Introducing the Imago Scriptura Book Club (ISBC) - Hope: A User’s Manual
So, how about this great image to introduce the first Imago Scriptura Book Club!?!?!?
Great image to talk about hope, eh?
I’ll explain it in a moment...Let’s first talk about the book club...
I read a lot. A square on an Edward Goode bingo game would definitely be “In this book I’m reading...” I am grateful for the family in which I grew up as reading was a HUGE part of all of our lives. A good gauge of how much a book spoke to me is how often I quote it and recommend it to others. A recent book like that is Hope: A User’s Manual by MaryAnn McKibben Dana. I had read a previous book of her’s called God, Improv, and the Art of Living and when I saw her book on Hope in 2023, I was drawn in. It is a beautiful and engaging book that works well for a daily read. She goes through a process of exploring hope starting from what hope is not and progressing to what it is, how it functions in our lives, different practices to explore it, and how hope can continue to live within and through us. There’s also some wonderful geeky Lord of the Rings and Marvel references throughout. I read it twice in the last year and am doing a third read through of it with a small group in the congregation I serve. Suffice to say, I love the book.
So, starting June 1, I am going to write a post every few days as I read it through once again. Like I’ve done with a few other books over the years, I’ll be sharing photos and reflections upon what I read and how that is seen in the everyday around me. I invite you to purchase the book as well and join me in this - links are at the end of the post. I’d love to hear what the sections speak to you and I’d love to see the ways that MaryAnn’s beautiful and powerful words are seen in your life. At the end of this post, I’ll include the days I’ll be sharing on each section so you can read along if you’d like. I strongly encourage you to purchase a copy of MaryAnn’s book to go along with these reflections. (And yes, I did get permission from MaryAnn to share through the book in this way).
But let’s get back to the photo above...how does this photo speak to hope? MaryAnn (who reads these posts) might be saying, “yeah, great advertising for my book - a big mud pit!”
The opening photo is what Sharon Lake near Cincinnati looked like this morning when I was walking there. Good thing photos do not have scents - it did not smell great at all either…ugh.
This is how the same area looked just a few months ago during Autumn...
What happened? Well, Great Parks of Hamilton County is draining the lake so it can be dredged out, invasive plants can be eliminated, and the health of the lake can be restored (details of the plan). It is a multi year process and the lake won’t be back to being a lake until sometime in the Fall of 2025. But it will be healthier ecosystem when it is all finished. But until then... yikes.
But as you look at the autumn photo, all looks well. You can’t see it in the photo but there were always ducks and geese on the water. There’d be herons around the edges and I saw an eagle there just a few months ago. All looked good. But under the surface, things weren’t great. Throughout the lake was an invasive plant that would bloom periodically during the year and cover the lake with a greenish slime and there were other issues that were not as obvious but equally unhealthy.
As MaryAnn starts the book with a section on “What Hope is Not”, she writes:
When it comes to hope, our culture peddles a lot of cheap knockoffs. This section of our user’s manual invites us to clean out the toolbox, removing all those dull and rusty tools that don’t work for us anymore. 1
These cheap knockoffs look great on the surface and they might work for a while but they don’t last. If they get pushed too far, they don’t hold up. Like this lake - on the surface, most of the time, all looks good. But get under the surface or be there at certain times during the year and it is obvious that something is wrong.
So, the starting place is, as MaryAnn put it, to clean out the toolbox of all those dull and nasty tools that don’t work for us anymore. This time with her book is going to take a while - it will start June 1 and wrap up on August 30. Think of it as a summer of hope.
There’s a lot in this world right now that is trying to draw us away from hope as well as a lot of false hope getting sold. But I hope through this summer we can together begin to move towards a more robust and lasting form of hope.
GPLJ,
Ed
Purchase Hope: A User’s Manual by MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Bookshop
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Audible Audio Version
Or stop at a local bookstore (Cincinnati folks, Joseph-Beth has it in stock)
Download the Summer of Hope Reading Plan
PDF |. iCal
PS - I will still be doing my occasional posts about benches and the like...
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 15). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
So looking forward to this - I just bought the audiobook recently and perfect timing!