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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

Maggie Allder returns with a new novel set in the future where the new normal may not be all it seems…

Daisy lives happily in a care home with twelve other children, sheltered from a dangerous world of sickness and war. As everything finally returns to normal, she and her friends begin to explore the city beyond the Water Meadows where she has grown up. But while there are exciting new experiences, there are also people who are quick to take advantage of naive teenagers, to exploit them for their own financial gain. They are both cunning and ruthless, and it isn’t long before Daisy and her friends find themselves threatened by them.

Not only that, there is something mysterious about Daisy’s friend, Sophie, a comparatively recent arrival to the care home. Why will she never speak about her time before she arrived at Xunzi House? Why, when everyone else seems to be spreading their wings and enjoying their new freedoms, does Sophie seem to withdraw more and more? And why does she seem to be afraid of the world out beyond the Water Meadows? Is she, perhaps, right to be fearful – and if so, what does that mean for Daisy and her friends? For years the world has been a dangerous place, but at last the country is getting back to normal – or is it?

“This book explores issues which are of particular interest to Quakers at present, and probably to a number of other faith groups too,” Winchester resident, Maggie says. “In this novel the teenagers explore some of the ordinary business of growing up. They make new friends, they meet people who are very different from their carers, and who are guided by beliefs that are new to Daisy and her friends. It is a story with a happy ending, which nevertheless does not fudge the issues with which it deals.”

We’re all wondering what life will be like when we reach the other side of the pandemic. Will it be better than before, as we’ll all appreciate the little things more? Will it be longer than we anticipated? What will it be like? In Beyond the Water Meadows, her alternative reality set in 2040, Maggie Allder gives voice to real issues affecting everyone, and in particular Quakers, in a highly original tale.

Publication Date: 28th March 2021
ISBN: 9781800462465 Price: £9.99
FOR AUTHOR INTERVIEWS, REVIEW OR COMPETITION COPIES, ARTICLES, PHOTOS OR EXTRACTS
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“It’s a wonderfully emotional, heart-warming journey of what it really means to be a parent” –The Los Angeles Times

In this magical, bewitching debut, Molly and Gene Myers’ marriage is on the brink of collapse. Then a child arrives, with a remarkable appearance. Will he bring them together, or tear their whole world apart?

Molly and Gene Myers were happy, until tragedy blighted their hopes of children. During the years of darkness and despair, they each put their marriage in jeopardy, but now they are starting to rebuild their fragile bond.

This is the year of Woodstock and the moon landings; war is raging in Vietnam and the superpowers are threatening each other with annihilation.

Then the Meteor crashes into Amber Grove, devastating the small New England town – and changing their lives for ever. Molly, a nurse, caught up in the thick of the disaster, is given care of a desperately ill patient rescued from the wreckage: a sick boy with a remarkable appearance, an orphan who needs a mother.

And soon the whole world will be looking for him.

Cory’s arrival has changed everything. And the Myers will do anything to keep him safe.

The dying sayings of early Quakers

Right from the start, ‘the people called Quakers’ recorded each other’s ‘dying sayings’. This book tells how, happening upon some of these by accident, a 21st century Friend learned of their speakers’ passion for equality and truth.

Originally published at a time when religious dissent was fiercely discouraged, the accounts presented here give inspiration to anyone working for justice and peace in today’s world.

An adult educator by profession, Jane Mace has a persistent curiosity in the to and fro of speech and writing.

Publisher: Quacks Books, info@quacks.info
ISBN number 978-1-912728-26-8

“There is much more to this book than the substantial extracts from the lives and dying sayings of twenty-four early Friends and the illuminating and scholarly discussion of these texts. It also maps a personal journey which Jane Mace invites us to take with her.” –Chris Skidmore

“This is an extraordinary little book that defies classification, enabling us to look into Quaker social history from a new angle. To my mind, the best of the book is when the author links those earlier Friends to us today, helping us to see our spiritiual forebears in new and unexpected ways.” –Judith Roads

Jane Mace is also author of God and Decision Making: A Quaker Approach from Quaker Books (2012)

For three centuries, members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) have regularly met to worship in extended times of silence, punctuated by vocal testimony. Anyone can share. This practice reflects the Quaker rejection of hierarchy and the belief that God can speak through any person, regardless of gender, race, or class.

But in the late nineteenth century, revivalism swept through America, and some Quaker meetings began to hire pastors to preach and teach for the benefit of new members—a practice that spread rapidly. Today many Friends meetings have pastors, and in those congregations, the sermon has largely replaced or severely limited traditional Quaker worship.

These changes have not been without controversy. There are those who feel that a professionalized clergy is incompatible with the ethos of historic Quakerism. On the other hand, there are some who believe that the pastoral system saved American Quakerism.
In this study, Derek Brown identifies patterns in Friends churches that have embraced a pastoral system, and he demonstrates how a Christ-centered Quaker pastoral theology might strengthen a church’s Quaker heritage while simultaneously increasing the effectiveness of its pastoral leadership.

As Friends seek to adapt to the needs of twenty-first-century America, they must enter into an ecclesiological conversation with their past practice, their present context, and their current condition. Consider this book a framework and guide for those discussions—the beginning of a journey.

 

Available from Barclay Press: http://www.barclaypressbookstore.com/On-Quakers-and-Pastors.html

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Quakers-Pastors-Derek-Brown/dp/1594980624/ref=sr_1_1