the understory: an invitation to rootedness and resilience from the forest floor

＂Walk in the woods with me.＂

That’s the invitation award-winning author Lore Ferguson Wilbert extends to readers in The Understory.

On this journey, Wilbert shares her story of alienation and disorientation after years of religious and political unrest in the evangelical church. In doing so, she looks to an unlikely place--the forest--to learn how to live and even thrive when everything seems to be falling apart. What can we learn from eroding soil, the decomposition process, the time it takes to grow lichen, the beauty of fiddlehead ferns, the regeneration of self-sowing seeds, and walking through the mud? Here, among the understory of the forest, Wilbert discovers rich metaphors for living a rooted and flourishing life within the complex ecosystems of our world. Her tenderness and honesty will help readers grieve, remember, hope, and press on with resilience.

Lore Ferguson Wilbert is the author of A Curious Faith and Handle with Care, which won a 2021 Christianity Today Book Award. She writes at lorewilbert.com. Wilbert has written for Christianity Today, Fathom magazine, and She Reads Truthand served as general editor of B&H’s Read and Reflect with the Classics. She lives in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York with her husband.