Christianity Today October 3, 2026 6 min signal 2026-10-03

‘The Shack’ sequel is as provocative as the original

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

October 2, 2026

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## Return to the Shack: A Journey into Redemption

Wm. Paul Young (Author)

Worthy Books

272 pages

$26.40

William Paul Young, Return to the Shack: A Journey Into Redemption (Apiary, 2026)

The enormously successful, highly controversial novel The Shack (2007) spotlit the problem of suffering, portraying a divine love willing to take whatever embodied form each uniquely broken soul might benefit most from confronting. Mack, grieving his youngest’s child’s death and haunted by abuse suffered as a teenager, apparently needed a Black, female “Papa” God and Middle Eastern Jesus to upend seminary-bound assumptions about his Creator. In Return to the Shack, Mack applies what he learned about symbol, metaphor, and reading between the lines. He encourages his remaining, alcohol-addicted daughter to take hold of the Bread of Life that her reason wishes to discard, and manages to validate the tenor of his estranged wife’s words even when her (justifiable) anger leads her toward exaggeration.

For all that Mack learned, he remains a relatable mess whose desire to protect generates a controlling instinct that preempts others’ decision-making. When presented with the imprisoned serial killer who abducted and murdered 6-year-old Missy, he must wrestle with not only the pain and outrage that still war with his decision to forgive but also a presumptuous impulse to prevent his wife from attempting the same journey toward reconciliation that draws him to visit death row in a Tennessee prison.

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Scattered, fraught interactions with his wife provide the tale its thematic backbone, the couple’s ongoing need to forgive themselves as well as one another setting the stage for the challenge of loving their family’s enemy (Matt. 5:43–48).

As with its predecessor, the novel employs clichés and unwitty witticisms that some will consider part of its charm en route to provocative, unorthodox ideas Young hopes will “at least spark many wonderful conversations.” These include the notion that some child predators may be “broken protectors,” a purgatory-like sanctifying “Moment” that may extend long after death, and the universalist-adjacent suggestion that hell is “the fire of God’s love consum[ing] everything in us that is dead” so that every soul may “finally stand fully human and fully alive.”

## To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith and Formation After Deconstruction

Tiffany Yecke Brooks (Author)

Wm. B. Eerdmans

250 pages

$24.99

Tiffany Yecke Brooks, To Rebehold the Stars: Reimagining Faith and Formation After Deconstruction (Eerdmans, 2026)

Tiffany Yecke Brooks’s helpful To Rebehold the Stars plots a path back to an active, honest faith practice for those who abandoned the church following deep hurt. A writing professor with a PhD in literature and MA degrees in both classics and spiritual formation, Brooks encourages close reading of Scripture buttressed by word studies, prayerful introspection, the occasional infusion of poetry, and practical exercises to help reshape one’s spiritual assumptions.

An “openness to beautiful mystery” lies at the heart of this invitation to a renewed relationship with God, a reminder that we cannot fully apprehend a universe made from the invisible (Heb. 11:3). Brooks suggests we can restore a humbling sense of wonder by admitting that our understanding of an infinite God remains in constant flux due to limited perceptions, variable emotions, and imperfect memories. Discovering the wondrous in creation not only reinvigorates adoration and gratitude but deepens reliance on God by inviting questions to sit alongside certainty, and by encouraging pursuit rather than possession.

Recognizing that biblical words used by legalists to bludgeon weary souls must be redefined before they can regain their life-giving power, Brooks models reexamination of terms like confession and evangelism. She encourages readers to rebuild their personal spiritual lexicon by revisiting the many scriptural metaphors used to describe God instead of fixating on a few; reminds us that our conceptions describe but never define our omniscient Creator; and helps recover contested practices like meditation and lament. This astute examination of contemporary church culture offers those outside a way back in.

## The Children of Men

P. D. James (Author)

Vintage

256 pages

$9.43

P. D. James, The Children of Men (Vintage Books, 1992)

The Children of Men (1992) by acclaimed mystery writer P. D. James marks an eerily prescient departure from her usual fare. Its most obvious touchstone concerns our past decade’s precipitous drop in birth rates, a problem anticipated in apocalyptic terms with the delivery of humanity’s last baby 25 years before the novel’s action begins. Initial efforts at international cooperation have disintegrated into rancorous othering and the withholding of research findings, with disastrous results. Staring down the barrel of the species’ imminent demise, the aging British population enlists slave labor from African countries, makes half-hearted attempts to generate fertile sperm with the help of government-sponsored porn shops, and shunts a shrinking criminal element onto an offshore penal colony.

Into this dismal, seemingly hopeless situation steps Theo, a central character and narrator determined to ignore the God signaled by his name. Oscillating between nostalgia-laden distant history and a morbid fixation on personal failures, the cerebral academic does everything possible to ignore an acedia-infused present. Self-imposed solitude and retreat into an epicurean’s preoccupation with elaborate dinners keep his senses sated and his mind quiescent.

Until, that is, a Christian determined to catalyze systemic change with outrageous, irrational love begins her work by awakening his slumbering conscience, drawing him toward liturgy he had tried to forget, and trusting him with a secret that could change the world. In this dystopian novel, sacrificial love undergirded by faith holds the power to transform the hardest heart. A favorite title in a genre I call the redemptively grotesque.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of literature and film at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is Digging in the Dirt and his Substack is Under a Tree.

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