Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School, has a new collection of political essays and sermons in a recently published book titled Writing Home, With Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers.
Since September 2013, Hall has been writing 800-word essays for the Durham Herald-Sun that are published the first Sunday of each month. Writing Home, With Love includes essays from the first two years of this work, with her commentary about the process of writing for a local paper as a public theologian. The collection was published by Cascade Books of Wipf and Stock Publishers on Dec. 9.
Drawing from her scholarship but also from informal conversations, Hall connects such disparate questions as school dress codes, surveillance cameras, LGBTQ dignity, Southern populism, faith in young adult fiction, and bullies in the workplace. She draws on pop songs, dead saints, young adult literature, and stories about her neighbors and family members.
Professor Vanessa Ochs of the University of Virginia stated about the book: "As a teacher of writing and a sermon-giver, I especially delight in Hall's ruckus-raising essays (reminding me of Anne Lamott and Maureen Dowd) and the prefaces and epilogues she includes. They reveal her strategies for moving hearts and minds, her knack for finding the deepest lessons in the particular details of everyday personal and communal life, and her courage in taking responsibility for her words."
Hall is the author of Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, and numerous scholarly articles in theological and biomedical ethics. Her fourth book, on Julian of Norwich, will be published by Duke University Press.