Stina Kielsmeier-Cook

Summer is a great time to escape our normal routines, explore unfamiliar places, and meet fascinating new friends. Whether or not you're able to travel far and wide this year, reading books is one of the best ways to experience new perspectives without ever having to leave your home. Through reading, you have the opportunity to step into worlds outside your own and encounter the viewpoints of others in ways you never could by yourself.

"This is a necessary book, poignant and true." Jon M. Sweeney, Catholic author and rabbi spouse, author of James Martin, SJ: In the Company of Jesus "Blessed Are the Nones turns 'unequally yoked' on its head. There is no sense of winners and losers, lost and found, broken and born-again. Rather, Blessed is an invitation: How do we dive deeply when confronted with inevitable changes in relationships and faith?

When I was in college my theology professor, lecturing on the Kingdom of God, turned to me and asked, “So, Stina. When you are older and own a home and have a perfectly good kitchen and dining room and so on, I want to know: Will you spend thousands of dollars updating it? Redoing it?” When I was the invincible age of twenty-two, the thought of having thousands of dollars to spend on anything—let alone owning a real home—seemed a million years away.