Book Review: Saints of Feather and Fang
Saints of Feather and Fang by Caryn Rivadeneira (Broadleaf Books, 2022)
My friend Caryn Rivadeneira adores animals. So do I … only not always the same animals. Caryn looks at a hawk and sees the power and grace of the Holy Spirit; I’m usually too busy screaming at the hawk to get away from my yard and leave my chipmunks alone to notice anything like that. She’s crazy about pit bulls; I have a terrible longtime phobia of them (I’m so sorry, Caryn, I just can’t help it).
But the important thing is, we both adore animals. So we have plenty of common ground after all. And anyone else who adores animals will find a lot to like about Caryn’s new book, Saints of Feather and Fang: How the Animals We Love and Fear Connect Us to God.
For one thing, it’s a refreshing corrective to certain strains of thinking about animals these days. There are those, sad to say, who use animals as an excuse to insult and accuse people. If you love animals too much, or spend too much time with them, the argument goes, you’re wasting time and energy that you could and should be spending on humans.
Caryn is having none of this. Her book is a celebration of animals, all kinds of animals, not just because they’re wonderful in themselves, but also because they point us to our common Creator. She’s not looking to denigrate humans, but to raise our appreciation of another amazing part of creation. She wrote the book “to look at the ways animals teach us about love; about God’s rescue plans; about vices and virtues; about delight, adaptability, and the importance of instinct; about fear, creativity, and abundance; about those liminal spaces between earth and heaven; and about redemption.”
Before I read Saints of Feather and Fang, I never realized just how many times animals are mentioned in the Bible. The book takes through a number of those references, exploring all the different ways God has used animals to teach us about Himself and about ourselves. It also shows how animals demonstrate qualities that God wants us to show in our own lives. While Caryn admits to being a little “heterodox” on certain points of theology, many of her ideas here make sense. Even in a fallen world, why wouldn’t creatures on whom God lavished so much effort and creativity reflect His glory and goodness?
Before I start making it sound like a Disney movie, let me clarify that the book is starkly honest about how brutal nature can be. It’s right there in the subtitle—“the Animals We Love and Fear.” And as I hinted above, you can’t spend much time considering hawks without remembering how and what hawks eat. But even with an awareness of that brutality, what this book does exceptionally well is lead us to spend time dwelling on all the beautiful, good—even redeemed—parts of nature, and to rejoice in them. And whether you’re Team Hawk or Team Chipmunk, that really is worth doing.
(Cover image copyright Broadleaf Books. Thanks to Broadleaf Books for the review copy.)
Book Links:
Saints of Feather and Fang on Amazon
Saints of Feather and Fang on Bookshop