Since this week marks the beginning of Lent, I’m taking a short break from my series on Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus to highlight a Lenten book that offers the seeds of a way forward in the midst of the deep challenges of attention that Hari names.
If you’re still looking for a Lenten devotional, I highly recommend Christine Valters Paintner’s new book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent. Its focus is helping us pay attention to our desires and how they give shape to our lives.
I wrote a brief review of this book for The Englewood Review of Books last month (along with four other great Lenten books). Here is my review (and a link to the original, for those who are curious about the other 4 books).
A Different Kind of Fast:
Feeding our True Hungers in Lent
Christine Valters PaintnerPaperback: Broadleaf Books, 2024.
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]In A Different Kind of Fast, Christine Valters Paintner challenges readers to take the Lenten season to fast not from food, but from some of the most prevalent compulsions of our day. These seven compulsions, explored one per week through Lent, are:
· Consuming
· Multitasking and Inattention
· Scarcity Anxiety
· Speed and Rushing
· Holding it all Together
· Planning and Deadlines and
· CertaintyIn addressing each of these compulsions and challenging us to imagine what fasting might look like in regard to each compulsion, Paintner offers us hope of transformation among some of the deepest pathologies of our times. Her interactions throughout the book with the witness of the desert monastics are timely and relevant, as they lived in an era like our own in which the nature of Christian life was changing rapidly due to the deepening bond between church and government. I am currently teaching at class here at Englewood Christian Church on the contemporary relevance of the desert monastics, and I will be recommending this book as a Lenten resource for class participants.
If you want to read a bit more of this book, here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
[ Excerpt via Google Books ]
I’m hoping to ease my way through this book during Lent.
*** Do you have a Lenten book that you will be reading?
I’ll be reading Painter’s book as well as River Through the Desert: A Lenten Journey in the Holy Land by Richard Sewell.