Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light

Rachel Marie Stone teaches English at the Stony Brook School in Stony Brook, New York. Her writing about food, faith, justice, public health, and maternal health has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Christianity Today, the Christian Century, Books and Culture, Sojourners, In Touch magazine, Religion News Service, Patheos, and more. Her books include the revised More-with-Less cookbook, Telling God's Story, and Eat with Joy, which won a Christianity Today Book Award. She and her husband, Tim, have two sons.

"English teacher and author Stone . . . writes movingly about childbirth and its meaning for women in this wistful memoir. . . . Her description of birth as both painful and joyful, and her exploration of how the two emotions feed each other, are highlights. Stone's style is reflective, making the book more of a meditation than a traditional memoir, and the prose is evocative throughout. . . . Readers will be gratified by how Stone turns the process of birth into a metaphor for her own personal and spiritual evolution."

"While Birthing Hope is filed as a Christian book, Stone’s story is so universal that it also fits generally among memoir, women’s health, and parenting titles. Stone’s faith is a large motivator for her and something that is woven throughout the book, but her story is relatable and its themes sympathetic regardless of religion or belief system."

"In these profound reflections on the mysteries of life and death, Stone unpacks how childbirth reveals our anxieties, our physicality, our mortality. All who are born or give birth will someday die. Yet even in the midst of our fears and doubts, birth is a profoundly hopeful act of faith, as new life is brought into a hurting world that groans for redemption. God becomes present to us as a mother who consents to the risk of love and ultimately lets us make our own way in the world, as every good mother must do."