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Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice

A memoir of a Quaker activist and master storyteller George Lakey on his involvement in struggles for peace, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, labor justice, and the environment, whose life will be the subject of a new documentary film coming in 2022.

From his first arrest in the Civil Rights era to his most recent during a climate justice march at the age of 83, George Lakey has committed his life to a mission of building a better world through movements for justice. Lakey draws readers into the center of history-making events, telling often serious stories with playfulness and intimacy. In this memoir, he describes the personal, political, and theoretical—coming out as bisexual to his Quaker community while known as a church leader and family man, protesting against the war in Vietnam by delivering medical supplies through the naval blockade in the South China Sea, and applying his academic study of nonviolent resistance to creative tactics in direct action campaigns. 

From strategies he learned as a young man facing violence in the streets to risking his life as an unarmed bodyguard for Sri Lankan human rights lawyers, Lakey recounts his experience living out the tension between commitment to family and mission. Drawing strength from his community to fight cancer, survive painful parenting struggles, and create networks to help prevent activist burnout, this book shows readers how to find hope in even the darkest times through strategic, joyful activism.
Author: George Lakey
Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2022
ISBN: 9781644212356
Paperback, 424 pages

Human beings “must now return nature . . . into our worship. And Quaker meeting is the perfect place to make that reclamation,” writes Jim Hood in this poetic and thoughtful meditation. In celebrating the interrelationship of living beings – the ecology – of the natural world, alongside the deep interrelationships at work in a meeting for worship, Hood calls us to deepen our spiritual relationship to nature and to the Light that illuminates it. He urges us to restore this deep connectedness with nature not only for our personal spiritual health, but so we can find our way back into connectedness with a planet we have largely forgotten and abandoned. Discussion questions included.
Author:  Jim Hood
Publisher: Pendle Hill (2022)

After nearly thirty years living in the Salish Sea’s San Juan Archipelago, Iris Graville felt compelled to write about the threats to its interwoven lattice of beauty, wildness, fragility, and relationship. In 2018-19, Graville served as the Washington State Ferries’ (WSF) first Writer-in-Residence on the “Interisland” route, traveling only among Lopez, Shaw, San Juan, and Orcas islands. As a result, this storytelling lover of the Salish Sea presents Writer in a Life Vest, thirty-six essays that explore climate change and endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales, while leading readers to ask questions and find resilience, inspiration, and hope.
Author:  Iris Graville
Publisher: Homebound Publications (2020)
ISBN: 1953340482
Paperback, 200 pages

Quakerism: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the history and diverse approaches and ideas associated with the Religious Society of Friends. This small religion incorporates a wide geographic spread and varied beliefs that range from evangelical Christians to non-theists. Topics covered include:
– Quaker values in action
– The first generations of Quakerism
– Quakerism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
– Belief and activism
– Worship and practice
– Quakerism around the world
– The future of Quakerism
With helpful features including suggested readings, timelines, a glossary, and a guide to Quakers in fiction, this book is an ideal starting point for students and scholars approaching Quakerism for the first time as well as those interested in deepening their understanding.
Author:  Margery Post Abbott, Carl Abbott
Publisher: Routledge (2020)
ISBN: 9780367191627
Paperback, 208 pages

Braving Your Way Toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace

Find spiritual insight for developing courage and meeting life’s broken-open, pulled-apart times for anyone seeking hope.

Daily we are asked to move toward bravery, to stretch in the direction of goodness, kindness, forgiveness, patience, and vulnerability. Yet life’s tender fragility, fear, anxiety, and our own practiced self-sabotage can derail us from growing and thriving, leaving us fractured and afraid.

Ordained Buddhist teacher and Quaker Valerie Brown invites us into the heart of compassion, insight, and courage. Filled with Quaker wisdom, mindfulness meditation practices, and portraits of real people living out simple yet life-affirming bravery, Hope Leans Forward is a guidebook for all of us who are on journeys of self-transformation, self-discovery, and spiritual discernment. Centering small, everyday acts of bravery with diverse stories from marginalized communities, Brown’s unique perspective as a Black Buddhist Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition and her extensive leadership experience shepherd us in navigating life’s essential questions to discover true aliveness and meaning. When we focus on cultivating clarity and discernment in our purpose, we begin to understand that we are truly connected to–and that we contribute to–a larger whole.

Written through a period of profound personal loss and in the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, Brown’s spiritual insight and life- and spirit-tested wisdom offers a new source for anyone seeking hope, and seeking to alleviate suffering within ourselves and our communities.

Walking in the World as a Friends: Essential Quaker Practices is a program of the Quaker Religious Education Collaborative.  It looks at how essential Quaker practices weave together the individual, Quaker community and Spirit, creating a unique, vital and transformative dynamic. It addresses the question “What do we do that makes us Quaker?”  

Author: Nadine Clare Hoover
Publisher: Quaker Religious Education Collaborative, 2020
ISBN: 9780982849279
Paperback, 72 pages

Reflections on God’s Love is a collection of prayers and commentaries to recall our hearts and minds to the loving Presence of God.

The readings can be used as doorways into contemplation and as inspirations to help us dwell in the Vine (John 15:4-6) and grow in our trust in God. Many of them draw on much-loved Bible passages. Included are reflections which shed fresh light on the Lord’s Prayer and on the parable of the prodigal son.

“Father, I have wandered from You long enough. Let me come to my senses, look (at where my wandering has led me), listen (to the inward longing which is calling me home) and return my heart and mind to You.”

Available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Inspirations-Peter-M-Parr-ebook/dp/B0976CL28X/

 

Small-town USA, entering the ’70s. A childless couple, Gene and Molly, adopted a strange, wounded child of the stars they call Cory.

Molly is the main narrative voice – a passionate nurse fighting for her own extraordinary child. Cory is gentle, vibrant, excitable, endlessly curious and loving – and both joy and danger comes from his otherworldly origins.

In Our Child of Two Worlds, a figure from the past brings uncomfortable truths, and Gene and Molly face the terrifying loss of everything they took for granted. Humanity needs Cory’s people to return to save the Earth – but if they take Molly’s son, it will break her heart.

The UK/Canadian eBook of Our Child of Two Worlds drops 31 March, same as the UK, and the hardback drops there 14 June.

Quakers and their Meeting Houses
Chris Skidmore

A highly illustrated and fascinating account of the architecture and historical development of the Quaker meeting house, from the foundation of the movement to the twenty-first century, drawing largely on examples from the UK but including some from colonial America.

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55131/

“Apart from being a fascinating snapshot of London in the 21st century, it’s a valuable social commentary.” –Terry Waite

In 1861, the great journalist and social advocate Henry Mayhew published London Labour and the London Poor, an oral history of those living and working on the streets of Victorian London. Nothing on this scale had been attempted before.

On the surface, the streets of London in 1861 and in 2019 are entirely different places. But dig just a little and the similarities are striking and, in many cases, shocking. Taking Mayhew’s book as inspiration, Jennifer Kavanagh explores the changes and continuities by collecting and mapping stories from today’s London.

Beggars, street entertainers, stalls selling a variety of food, clothes, second-hand goods, thieves and the sex trade are all still predominant. The rise of the gig economy has brought a multitude of drivers and cyclists, delivering and moving goods, transporting meals and people, all organized through smart phones but using the same streets as Mayhew’s informants. The precarity faced by this new workforce would also be familiar to the street-sellers of Mayhew’s day. In terms of resources, gone are the workhouses, almshouses, paupers’ lunatic asylums. Enter shelters, day centres, hostels, and food banks.

Let Me Take You By The Hand is an x-ray of life on the streets today: the stories in their own words of those who work and live in our capital.

Published in the UK & Commonwealth by Little Brown, £16.99. It will be available in paperback and in the US in 2022
https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/jennifer-kavanagh/let-me-take-you-by-the-hand/9781408713136/?fbclid=IwAR3KHIUhx1SK6UKdG1HdD5Mj97qkAUyCidQrZSWT58Turlew3Vu2-DBh81k