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Explore Our Digital Library While the library is closed, all digital resources will remain available. Visit this link to see all the eBooks, audiobooks, magazines, videos and more that you have access to with your library card.
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Spirituality and Religion May 2020
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The great blue hills of god : from the founder of Blackberry Farm, a story of enormous success, unfathomable loss, and discovering the true meaning of home
by Kreis Beall
"The Great Blue Hills of God is the powerful, resilient memoir by the creative force behind legendary, award-winning farm-to-table resort, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee. Born with "the gift of hospitality," Kreis Beall helped create one of the South's most enchanting destinations, Blackberry Farm, in Tennessee's Smoky Mountain foothills. For decades, she was a fixture in the entertaining and design world and on the glossy pages of popular shelter magazines. But beautiful exteriors and glowing accolades papered-over deep inner pain. At the pinnacle of her success, a brain injury left her with devastating hearing loss; that was followed by the collapse of her 36 year marriage to her "best friend and business partner," Sandy Beall, and a few years later, the tragic death of her grown son and proprietor of Blackberry Farm, Sam, at age 39. Alone and desolate as her marriage ends, Kreis begins a new journey, to find her faith and find God. After spending years on her exterior life and work, now she must begin the hardest undertaking of all: to reclaim her interior life and soul. Kreis retreats to Blackberry Farm, moving into a dimly lit 300 square foot shed with peeling paint walls, "where I met myself for the first time." Out of brokenness has come reflection, re-examination, and bit-by-bit, healing and meaning. By turns fiercely honest, heartbreaking, warm, and funny, Kreis Beall's story will resonate with anyone who has ever searched to find genuine beauty among their own flaws and scars"
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Orishas, goddesses, and voodoo queens : the divine feminine in the African religious traditions
by Lilith Dorsey
"Throughout Africa and beyond in the Diaspora caused by the slave trade, the divine feminine was revered in the forms of goddesses, like the ancient Nana Buluku; water spirits like Yemaya, Oshun, and Mami Wata; and the warrior Oya. The power of these goddesses and spirit beings has taken root in the West. This book shows us how to celebrate and cultivate the traits of these goddesses, drawing upon their strengths to empower our own lives"
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That Can Be Arranged : A Muslim Love Story
by Huda Fahmy
"Chaperones, suitors, and arranged marriages aren't only reserved for the heroines of a Jane Austen novel. They're just another walk in the park for this leading lady, who is on a mission to find her leading lad. From the brilliant comics Yes, I'm Hot in This, Huda Fahmy tells the hilarious story of how she met and married her husband. Navigating mismatched suitors, gossiping aunties, and societal expectations for Muslim women, That Can Be Arranged deftly and hilariously reveals to readers what it can be like to find a husband as an observant Muslim woman in the twenty-first century.
So relevant in today's evolving cultural climate, Fahmy's story offers a perceptive and personal glimpse into the sometimes sticky but ultimately rewarding balance of independent choice and tradition."From Hoopla.
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All Who Go Do Not Return : A Memoir
by Shulem Deen
A former Skverer Hasid and the founding editor of Unpious openly documents his harrowing loss of faith, which forced him into a life of deception, while providing a thought-provoking look at one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S.
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Unorthodox : the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots
by Deborah Feldman
"Now a Netflix original series!
Unorthodox is the bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman's escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Carolyn Jessop's Escape, featuring a new epilogue by the author. As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah's desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, regardless of the obstacles, she would have to forge a path—for herself and her son—to happiness and freedom.
Remarkable and fascinating, this "sensitive and memorable coming-of-age story" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) is one you won't be able to put down. " From Sunflower.
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When they come for us, we'll be gone : the epic struggle to save Soviet Jewry
by Gal Beckerman
"At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the Soviet Union. They lived a paradox-unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue. Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist "hooligans," and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. He also makes a convincing case that the movement put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. In cinematic detail, the book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats. This multi-generational saga, filled with suspense and packed with revelations, provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history." From Hoopla.
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Shul Going : 2500 Years of Impressions and Reflections on Visits to the Synagogue
by Charles Heller
"Covering 2500 years, here are the impressions of synagogue worshipers and visitors, Jews and non-Jews, told in their own words, from Jeremiah to George Washington, Liszt, and Yossele Rosenblatt, from the slums of Rio to the shtetls of Ukraine to the temple in Jerusalem. Here is the Jewish experience-tragic, comic, and inspiring by turns." From Hoopla.
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