This May Rachel Held Evans died tragically at the age of 37 from a reaction to antibiotics. For weeks my facebook feed was full of posts from friends of their tributes to Evans and the tributes of others. Over and over again my friends spoke of their deep sense of grief at her death and wrote of her profound affect on their faith. For the women I know who grew up in fundamentalist churches especially Evans had been a source of inspiration and encouragement.

I understand this and share their grief. I thoroughly enjoyed Evans books and have used them with adult confirmation classes. I especially loved her book Searching for Sunday which does a beautiful job of exploring the seven sacraments both intellectually and personally. She was a really engaging writer and was able to weave together academic understanding with pastoral and personal exploration in a way that is rare.

I have been meaning to read her last book Inspired for a while and so in August listened to the download version from the library. When I finished I started rereading parts from my own copy which had been sitting in my to-read pile. It is a beautiful book.

Evans weaves together contemporary retelling of Biblical stories with academic scholarship and her own journey with difficult or perplexing texts. I learned a lot from her and even things I already knew took on a significance they hadn’t had before for me because of the ways she retold the story. For weeks her insights kept showing up in my sermons and I find myself thinking of the book often.

Evans did her own audio book and this gives it a poignancy and sorrow that wouldn’t have been there had she not died so young. When she talks about how she plans to read the Bible to her sons it is difficult not to weep for her and for them. One can only hope that when they are older they will be able to listen and hear both her love for them and her love for scripture.