An Invitation to Join the Jesus through Medieval Eyes Launch Team

Read with me? 📚

Dear bookish friend,

Today’s letter is a little off the beaten path of my usual content. My first book—Jesus through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages—comes out next month! I won’t be sending another general email about the book like this again on Substack… I like to keep this space for your monthly meditations. But if your curiosity is piqued, read on for more info (or if you’d like to preorder, but don’t want to join the launch team, I’ve included links for easy access at the bottom of the post).

In three of the gospels, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” Our friend Simon Peter answers magnificently: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!” (Matthew 16:16). And then, in the fascinating backward and forward dance that characterizes the life of all followers of Christ, Peter immediately tries to cram Jesus back into the cultural box of his expectations. When Jesus teaches the disciples about his coming death and resurrection, Peter rebukes him. Implicitly, we hear it: such a thing could never happen to the Messiah, Son of the Living God. Peter has been waiting for the powerful and triumphal Messiah who will drive out the occupying empire once and for all. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus strongly responds.

Jesus’s question is for all his followers in all the times and places of the church, including us. But when we answer it, we find we are often no better than Peter, mired in his own expectations of what a savior should be. Arch-conservative Jesus, bourgeois Jesus, hippie Jesus, self-help Jesus, overthrow-the-government Jesus. We’ve all met those Jesuses, and may follow some version of them ourselves. How can we break out of our own cultural contexts when we answer Christ’s question? One way is by turning to the answers of the past, which have their own cultural assumptions and contexts—but not ours. It’s not that we wholesale adopt the ideas of the past in servile and unthinking fashion. But the past offers us gifts of unique perspective that we simply don’t share. Jesus through Medieval Eyes turns to the different answers of medieval thinkers, poets, and artists to look with paradoxically fresh and ancient eyes on the person of Christ.

Each chapter wrestles with a different medieval representation of Jesus in the poetry, prose, theology, and art of the Middle Ages in invitational and accessible chapters. I explore the words, images, and thought of medieval writers and artists like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Fra Angelico, Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many others. In this book, you will meet representations of Jesus that are sometimes familiar, and sometimes strange. You will encounter Jesus the Judge of the End of Days, who looks into the eyes of everyone who ever lived and calls them to account. You will meet Jesus the Lover, who gently and tenderly invites us to our marriage feast. Jesus the Knight jousts with the Devil, without weapons or shoes. Jesus the Mother labors to give birth to the church in his passion and tenderly feeds us, his beloved children, with his body. And there’s much more.

This book is not a textbook, not a straightforward work of literary criticism, theology, or medieval history, though it has elements of those things. It’s more like an ongoing conversation with these folks from the past centered on the One whom we love together as members of the same Body. In that conversational mode, I weave in some reflections on our present moment and my own life as I consider these medieval depictions of and thoughts on Christ.

I hope that Jesus through Medieval Eyes will deepen readers’ roots in the historical church and encourage us in our present moment by turning to those who came before us, who struggled with similar things—religious and political corruption, pandemics, reckonings with gender, money, and power—and kept the faith through their creative, fierce, and aesthetically beautiful devotion to Christ. Their pursuit of Christ has challenged me, taken me out of my comfort zone, and moved me to love. I wrote it for anyone and everyone curious about our medieval brothers and sisters and what they had to say about Jesus.

Over the next month and a half leading up to the book’s release day (fittingly, October 31st, great for the feast days of All Saints & All Souls), I’ll be sharing about Jesus through Medieval Eyes via email for those of you who opt in, and some on social media as well. I would be thrilled and honored to have you come along on this journey with me. 

One way to do that is by joining the Jesus through Medieval Eyes launch team. This group will have the chance to read the book before it’s available anywhere else, plus as we get closer to the launch date, I’ll start sharing discussion questions and reflection prompts on each chapter—basically turning the group into a mini Jesus through Medieval Eyes book club. Click the button below to join in:

A few other launch team-only “perks” will include: 

• 4-week reading guide 

• Bonus content from the book 

• Extra video posts from me 

• “How to host your own medieval book club” guide (which includes recipes for medieval-inspired honey cakes and mulled wine!) 

• Zoom Q&A with me to close out our discussion 

The only requirements to join are a willingness to preorder the book (you will also receive an advance digital copy as a member of this group), and a readiness to dive into these medieval ideas about Jesus with me. Also, feel free to invite any other friends you’d like to read with—just pass this along to them

Thank you in advance for joining me on this adventure. I am so excited, nervous, pleased at the thought of you reading this book!

Back to our regularly scheduled programming 😊

Peace, 

Grace   

P.S. If you’d like to preorder the book whether or not you’re interested in the launch team, here are some easy links… Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Thriftbooks, IndieBound… or order from your wonderful local bookstore, the best option of all.