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Spirituality and Religion August 2020
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Thin Places: Essays from in Between by Jordan Kisner What it is: Pushcart Prize-winner Jordan Kisner's thoughtful and engaging essays about her roller coaster teenage relationship with Christianity, with reflections on similar trends in American society as a whole.
Topics include: the religious ripple effects of American attitudes toward race; discomfort with the body; Mormon social media influencers; hip young pastors who "could be J. Crew models;" and Kierkegaard's relationship with doubt. | |
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Backpacking with the saints : wilderness hiking as spiritual practice by Belden C. LaneCarrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskj#65533;ld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with S#65533;ren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature.
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Rewilding : meditations, practices, and skills for awakening in nature by Micah MortaliReconnect with your wild essence as you awaken your innate bond with the natural world "Rewilding is a return to our essential nature. It is an attempt to reclaim something of what we were before we used words like 'civilized' to define ourselves." --Micah Mortali In his long-awaited book Rewilding, Kripalu director Micah Mortali brings together yoga, mindfulness, wilderness training, and ancestral skills to create a unique guide for reigniting your primal energy--your undomesticated true self--and deepening your connection with the living earth. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived intimately with the earth. We were in the wild and of the wild. Today, we live mostly urban lives--and our vital wildness has gone dormant. As a result, we're more isolated, unhealthy, anxious, and depressed than ever, and our planet has suffered alongside us.With Rewilding, Mortali invites us to shed the effects of over-civilization and explore an inner wisdom that is primal, ancient, and profound. Whether you live in the middle of a city or alongside the woods, the insights and practices on these pages will bring you home to your wild, wise, and alive self.
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Anchor and Flares: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service by Kate Braestrup What it is: the popular author's candid, bittersweet memoir detailing the intersections of her Christian faith, work as a chaplain, inclusive social beliefs, and her role as a mother (and stepmother).
Reviewers say: "Sensitive and wholesomely charming" and "another appealing, tenderhearted memoir braiding faith and family" (Kirkus Reviews). | |
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Laughing at the devil : seeing the world with Julian of Norwich by Amy Laura HallIn an impassioned, analytical, playful and irreverent book, a theologian takes up Julian of Norwich's call to laugh at the Devil as a means to transform a setting of dread and fear into the means to create hope, solidarity and resistance.
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Joan of Arc: A History by Helen Castor What it's about: the life and legend of Joan of Arc, the devout peasant girl who galvanized a divided France to defeat their English occupiers and later became a Catholic saint.
What sets it apart: rather than a biography, this history of the Hundred Years' War examines the "Maid of Orléans" as a social force, from the circumstances that allowed for her ascent to the later attempts to control her legacy. | | The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem by Stacy Schiff What it's about: the road to and fallout of the notorious witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.
Read it for: the analysis of the social, political and religious forces that created the perfect circumstances for paranoia and superstition to spiral out of control.
Author alert: Guggenheim fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff has also written biographies of historical and cultural notables such as Cleopatra, Vera Nabokov, Benjamin Franklin, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. | |
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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