Love Letters to God by Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey (Cascade Books, 2025).
Friendship is hard. Maybe you’ve noticed this. It’s a precious and valuable thing, even a necessary thing, but it is hard. Real friendship requires a vulnerability and a trust that I, for one, find extremely difficult—on some days impossible—to summon up. Some of my friendships have lasted a long time, but even in those friendships I struggle to be completely open.
A book like Love Letters to God by Devon Spencer and Katherine Willis Pershey is therefore especially appealing to someone like me. The book is made up of about a year’s worth of letters between the two women, begun when they had just recently become friends. Katherine is a pastor in the United Church of Christ; Devon is a therapist and, when they met, was a brand new convert to Christianity.
(Full disclosure: I’ve known Katherine for many years through various writers’ groups to which we both belong, and our new books share a publisher.)
“It was not a year into our friendship that I suggested we start exchanging letters,” Katherine explains in the introduction to the book. “I’ve always been more deft in writing than speaking, at least when it comes to more complicated theological musings. Some of our text messages were getting a little long. Epistles have long been central to the literature of the church, from Eugene Peterson and Henri Nouwen to St. Paul and St. John, and countless Christians in between.”
For all these reasons—and also with the eventual goal of making them into a project that would be published—the two friends wrote the letters that appear in this book. As the title indicates, the correspondence is much a conversation with God as with each other. Together they work their way through various religious questions and difficulties along with family and work issues, romantic troubles, and painful losses. Devon the eager convert devours Scripture and Augustine and Kirkegaard and a slew of other texts, coming up with numerous questions and bold interpretations. Katherine offers gentle correction at times, surprised admiration at other times. Each demonstrates a beautiful humility and respect in the face of what the other does and doesn’t know.
There are disagreements, too, and this was the part that I found most encouraging and instructive (and sometimes jaw-dropping, as a person who shies away from conflict and, as I said, doesn’t trust easily). Devon attends a theologically conservative church that she loves, but she feels torn about its refusal to ordain women and other points on which it differs from Katherine’s church. Katherine feels pain over the division as well, especially as she is herself a female pastor.
“In theory, I want to be able to build relationships that transcend differences,” she writes. “And I do! But some differences are, well, different. My ordination is so vital to my identity I wince to consider that for so many people it is at best a benign misconception and at worst a diabolical sham.”
For her part, Devon agonizes, “How could you trust me if I disavowed your ordination? … You’ve assured me of your covenantal friendship, but on some level that must be contingent as well.”
And yet, the two of them stay friends. From discussions and blind spots and arguments and reconciliations and renewed commitment, there emerges a story that feels simply remarkable. In our current cultural climate, in which we tend to perceive disagreement as attack and guard every aspect of ourselves so rigorously that any difference of opinion may be fatal, the portrait of warts-and-all friendship Devon and Katherine offer us here refreshes the soul. Such a friendship takes great courage, consideration, and love, but in sticking with it and even thriving within it, they open up a whole world of possibilities for the rest of us.
(Cover image courtesy of Cascade Books.)
Book Links:
Love Letters to God on Amazon
Love Letters to God on Bookshop
(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Goodreads Links:
Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell
The Astral Library by Kate Quinn
Between Shifts by W.R. Gingell
Other Links:
Christ and Pop Culture has made the first chapter of my new book The Screen and the Mirror, which deals with The Manchurian Candidate, available to read online for free! Thanks to them for running it and to my publisher for giving permission.
In case you missed it, Chris Williams has posted his audio interview with me here. It’s also available on YouTube. We had a great conversation, so be sure to give it a listen!
Links for My Latest Book:
The Screen and the Mirror on Amazon
The Screen and the Mirror at Hearts and Minds Books (20% off)
The Screen and the Mirror at Wipf and Stock
The Screen and the Mirror at Bookshop