"Patrick B. Reyes offers one of the most arresting insights I’ve ever read regarding how institutions of theological education interpret experiences that fall outside the white, middle-class norm. As a theological educator, I can tell a book has impacted me superficially if I can quote it and declaim on it with uninterrupted confidence. I can tell that it has impacted me deeply when it causes me to come up short, to stutter, to check myself, to talk less, and to listen more. Reyes’s book has brought me up short— sometimes mid-lecture—multiple times. I count that as one of the many gifts this book brings to the church’s conversation about vocation, justice, and discernment. Under Reyes’s tutelage, readers may be troubled as never before about the challenges of making spaces of education and formation attuned to God’s call. Readers may also be hopeful like never before that those challenges can be met with fidelity and imagination."―Robert Saler, The Christian Century, 7/21/17 (read the full review here)

"Among its many contributions, the book powerfully demonstrates how story, land, and the realities of marginalized communities reconfigure our understanding of vocation. As a result, it challenges Eurocentric framings that center vocation around the job market. This makes Nobody Cries When We Die an invaluable resource for churches, community groups, and educational programs engaging questions of vocation. It offers stories that people, especially marginalized people, may resonate with and draw upon to build their own sense of vocation. Further, the book is a resource for undergraduate and graduate classrooms engaging practical, systematic, or liberation theology, and/or decolonial scholarship broadly. By foregrounding story, community, and the ways a historical-colonial matrix of power shapes physical land, the book challenges academic methodologies, providing an explicit example of theory/theology stemming from, and speaking to, quotidian communal experience. Aside from its provocative thesis, then, the book’s very presentation advances a claim on how academic work ought to be framed: as reflection on, and contribution to, life. As a Latinx who resonates with much of this work, I believe Reyes overemphasizes ‘surviving’ and ‘living’ as the call of our communities. Vocation must also be about ‘thriving!’ Yet, a call to ‘thrive’ begets the question: What social conditions and structures need to change for our people to do more than merely survive? This is a live question. But Reyes’ methodology teaches that uncovering its answer requires embracing story, community, and land.”― Jorge Juan Rodríguez V, Perspectivas: The Journal of the Hispanic Theological Initiative ( read the full review )

The Rev. Mieke Vandersall’s sermon inspired by Nobody Cries When We Die, Through Survival to Life (with permission of the author), from NotSoChurchy.org


"In Nobody Cries When We Die Patrick Reyes vibrantly presents our common yearning to embrace a vocation to life. What God wants for us is life in abundance, to walk the life of justice and compassion with joy. Reyes anchors his narrative at the margins and in this, we all find the ‘good soil’ and invitation to live fully." —Gregory Boyle, Founder/Executive Director of Homeboy Industries, Author of Tattoos On The Heart

“At times both poetic and prophetic, Nobody Cries When We Die is a passionate hybrid of autobiography and theological reflection. Reyes writes such that biblical stories and theological ideas that are often flattened are fully rendered with depth, flesh, and feeling. To read this book is to enter into the world and experience it through the lens of a faithful Christian who sees struggle and injustice all around him, and there, in the midst of it all, finds God calling out for mercy and change. Reyes has heard this call. Nobody Cries embodies God’s demand for justice and prophetic transformation, and does so in a voice that never veers from compassion. It belongs on every shelf that holds Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.” —Callid Keefe-Perry, Author of Way to Water, cohost of Homebrewed Christianity, cofounder of the journal Theopoetics

“Patrick Reyes offers a brilliant mix of theological reflection and biographical snippets to demonstrate how ‘narrative can be used to discern vocation.’ Reyes grounds us in his firsthand accounts of ministry of la lucha, among la comunidad in a way that is not gratuitous but instead ensures the reader gets a sense of both the struggles and the ingenuity of oppressed people. This broader and necessary education will help us remember the way the call of God shapes our lives. What is more, it will implore us to commit our lives, according to Reyes, to helping call our communities to life.” ― Pamela R. Lightsey, Boston University School of Theology, author of Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology

“Nobody Cries When We Die is a captivating narrative of redemption. Patrick captures the reader’s attention with compelling stories of tragedy and grief while pointing us towards God’s triumph and grace. Nobody Cries When We Die lifts up the voices and stories of people who often suffer in silence but whose voices deserve to be heard. Patrick has provided us with a gift. His transparency shares both pain and purpose on a journey to turn wounds into to scars (the evidence of healing). God has clearly used Patrick’s journey as a instrument of redemption.”― Romal Tune, Author of God’s Graffiti: Inspiring Stories for Teens

“Patrick Reyes provides us with a way through some of the most difficult questions of our time as a theologian, a scholar, and a community-accountable activist. His book will be a classic text in the canon of literature produced by liberation theologians and speak to students who often are invisible in the seminary classroom. Teach it, read it, and maybe most important of all, live it!.” —Najeeba Syeed, Founder and Director of Center for Global Peacebuilding, Claremont School of Theology

“Nobody Cries When We Die is an outstanding journey. Reyes’s collection of stories offers an eye-opening window to Latinx life in the US. Written in a beautiful prose, the author recounts his experiences in a community forced into violence and finds a common thread in the permanent struggle for justice and healing. It is his Christian vocation that makes him keep strong in his convictions in front of heart-breaking stories. This is a must read for anyone who trusts we can build a better world.”― Santiago Slabodsky, Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, Hofstra University, New York

“With a riveting writing style, Reyes’s memoir invites readers to explore their own inner labyrinth of Christian vocational discernment. At each twist and turn on the journey, questions abound: How am I going to live? Who is calling me to life? Can anything good come from my neighborhood? His approach to examining the depths of wisdom in the lived experience of ordinary, often overlooked, people is a breath of fresh air for theological writing and a gateway for readers to encounter the Divine in the seemingly mundane.”― Gregory C. Ellison II, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Emory University, Candler, School of Theology and Founder of Fearless Dialogues

"Patrick Reyes has given us a beautiful witness to the power, creativity, and resilience at the heart of Christian community. This is a book that every young person needs to read to be encouraged and enlivened in their call, and every leader in churches, theological education, and non-profits must listen to if they are going to adequately create space for the future generation of leaders." ―Dr. Brian Bantum, Seattle Pacific University, author of The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World

“Reyes does not pull any punches as he takes his reader on a journey that can be a both heartbreaking and profoundly affirming story. Through a powerful retelling of his own spiritual autobiography, Dr. Reyes demonstrates how through God's redemptive power, his sense of calling and vocation have emerged, even in the midst of trauma, pain, loss and oppression. The text challenges the reader to consider how one’s own vocation can be heard and expressed in the messiness of everyday life.”― Dr. Michael W. DeLashmutt, Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs, The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church