ve encountered even in our short time here, and it was encouraging to hear him name these for what they are. On top of it all, he’s a good story-teller, a skill that he put to work in short anecdotal pieces interleaved through the book.