Book Display (Alum): Topical Displays

The COVID-19 pandemic left millions grieving their loved ones without the consolation of traditional ways of mourning. Patients were admitted to hospitals and never seen again. Social distancing often meant conventional funerals could not be held. Religious communities of all kinds were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. These unprecedented circumstances caused dramatic transformations of not only communal rituals but also how people make meaning after the losses of loved ones. Shattered Grief is an intimate portrait of how COVID-19 changed the ways Americans approach, understand, and mourn death. Based on extensive interviews incorporating a multitude of perspectives--including funerary and medical professionals, religious leaders, grief counselors, death doulas, spirit mediums, community organizers, and those who lost loved ones--it provides a snapshot of how people renegotiated spiritual and religious traditions, worldviews, identities, and communities during the deadliest pandemic in a century. Through these diverse and powerful voices, Natasha L. Mikles tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties. Compelling and accessible, Shattered Grief is an essential book for a range of readers interested in how we make sense of death and dying.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Nonprofit leader and minister Tallu Schuyler Quinn spent her adult life working to alleviate hunger, systemic inequality, and food waste, first as a volunteer throughout the United States and abroad, and then as the founder of the Nashville Food Project, where she supported the vibrant community work of local food justice in Middle Tennessee. That all changed just after her fortieth birthday, when she was diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma, an aggressive form of terminal brain cancer. In What We Wish Were True, Quinn achingly grapples with the possibility of leaving behind the husband and children she adores, and what it means to live with a terminal diagnosis and still find meaning. Through gorgeous prose, Quinn masterfully weaves together the themes of life and death by integrating spiritually nourishing stories about family, identity, vocational call, beloved community, God's wide welcome, and living with brain cancer. Taken together, these stunning essays are a piercing reminder to cherish each moment, whether heartbreaking or hilarious, and cast loose other concerns. As a mother, a kindred spirit, and a dear friend, Tallu Schuyler Quinn looks into our eyes with well-earned tears in her own and tells us the bittersweet truth: We are all searching for what has already found us--present and boundless love. This love will deliver us and never let us go.

With a diverse collection of essays, Rebellious Mourning shows that we can bear almost anything when it's worked through collectively, because when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen what debilitates us. Grief is, of course, universal, but - with unprecedented numbers of people made refugees, rapidly increasing effects of global warming, and the electoral rise of authoritarianism across much of the world - we are in a historical moment where many, especially on the left, are feeling a profound sense of loss.

In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end. Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters. In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He'd inspired her to become a doctor, and the stories he had told her as a child proved formative when it came to deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter. Dear Life follows how Rachel came to understand--as a child, as a doctor, as a human being--how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice.

This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about 'religion' and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and face others openly without losing heart.

2025 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner 2024 AESA Critics' Choice Award Winner Written by scholars from three generations of qualitative methodologists, Qualitative Research Design and Methods: An Introductionsituates qualitative research within the history of the field and integrates this history within discussions of specific research designs. This novel approach allows readers to come to know the genealogy of the field and how previous generations of scholars have informed what we know today as qualitative research. The text reflects these more traditional as well as emerging qualitative research approaches, providing a theoretically grounded approach to designing and implementing qualitative research studies. While some introductory research texts focus on the specific methods of qualitative research with little attention to the role of theory, this book forefronts theory in qualitative research. The authors speak to students new to qualitative research with clear discussions of theory and theoretical concepts and how those notions must be considered throughout all aspects of research design, implementation, and representation of findings. Each chapter integrates discussion of theory. In addition, the book highlights the role of ethics in the same way with a chapter at the beginning as well as discussions of ethics threaded throughout each of the design chapters. Qualitative Research Design and Methods is THE introductory textbook for students taking introductory masters and doctoral courses in qualitative research. Instructors in those classes will appreciate the straightforward language and concepts provided by the authors. Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Qualitative Research and Qualitative Research Design

Autoethnography is a method of research that involves describing and analyzing personal experiences in order to understand cultural experiences. The method challenges canonical ways of doing research and recognizes how personal experience influences the research process. Autoethnography acknowledges and accomodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research. In this book, the authors provide a historical and conceptual overview of autoethnography. They share their stories of coming to autoethnography and identify key concerns and considerations that led to the development of the method. Next, they outline the purposes and practices - the core ideals - of autoethnography, how autoethnographers can accomplish these ideals, and why researchers might choose to do autoethnography. They describe the processes of doing autoethnography, conducting fieldwork, discussing ethics in research, and interpreting and analyzing personal experience, and they explore the various modes and techniques used and involved in writing autoethnography. They conclude with goals for creating and assessing autoethnography and describe the future of autoethnographic inquiry. Throughout, the authors provide numerous examples of their work and share key resources. This book will serve as both a guide to the practices of doing autoethnography and an exemplar of autoethnographic research processes and representations.

Practical Theology is a growing discipline in its own right, and the latest thinking in practical theology; of how to use theological learning in practical situations, is fully explored in this new edition of an established textbook. The authors examine methodologies of the social sciences and questions how they can enable the task of theological reflection; examine the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods and highlight the significance of both for the task of practical theology. They also take the reader through the actual process of developing and carrying out a research project using the author's own research as case study examples. Previous case studies include: the rise in spirituality; the decline in church attendance, evidence-based medicine compared to needs-led assessments, the growth in chaplaincy and how it is understood as separate from parish ministry.In this second edition, case studies and all bibliographies have been updated plus a new chapter has been added.

Field Guide to Church of the Wild serves as a companion to a movement committed to restoring sacred relationship with Earth. With a wide-ranging collection of stories, rituals, and practical resources, its pages lead us toward prayer and mountain, ritual and wren, gatherings and forests.
Practiced as a personal spirituality or in communion with others, Church of the Wild is more than a novel way to do church outside or declare nature your church. Expanding beyond religious and institutional boundaries, this book offers ways to rewild your spirituality no matter your spiritual heritage.
Field Guide to Church of the Wild invites us into landscapes and wild church communities to meet the movement's leaders and participants, both human and more-than-human. Join Loorz, founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, and Serrels, director of the Wild Church Network, as they present wisdom collected from among the hundreds of wild churches blooming throughout the world. Gather inspiration and courage to invite a group of friends to practice wild spirituality. Create eco-spiritual practices that honor the sacred presence you already experience in nature. Each chapter includes stories and practices common to many wild churches, including grounding practices, land acknowledgments, liturgies, prayers, solo sauntering prompts, and ways to listen reverently to the land and one another.

Honorable Mention: Best First book in the History of Religions Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.'s call for all people to "become involved" in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd's Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights--one party's religious freedom and another party's property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win. Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country--an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations--to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership. Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions--between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations--towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

How do we, as individuals, accommodate a pessimistic and misanthropic view of the world? If the human condition is impossible to ameliorate, then how should we live? How do we bring about the wellbeing and happiness we seek in the face of such overwhelming evidence that our condition is and will remain very bad indeed and owes significantly to our own entrenched failings?
In this thoughtful and insightful book the philosopher David E. Cooper explores this fundamental dilemma. He rejects an activist commitment to radical improvement of the human condition, and instead advocates quietism as a way to live as well and as happily as we can. This quietist position, which draws on Buddhist and Daoist ideas as well as those from western philosophy, is supplemented by finding refuge from the everyday human world in a "place" both "other" and "better" than that world. Such places of refuge, Cooper argues, are best found in natural environments.
Refuge in nature, whether a garden or a wilderness, cultivates an attunement to, or a sense of, the way of things, and thereby invites assurance of being "in the truth" and the enjoyment that such assurance fosters. The quietist who finds refuge in nature lives as well as and as happily as anyone can do who accepts the negative verdict on the human condition.

The climate crisis' most difficult questions are not technological but relational. Environmental catastrophe reveals a world increasingly divided and inextricably linked, pressing questions of place. How do the places in which we stand relate to the places of others? What are the limits of our belonging and our power? To whom are we responsible, and what does that accountability require? In Holy Ground, Jerusha Matsen Neal centers the sermons of displaced, Indigenous communities in the South Pacific and the proclamation of the displaced prophet Ezekiel to expose colonial specters in the contemporary environmental movement and the North American pulpit. Communities that have loved and lost land carry hard-fought wisdom about the renunciation of false hopes and false gods. Such wisdom crucially orients climate justice preaching in an unraveling world. Naming broken pasts and uncertain futures, the sermons this volume engages take seriously the question seared into the heart of the biblical text: can the creation and covenant of a good God come undone? The scriptural witness forecloses simple answers to that theological crisis, as do the contemporary witnesses of those who stand in rising tides. Instead, such witnesses call listeners to costly acts of repentance and covenantal solidarity, reclaiming preaching's role in the climate fight. Written for scholars and clergy alike, Holy Ground constructs a practical theology of place that equips preachers from various contexts to proclaim God's Word in the face of climate catastrophe. Attuned to place's revelatory testimony, preaching becomes more than a persuasive technology. It becomes a site of divine encounter, relinquished control, and reclaimed relationship, unveiling the place of apocalypse as holy ground.