WESTMONT, IL—InterVarsity Press is pleased to announce that Library Journal selected Birthing Hope by Rachel Marie Stone for its 2018 Best Books list.
“Rachel Marie Stone is one of the most elegant and perceptive authors I have ever worked with,” said Al Hsu, senior editor, IVP Books. “Her writing makes us reflect deeply on things that matter—birth and death, family and fear, life and hope. I’m delighted that Birthing Hope has been named one of the best books this year, or any year! Congratulations, Rachel.”
In place of the top ten best books list that Library Journal has traditionally released, this year editors sifted through thousands of books that were published in 2018 and put together a larger and more diverse mix of titles across twenty categories, with 188 titles recognized.
Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light was chosen as one of Library Journal ’s top ten books in the religion and spirituality category. The mother of two sons, Stone unpacks how childbirth reveals our anxieties, our physicality, our mortality. She writes, “To bring anything new into the world is to open one’s self and therefore to take on risk, to contaminate oneself with the other, to be made vulnerable. This requires not just courage but many things, among them faith, hope, help, companionship, grace—in a word, love.”
In a June 2018 Library Journal review, Sandra Collins described Birthing Hope this way: “A quiet memoir on hope as the most paradoxical of virtues.”
Rachel Held Evans, author of Searching for Sunday, said, “I’ve been waiting for a book like this one for years, and no one could have written it more beautifully and wisely than Rachel Marie Stone. With the skill of a poet and the patience of a doula, Stone invites the reader to look straight into the face of fear and find in it the spark of hope. There are words and phrases from these pages that I will go on pondering for years. Theologically rich and carefully researched, Birthing Hope is a book for everyone, but as a new mother it proved life changing—the kind of book that leaves you breathless.”
Stone teaches English at the Stony Brook School in Stony Brook, New York. Her writing about food, faith, justice, public health, and maternal health has appeared in the New York Times, theWashington Post, the Huffington Post, Christianity Today, the Christian Century, Books & Culture, Sojourners, In Touch magazine, Religion News Service, Patheos, and more. Her books include the revised More-with-Less cookbook, Telling God’s Story, and Eat with Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food, which won a Christianity Today Book Award and was named by a Religion News Service columnist as one of the year’s ten most intriguing titles in religion.
For a complete list of IVP award winners visit ivpress.com/awardwinners.
Founded in 1947 as an extension of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, InterVarsity Press serves those in the university, the church, and the world by publishing thoughtful Christian books that equip and encourage people to follow Jesus as Savior and Lord in all of life. For more information, visit ivpress.com.
