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 the Sunday service. Here is their list for the upcoming service featuring Janet Pivnick on Sunday, October 26, 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. Trusting Change: Finding Our Way Through Personal and Global Transformation, by Karen Hering, 2022, 248 HER [From LibraryThing: “… offers pastoral support and spiritual skills building for individuals on the cusp of personal change within the collective context of a world that is reshaping itself at a faster pace than ever. The book’s ten thresholding skills give readers practical tools for living on the threshold and through change, but this is not a typical “how-to” guide and its beautifully written and evocative language will connect readers with their own deeper consciousness. … Hering does not pretend that change is easy but notes its inevitability and some of the ways readers can participate in it, allowing them to trust it more in the future. Sharing wisdom found in nature and in metaphors, the reflections include evocative questions and creative, often embodied exercises that invite the reader into a larger story of change. …”].
2. As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, by Matthew Cobb, 2022, 660 COB [From LibraryThing: “… In 2018, scientists manipulated the DNA of human babies for the first time. As biologist and historian Matthew Cobb shows in As Gods, this achievement was one many scientists have feared from the start of the genetic age. Four times in the last fifty years, geneticists, frightened by their own technology, have called a temporary halt to their experiments. They ought to be frightened: Now we have powers that can target the extinction of pests, change our own genes, or create dangerous new versions of diseases in an attempt to prevent future pandemics. Both awe-inspiring and chilling, As Gods traces the history of genetic engineering, showing that this revolutionary technology is far too important to be left to the scientists. …”].
3. AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, by Kai-Fu Lee and Quifan Chen, 2021, 006 LEE [From LibraryThing: “… the former president of Google China and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an urgent question: How will artificial intelligence change our world over the next twenty years? AI will be the defining issue of the twenty-first century, but many people know little about it apart from visions of dystopian robots or flying cars. Though the term has been around for half a century, it is only now, Kai-Fu Lee argues, that AI is poised to upend our society, just as the arrival of technologies like electricity and smart phones did before it. In the past five years, AI has shown it can learn games like chess in mere hours-and beat humans every time. AI has surpassed humans in speech and object recognition, even outperforming radiologists in diagnosing lung cancer. AI is at a tipping point. What comes next? Within two decades, aspects of daily life may be unrecognizable. Humankind needs to wake up to AI, both its pathways and perils. … In ten gripping short stories that crisscross the globe, coupled with incisive analysis, Lee and Chen explore AI’s challenges and its potential”].
4. 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 Scorpio Books: “The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, war, political polarization, economic upheaval, and the dying back of nature together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. This revised, tenth anniversary edition of Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face these crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.”].
5. Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, by Toko-pa Turner, 2017, 155 TUR [From the Vancouver Public Library: “We live in one of the most connected times on earth but never before have we been so lonely, so alienated from each other, from ourselves, and from the natural world. Whether this manifests as having difficulty finding community, feeling anxiety about your worthiness and place in the world, or simply feeling disconnected, the absence of belonging is the great silent wound of our times… In Belonging, Toko-pa explores the origins of our estrangement, how that alienation affects the choices we make as individuals, and as a culture, and what are those skills to which we can apprentice ourselves, to restore a sense of belonging in our lives, and in our world.”].
6. Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, 304 HAU [From Salt Spring Books: “Deepen your connection to the natural world with this inspiring meditation, “a path to the place where science and spirit meet” (Robin Wall Kimmerer).
In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperiled, beloved earth?”].
7. Rehearsals for Living, by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, 306 MAY [From Quill & Quire: “A balm for despair, Rehearsals for Living is an epistolary dialogue between Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that takes stock of our collapsing society and imagines what we might build from the wreckage. Over a year of correspondence, the authors share daily observations, ideas, and memories; these are interwoven with the words and thoughts of other activists, writers, and artists to create a polyphonic work of critical scholarship that radically reframes the concept of survival to map a feminist, abolitionist, and anti-racist path to the future.”].
8. A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going, by Michael Wooldridge, 2021, 006 WOO [From LibraryThing: “From Oxford’s leading AI researcher … The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world. While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. …”].
9. The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, 2021, 363 FIG [Donated by John Boyle. From LibraryThing: “In this cautionary but optimistic book, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac–the architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement–tackle arguably the most urgent and consequential challenge humankind has ever faced: the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity. … the authors outline two possible scenarios for the planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris targets for carbon dioxide emission reduction. In the other, they describe what it will take to create and live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head on, with determination and optimism. How we all of us address the climate crisis in the next thirty years will determine not only the world we will live in but also the world we will bequeath to our children and theirs. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us, in no uncertain terms, what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster”].
10. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, by Britt Wray, 2023, 155 WRA [Donated by John Boyle. From LibraryThing: “An impassioned generational perspective on why climate anxiety is completely natural and necessary, and how we can be stronger for it. Climate and environment-related fears and anxieties are on the rise everywhere, with few resources to address them. As with any type of stress, eco-anxiety can lead to paralysis, burnout and avoidance. … seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these complicated feelings are a sign of our humanity, and acknowledging and valuing them is key to making it through present and future crises. This isn’t a simple process, and it’s not a level playing field when it comes to our vulnerability, she notes. However, with the worsening situation, we are all on the field–and unlocking deep stores of compassion and care is a crucial step in healing our relationship to the planet and each other. With openness and curiosity, Britt explores her own fears about starting a family when evidence of dangerous environmental shifts creates an especially bleak picture of what lies ahead. …”].
11. The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change, by Gleb Raygorodetsky, 2018, 304 RAY [From LibraryThing, on the book jacket: “… while our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life. … shows how these communities are actually islands of biological and cultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. They are an “archipelago of hope” as we enter the Anthropocene, for here lies humankind’s best chance to understand how to take care of the Earth. These communities are implementing creative solutions to meet these modern challenges. Solutions that are relevant to the rest of us. …”].
12. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, 2021, 363.7 [From LibraryThing: “… There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it’s clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial table. More than a problem of bias, it’s a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone. All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States – scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race – and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society. …”].
13. American Exodus: Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival, by Giles Slade, 2013, 304.8 SLA [Written by a UCV member. From Amazon: “… Giles Slade argues that we are entering a long period of global desperation which will be characterized by human migration on an unprecedented scale. American Exodus is a frighteningly believable survey of our immediate future, but it ends on a note of hope: we may yet survive the coming century of climatic change if we act now to safeguard our shelter of last resort. …”].
14. Just Cool It!: The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do – A Post-Paris Agreement Game Plan, by David Suzuki and Ian Hanington, 2017, 363.738 [Gift of Mei Jia Lam. From LibraryThing: “A resounding post-Paris Agreement wake-up call about the urgency of the climate crisis that offers a range of practical solutions-and above all, hope. Climate change is the most important crisis humanity has faced, but we still confront huge barriers to resolving it. So, what do we do, and is there hope for humanity? The problem itself is complex, and there’s no single solution. But by understanding the barriers to resolving global warming and by employing a wide range of solutions-from shifting to clean energy to planting trees to reforming agricultural practices-we can get the world back on track. … offers a comprehensive look at the current state of climate science and knowledge and the many ways to resolve the climate crisis, imploring us to do what’s necessary to live in a better, cleaner future. When enough people demand action, change starts happening-and this time, it could be monumental.”].
15. Time to Change: Essays, by David Suzuki, 1995, 333.7 SUZ [From LibraryThing: “… a time when we must change. The signs are everywhere; … first calls our attention to the signs and then considers the realms of science, politics and economics to find the source of our problems and also the ground on which we can – and cannot – place our hope for the future”].
16. The Big Disconnect: The Story of Technology and Loneliness, by Giles Slade, 2012, 303.48 SLA [Written by a VanU member. From LibraryThing: “… the author offers a bracing look at an America where intimacy with machines is increasingly replacing mutual human intimacy. In a sweeping overview that ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present, he reveals how consumer technologies changed from analgesic devices that ameliorated the loneliness of a newly urban generation in the Gilded Age to prosthetic machines that act as substitutes for companionship in contemporary America. Mining insights from neuroscience, the author delves deeply into the history of this transformation, showing why Americans use certain technologies to mediate their connections with other human beings instead of seeking out face-to-face contacts. In a final investigative section, he describes ways in which some people are bucking the trend by consciously including interpersonal strategies that build empathy, community, and mutual acceptance. …”].
17. Social Action Heroes: Unitarian Universalists Who Are Changing the World, by Michelle Bates Deakin, 2012, 261 DEA [Published by Skinner House Books. From Amazon: “Unitarian Universalists are committed to acting on important issues of social justice throughout the world. Award-winning journalist Michelle Bates Deakin explores the actions of eleven individuals and the impact their actions have had on their communities and their souls. Compelling and inspiring, Social Action Heroes illuminates the potential for deep change inherent in each of us, and in Unitarian Universalism as a whole.”].
18. From Naked Ape to Super Species: A Personal Perspective on Humanity and the Global Ecocrisis, by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, 1999, 304.2 SUZ [From LibraryThing: “… describe how we have evolved beyond our needs, trampling other species, believing that we can make the Earth work the way we want it to. And they introduce us to the people who are fighting back, those who are resisting the inexorable advance of the “global economy” juggernaut, the people whose voices are difficult to hear over the din of corporate public relations machines. …”].
19. Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen R. Covey, 1990, 158 COV [From LibraryThing: “… presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With insights and anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity — principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.”].
20. The New Way Things Work, by David Macaulay, 1998, 600 MAC [From LibraryThing: “Text and numerous detailed illustrations introduce and explain the scientific principles and workings of hundreds of machines. Includes new material about digital technology.”].