New Book by Dean Powery Deepens Faith Through Questions

Update 1/4/24: In an interview with the podcast Public Worship and the Christian Life, Dean Luke Powery discusses how he got the idea for Living the Questions of the Bible and some of its implications for a Christian spirituality that embraces questions. Listen to the interview.

In his latest book Living the Questions of the Bible, Duke Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery invites the reader to focus on questions drawn verbatim from the Bible—questions such as “What shall I cry?”, “Why are you afraid?”, and "Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”

Written for a broad audience, the book offers reflections on twenty-one questions embedded in the Bible, which are grouped into three sections: Who Is God? Who Am I? What Should We Do? Each chapter is dedicated to a biblical question with exegesis of the surrounding verses, present-day illustrations, and questions to spur group discussion.  

“The Bible is a question book,” Dean Powery writes in the book’s opening chapter. “It has its own questions for us, to us, about us. We don’t have to make up questions; they are right there in God’s Word.”

A professor in Duke’s Divinity School and Department of African and African American Studies, Powery says that questions are as much a part of the life of faith as answers.

“The purpose of this book of reflections is to follow the pattern and language of Scripture by reminding Christians that questions are also the mother tongue of faith,” he writes. “Thus, this is a question book not an answer book. It aims to affirm an interrogative spirituality as a faithful Christian practice.”

Living the Questions of the Bible is published by Wipf and Stock Publishers.