Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway

Keeping time with the liturgical year, Smith (senior editor, HarperOne; creator, Slant Letter) takes readers through liturgical seasons as she shares her own pregnancy stories: experiencing a miscarriage, getting pregnant again, and giving birth. She is at once awed, frightened. and joyful at the tiny nuances of life. Her thoughts are interspersed with a dizzying array of sometimes airy, sometimes insightful quotes from the likes of Viktor Frankl, Richard Feynman, Gregory of Nyssa, and others. She turns words such as breath, contraction, miscarriage, and labor into spiritual metaphors about a new life. Her book shows much of her interior reckoning with all of the small moments she believes are too often overlooked. There are also descriptions of the emotionally big ones, where the divine seems anywhere but there with her.