You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender. This week, Dan shares his

second recommendation for essential summer reading, Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson. This is a book that

shines light into some of the darkest realities of our nation's systems of racism and injustice. Dan invites us to enter this

text open to learning, reflecting, and being changed.

As we consider what you may wish to read this summer, the book that I most recommend is a book by Brian Stevenson called Just Mercy, a story of justice and redemption.

I want to read a section from Nicholas Christoph, who I have great respect for who

writes for the New York Times. He says this is a searing, moving, and infuriating memoir. Brian

Stevenson, indeed, might be America's Mandela. For decades, he has fought judges, prosecutors, and police

on behalf of those who are impoverished, black, or both. Injustice is easy not to notice,

when it affects people different from ourselves. That helps explain the obliviousness of our

generation to inequity today. We need to wake up.

And that is why we need a Mandela in this country.

One of the things that I invited you to consider in our last podcast is what do you

read during the summer?

Summer reading is a really important endeavor. And I quoted a section from one of my

favorite authors, Franz Kafka. And I'll just read the last section. We need to read books that affect us

like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, like being banished

into forests far from everyone like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

That is my belief. Indeed, this book is that very, very thing, an axe to the very cold parts of our soul. But frankly, I think it is far more.

It is a warming of our hearts, really to the marvel, marvel of grace itself, to mercy itself.

So let me tell you that Stevenson is a remarkable man. Just a memoir about his

life would be incredibly compelling. From Harvard law, he ended up in Georgia doing lots of work

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