Books
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Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love
(Brazos Press, February 9, 2027) A rare cancer diagnosis should have narrowed Barbara Mahany’s life. Instead, it cracked it wide open. Writing of 3:00 a.m. terror, of her husband and sons, and of every slant of light that draws her deeper into the presence of God, she offers hard-won wisdom for anyone facing illness, loss, or the plain fact of their time on earth running out: on the other side of the breaking is not just grief but also gratitude.
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The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text
(Broadleaf Books, March 2023) For millennia, people of faith read the natural world as a sacred text, the first and best way into encounter with the divine. Weaving together the astonishments of science, the wisdom of poets, mystics and observers who came before her, and her own quiet practice of paying attention, Barbara Mahany invites us to read that book again: the stars, the seasons, the pull of tide and migration.
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The Stillness of Winter: Sacred Blessings of the Season
(Abingdon Press, October 2020) A book for the curling-in months of winter, when quietude is the holy balm and the long nights invite us inward. Essays, meditations, prayers, recipes, field notes and winter wonderlists, drawn in part from the winter pages of her first book and filled with new reflections. One reviewer called it “like going on retreat with her.”
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The Blessings of Motherprayer: Sacred Whisperings of Mothering
(Abingdon Press, April 2018) A little bit Motherprayer, a little bit Slowing Time, and a little bit altogether new: a small gift book of essays, prayers, meditations and recipes, unfurled season by season. It is small enough to tuck into a purse or a coat pocket, and it invites readers to pay attention, savor the moment, see the sacred, and learn the lessons of loving from those they love most.
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Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving
(Abingdon Press, April 2017) “Mothering was my crash course in love.” Field notes, love letters really, gathered across the arc of her sons’ growing-up years, from kindergarten through college and beyond. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, wrote that she captures how mothering “can itself be sacramental.” At its heart is one question: How do we love?
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Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door
(Abingdon Press, October 2014) Meditations on finding the divine in ordinary moments, gathered from three landscapes: under heaven’s dome, on the front lines of the homefront, and in the unspooling of the seasons. Publishers Weekly named it one of the top 10 religion books of fall 2014 and called it “balm for the hurried heart.”