The community we build around us can be life-giving, especially in difficult times. In today's political climate, our communities have become even more important, as they are sources of vital support, protection, joy, nourishment, friendship, and healing. The books below explore the way community sustains us, and invite us to consider ways we can continue to build these relationships in our neighborhoods and beyond.
As the first Black woman to anchor the Boston-area evening news, Liz Walker found herself in an industry that defined her neighborhood largely by violence. But when she became a pastor there, she grew close to households marked not only by trauma but by courage. In moments of loss and pain, her congregation gathered to create soft spaces for others' grief to land. There, in the stories told, the meals shared, the tears shed, and the silences kept, people found a space to receive their sorrow. Out of this ministry grew a grassroots trauma-healing program, one now being replicated across the country. No One Left Alone is an extraordinary account of a Black church that decided to give neighbors a space to share their grief and provides a blueprint premised on a simple truth: the wounded heal best together.
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People would like for you to believe protest is an ineffective tool for change, but history tells us that student activism has been a formidable force leading to substantive change throughout history. But how should students organize? With My People answers this fundamental and crucial question by bringing together ethnography and notes on community-building, taking readers on a yearlong journey from the front lines of Ferguson to undergraduate campus life at Saint Louis University.
Prayer has long sustained movements for social change. Ritual gives shape to our desire for justice, and liturgy lends power to our work. With more than fifty resources from eighty contributors, We Pray Freedom is useful for individual reflection, corporate worship, and protest and action. Through liturgies of liberation, join a movement that bears witness to the justice of God and to human faith, suffering, protest, and love.
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible proclaims justice and abundance for the poor. Yet these powerful passages about poverty are frequently overlooked and misinterpreted. In We Cry Justice, leaders of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival uncover what the Bible really says about justice and poverty. Liz Theoharis is joined by pastors, organizers, scholars, low-wage workers, and people in poverty in interpreting sacred stories about the poor seeking healing, justice, and freedom. The Bible cries for justice, and we do too. It's time to act on God's persistent call to repair the breach and fight poverty, not the poor.
The rise of White Christian nationalism seems impossible to stop. We need a road map to countering recruitment. And we needed it yesterday. For White folks alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism, Bring Back Your People is a mouthy, practical guide to resisting, organizing, and holding conversations with your friends, family, or anyone else who has been misled by White Christian nationalist ideas.
Life at the US border is both hectic and harrowing. Families arrive. Families leave. Families get through to the US. Families are returned from the US. Women weep, children squabble, and grown men sob over photographs of their murdered sons' mutilated bodies. From award-winning journalist and priest Cristina Rathbone comes The Asylum Seekers, a remarkable, devastating work of reporting about these asylum seekers trapped at a port of entry to the US: the trauma they carry, the community they create, and the faith they maintain.
Nia Chiaramonte, Katie J. Chiaramonte
When Nia Chiaramonte came out as a trans woman to her wife Katie, she knew she would be met with a loving response. But she was less sure what would happen when they began to bring their community alongside them on their journey of identity formation as a Queer family. Embracing Queer Family is a guidebook with tools for learning and reflection for Queer families on how to live into your true selves and strengthen your communities through radical love, acceptance, and mutual healing.
We are living in an era of a massive empathy deficit, yet our capacity to imagine what someone else is experiencing has never been more important. Through inspiring stories, interviews with experts, and self-development exercises, Purposeful Empathy offers practical advice to foster personal, organizational, and social transformation.
Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul
Social justice work, we often assume, is raised voices and raised fists. But what does social justice work look like for those of us who don't feel comfortable battling in the trenches? Alongside inspiring, real-life examples of highly sensitive world-changers, Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul expands the possibilities of how to have a positive social impact, affirming the particular gifts and talents that sensitive souls offer to a hurting world.
Between the Listening and the Telling
Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us: Fear is wisdom. Vanity is virtuous. Violence is peace. In the pages of Between the Listening and the Telling, storyteller, author, and activist Mark Yaconelli leads readers into an enchanting meditation on the power of storytelling in our individual and collective lives.
America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. 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.
To view all of our books and resources, visit broadleafbooks.com.
