Six New Things – Week of October 7, 2024

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is next week. All Saints Day is in just over three weeks. Stewardship drives will follow fast on the heels of Election Day. Climate-change-induced extreme weather is everywhere. As daylight shortens and the drought lengthens, let’s take a look at theologically-grounded healing and well-being for self, neighbor, and all creation.

ONE

A pet’s death is excruciating. The Light in My Bunny (Beaming) is ‘a gentle look’ into pet loss that helps readers process the grief of losing someone slowly as it affirms that ‘through love and memory, the light of our loved ones never goes out’.

[See our Pastoral Care: Chronic Illness & Grief, Death, & Dying lib guides.]

As daylight, itself, wanes, many folx begin to feel a different kind of loss. Midwinter Light: Meditations for the Long Season (Broadleaf) reflects on ‘freedom, growth, quietude, and keenly felt hope’, guiding readers into a ‘simple contentment’.

[Find more in our Meditations & Poetry lib guide.]

Create more awareness and understanding about mental health – and a greater welcome for those who struggle with it – in worship with Redeeming Our Cracks: Prayers, Poems, Reflections and Stories on Mental Health and Well-Being (Wild Goose/Iona).

[Find additional resources in our Inclusive Worship lib guide.]

TWO

Indigenous Wisdom, ‘helps readers learn life ways that lead to true wholeness, well-being, justice, and harmony’, in Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being (Broadleaf).

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 14, 2024) – and every day – ‘celebrate the stories and voices of Native American and Indigenous authors’. Here’s one publisher’s list. Here’s our Indigenous Voices lib guides: for Adults, Youth, and Children.

THREE

Intrinsic to Indigenous life ways is living in intentional relationship with all creation. Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality (Fortress), ‘provides readers with both theoretical foundations for understanding a rewilded Christian spirituality for the twenty-first century and practical strategies for rewilding our own lives’ through a ‘conversation’ between, ‘biblical foundations’, ‘the history of Christian spirituality’, ‘environmental ethics, ecopsychology, and ecopoetics’.

Find more in our Emerging Theologies lib guide.

FOUR

A relationship with all creation includes our relationship with our own finances.

On Giving: Reflections & Resources for Pre-Generous Parishioners (Pilgrim) simply has the best stewardship title I’ve read in a while. Its dose of humor helps, “make ‘Money’ an easier topic in any congregation”.

Find more inspiration in our Congregational and Individual Adult Stewardship lib guides.

FIVE

Stewardship Season is a great time to consider the congregation’s Vision, Mission, and Identity: The Wages of Peace: How to Confront Economic Inequality and Love Your Neighbor Well (Herald), ‘offers practical steps to address complex socioeconomic challenges and become equipped to talk about money, work, and well-being [including] confronting where our theologies of wealth and work have come up short and naming that when we put profits over people, we pay the price in despair and violence. Jesus calls us to seek shalom in the marketplace and the neighborhood. It’s time to dismantle inequality and work for an equitable peace.’

While Building Belonging: The Church’s Call to Create Community and House Our Neighbors (WJK) attests that, ‘Churches, amid declining membership and dwindling engagement, have an opportunity to provide a key role in… changing landscapes’, as it reveals, ‘how numerous congregations across the United States are leading the charge, embracing innovative approaches to ministry that leverage their resources to become havens of both welcome and shelter’. Includes a free downloadable Congregational Guide to action.

Both can be found in our Neighborhood Revitalization and Poverty, Hunger, & Unhoused lib guides.

SIX

Christian Nationalism is playing an outsized role in fomenting fear, frustration, anger, and distrust between individuals, communities, and institutions.

Lessons from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a House Divided and a World on Fire is a collaboration between the International Bonhoeffer Society – English Language Section and Lutheran Advocacy Ministries in Pennsylvania – a particular hotspot where Christian Nationalists are distorting Bonhoeffer’s teachings to support their own world views. This free resource (though a donation is requested), ‘will deepen participant’s understanding of how Bonhoeffer’s theology helps us eschew ready answers and inspires us to ask more faithful questions as we live at the intersection of faith and civic life together’.

[Find additional supremacy-narrative-countering resources in our Christian Nationalism lib guide.]

When election and division and despair discussions become too much, restore your own spirit – and/or the whole group’s – with the simple gift of beauty and promise found in 40 Days of Prayer before the Election, a self-published collection of vivid images and powerful poetry to bolster the weary soul.

And see our Elections Approaching: What to Do? Great Idea for more ways to engage and repair.