Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love

by Barbara Mahany

What if the moments that break us open could also awaken us to what matters most?

When life shatters our plans--through illness, loss, or sudden uncertainty--we often wonder how to keep moving forward. In Broken Open, award-winning journalist and former oncology nurse Barbara Mahany recounts the rare cancer diagnosis that reshaped her life and invited her to see the world differently. Through luminous storytelling and personal reflection, she explores

· how illness and loss can generate appreciation for the sacred gift of time;
· why wrestling with an uncertain future can deepen gratitude and compassion; and
· practices for living with intention, tenderness, and wholehearted love.

Perfect for readers navigating grief, illness, or disruption, Broken Open is a hopeful meditation on living with deeper faith and courage in the present moment.

224 pages, Paperback

Expected publication February 9, 2027

About the author

From the front pages of the Chicago Tribune, to her revered page-two columns, Barbara Mahany, an author and longtime journalist, has opened her heart and told her stories and the stories of her family’s life that have drawn in thousands of readers for decades. She writes from the well of her Christian-Jewish marriage. Bracingly honest and heart-achingly daring, she explores the sacred mysteries with a voice, recognizable and clear. She is a sought-after speaker, and writing teacher. She lives in Wilmette, Illinois.

She and her husband, Blair Kamin, the Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning former architecture critic, have two sons, Will, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, and Teddy, a journalist, line cook, and creator of Chefs' Tribune. Mahany has published five books, with a sixth due out in February 2027. Her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (2014, Abingdon Press), was named by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top 10 Religion books for Fall 2014. Her most recent, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God's First Sacred Text (2023, Broadleaf Books), has been called a "spiritual classic of the 21st century." Her forthcoming book, Broken Open: How Our Most Fragile Seasons Invite Us to Extravagant Love (2027, Brazos Press), explores spiritual epiphanies in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, a rare lung cancer.