Sunday, October 1, 2017

Here If You Need Me, the UUAWOL nonfiction book of the month for September, 2017

The UU A Way Of Life non fiction book of the month for September, 2017 has been Kate Braestrup's book, Here If You Need Me. It is a wonderful book about loss and grief and new life based on love, sharing, and ministry. Braestrup writes in Chapter 18 on page 194, "Mourning, that excruciating conspiracy of human memory and human love, demands rituals that can prolong the relationship between the living and the dead."

And it reminds me of what I have learned in my life which is that the physical body dies but the spirit continues to live on in the stories we tell about the person's values, opinions, beliefs, practices, preferences, and intentions.


In October, 2017, our nonfiction book will be Naomi Klein's book, "No Is Not Enough."






2 comments:

  1. I loved Kate Braestrup's book. Thanks for chosing it. I might not have read it had it not been recommended here. I also am looking forward to Klein's book. I had already started reading it and now I will surely finish it. Klein says in her introduction that you can't expect people to vote in their own self interests when they are so disoriented that they don't even know any longer what their self interests are. Americans are not very politically literate. They don't understand how their goverment works. It has been bought by and is being run by corporate interests and the 1 %. They are subjected to propaganda to distract them from the real issues and concerns. Just look at Trump's nonsensical tweets and the oxygen they consume in the news cycles. Americans have their heads spinning while they are being manipulated by a media culture they don't understand. This media illiteracy may be the biggest social justice issue of our time because of the confusion, an disorientation and divisiveness it creates.

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  2. Thanks for choosing No Is Not Enough for the October read. I noticed the sentence in the introduction which reads, "It's a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions." p.3 If there were any group that it would be difficult to use divide-and-conquer politics on, it would be UUs. We have a covenant and our covenant calls us to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Divide and conquer racial and sexual politics should bounce off of UUs with little or no effect if we stay strong in our covenantal relationships.

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