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, April 20, 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. What Easter Means to Unitarians, by Phillip Hewett, 1987, 394 HEW.
2. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson, 2014, 921 STE [From LibraryThing: “… Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship – and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.”].
3. The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, by Desmond Tutu, 2015, 179 TUT [From LibraryThing: “… Writing with his daughter, Mpho, an Anglican priest, they lay out the simple but profound truths about the significance of forgiveness, how it works, why everyone needs to know how to grant it and receive it, and why granting forgiveness is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves when we have been wronged. They explain the four-step process of forgiveness — Telling the Story, Naming the Hurt, Granting Forgiveness, and Renewing or Releasing the Relationship — as well as offer meditations, exercises, and prayers to guide the reader along the way. ‘With each act of forgiveness, whether small or great, we move toward wholeness,’ they write. ‘Forgiveness is how we bring peace to ourselves and our world.’”].
4. Forgiveness, by Mark Sakamoto, 2014, 940.54 SAK [From LibraryThing: “… When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people’s land for a dollar a day.
By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph’s daughter and Mitsue’s son fell in love.
Although the war toyed with Ralph’s and Mitsue’s lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.”].
5. The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart, by Joseph Chilton Pearce, 2007, 200 PEAR [Gift of W. Knox Carr. From LibraryThing: “Social visionary Joseph Chilton Pearce’s indictment of cultural imprinting as the cause of humankind’s cruel and violent behavior * Refutes the Neo-Darwinist assumption that violence is inherent in humanity * Identifies religion as the sustaining force behind our negative cultural imprinting * Shows how infant-adult interactions unconsciously block the creative spirit We are all too aware of the endless variety of cruel and violent behavior reported to us in the media, reminded daily that in every corner of the world someone is suffering or dying at the hands of another. We have to ask: Is this violence and cruelty endemic to our nature? Are we, at our foundation, really so murderous? … Joseph Chilton Pearce, life-long advocate of human potential, sounds an emphatic and convincing no. Pearce explains that beneath our awareness, culture imprints a negative force-field that blocks the natural rise of the spirit toward its innate nature of love and altruism. Further, he identifies religion as the primary cultural force behind this negative imprinting. Drawing from recent neuroscience, neurocardiology, cultural anthropology, and brain development research, Pearce explains that the key to reversing this trend can be found in the interaction between infants and adults. The adult mind-set effectively compromises the infant’s neural and hormonal interactions between the heart and the higher evolutionary structures of the developing brain, thus keeping us centered primarily in our most primitive and defensive neural foundations, generation after generation. Pearce shows us that if we allow the intelligence of the heart to take hold and flourish, we can reverse this unconscious loss of our true nature.”].