The Book of Delights
A Preacher Book Club selection
Reader Recommendation: The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay
Recommended by: Proclamation Project’s Preacher Book Club
The Book of Delights was a Preacher Book Club selection in September 2024.
From the publisher:
The New York Times bestselling book of essays celebrating ordinary delights in the world around us by one of America’s most originally gifted writers. Ross Gay spent a year writing a short daily essay about delight — about gratitude, joy, and the small occasions of beauty in everyday life.
For preachers, The Book of Delights is an invitation to pay attention differently. Ross Gay’s essayist practice — noticing delight, naming it precisely, and following it into larger questions about human life — is closely related to what good preaching does. The book models a discipline of attention that can renew a preacher’s capacity to see the world with fresh eyes and bring that seeing to the pulpit. It is also a resource for thinking about joy as a theological category: what does it mean to preach with delight, and why does that matter?
The Preacher Book Club selected this book because preaching requires a preacher who is alive to the world — and Gay’s essays are one of the best examples available of what that aliveness can look like in practice.
You might also find helpful:
- Indigo: The Color of Grief — A poetry-style book for preachers tending to their own grief while walking alongside others in theirs.
- Recovering the Soul of Preaching Through Rest — A reflection on renewal and the inner life of the preacher.
- When Church Stops Working — A Preacher Book Club selection on the future of congregational life beyond programs and strategies.
Reader Recommendations are submitted by Disciples preachers and are not created or fully reviewed by the Proclamation Project.
