Six New Things – Week of September 29, 2025
This National Day of Remembrance, remember, repent, repair, and reimagine relationships.
ONE
September 30 is the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools, a day to ‘remember Indigenous children who were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools (known as “Indian boarding schools”) across the United States and Canada’. In August, the ELCA passed a churchwide commitment to observe this as ‘a day of remembrance, mourning, [repentance], and raising awareness‘ (Living Lutheran). Please learn more, wear your orange shirt, and grow awareness in your community through resources found at the ELCA’s Indian Boarding Schools page or your own denomination’s resource page.
See also Sarah Bessey’s Field Notes post (Substack), 10 Spiritual Books from Indigenous Leaders in Honour of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (Canada’s name for the same observance, on the same day).
Wearing a Broken Indigene Heart on the Sleeve of Christian Mission (Canadian Mennonite University/CMU Press) was on Bessey’s list. It offers, ‘Indigenous intercultural theology’ as it asks, ‘If Indigenous hearts are broken by Christianity, what is it in Christian theology that is life giving at all?’
The list and book are in our Anti-Racism – Adults: Hearing/Reading Diverse Voices lib guide.
TWO
It is past time for white, colonizer, settler peoples (of which I am one) to know and claim our own history – and develop the courage and humility to repent.
I’m Sorry You Got Mad (Dial), ‘is a journey in learning the importance of an apology that goes deeper than just words’.
Something we can learn at any age.
Find more in our Faith, Love, Compassion, Forgiveness, and Mindfulness lib guides.
THREE
Repentance requires humility and awareness. Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism (Princeton University Press), follows, ‘the bright red thread of misogyny’ connecting numerous global acts, ‘almost always carried out by men or boys’, to reveal, ‘a patriarchal backlash… driving an exponential rise in mass and far-right violence’; and offers ‘essential strategies’ we can use ‘to fight the rising tide of violence, beginning with recognizing the misogyny that pervades our everyday lives’.
Find more in our Social Justice Engagement: Confronting Misogyny and Toxic Masculinity lib guides.
FOUR
Unrepentant infliction of pain and suffering takes many forms.
- There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown), ‘illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right’;
- The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency (Broadleaf), ‘offers essential insights and potential solutions to these pressing challenges’.
Ready to repair some of the harm of the housing and debt crises? The theme of Align MN’s Fall Guide is, ‘working while experiencing homelessness’; it includes ‘information to prepare for voting in elections this fall, goods drives, volunteer opportunities, and more’.
Find more in our Social Justice Engagement: Poverty, Hunger, & Unhoused and Education lib guides.
FIVE
Colonizer/settler ideology is increasingly recognized as a root of climate change and the economies and ideologies that perpetuate it. [See this excellent 2019 Sunrise Movement video, narrated by AOC.]
It’s time to Make Way for Monarchs: EcoWarriors Book 3 (Climate Kid Adventure Books), in which tween twin sisters combat their own disagreements about best practices and urgency, while fending off deforestation and saving the monarch’s migration route ‘before it’s too late’.
In ‘The World Leans in, the US Checks Out, and How to SHIFT into Action‘,Katharine Hayhoe shares a recap of NYC’s Climate Week (and the UN Summit) and a great jump start to an interactive, intergenerational creation care event.
Find more – including the whole EcoWarriors Series – in our EcoAnxiety Toolkit: Intersectional Justice as Antidote and …and Youth and our Tweens & Teens: Justice and FF: Creation Care lib guides.
SIX
For a fictional take on the traumas of extractive economies, Tuck Everlasting (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is now available as a graphic novel. With ‘gorgeous watercolor artwork’, this rendition could open discussions on eternal life, family and belonging, and yes, displacement and colonizer extractive economies.
Find other Graphic Novels in our Tweens & Teens lib guide.
