Six New Things – Week of February 23, 2026

Tragedies and traumas continue even as some can refocus on repair and healing. And others are striving to address the multicrises as chaos and destruction threaten our very existence. Yet we also need rest and renewal.

ONE

As we wearily and warily watch  ICE’s Plan to End Surge, the effects of the ‘drawdown’ and our responses will be as varied as our diverse contexts.

AND…

Many of us are experiencing renewed overwhelm as our focus shifts to the multicrises – designed to overwhelm us.

This string of articles offer some guideposts for discernment and attention:

• I don’t know how to do this… (Emily Atkin)
• Actually, I do know how to do this… (Emily Atkin)
• Lessons from Minnesota (Emily Atkin)

To help us reorient and refocus:

• Katharine Hayhoe helps us discern, When AI Hurts the Climate – and When It Helps (Talking Climate).
• The Eagan City Council leads with the ‘First-of-Its-Kind Moratorium on Building Any New, Large Data Centers’ – a learning opportunity for all other city councils!
• In the face of The GOP [Going] Scorched Earth in the Boundary Waters Battle, Pres. Teddy Roosevelt’s four direct descendant urge the US legislature to ‘vote against a measure that opens up the BWCAW to [a] Chilean mining giant’

All of this highlights why Who We Are Becoming Matters: The Courage, Wisdom, and Aloha We Need in a Timepiece of Collapse (North Atlantic)

TWO

Sustainable engagement is of the utmost importance.

A Year of Nothing (Whitefox Limited) offers, ‘a gentle, hopeful guide to what happens when you stop trying to fix everyone and choose to feel instead.’

Leader support is available.

• Leaders are encouraged to Lean on LeaderWise (and The Ministry Lab!) who remind us: Rest is also Resistance.
  • LeaderWise offers a 15-minute online weekly contemplative centering
  • and an hour-long online Group Spiritual Direction.
  • The Ministry Lab offers Midweek Retreat, an online weekly half-hour breath/somatic/contemplative practice.
• Shalem Institute ‘Is on Social’: find ‘like-hearted community’ on line at:
  • facebook
  • instagram
  • YouTube
• Rev. Cameron Trimble’s Standing in Moving Water (02.23.26) urges us to develop resilience – which is not the same thing as ‘toughness’.

THREE

Convergence underscores the essential role of community with:

• Why Spiritual Community Can Change the World (02.24.26)
  • ‘our world is not as it should be’
  • ‘it will take community’ to ‘make a better world’
• The Cost of Belonging (02.16.26)
  • ‘we will grieve’
  • will we be hardened or transformed?
• Living in a Laboring World (02.17.26)
  • ‘the new world begins as behavior before it becomes structure’
• The Month That Teaches the Heart to Notice (02.19.26)
  • Ramadan teaches a paradox: we become more human not by consuming constantly, but by pausing long enough to recognize one another.
  • How can Christian’s Lenten journey be informed by the spiritual growth of Muslim’s observance of Ramadan?

Spiritual Care First Aid: An All-Hands Approach for Church and Community (Augsburg Fortress) ‘is an ideal training resource for… skill-building or pastoral care and counseling for non-clinicians… laypeople in spiritual care, [and]… pastors who desire to develop robust, practical care skills’.

FOUR

The church keeps showing up. We continue with encouragement and bravery:

• Rebecca Solnit shared, Welcoming the Stranger and Fighting the Power: A Roundup – encouraging stories ‘that there is resistance against this would-be authoritarian regime and its attacks on, well, almost everything’.
• Rep. James Talerico’s interview with Stephen Colbert, ‘On Confronting Christian Nationalism, and Strange Days in the Texas Legislature‘ calls for the separation of church and state so that church’s can do their good work of repair and healing.
• Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith (HarperOne) is a collection of Rachel Held Evans’ that lets readers ‘borrow her bravery’.

FIVE

Why We Suffer and How We Heal: Using Narrative, Ritual and Purpose to Flourish Through Life’s Challenges (Harmony) asserts that rituals – private and communal – ‘create the bridge from insight to change’ offering ‘three tools [that] can help you not only weather the winters of life but thrive through them’.

The Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area’s Support Our Response and Recovery, offers links for mutual aid, financial, and ministry/worship support.

The Minnesota Conference UCC offers:

• Emergency Grants of up to $1000 to relieve ‘immediate material needs’
• Clergy and Leader Self-Care Salons – around the Twin Cities (and soon greater Minnesota)
• Leader spiritual care support (info going directly to authorized ministers)
•  Spiritual Retreats Funding and Housing (coming soon)
• and Rev. Dr. Jia Starr Brown’s Antiracism Preaching Series for Rural Churches

SIX

And we cannot neglect our young ones:

• Hello, Cruel World! Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) offers a ‘hopeful guide on how to raise children who will not just survive, but thrive in this challenging, terrifying world – and who could ultimately help save it’.
• Your Kids Belong Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children (Johns Hopkins University) is ‘a compassionate and comprehensive guide to parenting neurodivergent children’.
• Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth (Philomel), ‘gifts children and parents everywhere with a gently sweet and humorous missive about our world and those who call it home’.

SEVEN

Here’s a little prayer, from poet Danez Smith:

 

let ruin end here

 

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

 

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

 

let this be the healing

& if not     let it be

~~

Find more good tidbits at The All We Can Save Project.