Book Title & Cover Reveal! And Some Stuff About Empathy Too.

I’m delighted to reveal the title and cover of my forthcoming book (to be published with The Good Book Company in September this year).

Single Ever After has been ten years in the making. In fact, I embarked on a PhD with the specific goal of writing this book. (No, I’m not joking.) And so, of course, I’m both eagerly excited and quietly terrified about its upcoming release!

As I explain in the introduction:

“This book is for both the 20-year old single Christian excited about the prospect of marriage and also the 40-year-old who wonders if it will ever happen. It’s for the 32-year-old divorced single father and the 69-year-old widowed grandmother. It’s for those eagerly anticipating marriage and those grieving its absence; it’s for those single by choice and those single by circumstance; it’s for the content, the discontent, and those who feel both— sometimes, like me, at the very same time.

But this book isn’t just for singles. It’s also for their married friends and their church pastors. If that’s you, I’m so glad you’re reading these words. We, your single brothers and sisters, need your support as we seek to live for Jesus. We need your help to live out our singleness within our church family faithfully. We need you to love us well in our singleness and to help us love you well in it, too. All of that requires you to not only understand singleness itself but to understand us in our singleness.

Finally, this is a book about singleness but for everyone because, while only some of us will remain single—or become single again—in this life, in the eternal life to come, all of God’s people will be Single Ever After.”

You can read the full description, see the table of contents, and download the introduction and first chapter of Single Ever After at the first button below or pre-order it on Amazon at the second. An audiobook version will also be available (possibly narrated by yours truly!).

Exiling Empathy?

Empathy—or, more specifically, empathy as a tool of social manipulation—is becoming a hot topic in evangelical and secular discourse. One of the leading Christian proponents of the argument against empathy is Dr Joe Rigney, a fellow at New St Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho (he who has ears…).

The good folks at Mere Orthodoxy have just published my 5000 word review of Rigney’s new book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and it’s Counterfeits.

“5000 words?!” I hear you groan.

Yep. 5000 words.

Why? Well, because sometimes it takes a lot of words to show why a lot of other words are the kind of words that we would do well to pay meticulous attention to.

“After reading The Sin of Empathy, we may be tempted to freeze in place, hoping that the “stuff and nonsense” will simply go away. But if, in this present moment, there is a book that right-minded, wisely discerning, and spiritually mature Christians—especially male pastors and leaders—ought to move on and speak against, it is this one. Because, you see, when Joe Rigney shouts at empathy, “Off with her head!” the real culprit he would metaphorically decapitate (as fitting for Medusa) is your sister in Christ.

But there is another, even more fundamental reason we must not become paralyzed by Rigney’s contrived claims and instead hold them up to the mirror of Scripture. If we accept that reason, truth, and justice stand in opposition to joining people in their suffering, what are we to make of the incarnation of Christ? Surely, the Word becoming flesh and making his dwelling amongst us (John 1:15) is the most profound act of empathy the world has ever known?”