Rachel Held Evans’ final book to release

Rachel Held Evans’ final book to release

Rachel Held Evans’ final book is set to release, two years after the author’s untimely death.

Entitled Wholehearted Faith, it is set for a 2 November release.

In a post on the late author’s Facebook page, her husband Daniel recounted the experience of getting together Ms Held Evans’ unfinished work, which has since been completed by editor Jeff Chu.

“Frankly, I don’t yet know how to market this book,” he wrote.

“I couldn’t bring myself to read it until just a handful of weeks ago. In 2019, as I sorted through Rachel’s laptop to gather the material Jeff Chu needed to finish it, I didn’t read the documents. I checked word counts and edit dates and then closed them. While she was still alive, Rachel didn’t let me read her work until it was good enough to send to the publisher.”

“But she always had clean first drafts because she edited as she wrote. All I can say right now is: Jeff, thank you for all your work. Thank you for taking Rachel’s last written words, previously unpublished writings, and building this polished work of art. It is beautiful.”

The blurb for Wholehearted Faith reads:

This book is for the doubter and the dreamer, the seeker and the sojourner, those who long for a sense of spiritual wholeness. Through theological reflection and personal recollection, Rachel wrestles with God’s grace and love in an imperfect world, looks unsparingly at what the Church is and does, and explores universal human questions about becoming and belonging.

The book is the latest posthumous publication from the author and her last book aimed at adults.

In March 2020, Daniel published an unfinished post to her popular blog, on the theme of LGBTI inclusion.

Rachel Held Evans passed away on 4 May 2019 at the age of 37.

She was known for her advocacy for a more inclusive church.

While researching A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she spent much of 2011 enacting Biblical verses word for word as a critique of rigid literalism.

In a 2015 piece written for the Washington Post, Held Evans suggested that churches seeking to gain younger members need to stop “trying to make church cool.”

This, she said, was because churches all too often focused on stylistic factors which were not themselves, “the key to drawing millennials back to God in a lasting and meaningful way.”

“Young people don’t simply want a better show,” she wrote.

Wholehearted Faith is available now for pre-order from Angus & Robertson and Amazon.

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