Download or read book Anchored in the Current written by Gregory C. Ellison II and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Thurman was famously known as one of the towering giants of American religion in the twentieth century. His writings have influenced some of the most important religious and political figures of the last century, from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. Theologians such as James Cone and Cornel West regularly signal their indebtedness to him. He was a mystic, a preacher, an educator, a theologian, and much more. It is impossible to understand the African American church today without an appreciation for his contributions. And yet, while Thurman's name is often recognized, his seminal ideas have not received the attention they deserve. In this volume, internationally known leaders like Marian Wright Edelman, Parker Palmer, and Barbara Brown Taylor invite the reader into creative engagement with Thurman's writings. Anchored in the Current illuminates how Thurman’s life and wisdom lead these influential names on the ancient quest to connect with the Ultimate, all while discovering the contemporary need to seek racial justice and sharpening the minds and faith of those who come after us. Readers will find important and enduring answers in the works of this indispensable prophet and teacher.
Download or read book Anchored in the Current Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator Activist Guide and Prophet written by Gregory C. Ellison II and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, internationally known leaders like Marian Wright Edelman, Parker Palmer, and Barbara Brown Taylor invite the reader into creative engagement with Thurman's writings.
Download or read book The Seeker and the Monk written by Scott Sophfronia and published by Broadleaf Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun? Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today. In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it? By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within--and even to love--this despairing and radiant world.
Download or read book Biographical Dictionary of African Americans Revised Edition written by Rachel Kranz and published by Infobase Holdings, Inc. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, African Americans have made important contributions to American culture. From Crispus Attucks, whose death marked the start of the Revolutionary War, to Oprah Winfrey, perhaps the most recognizable and influential TV personality today, black men and women have played an integral part in American history. This greatly expanded and updated edition of our best-selling volume, The Biographical Dictionary of Black Americans, Revised Edition profiles more than 250 of America's important, influential, and fascinating black figures, past and present—in all fields, including the arts, entertainment, politics, science, sports, the military, literature, education, the media, religion, and many more.
Download or read book Jesus and the Disinherited written by Howard Thurman and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “No other publication in the twentieth century has upended antiquated theological notions, truncated political ideas, and socially constructed racial fallacies like Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman’s work keeps showing up on the desk of anti-apartheid activists, South American human rights workers, civil rights champions, and now Black Lives Matter advocates.” –Rev. Otis Moss III, author of Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World and senior pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ A commemorative edition of the work that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and helped shape the civil rights movement In this beautiful gift edition of the classic theological treatise, complete with a place-marker ribbon and silver gilded edges, celebrated theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1899–1981) revolutionizes the way we read the gospel. Thurman lifts Jesus up as a partner in the pain of the oppressed and reveals the gospel as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. In this view, the example of Jesus’s life shows us that hatred does not empower—it decays. Only by recognizing fear, deception, contempt, and love of one another can God’s justice prevail. With a new foreword by acclaimed womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, this edition of Jesus and the Disinherited is a timeless testimony of faith that demonstrates how to thrive and flourish in a world that attempts to destroy one’s humanity from the inside out. Having witnessed firsthand the depths of white supremacy and the heights of human civility, Thurman reiterates the inherent dignity of all of God’s children.
Download or read book What Makes You Come Alive written by Lerita Coleman Brown and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Thurman served as the spiritual godfather of the civil rights movement. What wisdom might he offer us today? Lerita Coleman Brown beckons everyday seekers and activists into a mentorship with Thurman and his mystical and liberating spirituality. Thurman's work enlivened an entire movement, and it may inspire us to authentic action today.
Download or read book Liberation and the Cosmos written by Barbara A. Holmes and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These imagined dialogues between the elders on freedom, liberation, and more offer rich reflection and a unique vantage point for understanding the luminaries of liberation through the generations. An important resource for the contemporary task of Black liberation.
Download or read book A Darkly Radiant Vision written by Gary Dorrien and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third and final volume in the first comprehensive history of Black social Christianity, by the “greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century” (Michael Eric Dyson) The Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed and ongoing importance in American life, argues Gary Dorrien in his groundbreaking trilogy on the history of Black social Christianity. This concluding volume, an interpretation of the tradition since the early 1970s, follows Dorrien’s award-winning The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. Beginning in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorrien examines the past fifty years of this intellectual and activist tradition, interpreting its politics, theology, ethics, social criticism, and social justice organizing. He argues that Black social Christianity is today an intersectional tradition of discourse and activist religion that interrelates liberation theology, womanist theology, antiracist politics, LGBTQ+ theory, cultural criticism, progressive religion, broad-based interfaith organizing, and global solidarity politics. A Darkly Radiant Vision features in-depth discussions of Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Gayraud Wilmore, James Cone, Cornel West, Katie Geneva Cannon, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Traci Blackmon, William J. Barber II, Raphael G. Warnock, and many others.
Download or read book Hope Is Here written by Luther E. Smith Jr. and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joyful and daunting opportunities to live into God’s dream of justice and beloved community are compelling and available. Hope, says Luther Smith Jr., is essential to the needed personal and social transformations that prepare us for such sacred opportunities. Yet genuine hope is often confused as merely wish fulfillment, optimism, or perceiving better tomorrows. In Hope Is Here! Smith describes how we truly perceive and join “the work of hope,” enlivening us to a life that is oriented toward immediate and future experiences of personal fulfillment, justice, and beloved community. Interpreting five spiritual practices for individuals and congregations to experience the power of hope, this book prepares us to engage racism, mass incarceration, environmental crises, divisive politics, and indifference that imperil justice and beloved community. It delivers the inner resources necessary to work for change through its interpretation of hope. Additionally, each chapter ends with questions that prompt readers to examine their experiences and their readiness to journey with hope. Written for Christians who want to commit themselves to justice and beloved community, this book will provide helpful guidance for a life sustained by God’s gifts of hope and love. Hope is here for our “responsibility” and “response-ability” to live the fulfilling life that God dreams for us.
Download or read book Cut Dead But Still Alive written by Dr. Gregory C. Ellison II and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To cut dead means to refuse to acknowledge another with the intent to punish. Gregory Ellison says that this is the plight of African American young men. They are stigmatized with limited opportunity for education and disproportionate incarceration. At the same time, they are often resistant to help from social institutions including the church. They are mute and invisible to society but also in their inward being. Their voice and physical selves are not acknowledged, leaving them ripe for hopelessness and volatility. So if the need is so great yet the desire for help wanes, where is the remedy? Healing can begin by reframing the problem. While to cut dead is destructive, it also refers to pruning and repotting a disfigured plant—giving it new possibilities for life. In this provocative book, Ellison shows how caregivers can sow seeds of life, and nurture with guidance, admonition, training, and support in order to help create a community of reliable others, serving as an extended family.
Download or read book Living the Questions of the Bible written by Luke A. Powery and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living the Questions of the Bible presents questioning as a viable and faithful Christian practice. We may think the Bible is only about getting answers, but the Bible is also a question book, revealing how the life of faith is a quest with and for God. By exploring various passages in the Bible, this book attempts to invite readers into an interrogative spirituality, one in which we learn that even God questions. Faith seeks and keeps on seeking. It may reach understanding, or it may not. Either way, our questions are a way to live the Christian life honestly, faithfully, and doxologically.
Download or read book From Despair into Healing written by Pauline E. Doty and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pauline Doty presents her story and faith, sharing hope and the power of transforming love. This kind of faith leads to transformed lives and transformed communities. Doty shares questions and answers that have been a part of her journey with faith, mental illness, #metoo grief, and losses. This book will renew your personal faith in a loving God, and grow your loving relationships with yourself and others. Doty connects with an audience that includes all believers and all who live with doubts and questions. All seekers for peace, hope, and truth in our divided America will find stimulating and helpful dialogue with the hard questions. She lends confidence that God (by many names and revelations) goes with and before us, all ways and always.
Download or read book On the Brink of Everything written by Parker J. Palmer and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This impassioned book invites readers to the deep end of life where authentic soul work and human transformation become pressing concerns.” —Publishers Weekly 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medalist in the Aging/Death & Dying Category From bestselling author Parker J. Palmer comes a brave and beautiful book for all who want to age reflectively, seeking new insights and life-giving ways to engage in the world. “Age itself,” he says, “is no excuse to wade in the shallows. It’s a reason to dive deep and take creative risks.” Looking back on eight decades of life—and on his work as a writer, teacher, and activist—Palmer explores what he’s learning about self and world, inviting readers to explore their own experience. In prose and poetry—and three downloadable songs written for the book by the gifted Carrie Newcomer—he meditates on the meanings of life, past, present, and future. With compassion and chutzpah, gravitas and levity, Palmer writes about cultivating a vital inner and outer life, finding meaning in suffering and joy, and forming friendships across the generations that bring new life to young and old alike. “This book is a companion for not merely surviving a fractured world, but embodying—like Parker—the fiercely honest and gracious wholeness that is ours to claim at every stage of life.” —Krista Tippett, New York Times-bestselling author of Becoming Wise “A wondrously rich mix of reality and possibility, comfort and story, helpful counsel and poetry, in the voice of a friend . . . This is a book of immense gratitude, consolation, and praise.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, National Book Award finalist
Download or read book Healing the Heart of Democracy written by Parker J. Palmer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hope for American democracy in an era of deep divisions In Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker J. Palmer quickens our instinct to seek the common good and gives us the tools to do it. This timely, courageous and practical work—intensely personal as well as political—is not about them, "those people" in Washington D.C., or in our state capitals, on whom we blame our political problems. It's about us, "We the People," and what we can do in everyday settings like families, neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations and workplaces to resist divide-and-conquer politics and restore a government "of the people, by the people, for the people." In the same compelling, inspiring prose that has made him a bestselling author, Palmer explores five "habits of the heart" that can help us restore democracy's foundations as we nurture them in ourselves and each other: An understanding that we are all in this together An appreciation of the value of "otherness" An ability to hold tension in life-giving ways A sense of personal voice and agency A capacity to create community Healing the Heart of Democracy is an eloquent and empowering call for "We the People" to reclaim our democracy. The online journal Democracy & Education called it "one of the most important books of the early 21st Century." And Publishers Weekly, in a Starred Review, said "This beautifully written book deserves a wide audience that will benefit from discussing it."
Download or read book Meditations of the Heart written by Howard Thurman and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “As poet, prophet, and priest, Thurman builds upon a powerful legacy of ancestral hope: belief in a liberating God who can always be found ‘in and among the struggling.’” —Yolanda Pierce A universal beacon of hope and endurance for people of all faiths seeking to meet the challenges, uncertainties, and joys of life Howard Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart is a beautiful collection of over 150 prayers, poems, and meditations on prayer, community, and the joys and rituals of life by one of our greatest spiritual leaders. Thurman, a spiritualist and mystic, was renowned for the quiet beauty of his reflections on humanity and our relationship with God. In a new foreword, Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University’s School of Divinity, calls attention to the justice-centered theological framework of Thurman’s words. Pierce notes how Thurman brings to light an image of God who can always be found “in and among the struggling,” both in times of weariness and in strength. First written for and shared with his congregation of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, California, these meditations sustain, elevate, and inspire. They are a universal beacon of hope and endurance for people of all faiths seeking to meet the challenges, uncertainties, and joys of everyday life with a renewed and liberating faith.
Download or read book The Politics of the Brokenhearted written by Parker J. Palmer and published by Jossey-Bass. This book was released on 2005 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of the Brokenhearted "I write at a heartbreaking moment in American history. This 'one nation, indivisible' is deeply divided along political, economic, racial, and religious lines. And, despite our historic dream of being 'a light unto the nations,' the gaps between us and our global neighbors continue to grow more deadly. The conflicts and contradictions of twenty-first-century life are breaking the American heart and threatening to compromise our democratic values. We think of heartbreak as a personal, not a political, condition. But I believe that heartbreak offers a powerful lens through which to examine the well-being of the body politic. I want to use that lens to examine the way we hold tensions in politics as well as private life—a critical connection in a democracy that rises or falls on our individual and collective capacity to respond to conflict in a life-giving, not death-dealing,way. The image of a broken heart may seem too sentimental for politics, yet diagnosing, addressing, and sometimes manipulating heartbreak has long been implicit in realpolitik. The 'values vote' that helped swing the 2004 presidential election seemed to take the media by surprise. But politicians have long understood that advocacy related to the issues that break people's hearts—such as abortion, marriage and the family, patriotism, religion in public life, and fear of many sorts, not least of terrorism—always elicits votes. Indeed, railing against the sources of heartbreak, real or imaginary, keeps winning elections even when the rhetoric consistently outstrips legislative results. The word heartbreak may be infrequent in the literature of political science, but the human reality it points to is an engine of political life." —Parker J. Palmer, from The Politics of the Brokenhearted: On Holding the Tensions of Democracy The Fetzer Institute's project on Deepening the American Dream began in 1999 to explore the relationship between the inner life of spirit and the outer life of service. Through commissioned essays and in dialogue with such writers as Huston Smith, Jacob Needleman, Gerald May, Cynthia Bourgeault, Kathleen Norris, Robert Inchausti, Carolyn Brown, Elaine Pagels, Parker Palmer, and others, the project is beginning to sow the seeds of a national conversation. With the publication of these essays, the thinking and writing coming from these gatherings is being offered in a series of publications sponsored by Fetzer Institute in partnership with Jossey-Bass. The essays and individual volumes and anthologies to be published will explore and describe the many ways, as individuals and communities and nations, that we can illuminate and inhabit the essential qualities of the global citizen who seeks to live with the authenticity and grace demanded by our times.
Download or read book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander written by Thomas Merton and published by Image. This book was released on 2009-11-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series of notes, opinions, experiences, and reflections, Thomas Merton examines some of the most urgent questions of our age. With his characteristic forcefulness and candor, he brings the reader face-to-face with such provocative and controversial issues as the “death of God,” politics, modern life and values, and racial strife–issues that are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is Merton at his best–detached but not unpassionate, humorous yet sensitive, at all times alive and searching, with a gift for language which has made him one of the most widely read and influential spiritual writers of our time.
