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Featured Book for April 2024

Hope Is Here!: Spiritual Practices for Pursuing Justice and Beloved Community

by Luther E. Smith Jr

Joyful and daunting opportunities to live into God’s dream of justice and beloved community are compelling and available. Hope, says Luther Smith Jr., is essential to the needed personal and social transformations that prepare us for such sacred opportunities. Yet genuine hope is often confused as merely wish fulfillment, optimism, or perceiving better tomorrows. In Hope Is Here! Smith describes how we truly perceive and join “the work of hope,” enlivening us to a life that is oriented toward immediate and future experiences of personal fulfillment, justice, and beloved community. Interpreting five spiritual practices for individuals and congregations to experience the power of hope, this book prepares us to engage racism, mass incarceration, environmental crises, divisive politics, and indifference that imperil justice and beloved community. It delivers the inner resources necessary to work for change through its interpretation of hope. Additionally, each chapter ends with questions that prompt readers to examine their experiences and their readiness to journey with hope. Written for Christians who want to commit themselves to justice and beloved community, this book will provide helpful guidance for a life sustained by God’s gifts of hope and love. Hope is here for our “responsibility” and “response-ability” to live the fulfilling life that God dreams for us.

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Community Questions

Community Questions from Claudia Love Mair

Week 1

  1. If this is your experience, think of a time you felt hopeless. How did (or do) you manage it?
  2. How does hope enliven your life? p. 4
  3. What does it mean to you to be “a people of hope for “beloved community”? p.11

Week 2

  1. If “The cloud of witnesses is a cloud of stories” (p. 31) what kind of stories will your life tell?
  2. Name a person in your cloud of witnesses. What hope does their story give you?
  3. What prayers, either spoken or read, of someone else, living or dead, inspire you? (Chapter 3, Contemplative Praying)

Week 3

  1. Name a time in your life when you were prophetic. p.81
  2. Who is currently, or has previously been a prophetic witness in your life?
  3. Luther writes in chapter 4, “The ancestors are vital to our prophetic work of interpretation and stewardship.” What ancestors, in your family lineage or your faith’s ancestors, fuel your studies and understanding of matters of faith?

Week 4

  1. In the chapter Crossing Identity Boundaries Luther writes about boundary clarification. Regarding your sense of self, what do you want other people to know? What about your sense of self makes you feel vulnerable and inclined to withhold? p.103
  2. Transforming can be disorienting and challenging. How do you befriend transformation, especially when it is difficult to?
  3. Community can and should be the place where we come alive. Luther writes, “Beloved community is the true image of community.” What does beloved community look like to you?