To be human is to long for home. Home is our most fundamental human longing. And for many of us homesickness is a nagging place of grief. This book connects that desire and disappointment with the story of the Bible, helping us to see that there is a homemaking God with wide arms of welcome-and a church commissioned with this same work.

Many of us seem to be recovering the sacred, if ordinary, beauty of place, writes author Jen Pollock Michel. Perhaps we’re reading along with Wendell Berry, falling in love with Berry’s small-town barber and Jayber Crow’s small-town life… . Or maybe we’re simply reading our Bibles better, discovering that while we might wish to flatten Scripture to serve our didactic purposes, it rises up in flesh and sinew, muscle and bone: God’s holy story is written in the lives of people and their places.

Including a five-session discussion guide and paired with a companion DVD, Keeping Place offers hope to the wanderer, help to the stranded, and a new vision of what it means to live today with our longings for our eternal home.