I was a judge for the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards (GAYA). For Best Memoir, I selected This Gladdening Light: An Ecology of Fatherhood and Faith by Christopher Martin.
Below is my submission statement:
Disillusioned by the “artificial light spread by industrial Christianity,” Christopher Martin is in search of a new theology. Through a spiritual pilgrimage consisting of treks amid the Appalachians, unsuccessful backyard gardening, and (above all else) the births of a son and daughter, Martin’s faith is renewed by “the God I met in my children…a God who could be human.” Steeped in the physical and political environs of the American south and spiritually inheriting from both Thoreau’s Walden and Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, This Gladdening Light is a poignant, lyrical, and heartfelt expression of the divinity within our planet and ourselves.
Congratulations to the author. I highly recommend this book!
Disclosures:
1) My book, Remain Free, won the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year Award. In 2018, I was contacted about judging this year’s GAYA. I otherwise have no affiliation with the Georgia Writers Association or the GAYA.
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