Our library in Hewett Centre is open every Sunday after service during Coffee Hour in Hewett Centre, and our Library Team offers related reading lists based on the topic of Sunday service. Here is their list for the upcoming service featuring Rev. Shawn Gauthier on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 at 11 a.m. All are welcome in Hewett Centre after the Sunday service to check out some books and to have coffee and conversation.
VanU library books related to this Sunday’s sermon:
1. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, 2022, 303 MAC [From LibraryThing: “This revised edition of “Active hope” shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.”].
2. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, by Jane Goodall, Douglas Adams and Gail Hudson, 2021, 304 GOO [Donated by Elizabeth Murdoch. From LibraryThing: “… Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist, and Douglas Abrams, the internationally bestselling co-author of The Book of Joy, explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit. Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? …”].
3. Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, translators Erica Moore and Elizabeth Manton, 2021, 128 BRE [From LibraryThing: “It’s a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest. Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. The instinct to cooperate rather than compete, trust rather than distrust, has an evolutionary basis going right back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too. In this major book, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman takes some of the world’s most famous studies and events and reframes them, providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history. …”].
4. Thoreau as Spiritual Guide: A Companion to Walden for Personal Reflection and Discussion, by Barry M. Andrews, 2000, 200 AND [From LibraryThing: “Walden, one of America’s classic works on non-fiction, gets a fresh examination from a faith-based, and meditative perspective. Thoreau and the Trancendentalists tried to achieve a balance in their lives between work and leisure, nature and civilization, society and solitude, spiritual aspirations and moral behavior. This guide helps one “walk” through Walden again and find its soul while expanding your own.”].
5. Good Grief Rituals : Tools for Healing, by Elaine Childs-Gowell, 1992, 155.937 [From LibraryThing: “In this comforting and deeply thoughtful book, the author offers a series of simple grief rituals, among them the venting of feelings, letter writing, affirmations, exercises to act out negative emotions as well as forgiveness, fantasies, meditations, and more. …”].
6. From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives, by Robert Fulghum, 1995, 128 FUL [From the author in the paperback edition, as stated on LibraryThing: “… Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective–when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over. I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire. Remembering. As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.”].
7. A New Earth Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, by Tolle Eckhart, 2008, 204.4 TOL [The publisher description, from LibraryThing: “Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity: he implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity. However, there is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one. In illuminating the nature of this shift, Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness. We will come to experience who we truly are–which is something infinitely greater than anything we currently think we are.”].