Braving the Truth

Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith

by Rachel Held Evans
edited by Sarah Bessey

Review posted June 12, 2026.
HarperOne, 2026. 383 pages.
Review written May 17, 2026, from my own copy, ordered via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

Rachel Held Evans was a Christian writer who wrestled with her faith in print - and changed people's lives. She died way too soon in 2019, only 38 years old. She started blogging in 2007, shortly before she started publishing books - and this book collects many of those blog posts.

Editor Sarah Bessey chose the selection of posts to collect in this book, and she also included tributes from 37 other authors - usually after a blog post from Rachel that especially inspired that author when it was first posted.

This book makes me so wish I was following Rachel when she was blogging. [Yes, I was blogging at the time, but I wasn't reading a lot of blogs because I was so busy with books. I also didn't have a good feed reader, so attempts to read blogs usually got forgotten. Now that many authors have switched to Substack, my email has blown up with unread emails, so maybe it's just as well?] Anyway, now that it's in book form, I can see so much wisdom coming from this young woman. It does make me wish I'd been in on the conversations she got going on her blog.

What is it about? The essays (That sounds more book-like than posts, doesn't it?) are presented in categories, rather than chronologically, though the book does start with her first blog post and end with her last. The topics covered are Evolving Faith, Patriarchy and White Supremacy, the Church, Gender and Sexuality, and "Life in the Midst of It All."

This is full of wonderful writing, Braving the Truth is an appropriate title, because Rachel gets real with her readers, and that wasn't an easy thing to do.

Let me copy a few examples of quotations I marked to give you an idea:

This is from a post on lessons she learned the hard way:

It's not always right to rock the boat. I get frustrated with Christians who seem to find it easy to believe everything their pastor tells them to believe. It makes me especially angry when my friends refuse to even listen to new ideas because they are either too certain or too afraid to see things from another perspective. But I've learned that it is not my job to test other people's faith. My job is to be a friend to people who are already struggling through tough questions, to offer companionship on the difficult journey through doubt. I am to be a counselor, not a recruiter. It's not always right to rock the boat.

This is a post about what she'd say if she got a chance years later to redo the commencement address she gave as a graduate of a conservative Christian university:

I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.

I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world's questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ's banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I'd ever imagined.

And this is from an essay called, "I love the Bible."

I love the Bible more now than ever before because I have finally surrendered to God's stories.
God's long, strange, beautiful stories.
We asked questions.
God told stories.
We demanded answers.
God told stories.
We argued theology.
God told stories.

And when those stories weren't enough, when the words themselves would not suffice, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, laughed among us, wept among us, ate among us, told more stories among us, suffered among us, died among us, and rose among us. The Word entered our story and invited us into his.

If you've already read any of Rachel Held Evans books, I probably don't need to tell you that, yes, you'll want to read this one. If you haven't read any of her books, this would be a great place to start. Many of the posts (essays!) were written before her books were published, but they also give a great overview of the topics that she wrote about in her other published books. This brings her thoughts together, and the tributes alongside show that she powerfully affected people's lives in good ways.

You couldn't ask for a nicer tribute than this lovingly collected volume.