The Banality of Grace

Most of the literature on spirituality has to do with our spiritual disciplines and the things we do to draw near to God. This book is about the ways in which God reveals Godself to us in the everyday and the difference that makes in our lives. We can usually muster the courage to live faithfully through the momentous events in our lives. Courage falters in the details of the day. So, it is in the daily, the mundane, pedestrian, prosaic, quotidian, and even banal that God shows us our place in God's momentous story. We witness the banality of grace in our everyday lives: in worship, as we seek reconciliation between individuals and groups of people, in spiritual experiences that are more common to us than we realize, in an ethic informed by the future revealed to us by God, and by lives lived in response to this good future. The singularity of this book is the stories the author tells from his experience as well as from literature. He employs narrative to show, rather than tell the reader about, God's presence in our lives.

Bruce K. Modahl was a parish pastor for 37 years. He is the co-author with F. Dean Lueking of Sermons of Consequence and is a frequent contributor to The Christian Century and publications of Augsburg Press. He writes and edits the newsletter for The Crossings Community and contributes lectionary text studies to the Community's Sabbatheology blog.He and his wife Jackie split their time between Chicago, Illinois and Bradenton, Florida. They have two adult children and two grandchildren.


Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. She is the author of four previous collections of poems, a poetry textbook, and Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring. She edited the collection Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature and serves as poetry editor of The Christian Century.