Six New Things – Week of August 19, 2024

The sky’s the limit when we find the courage to initiate and build new relationships – in our schools, our congregations, our families, our work places, and our society.

ONE

Celebrate the joy of new discoveries – at school and in friendships – with Addy’s Chair to Everywhere (Free Spirit), which ‘highlights the importance of understanding differences and fostering inclusivity’ and Anonymoose (Beaming), which invites kids to explore shyness, courage, and making new friends.

Find more in our Special Needs & Neurodiversity, Antibullying & Friendship, and Healthy Boundaries lib guides.

Come make new friends and renew old friendships at ConNext Summit 2024 – where the whole event is about encouraging new relationship! Workshops include Ministry with Neurodivergent Children & Training for Youth & Adults, Creating Gender Inclusive Ministries, Building Disabilities Ministries with Children & Families, and more!! Join us October 13-15, 2024 at Dunrovin Retreat Center for an amazing gathering of peers! Learn more and register here.

TWO

Develop stronger relationships with your Tweens & Teens with Being Thirteen: A First Look at Gen Alpha (Springtide), in which ‘young teens share their thoughts on religion, politics, and technology; their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic; their mental health and well-being; and more’.

Get specific with your awareness-building with Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity (Atria), ‘an authoritative guide to understanding and navigating gender identity from an acclaimed expert on the mental health of transgender and gender diverse youth’.

Find more on ministry with Tweens & Teens in our Affirmation of Baptism/Confirmation and Pastoral Care: LGBTQ+ lib guides.

THREE

Support stronger family ties with If the Bough Breaks…: When Faith and Politics Bend a Family Tree to its Breaking Point (Cascade), ‘an everyday shero’s quest to cling to love and fight mightily for it, even if it means letting go of relationships that appear to be broken beyond repair. But are they truly, irreparably broken? Or can love, ultimately, triumph over fear–?’

Find more relationships-in-the-midst-of-divisiveness support for individuals, families, and the whole congregation in our Courageous Spaces Toolkit. And watch for the imminent launch of our five-week video series, Graceful Conversations. It should be available by the end of this week!

FOUR

When relationships are deeply fractured, avoid a quick ‘forgiveness-fix’ with Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness (Broadleaf), ‘a whirlwind tour of the many abuses of the concept of forgiveness’, that ultimately asks, ‘Is it ever better not to forgive?’

Find more on Forgiveness in our lib guide.

FIVE

For Millennials and Gen Z’ers for whom work is an unhealthy whirlwind, Digital Overwhelm: A Mid-Career Guide to Coping at Work (Casade), ‘draws on biblical wisdom literature to offer a primer on organizational communication’ and offers chapter-summarizing workshops on Zoom room survival, writing authentic emails, navigating tech break downs, and delegating.

Find more on healthy Relationships & Identity with regard to Technology in our lib guide.

SIX

To affirm healthy work-life relationships for everyone, check out Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Global Labor, Liberation, and the Social Gospel post: a series of reflections on the RCL texts for September 1, 2024 (Labor Day Sunday), developed to ‘provide alternative lenses to scripture and to open up interpretative possibilities for how the Bible speaks to the reality of working people’.

Include Littles in Labor Day awareness with Teaching for Change’s Labor and Organizing Booklist for Children – it’s accompanied by Zinn Education Project lessons for teaching.

You might also share their Voter Rights Booklist for Children, also supported but Civil Rights Teaching and Zinn Education Project free downloadable lessons and additional resources.

Find more in our Worship: 4th, Labor, Memorial, & Veteran’s Day, our new Unions/Labor, and our Census, Elections, & Voting lib guides.