Six New Things – Week of April 17, 2023
With Easter in our sails and Earth Day around the corner, emerging theologies lead us to create alternative communities built on love, confession, and intentionality – all of which lead to New Life for the planet and each other.
ONE
“There was once a man who loved big enough to change the world… Everywhere he went, people would ask him, “What’s the best way to live?” This man, whose name was Jesus, would answer:
Love.
Love God.
Love yourself.
Love everyone else.”
Thus begins the nonviolent interpretation of Easter, This Is the Mystery of Easter (Amelia Richardson Dress and Lilly J. Moore; 2020). It’s available as a free download and includes instructions on how to share it as a children’s sermon.
The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (SacraSage) shares another love-based alternative theology – arguing that God acts not from a place of being all-powerful, but all-loving.
Find additional Atonement Theory disputations and Emerging Theologies in our lib guides.
TWO
Shifts in theological perspectives prepare us for shifts in leadership: Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice (Broadleaf) highlights the work of diverse female-bodied leaders whose work, ‘lights the way for conversation and collective action in our homes and in the world.’
Heather McTeer Toney argues it’s time the environmental movement ‘shift direction and leadership toward those most affected and most affecting change: Black communities’, in Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions (Broadleaf).
Prepare communities – and leaders themselves – to embrace emerging leadership styles with resources from our Adaptive Leadership lib guide.
THREE
Young people will bear the brunt of climate change their whole lives; many struggle with this reality. Gain insight into providing the, ecologically informed pastoral care with In Deep Waters: Spiritual Care for Young People in a Climate Crisis (all Fortress).
FOUR
Develop your own hope and resilience as you strengthen personal tools for transformational leadership with Leading Faithful Innovation: Following God into a Hopeful Future; deepen your reservoir with Holy Friendships: Nurturing Relationships That Sustain Pastors and Leaders; and develop personal and communal resilience with Remorse: Finding Joy through Honest Apology (all Fortress).
FIVE
Communal resilience springs from deeply experienced and graciously expressed love for self, community, and purpose.
Joe Davis’s Remind Me Again: Poems and Practices for Remembering Who We Are (Augsburg Fortress) will soon be accompanied by a discussion guide from Rev. Dr. Jia Starr Brown.
Stories, positive psychology, and self-development exercises engender Purposeful Empathy: Tapping Our Hidden Superpower for Personal, Organizational, and Social Change (Broadleaf).
Hope Restored: Biblical Imagination against Empire (a collection from Walter Brueggemann; WJK) explores ‘gritty, wide-awake hope’ that, ‘[reaches forward] to bring into reality a social order that benefits and cares for all’.
And Stuck Together: The Hope of Christian Witness in a Polarized World (Herald), inspires us ‘to open hearts and minds to persons with whom we disagree as we gain confidence in our own convictions.’
SIX
Love for others begins with loving the self: Anastasia E. B. Kidd founded the Fat Church digital platform to help people of faith disrupt anti-fat bias in their own lives and church communities. Learn more @FatChurch, fatchurch.org, and in Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation (Pilgrim).
Find additional positive Body Image resources in our lib guide.
