Six New Things – Week of 08.18.25

It’s ‘Overwhelm Season’ as climate change and political distresses increase and ‘regular’ life somehow keeps rolling on. Here are offerings of friendship- and resilience-building, hope, love and faith to encourage and sustain through these extra-ordinary days.

ONE

In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty (North Atlantic), offers ’17 soulful essays to help us move together through the anxieties, difficulties, and sacred transitions of 21st-century life’.

Break it down for everyone with, I Got You (Penguin Random), ‘a touching and joyful celebration of siblinghood’ that celebrates the close bonds of two brothers as they develop healthy boundaries and emotional awareness that address needs for personal space and time with age-group friends.

Find more in our Adaptive Leadership and Healthy Boundaries lib guides.

TWO

Back-to-school is overwhelming for a lot of kids, parents, teachers, and school staff. You Can Sit with Me (Feiwel & Friends), ‘shows the power of one simple offer to not only make one person’s day better but lead our whole world toward inclusion and love’.

Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – ‘the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades’ – is an adult version, ‘revealing how profoundly [Baldwin’s] personal relationships shaped his life and work’. Gracious learning for us all.

Find more in our Back-to-School Sunday and Mystics & Saints lib guides.

THREE

Also new in our Mystics & Saints guide is Woods & Words: The Story of Poet Mary Oliver (Beach Lane), an ‘inspiring and enriching picture book biography that, ‘[shines] a light on Mary’s belief that there are treasures and poems all around us in nature waiting to be discovered’.

Oliver’s gift of inspiring awe and wonder deepens and strengthens our imagination. If I Could Choose a Best Day: Poems of Possibility (Candlewick), features 31 poems from 31 diverse poets, all beginning with the word, ‘if’, reminding us that ‘if is where your imagination begins, where the impossible becomes possible, if only you imagine. And if you do, just think of how much better our world could be.’

Find more in our Spiritual Practices: Awe, Wonder, & Curiosity and Meditations & Poetry lib guides and our EcoAnxiety Toolkit.

FOUR

The Save America Movement invites leaders and congregations – and people of all ages and religions and backgrounds – to imagine a different future, to wonder what a ‘best day’ might look like for the most vulnerable among us and for our nation as a whole. Their short-form video series is powerful and compelling. Share it in worship, study, or visioning gatherings.

Invite the broader community to dialogue and wonder together.

Bishop William J. Barber III writes, ‘Our country is facing a moral crisis. We are living in dark times. And in times like these, we don’t just need strategy to find a way back into the light. We need a moral center that can guide us there.

We wanted to make a declaration that even in the midst of darkness, cruelty, and silence, there is still beauty. There is still grace. There is still the capacity to stand, to organize, and to fight back with nonviolence, truth, and love in action.

We stand at a moment of moral crisis in our great country. When masked agents snatch folks off our streets in the name of the state, when they snatch them in their homes, at their jobs, or at their places of worship—it’s incumbent upon us, The People, to stand up and say, “This is wrong.”’

The first two videos, Amazing Grace and Keep on Walking are now available.

Find further encouragement in our related Moral Mondays Great Idea.

FIVE

I don’t normally include movies and/or novels, but, with the current surge in book bans and website wiping and history and culture deletions, works that explore the essential nature of history as memory and ask questions about who curates and has access to our collective histories feel essential. Like the hit horror film Sinners, The Memory Hunters (Erewhon) – ‘a sapphic, dark academia-adjacent, climate dystopia – with mushrooms’ – also explores colonization, extractive economy, appropriation, and capitulation to Empire.

A little light reading to close out the summer…

Find more in our Tweens & Teens: Leadership lib guide.

SIX

And because I know our small and rural congregations are doing amazing work that often goes unheralded or invisible, I was thrilled to learn of The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation (Fortress), which, ‘can help clergy and lay leaders recover from discouragement and disillusionment regarding the often-disregarded work done in small-membership churches, …see their congregations’ vital impact with clearer and fresher eyes, …[and] facilitate a renewed commitment to the work of small-membership churches.’

If your small membership congregation is looking for an engaging, effective Affirmation of Baptism program, consider Living Faith Online Confirmation Classes (Damascus Project), with two cohorts for seventh- and eighth-graders and a curriculum created by instructor Rev. Uriah Williams (with guidance from new MN Conference UCC Conference Ministry, the Rev. Dr. Tanya Sadagopan) and the always wonderful, Sana Del Corazon serving as teaching intern, this will be a fantastic year for your confirmands.

Find more in our Reimagining Church: Reclaiming Rural/Small and Faith Formation: Affirmation of Baptism/Confirmation lib guides.