In the Land of the Willing

In this follow-up work to his earlier In the Land of the Living: Prayers Personal and Public, Kenneth L. Sehested sustains his evocative poetic imagination and capacity "for finding the right text at the right time," as Walter Brueggemann notes in his foreword. Sehested, an award-winning author and activist as well as a poet, pastor, and sometime stonemason, knows that serious thinking about Jesus is transacted on the road and then translated in liturgy to provoke the kind of praise that rankles the world (as it is) with a foretaste of what it might be. Most of the pieces in this work have been used first in worship in his own Circle of Mercy Congregation. "This book is a great gift," Brueggemann writes, and "it issues in a calling that befits the coming rule of God." Or, as Sehested writes in his meditation on John the Baptizer, "There's no getting right with God. There's only getting soaked."