Love in a Time of Fear

How do we love people who we are afraid of?

The political climate of the US in recent years has revealed significant divisions in our nation and our neighborhoods, divisions often fueled by fear. For those who follow a call and commitment to love our neighbors, how do we love in the midst of this fear?

In this book, Cassie Trentaz looks that question in the eyes and asks her friends and neighbors in four communities currently facing pressure and often viewed with suspicion--immigrants, Muslim Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and young African American men--what feels like love to them and, alternatively, what does not. Trentaz brings their honest, heartfelt responses in their own words, helping us to know people we might not know and bringing us powerful stories of offerings of love that were received as love as well as stories of good intentions that missed their mark. She then offers us tools to help us act on what we hear. This book is both an invitation and a toolbox for listening. It takes love from a good idea to a concrete force that can speak to our fears, reach across divisions, and just might heal our world.

""Unlike many contemporary books and films that seem to take a majority-cultured quick and agenda'd look into the concerns and cultures of 'others,' Dr. Trentaz's work is a slow-paced, pliable gaze into not just the lives of her subjects, but into their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and resolves. . . . If we all could listen and tell the story of others so well, what an inspired civilization we would be. I find her work honest, sincere, revealing, and immediately useful, leaving me with a sense of being honored, awakened, informed, and hopeful.""
--Michelle Lang, founder of The Art of Tough Talks

""This lovely, winsome book emerges out of the Christian college world to ask this question: what does love look like in a time of fear? The author, Professor Cassie Trentaz, is especially addressing white US Christian fears--of immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ persons, and people of color. . . . This is a sweet-spirited book, but also quietly devastating, because the voices she features of young people on the margins, routinely harmed by Christian Americans, have such sad stories to tell. I highly recommend this book.""
--David P. Gushee, Mercer University

Cassie J.E.H Trentaz is Associate Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Church History at Warner Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Theology in the Age of AIDS & HIV: Complicity and Possibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and is a parent, partner, neighbor, teacher, minister, activist, and low-key rascal committed to inching, stumbling, and leaping toward glimpses of shalom in the world today following the lead of those often excluded.