Reader Recommendation: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us, by Cole Arthur Riley

Recommended by: Proclamation Project’s Preacher Book Club

This Here Flesh was a Preacher Book Club selection in November 2023.

From the publisher:

“From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.” “From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.”

So writes Cole Arthur Riley in her unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Arthur Riley reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father, and how they revealed to her an embodied, dignity-affirming spirituality, not only in what they believed but in the act of living itself. Writing memorably of her own childhood and coming to self, Arthur Riley boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.

At once a compelling spiritual meditation, a powerful intergenerational account, and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh speaks potently to anyone who suspects that our stories might have something to say to us.

For Disciples preachers, This Here Flesh is a resource for the kind of preaching that refuses to separate the spiritual from the bodily, the personal from the communal. Cole Arthur Riley’s writing models a voice that is deeply theological and fully human — a combination the preaching moment needs. The Preacher Book Club selected it in November 2023 as an invitation to preachers to descend into their own stories with honesty and care.

Check it out

You might also find helpful:

• Theopoetics in Color: Embodied Approaches in Theological Discourse — on embodied, poetic theological language in preaching
• The Sound of the Genuine — resources on authentic, embodied preaching voice for Disciples preachers
• Decolonizing Preaching: The Pulpit as Postcolonial Space — on liberation, justice, and who gets to speak from the pulpit