Six New Things – Week of March 31, 2025

It’s hard to know where to focus. This week, as the EPA gets ripped apart, long-standing protections get rolled back, and vast swaths of shared wild spaces teeter on privatization, we take a wide-lens look at nature and related arenas of justice. God’s Good Earth is being destroyed. As Easter approaches, how do we live so that all creation might celebrate New Life?

ONE

Perfect for Easter, Earth Day, or any time, If God Were a Great Big Bear (Beaming), affirms that, ‘Creator God made a perfectly balanced and interconnected world’ to ‘please not just us humans but every plant and animal, every planet and star in all creation’.

While Littles explore Creator God, adults might wonder about Embodied Christ with Elaine Pagel’s latest, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Penguin), which, ‘sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world’.

Find other Easter resources and more for Exploring God and honoring Earth Day in our lib guides.

TWO

And watch for our Chrysalis: Courageous Imagination, Sacred Transformation – An Easter Season Toolkit, which pairs Building a Moral Economy with The Hunger Games and weekly themed children’s books to foster intergenerational discussion, spiritual practices, and creation care engagement (largely from Zero Waste Kids). I’ll ‘unveil’ it  – and open access – at the EcoFaith Summit of the Upper Midwest on April 5. I hope to see a few of you there!

PLUS: I’m hosting a weekly book discussion on Building a Moral Economy and The Hunger Games to support leaders in facilitating the Toolkit in local congregations. Learn more about the discussion group here.

Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism (Haymarket), offers another perspective on ‘world history, global justice, and the climate crisis’.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Trimble – who has three mentions in this week’s post – is always a voice of theological grounding and prophetic witness. In Whitewashing History (Piloting Faith), she urges us to ‘refuse the bait of false binaries; …refuse to pit ‘unity’ against justice, ‘order’ against honesty, ‘sanity’ against truth. Our task is not to win an argument within MAGA’s logic – it is to tell a fuller story outside of it.’

THREE

If these topics continue to feel challenging, try The Nine Asks: Creating Safer and More Courageous Spaces (WJK), which, ‘lays out the practical expectations we should bring to communal engagement and explains how healing from trauma is the responsibility of communities, not simply individuals’.

We’ve added this to Books & Readings in our Courageous Spaces: Congregations that Listen, Lament, and Repair Toolkit.

For conversations that include the broader community, you might find greater support in our Graceful Conversations: Building Arcs across Divided Perspectives five-part video series with Tammy Walhof of Lutheran Advocacy – MN.

FOUR

Conversations like these are more and more essential, as evidenced by the brutal and brittle nature of our current administration and giant corporations. Rev. Dr. Cameron Trimble’s second highlighted post, When Empire Tries to Silence Us (Piloting Faith) clarifies just how essential free speech, criticism, and safe spaces for listening and learning are.

Empower Littles for resilience and openness to criticism with Echo (Dial), which follows Junior – who is never criticized into his first relationship with, ‘a disagreeable, rude girl who doesn’t think Junior is right all the time’. After time alone with only his echo, ‘who agrees with him all the time’, Junior ‘must decide if a new friend is worth admitting he was wrong.’

Yea!! for children’s books!!

FIVE

We all might better handle critique and criticism if we learned to ’embrace [Biblical] complexities with curiosity and courage’. Sacred Tension: Embracing Dissonance and Dialogue in the Old Testament (Upper Room) asserts that, ‘The Bible was not written for passive readers or lazy listeners. It was written for active engagement, deliberation, dialogue, and debate, because the Bible itself is fundamentally a conversation’.

Again, Rev. Dr. Trimble reveals why ‘curiosity and courage’ are necessary, writing, ‘Christian nationalist ideology…is fighting for the survival of a myth… [which] says there is a divine order to the world… and everything in nature – including human nature – has a fixed place… God is king, hierarchy is sacred, and deviation is dangerous.’ Living through the Cracking of a Myth (Piloting Faith) urges us to deconstruct hierarchy and binary thinking.

Find more from various perspectives in our Adult Bible Study lib guide.

SIX

One of the best ways to debunk the myth is to keep it from taking root in young hearts and minds. Foster creative curiosity, openness for exploration and wonder, and courage to fully express one’s self with:

  • the graphic novel, A Song for You and I (Penguin): ‘a pastoral fantasy exploring gender identity and what it means to be one’s true self’ in a ‘viscerally powerful romantasy epic’; and
  • Sunrise on the Reaping (A Hunger Games Novel) (Scholastic), which follows a young Haymitch Abernathy into his first games, with the question: ‘When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?’

Sounds a little too familiar, these days. Yet, we struggle on ’til Resurrection comes.

Explore Relationships & Identity further and discover our new Tweens & Teens – Fiction lib guide.