Ten Theology Books to Watch For – February 2025

The Prayer of Unwanting: How the Lord’s Prayer Helps Us Get Over Ourselves–and Why That Might Be a Good Thing

David Williams

(Broadleaf Books)

An astute, lively book about the Lord’s Prayer–the ancient Christian prayer that helps us get over ourselves, which is sometimes exactly what we didn’t know we needed.

Sometimes we imagine prayer as a magical incantation–a way to change our circumstances. We try to pray our way toward success, safety, health, or love. But what if true prayer is more about undoing our desires for power and profit than indulging them? What if the purpose of prayer isn’t to give us what we want but to change the very heart of our wanting?

Novelist and pastor David Williams leads us toward a new encounter with the prayer Jesus taught us to pray. Prayed through millennia by believers in groups and alone, the Lord’s Prayer speaks precisely to our age. Jesus taught his followers this prayer for a reason, and this same prayer rings true to those of us with a hunch that our desires are being endlessly manufactured, manipulated, and managed. If we are to be good little consumers, our hunger must be endless. We want because we are afraid of not having enough. We want because we feel compelled to have more than our neighbor. We want power over others. Our broken wanting can break the world. So Jesus gave us the prayer we need: one that repairs and reorients our longings.

With stories from scripture, whimsical anecdotes, and pastoral wisdom, Williams guides us into profound interaction with each line of the Lord’s Prayer. Questions and ideas for ways to experience the Lord’s Prayer can facilitate and deepen group conversation and individual prayer. There’s power in the Lord’s Prayer, Williams testifies, even if it’s a power we have yet to understand.
 

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When Stories Wound: Responsible Living in a Polarized World

Nathaniel Samuel

(Liturgical Press)

How is moral agency shaped by the narratives we inherit, tell, and live through?

How do we live responsibly in a world shaped by narrative? When Stories Wound explores the significance of narrative for moral agency and engages the harm that our current polarizations have inflicted. This harm is often rooted in false, stereotyping, and dehumanizing narratives about others, by which we rationalize the existence of the wounded and abrogate responsibility for the work of healing and restoration.

Faced with the task of discerning how to live within our increasingly contested public spaces, Nathaniel Samuel suggests that the primary moral question for today is not centered on questioning what is the right thing to do, but rather asking, What are the right stories that must be known, and what is the fitting response? When Stories Wound urges readers to be conscious of the stories we live and to re-imagine what responsibility looks like—as only such commitment can break the hold of the divisive myths that we live, and recover the truth of our common humanity, shared brokenness, and mutual dependence.

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