Hannah Packard Crowther: Gracing
Today, we’re thrilled to share a conversation with Hannah Packard Crowther about her new book, Gracing, the latest release from Faith Matters Publishing. We love Hannah's profound wisdom, lyrical writing, and her invitation to reflect on grace in entirely new ways. The book also features stunning, original artwork by J. Kirk Richards.
Hannah asks, What if grace is not a gift we passively receive, but a dynamic process we actively engage in and co-create with God? Drawing from life’s ordinary moments and its most difficult experiences, she demonstrates how grace can infuse our actions, relationships, and even our struggles with meaning and beauty. The title, Gracing, reflects this vibrant view of grace as a verb—alive, present, and always moving through our lives.
In this conversation, Hannah shares profound insights into creativity, community, and resilience, especially through the lens of her experience living with chronic illness and a body that sometimes resists her plans. She opens up about how those experiences have deepened her understanding of grace and shaped a more compassionate way of being. We also explore her heartfelt call to rethink how we care for those on the margins of our faith communities, including gender and sexual minorities, and to discover creative, courageous ways to embody grace in all our relationships.
This conversation is warm, vulnerable, and full of wisdom, and we hope you enjoy it! We also published an excerpt from Gracing this week in Wayfare, which we think you will love.
Gracing is for you if…
You are seeking a God who is big.
You are wanting to engage in “the works” of your religious life in nourishing new ways.
You are struggling with the language of “the covenant path” and want to meander a while through a covenant garden.
You thought religious life meant carting a wheelbarrow of cleaning supplies and lasagnas around the neighborhood, but now chronic illness obscures your way.
You choose the God who is present in both fireflies and psalms—alive in both the scientific story and the religious one.
You believe that theoretically, God is present in the face of each human being, but practically, you sometimes struggle to see it.
You are interested in collecting fragments of truth from wherever they arise—from Judaism to ant biology, from C.S. Lewis to Luke Skywalker, from tarantula hawk wasps to seashells.
You believe the choice between grace and works is a false dichotomy and want to explore how the pieces fit together.
You seek the God who doesn’t merely answer our prayers from atop His mighty throne, but shares our prayers in the middle of our mighty mess.
You seek a present paradise more earnestly than a future one.
Your hope for church is less about the staking of truth claims and more about an invitation to a nourishing, abundant life.
You seek holiness in the mundane and the universal in the particular.
You are looking for a quiet book that packs a punch.
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