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Civic-Minded Book Club

Civic-Minded Book Club Online

Do you want to effect change in our society? Topics to be explored are the current global political climate, the Constitution, inequalities in the political and economic systems, the state of America and its citizens today, and alternatives for our future.

This book club meets the fourth Thursday of each month on Zoom. To get the Zoom link please register below.

This month we'll be discussing Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells.

We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live?

Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead.

Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing "watershed discipleship" in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming--guns into ploughshares. She watches the world's greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.

Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.

Date:
Thursday, April 27, 2023 Show more dates
Time:
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Time Zone:
Pacific Time - US & Canada (change)
Location:
Online
Online:
This is an online event. Event URL will be sent via registration email.
Audience:
  Adults  
Categories:
  Book Clubs     Earth Month     Online  
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