Six New Things – Week of July 07, 2025

The path into self-awareness opens us to process powerful emotions, heal from trauma, learn from others, develop our True Selves, and enact change that empowers thriving – through vulnerability.

ONE

Start Littles on ‘a journey through a full range of emotions’ with Harper Handles Big Feelings: Lessons for Littles on Anger, Worry, Frustration, and Other Emotions (Penguin); its ‘simple calming rhyme’ helps Littles ‘manage their big feelings’.

For a deeper dive with slightly older kids (or any age group), check out The Smart Cookie (HarperCollins; see also its accompanying series), which touches on, ‘social anxiety, self-doubt, and the importance of community support’.

Find more along these lines in our Mindfulness and Pastoral Care: Children & Families – General lib guides.

TWO

Parents are invited to ‘break the cycle, enjoy the journey, and create healthy, joyful, dynamic, lasting relationships with [their] children’ with Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be (Broadleaf).

Parents could do far worse than to model themselves after Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf), which asserts that, ‘Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children’, then wonders: ‘as the very ground shifts beneath our feet, what if we apprenticed ourselves to the creaturely mothers with whom we share this beloved home?’

Find more in our Parenting and Celtic & Creation-Oriented Spiritual Practices lib guides.

THREE

Let the Children Lead: Models for Worship with All Generations (Abingdon), ‘offers theological perspectives on the importance of worship in children’s faith formation’ along with models of ‘pray-grounds, sensory sensitive worship practices, outreach-oriented experiences, school partnerships in the arts, and leadership in band-led worship settings’ as ‘practical help… to support and serve children not as a means for church growth but as an act of faithfulness’.

Congregational models of flourishing may feel few and far between – and are experienced in myriad ways – making Thriving Church: What You Can Learn from Healthy Congregations (Chalice) a treasure-trove of ‘scripture references and discussion questions designed for staff, boards, elders, classes and leaders’.

Find more in our Vision Worship: Intergenerational lib guides.

FOUR

Empower congregational and family models outside of binary and ‘traditional’ norms with Drag Queen Preacher (Pilgrim), ‘a memoir-in-poetry about culture, family, queerness, resistance, and faith’.

Find more in our Identity & Diversity and Prophetic Witness lib guides.

 

 

 

 

FIVE

Teens & Tweens need role models, good friends, and stories centering diverse characters and experiences as they grow into their True Selves. I Wanna Be Your Girl; Vol. 1 (Penguin) introduces a manga series that ‘thoughtfully explores… the complications of first loves, friendship, and what it truly means to be an ally’.

Find more in our Tweens & Teens: Gender/Sexuality/Sex

SIX

In an era when self-awareness is demonized as weakness, Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World (Penguin), provides ‘an inspiring manifesto… that explores [a] surprising source of power and strength – vulnerability – and how we can all harness it to effect meaningful change’.

Find more in our Adaptive Leadership lib guide.