What Is the Giving Tree? Brennan Manning Takes the Classic Children’s Book to Tell You Something So Important.

Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is one of the most beloved classics of children’s literature. A young boy loves playing in and with a tree, eating of apples, and the tree, in turn, loves the boy and is happy to provide. Brennan Manning is one of the most beloved and radically influential clerymen of the twentieth century, who through his reflections on poverty and living with the struggles of the world (and his own sturggles in alcoholism) inspired DC Talk, Rich Mullins and others. What happens when you put them together? A dramatic reading that, says, Manning is “my best understanding of Jesus Christ” – the tree that gives and gives and gives, until finally inviting us to rest.