This was great. I personally liked it better than Washed and Waiting, probably because this was precisely the book I wanted to read at this moment. I’ve been thinking about deep and covenantal friendships and how that can look specifically Christian, so I loved Hill’s passionate defence of and hope for friendships as well as his analytical and historical approach to the topic.

As another reviewer mentioned, this is very male-centric. As I was reading I especially noticed the amount of time he spent considering (and quoting others talking about) how friendship is different than erotic/sexual/romantic love (though I would argue that romantic and sexual love are not necessarily the same) and and how to keep that distinction. He did note how men like C.S. Lewis, Samuel Johnson, and others tended to have much less rigid boundaries in their actual lives than they indicated in their writing, but I still found it amusing how concerned they were about it all making sense. It doesn’t make sense, a lot of the time! And I think (though I may be wrong) that women tend to be a little less worried about keeping things from being messy—feelings and love are messy, that’s just a reality of life. “Better sometimes to remain confused,” he quotes Iris Murdoch as having said, and I couldn’t agree with her more. 

Apart from that, though, it was a great read. I liked Part One (Reading Friendship) best, and Chapter Six, “Patterns of the Possible,” had some really good stuff about the best friendship happening in the larger community. This is one of the more important points in the book. Hill demonstrates how friendship strengthens community, community leads to friendship, and friendship enables greater hospitality to the wider community.