It's a Book... and an Important Cause.
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Lots of topics kicking around in my head, but those are going to have to wait a week, because Hope: A User’s Manual is available for pre-order!
Here’s the book description:
Hope is not optimism. It’s not toxic positivity. It’s not a promise of future success or progress. And it’s definitely not something that can be reduced to a scripty-font platitude on an Instagram post.
So what is it?
One thing is certain: real hope demands that we do something with it. That we live it out. That we use hope to participate in a bigger story playing out behind the bleak world we see on the news or in our social media feeds every day.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a person of faith, or someone disillusioned with faith, or someone who hardly ever thinks about faith: if you’re a human being who longs for a spiritual counternarrative to live by, this book points to one resilient enough to endure crises and crushing defeats. If you’re tired of hearing about some heavenly hereafter amid the pressing need for justice here and now, this is a book about hope for this world—not the next.
After exploring what hope isn’t and then what it is, MaryAnn McKibben Dana reflects on the surprising place where hope is often found—in the messiness of our imperfect, flawed, beautiful human bodies. In the second half of the book, she talks about making hope real: sharing hope through stories, cultivating hope through simple practices, and nurturing hope in hopeless times—when only real hope can persevere.
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Pre-orders make a huge difference to authors, especially smaller-market authors like yours truly. You can pre-order Hope: A User’s Manual at one of the big boys if you want, but I love Bookshop.org because they’re an online alternative to you-know-who, and they support local bookstores. The shop closest to my heart is Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama, but you can choose your own to support.
And because the world needs us all to pitch in–and because hope isn’t hope unless it puts on its workboots–let’s get concrete. Email me at maryannmcdana @ gmail with a copy of your pre-order, and for every email I receive, I will make a donation to World Central Kitchen, which is feeding Ukraine.
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What I’m Up To
Hope Notes meets today at 4 Eastern! Topic: the book/limited series Station Eleven, and the art that saves us amid apocalypse.
Speaking of Hope Notes, I’ll be dropping an episode of The Blue Room podcast as usual this Friday. My producer will be out of the country on a study trip to Martinique (tough life as a college student), so I’m doing a no-edit special, a Hope Notes meditation about the hilarious and charming movie, Free Guy. My goal is a tight 15 minutes. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.
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Link Love
This has been making the rounds: Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ.
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