Books
Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel
“…beautifully crafted.”
–Leif Enger, bestselling author of Peace Like a River
Featured at readerscircle.org
When a fifteen-year-old Sri Lankan girl moves to the all-white Pisgah Ridge, Shelby Lenoir Maynard invites her to join Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends for a swim at the Blue Hole-less in a gesture of bold social reform than because it is simply too hot to think straight. Exotic, mysterious and fiercely independent, the new girl throws the entire town into turmoil. When two different members of The Pack, as Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends call themselves, begin exhibiting interest in the new girl and a third hints he may be conspiring with the local Klan, the Pack itself threatens to splinter. Throughout the summer, as the town’s hostilities steadily increase along with the heat, the Blue Hole remains the teenagers’ only place of real peace-and even that has its limits. Eventually, the tensions outside the Blue Hole erupt in betrayals, cross-burnings and a deadly explosion. Ultimately, though, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation, mercy and healing.
Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith
Blasting the facade that sometimes makes Christianity into pretty promises and plastic grace, Joy Jordan-Lake considers the often uncomfortable path of genuine faith.
Jesus offers grace and mercy, but he’s also ratcheted up all the rules. Nice as it would be to frame him simply as a hip, mercy-dispensing kind of Malibu Ken with long, sun-streaked hair, good teeth and dark skin, the stories we have about him are a lot more disturbing than that. We hear about celebrations that begin with a wake, about people who don’t use their talents well being bounced clear out of the club, and about how it’s not nearly enough just to not avoid murder, stealing, committing adultery, or telling lies.
In this unconventional, sharp-witted, challenging book, Joy-Jordan-Lake explores ten reasons that Jesus makes her nervous-and why that nervousness is such a good thing! Each chapter examines one commonly tossed-about term (such as Resurrection, Blessedness, Community) and explores the potentially alarming, even dangerous implications of actually living out these words. Tossed-about terms with real meaning can reveal a Jesus worth living and dying for, and together this understanding can become our greatest source of hope and purpose.
“In this collection of meditations on some of the themes that undergird and define the Christian spiritual life, Jordan-Lake confronts what it means for believers to experience the difficult and disconcerting and, frankly, appalling teachings of Jesus. A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University , the author mines her personal history as a pastor, mother, social justice activist and friend to illumine and interpret ideas such as resurrection and hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility, argues that foundational concepts of Christian living, like worship and blessedness, may often be disruptive, disturbing, frequently joyful and often deeply life-changing experiences. …[S]he has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose….”
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Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting, and Career
Who hasn’t heard a lot about juggling, balancing, and surviving? Navigating parenthood and professional life is all those things. But amidst the struggle, a life of kids, careers, and busy-craziness can be a privilege–and a tremendous reward.
Joy Jordan-Lake, a woman passionate about her kids and career, gives you examples from the lives of real people, some famous and some you’ll meet for the first time in these pages. Drawing upon her background as a college professor, writer, mom and wife, she helps couples and families navigate life together for joy and purpose. Along the way, the insight, gentle humor, creative ideas, and encouragement of Working Families will help you sail through oceans of demands with confidence because you can change the world–and not in spite of your children but because of them.
Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life
A collection of stories, poems and essays from various seasons of women’s lives, GRIT & GRACE was described by The Chicago Tribune as: “Written with
much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”
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Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe
Joy Jordan-Lake’s Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides a thorough account of nineteenth-century plantation romances written by women in reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Jordan-Lake suggests that Mary H. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’ Cabin (1852), Maria J. McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), and other anti-Tom novels appear to attack patriarchy but ultimately reinforce all “three primary buttresses of slavery: racial, gender, and economic oppression” (p. xxii). As Jordan-Lake shows, images of slave culture made their way from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, through plantation novels, into twentieth-century fiction and beyond. The result is a useful corrective to academic discussions that sometimes turn Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself into a Southern romance.
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