Download or read book A More Perfect Union written by Adam Russell Taylor and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the Beloved Community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the Beloved Community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the Beloved Community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.
Download or read book Building King s Beloved Community written by Donald M. Chinula and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does oppression manifest itself in the structures and systems of society? What are the psychological and theological issues surrounding the phenomena of a tortured self-identity and diminished self-esteem? Through the study of King's life and witness, Building King's Beloved Community seeks to inspire and suggest a prophetic practice that will broaden and inform the paradigm for pastoral caregiving in responding to the needs of oppressed people in any context--especially where Christianity is practiced.
Download or read book Brothers in the Beloved Community written by Marc Andrus and published by Parallax Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “beautiful and wise account” of Martin Luther King Jr. and Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, who “gave greater life to all of us through their remarkable friendship and shared vision of nonviolence” (Joan Halifax, author of Standing at the Edge). The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a heartbroken letter to their mutual friend Raphael Gould. He said: "I did not sleep last night. . . . They killed Martin Luther King. They killed us. I am afraid the root of violence is so deep in the heart and mind and manner of this society. They killed him. They killed my hope. I do not know what to say. . . . He made so great an impression in me. This morning I have the impression that I cannot bear the loss." Only a few years earlier, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote an open letter to Martin Luther King Jr. as part of his effort to raise awareness and bring peace in Vietnam. There was an unexpected outcome of Nhat Hanh's letter to King: The two men met in 1966 and 1967 and became not only allies in the peace movement, but friends. This friendship between two prophetic figures from different religions and cultures, from countries at war with one another, reached a great depth in a short period of time. Dr. King nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He wrote: "Thich Nhat Hanh is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity." The two men bonded over a vision of the Beloved Community: a vision described recently by Congressman John Lewis as "a nation and world society at peace with itself." It was a concept each knew of because of their membership within the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace organization, and that Martin Luther King Jr. had been popularizing through his work for some time. Thich Nhat Hanh, Andrus shows, took the lineage of the Beloved Community from King and carried it on after his death.
Download or read book Seeking the Beloved Community written by Joy James and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected essays on radical social change.
Download or read book Community written by Peter Block and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of our communities are fragmented and at odds within themselves. Businesses, social services, education, and health care each live within their own worlds. The same is true of individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. What keeps this from changing is that we are trapped in an old and tired conversation about who we are. If this narrative does not shift, we will never truly create a common future and work toward it together. What Peter Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation. How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? What can individuals and formal leaders do to create a place they want to inhabit? We know what healthy communities look like—there are many success stories out there. The challenge is how to create one in our own place. Block helps us see how we can change the existing context of community from one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement to one of possibility, generosity, and gifts. Questions are more important than answers in this effort, which means leadership is not a matter of style or vision but is about getting the right people together in the right way: convening is a more critical skill than commanding. As he explores the nature of community and the dynamics of transformation, Block outlines six kinds of conversation that will create communal accountability and commitment and describes how we can design physical spaces and structures that will themselves foster a sense of belonging. In Community, Peter Block explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.
Download or read book Blue Note Preaching in a Post Soul World written by Otis Moss III and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Can preaching recover a Blues sensibility and dare speak with authority in the midst of tragedy? America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. The world is experiencing the Blues, and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses of non-prescribed prosaic sermons with severe ecclesiastical and theological side effects." â€"from chapter 1 Uniquely gifted preacher Otis Moss III helps preachers effectively communicate hope in a desperate and difficult world in this new work based on his 2014 Yale Lyman Beecher Lectures. Moss challenges preachers to preach with a "Blue Note sensibility," which speaks directly to the tragedies faced by their congregants without falling into despair. He then offers four powerful sermons that illustrate his Blue Note preaching style. In them, Moss beautifully and passionately brings to life biblical characters that speak to today's pressing issues, including race discrimination and police brutality, while maintaining a strong message of hope. Moss shows how preachers can teach their congregations to resist letting the darkness find its way into them and, instead, learn to dance in the dark.
Download or read book Spiritual Defiance written by Robin Meyers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry. Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.
Download or read book Racial Justice and Nonviolence Education written by Arthur Romano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role that community-based educators in violence-affected cities play in advancing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical nonviolent vision for racial and social justice. This work argues that nonviolence education can help communities build capacity to disrupt and transform cycles of violence by recognizing that people impacted by violence are effective educators and vital knowledge producers who develop unique insights into racial oppression and other forms of systemic harm. This book focuses on informal education that takes place beyond school walls, a type of education that too often remains invisible and undervalued in both civil society and scholarly research. It draws on thousands of hours of work with the Connecticut Center for Nonviolence (CTCN), a grassroots organization that presents an ideal case study of the implementation of King’s core principles of nonviolence in 21st-century urban communities. Stories of educators’ life-changing educational encounters, their successes and failures, and their understanding of the six principles of Kingian nonviolence animate the text. Each chapter delves into one of the six principles by introducing the reader to the lives of these educators, providing a rich analysis of how educators teach each principle, and sharing academic resources for thinking more deeply about each principle. Against the backdrop of today’s educational system, in which reductive and caricatured treatments of King are often presented within the formal classroom, CTCN’s work outside of the classroom takes a fundamentally different approach, connecting King’s thinking around nonviolence principles to working for racial justice in cities deeply impacted by violence. This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, race studies, politics and education studies, as well as to practitioners in the field.
Download or read book Building Beloved Community in a Wounded World written by Jacob L. Goodson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the beloved community local, national, global, or universal? What kind of love is required for the beloved community? Is such a community only an ideal, or can it be actualized in the here and now? Tracing the phrase beloved community from Josiah Royce through Martin Luther King Jr. to a variety of contemporary usages, Goodson, Kuehnert, and Stone debate answers to the above questions. The authors agree about the importance of beloved community but disagree on the details. These differences come out through arguments over the local vs. the universal, the type of love the beloved community calls for, and what it means to conceptualize community. Ultimately, they argue, the purpose of beloved community involves responding to the cries of the wounded and those who suffer in the wounded world.
Download or read book Building Beloved Communities written by Hildi Hendrickson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities—Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Brooklyn, NY—over a six-decade career. Following the lead of his mentor, Dr. Howard Thurman (who was also a key influence on Martin Luther King Jr.), Smith has concentrated on building thriving multicultural congregations to create the sorts of communities envisioned by King and others. In 1979, he became the first black minister of all-white Hillside Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, making him a unique leader among the 4,000 Presbyterian congregations in the United States. In 1986, he was elected the first African American pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Throughout his ministry in various churches, he has consciously moved his congregations toward being explicitly multi-cultural and multi-racial, as well as more politically active and welcoming of LGBTQ communities. Hendrickson examines his pastoral care and his increased work with corporations, colleges, and charitable foundations. Building Beloved Communities details the complicated life of a man dedicated to serving as a bridge between Christianity, community activism, public health institutions, and the business world. Based on archival research, historical analysis, and original interviews with Smith and his colleagues, Hildi Hendrickson offers a critical biography of the preacher and his work from the 1960s to the present.
Download or read book Parenting for Liberation written by Trina Greene Brown and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking directly to parents raising Black children in a world of racialized violence, this guidebook combines powerful storytelling with practical exercises, encouraging readers to imagine methods of parenting rooted in liberation rather than fear. In 2016, activist and mother Trina Greene Brown created the virtual multimedia platform Parenting for Liberation to connect, inspire, and uplift Black parents. In this book, she pairs personal anecdotes with open-ended reflective prompts; together, they help readers dismantle harmful narratives about the Black family and imagine anti-oppressive parenting methods. Parenting for Liberation fills a critical gap in currently available, timely parenting resources. Rooted in an Afrofuturistic vision of connectivity and inspiration, the community created within these pages works to image a world that amplifies Black girl magic and Black boy joy, and everything in between. "Trina Greene Brown has created a guide for Black parents who want to raise fierce, fearless, joyful children. She knows what a challenge this is given the state of the world but argues that liberated parenting is possible if we commit to knowing and trusting ourselves, our children, and our communities. Anyone curious about how to walk with a child through tumultuous times needs to read this book now." —Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood
Download or read book Welcoming Justice written by Charles Marsh and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and theologian Charles Marsh partners with veteran activist John Perkins to chronicle God's vision for a more equitable and just world. Now updated to reflect on current social realities, this book shows how abandoned places are being restored, divisions are being reconciled, and what individuals and communities are now doing to welcome peace and justice.
Download or read book The Dearly Beloved written by Cara Wall and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This gentle, gorgeously written book may be one of my favorites ever.” —Jenna Bush Hager (A Today show “Read with Jenna” Book Club Selection!) This “moving portrait of love and friendship set against a backdrop of social change” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice) traces two married couples whose lives become entangled when the husbands become copastors at a famed New York city congregation in the 1960s. Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily—fiercely intellectual, elegantly stern—after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? And yet, how can he not? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante. James’s escape from his desperate circumstances leads him to Nan and, despite his skepticism of hope in all its forms, her gentle, constant faith changes the course of his life. In The Dearly Beloved, Cara wall reminds us of “the power of the novel in its simplest, richest form: bearing intimate witness to human beings grappling with their faith and falling in love,” (Entertainment Weekly, A-) as we follow these two couples through decades of love and friendship, jealousy and understanding, forgiveness and commitment. Against the backdrop of turbulent changes facing the city and the church’s congregation, Wall offers a poignant meditation on faith and reason, marriage and children, and the ways we find meaning in our lives. The Dearly Beloved is a gorgeous, wise, and provocative novel that is destined to become a classic.
Download or read book Beloved Economies written by Jess Rimington and published by Page Two. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if changing how we work could make our economies work for us? For many of us today, work feels like a fever dream. We battle our way through overwhelm, stress, and an impossible to-do list--and remain financially strapped. All the content we consume seems to be telling us: we are the problem. If we just used the right time-blocking app, or managed our finances better, or learned to meditate, or... But what if work feels this way because it's a direct result of how our current economy is designed, going back to the very roots of our current society itself? And what if work could be profoundly different? What if we told you that there are teams, businesses, organizations, and individuals who are transforming their work to co-create life-affirming innovation and success? What if we told you those involved in these breakout cases describe their work with words like lightness, liberation, momentum, self-knowledge, calm, meaningful, community, and even joy - all while outperforming their mainstream counterparts? Based on seven years of research and co-learning with dozens of these breakout individuals, teams, and organizations, Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work offers readers an imagination-expanding vision of what work can be. The book outlines seven practices that any individual, team, or enterprise can embark on now, to transform how we work and build economies that are healing, just, and wise. Beloved Economies reveals that it is not what we do, but how we do it that can be our most powerful lever for building economies that we can all love.
Download or read book The Beloved Community written by Charles Marsh and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted theologian explains how the radical idea of Christian love animated the African American civil rights movement and how it can power today's social justice struggles Speaking to his supporters at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that their common goal was not simply the end of segregation as an institution. Rather, "the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community." King's words reflect the strong religious convictions that motivated the African American civil rights movement. As King and his allies saw it, "Jesus had founded the most revolutionary movement in human history: a movement built on the unconditional love of God for the world and the mandate to live in that love." Through a commitment to this idea of love and to the practice of nonviolence, civil rights leaders sought to transform the social and political realities of twentieth-century America. In The Beloved Community, theologian and award-winning author Charles Marsh traces the history of the spiritual vision that animated the civil rights movement and shows how it remains a vital source of moral energy today. The Beloved Community lays out an exuberant new vision for progressive Christianity and reclaims the centrality of faith in the quest for social justice and authentic community.
Download or read book Unarmed Empire written by Sean Palmer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shunned. Condemned. Controlled. Describing church, believers and nonbelievers deploy stinging terms to define an imperial, culturally privileged, and powerful American force. Church has become synonymous with shame, exclusion, and hostility. This is not the church of Jesus. American Christians are victims of a deliberate and shortsighted scheme designed to identify and defeat religious, cultural, and sexual Others. From the language of "makers and takers," to "if you're not for us, you're against us," to the continual suggestion that we are soldiers in a constant series of wars--the war on women, the war on the family, the war on Christians, the war on Christmas, the war on terror, and much more--Christians are near the heart of enmity. The New Testament, however, seeks to create an alternative community--a community devoid of fear, wherein God's love and acceptance are mediated to all people through the grace of Jesus. In Unarmed Empire, Sean Palmer reclaims the New Testament's vision of the church as an alternative community of welcome, harmony, and peace. Unarmed Empire is for everyone who's been misled about church. It's for everyone who feels blacklisted by believers, everyone who has been hurt. It's for everyone longing for a purer experience of church.
Download or read book because I said I would written by Alex Sheen and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single promise can change a life forever. We all make promises constantly. “Yes, I’ll be there.” “Sure, no problem!” But do we really mean what we are saying? What is the impact of a broken promise? And what happens to a life when a promise is honored? Because I said I would is the international social movement at the forefront of shifting how the world views commitment and accountability. With over 10.3 million Promise Cards distributed, this cause has played a unique role in changing lives around the world. Heartwarming, humorous, inspirational, and tragic—these stories will challenge readers to look deep within themselves and consider the importance of the promises they make. Through a collection of inspiring short stories and concise philosophical chapters, readers will gain the following: • Practical life lessons from surprisingly raw stories of everyday people with incredible determination • Useful advice on how to get better at keeping promises • Inspiring perspectives that can be utilized in leadership and character development initiatives One hundred percent of the author’s proceeds go to because I said I would, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is bettering humanity through chapters of volunteers, character education in schools, accountability programs, and awareness campaigns with global reach.
