Six New Things – Week of March 03, 2025

We move, now, from Black History Month to Women’s History Month. Both are more important than ever to observe, because the enormous struggles for equity and justice they contain are systematically being erased and demonized. Let’s overwhelm crushing, fractious narrative with stories of empowerment and love!!

ONE

One Big Open Sky (Holiday) tackles ‘powerful themes of autonomy and Black self-emancipation, [through] an intimate look into the lives of three women and an expansive portrait of generations striving for their promised freedom’ as it follows Lettie, her mother, and a young teacher – newly free from slavery – but ‘bound by poverty, access to opportunity, and patriarchal social structures’ in their move from 1879 Mississippi to the hope of Nebraska.

Find more Perspectives & Stories for youth in our lib guide.

TWO

We live in a multiracial world. ‘Multiracial identity brings both gifts and challenges—for kids and their parents.’ What about the Children: Five Values for Multiracial Families (WJK), ‘covers both the basics and nuances of raising children with a sense of pride in their heritage and a strong, resilient sense of self’ and features ‘families of various multiracial makeups, questions for readers to reflect on, and suggestions of age-appropriate action steps’.

Find more in our Multicultural/Multiracial and Parenting lib guides.

Support (some) multiracial families and multiracial congregations with Imani Rituals: Nurturing African Spiritual Heritage (Skinner), a ‘powerful and necessary collection of rituals centering the African American experience and the African Diaspora’. It includes individual, family, and community rituals and an ‘introduction to African ritual practices and accessibility guidelines’ along with ‘mindfulness about cultural misappropriation for use in multicultural settings’.

Find more Inclusive Worship resources in our lib guide.

THREE

We celebrate racial and cultural diversity in resistance to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of our siblings in places like Ukraine and Gaza. Deepen awareness and strengthen solidarity with both regions with:

  • The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself about Russia and Betrayed Ukraine (PublicAffairs), a history of US policies and practices, that ’emboldened Russia’ by playing into Russia’s ‘imperialist, centuries-long mythos of regional hegemony’, resulting in the ‘[foreseeable] aggression and full-scale invasion’ we see today.
  • One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf) – based on the tweet from inside Gaza – (viewed more than 10 million times), is a ‘heartsick breakup letter with the West… a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States… This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up.’

Find more in our new Russia & Ukraine and long-standing Israel & Palestine and Politics & Social Structure lib guides.

FOUR

Invite conversation and relationship with A World Worth Saving (Dial), a tween/teen novel centering a Jewish trans kid whose parents force him to attend meetings designed to ‘cure’ him – and circumstances force him to decide if ‘a world that seems hellbent on rejecting him [is] even worth saving at all’.

Find more in our 2SLGBTQIA+ lib guide.

Women leaders who ‘feel constrained by outdated biases and gender divides’ will find a roadmap in Wired to Lead: Being the Leader the Church Didn’t Think You Could Be (Chalice), a guide ‘through the challenges of leading with faith in a world that often sidelines you.’

Find more in our Adaptive Leadership lib guide.

FIVE

The world and the church need every leader we can find!

Listen for Earth’s cries in When the Earth was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance (St Martin’s), which ‘brings readers back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas… underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home’.

AND

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday), a ‘groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today’.

SIX

For phenomenal leaders who don’t have Lent entirely planned, The Many offers numerous Ready-to-Download Lent Music & Liturgy resources that, ‘don’t shy away from what’s going on in the world around us, that center opportunities to honestly share sorrows and griefs, that invite genuine participation and lay the groundwork for gratitude, hope, even joy’. Thank you, The Many!

Find more last-minute helps in our Lent-Easter Liturgical Elements lib guide.