The Habit

Mitali Perkins has always thought of herself as an outsider writing for outsiders. And yet she has a remarkable gift for inviting people in. She has two new books out: Hope in the Valley is a middle-grade novel. Holy Night and Little Star is a picture book for Christmas.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Illustrator Joe Sutphin has been a fixture around the Rabbit Room for many years. Highlights of his long career include illustrating The Wingfeather Saga and Little Pilgrim’s Progress. His newest book, however, is his most ambitious yet. It’s an almost 400-page graphic novel version of Richard Adams’s classic Watership Down.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amber and Seth Haines have each written and published books of their own, but now this married couple have written a book together—The Deep Down Things: Practices for Growing Hope in Times of Despair. In this episode, Amber and Seth Haines talk with Jonathan Rogers about Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in partnership, marriage, and recognition, among other things.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Wilson is Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London, and has degrees in history and theology from Cambridge (MA) and King’s College London (PhD). He is a columnist for Christianity Today, and has written several books. The most recent is Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Historian Mark Noll wrote, “Andrew Wilson’s book is extraordinary in every way: extraordinary in the breadth of research; extraordinary in the multitude of world-significant events that Wilson identifies for 1776; extraordinary in the depth of his insight on what those events meant (and continue to mean); extraordinary in the verve with which he makes his arguments; and, not least, extraordinary in the persuasive Christian framework in which he sets the book. Remaking the World is a triumph of both creative historical analysis and winsome Christian interpretation.”Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amy Baik Lee has written that in every place her life has taken her, "there have been hints of beauty and great knocks of mercy that have called to me from beyond my surroundings, always speaking of a King and Friend and Father whose presence is truly Home.” That sense of longing, those clues that maybe we were made for a different world, make their way out in every thing Amy writes, and especially in her new book, This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today. In this episode, Amy and Jonathan Rogers talk about homeward longing, the idea of Sehnsucht, and the importance of writing in community.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2001, Henry Louis Gates announced the discovery of an unpublished novel called The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written in the 1850s by an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts. If Gates had the authorship right, it would be the oldest known novel by an African-American woman. But many people doubted the book’s authorship. In 2013, however, Gregg Hecimovich produced evidence that The Bondswoman’s Narrative was indeed written by a black woman in the1850s. Hannah Crafts, he demonstrated, was the pen name of Hannah Bonds, who escaped from slavery in North Carolina. Dr. Hecimovich’s new book is The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondswoman’s Narrative. It’s a biography of Hannah Bonds. It’s also a detective story, telling how Gregg Hecimovich and many others uncovered the fascinating true story behind Hannah Bonds’s fictional story.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Tiffany Eberle Kriner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. She is also a farmer. Her new collection of essays is In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm. In it, Dr. Kriner connects culture, ecology, faith, and literature, and invites readers to cultivate fruitful conversations between literature and the environments in which they live.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Emma Fox is the author of The Carver and the Queen, an historical fantasy novel based on the folklore of Siberia. In this episode, Emma talks with Jonathan Rogers about piano lessons, teaching and mentoring young writers, and how she got interested in Slavic folklore. Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Philip Yancey has written and published more than 25 books. He is known for his honesty, his willingness to wade into difficult questions–and, more to the point, his unwillingness to give easy answers to those difficult questions. In his latest book, published by Rabbit Room Press, Philip Yancey engages the seventeenth-century poet and preacher, John Donne. Undone is Philip Yancey’s modern rendering of John Donne’s Devotions, a collection of prose meditations that Donne wrote on his sickbed in 1623. Philip Yancey makes Donne’s gorgeous but often convoluted prose more accessible to 21st century readers.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Diana Glyer teaches in the honors college at Azusa Pacific University. Her writing and research focus on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings. Her most recent book is The Major and the Missionary. Dr. Glyer edited this collection of letters between Warren Lewis, the brother of C.S. Lewis, and Dr. Blanche Biggs, a medical missionary in Papua New Guinea. Their conversation spans faith, literature, fear, doubt, tragedy, sickness, health, friendship, and life & death itself. Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.