February is here. I finally took down our outside Christmas lights after January’s ice melted away. In a month, the season of Lent will start with Ash Wednesday on March 5 and will run through Easter on April 20.
There are lots of good Lent devotionals you can use, including new ones coming out this year. But if you’re looking for a Lent devotional book to help you think through biblical texts in this unusual time, I’d suggest Unsettling Lent. First published by Chalice Press in 2023, the daily devotions by Angela Parker, Beau Underwood, and me will, unfortunately, feel like they’re ripped from current headlines. And Chalice is even running a flash sale right now to give you 60% off.
In Unsettling Lent, you’ll reflect on the biblical stories alongside reflections about overreach of government power, Donald Trump, Christian Nationalism, Jan. 6 insurrectionists, anti-immigrant actions, antisemitism, gun violence, attacks on Medicaid, and many other issues that have dominated the news in recent weeks. We live in unsettling times. And that calls for unsettling the biblical stories about Jesus’s teachings, ministries, death, and resurrection.
“Unsettling Lent is not your ordinary Lenten devotional,” Chalice explains. “That’s a good thing, given the ways Lent’s radical meaning has been diminished by our culture’s false promotion of religious complacency. By connecting the biblical story to present-day realities, it invites Christians to make Lent a season of solidarity and justice-seeking. In contrast to devotionals emphasizing personal spirituality and interior transformations, Unsettling Lent emphasizes the public implications and communal aspects of self-denial, sacrificial love, and confrontations with power.”
With this devotional, you’ll be challenged each day to reconsider the biblical texts and what the stories mean in today’s religious and political environment. After the first few days that introduce Lent, the rest of the devotionals follow a new theme each week: announcing the kingdom, social challenges, crossing boundaries, conspiracies/plotting, social/political context, and then Holy Week.
Here’s how I explained what to expect in the introduction: “We hope you’ll be challenged to not let the biblical texts hide behind stained-glass windows and cute coloring pages. We hope these devotionals will challenge and even irritate you as you reflect on them. Because they did for us as we put them together. Thanks for joining us on this unsettling adventure during unusual times.”
While we’ve published Unsettling Advent devotional emails each year since 2021, we’ve only put together Unsettling Lent once. If you read through the devotional book two years ago, you might find them helpful to return to. And if you’ve never picked up Unsettling Lent, this really is the perfect year.
Although you can buy Unsettling Lent from various booksellers, if you order today directly from Chalice, you can save 60% and get your copy for just $1.99. Lent will be here soon. And it’s a story of resistance we need now.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
