Coffee, Tea, and Holy Water: One Woman's Journey to Experience Christianity Around the Globe

Coffee, Tea, and Holy Water takes the reader on an armchair tour of Christianity in our world, across borders and over continents. Author Amanda Hudson provides a personal touch with cultural curiosities, profound questions about the nature and practice of faith, as she travels to five countries: Brazil, Wales, Tanzania, China, and Honduras.

Part reflection, part entertaining travelogue, Coffee Tea, and Holy Water explores everything from each culture’s offer of hospitality to life in a Masaai boma. “There are lessons to be learned from other countries that are not visible in our own culture,” writes Hudson, “Questions that are not our questions. Struggles that are not our normal struggles. And yet, when we look around the throne one day at the nations assembled there, instead of marveling at the diversity, I think we will actually be fascinated by what we all had in common.” This is a book about the places we meet, what we share, how we can learn to cross borders (geographical, cultural, personal), and learning that the steps to do so make all the difference.

Honest, witty, and thought-provoking, these stories come from a young woman raised in the South, who found herself wondering what “normal” Christianity looked like in other countries.