Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World

"Theology is a place and a story. Theology is the place and story you think of when you ask yourself about the meaning of your life, of the world, and the possibility of God."

So begins Serene Jones's epic work of raw truth, fierce love, and spiritual teaching as muscular as the fractured soul of this century demands. From her abiding Oklahoma roots to her historic leadership of a legendary New York seminary, her story illuminates the deep fault lines of this age--and points beyond them. With a voice that is at once frank and poetic, humble and prophetic, intimate and practical, Jones makes complex teachings around hatred, forgiveness, mercy, justice, death, sin, and grace understandable and immediately applicable for modern people. Excavating the wisdom of great theological voices--Soren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Calvin, James Baldwin, James Cone, Luce Irigaray, Saint Teresa of Avila--she brings them to life with an intimacy and vividness that illumines our lives and our culture now. At the same time, and with great beauty, Call It Grace reveals Serene Jones as a towering voice of a new, and urgently necessary, public theology for this century.

Serene Jones is the president of the historic Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. The first woman to head the 180-year-old institution, Jones occupies the Johnston Family Chair for Religion and Democracy. She is the past president of the American Academy of Religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University, where she was the Titus Street Professor of Theology at the Divinity School, and chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Jones is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace. She is a child of the Oklahoma plains, a daughter of a university president and a single mother, a sister, a cancer survivor, a theologian, a minister, a news commentator, a public intellectual, and a devoted teacher.