Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
By: Serene Jones
Viking 2019; 336 pp., $26 (cloth)
Serene Jones is the president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, making her the first woman to hold the position in the institution’s 182-year history. In Call It Grace, Jones offers a deeply personal reflection on her spiritual journey and what it means to connect with the divine. Theology, she claims, is the place and story you think of when you ask yourself about the meaning of your life. For her, Oklahoma is that place and story, and so she tells moving, illuminating stories about such things as her foremothers and fathers engaged in the backbreaking work of prairie farming, the lynching and other manifestations of racism that her family was involved in, and the tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing. Jones frames her theology in Christian language, but many Buddhists, especially those with a Christian background, will find they share a lot of common ground with her.
