Publishers Weekly Top Religion Pick for Fall 2013!

“Debbie Blue’s book is the best I read all year.”

Lauren Winner - Bestselling author

Debbie Blue has a knack for noticing things; things of God and things of life. She not only notices, she sees. She sees the way spiritual guides see - with insight, clarity, wit and truth. Debbie is at her best in Consider The Birds and for those who are up for going on a journey of seeing the ways of the birds and of God this book is a gem.

Doug Pagitt - Pastor, Author, Goodness Conspirator

Debbie Blue points to the sky, and the trees, and the grimy sidewalks of our world the way she points to the Word, saying: “Wisdom: attend!” And through the birds and their Creator and our stories about both, Debbie Blue does midrash on our lives, revealing mysteries and heartbreak, pratfalls and glory. This is a brilliant, astonishing work of scholarship and attention that will become a classic of Christian writing.

Sara Miles - Author of Take This Bread, Jesus Freak, and City of God

Debbie Blue is simply one of my favorite preachers and writers in America today. Consider the Birds is a singular work of devotion and beauty which will make you fall in love with that which you may have never bothered to notice before. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber - Author, Pastrix; the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Simmer & Saint

Debbie Blue knows a lot about birds. She’s ransacked history and mythology, not to mention her own back yard, for a wildly entertaining trove of obscure, comical, and sometimes downright revolting bits of lore about the vultures, roosters, sparrows and pigeons that we hardly notice when we’re reading the Bible. But it’s what Debbie knows about our hearts, and about the texture of life in our world today, and about God, that makes this book a real treasure. Debbie has a keen eye for the inhumane, the self-destructive, and the really stupid stuff that masquerades as cultural wisdom, conventional religion and common sense, and the way she laughs at herself, and us too, when we unthinkingly fall into line is a big part of the charm of this book. In Debbie’s sure hands, the Bible becomes a sly and paradoxical, and often very funny, collection of stories that doesn’t say anywhere close to what we have been taught to think it says, and God becomes a presence so unrelentingly good that we can hardly believe it.

Doug Frank - Author of A Gentler God

Blue's book is buoyant. We fly up like birds in a conversation about a supreme being - and I appreciated so the flight of this god-talk, a subject that doesn't usually fly anymore, encrusted as it is by gold, shadows, centuries...

Rev Billy Talen - Founder of the Church of Stop Shopping, author of The End of the World.

I would read Debbie Blue's grocery list. That's how much I love her writing. So, yes, I want to read her writings on birds -- in the world and the Bible -- about how birds are the 'currency of mercy,' about eating quail until it comes out of your nostrils, about the killing prowess of eagles. This is a book to be savored, to be read while sitting next to a lake, to be read aloud to a loved one, to be shelved with the most beautiful books you've ever read.

Tony Jones - Theologian-in-residence at Solomon's Porch, Minneapolis, author, blogger (tonyj.net)

"A different kind of field guide! From the raven to the dove and the ostrich to the sparrow, Debbie Blue reminds us how rich the Biblical account of the natural world can be, an endless source of metaphor and inspiration!"

Bill Mckibben - Founder of 350.org

Why do Jesus and Debbie Blue both tell us to “consider the birds”? Perhaps because a “corporate person” has never seen a bird and never will. And perhaps because the visitations of spirit are very like being stunned by a wild bird, and nothing like staring at a screen. Birds neither reap, sow, “tweet,” nor “friend.” They just fly into our lives with a powerless power rooted in the fact that beauty is truth and (as this delightful book and birdsong and Origen all agree) “the fowls of the air are also within thee.” To see or hear a bird clearly, for the duration of that clarity, is to be the Way.

David James Duncan - Author of The Brothers K and The River Why

Baby pelicans faint after feeding? A vulture collided with an airplane at 37,900 feet?

How much there is to learn about birds! And, by following Debbie Blue's meditations on them, how much there is to learn from birds about the Creator and our place in Creation. This book is a delight.

Marilyn Nelson - Author of Carver: A Life in Poems, A Wreath for Emmett Till, and Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems