Social Change

In our default state, our brains constantly get in the way of effective communication. They are lazy, angry, immature, and distracted. They can make a difficult conversation impossible. But Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Waldman have discovered a powerful strategy called Compassionate Communication that allows two brains to work together as one.

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another.

Hope alone can be transformational—but in moments of despair, or when you’re up against profound injustice, it isn’t enough on its own. Hope without action is, at best, naive. At its worst, it tricks you into giving up the power and agency you have to change systems that cause suffering. Enter critical hope: a spark of passion, an abiding belief that transformation is not just possible, but vital. This is hope in action: a vibrant, engaged practice and a commitment to honoring transformative potential across a vast spectrum of experience.

Temperatures are rising all over the world, leading to wildfires, droughts, animal extinctions, and ferocious storms - climate change is real. But how did we get to this state, and what can we do next? What if we could work to protect the planet, while also taking action to make life fairer and more equal for the people who live on it? We can - if we're willing to change everything.

It's easy to get discouraged by the headlines. It can often feel as if God has left the building, like we are on our own. We want to believe God's promises to us, and we search for signs of his continuing restoration of the world in which we live. Now, with passion and heart, two leading experts on Christianity and culture cut through the chaos and uncertainty to show listeners how God is powerfully active and intensely engaged in fulfilling his promise to restore all things unto himself.

In The Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump's policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence.

Instead of thinking about social justice as a process that starts with changing people's minds, Embodied Activism understands our bodies—how we feel in them and relate to others through them—as the sites of transformation.

All of us constantly broadcast information to others, even when we don't say a word. Sales professionals broadcast to potential clients in a way that wins new business. Managers broadcast to their teams about projects. Colleagues broadcast to one another about available resources. The messages we choose to broadcast shape others' beliefs in the potential for success and their ability to create positive change.

Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early 1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, increases in life expectancy, and even the frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last few generations.

Traditionally, an entrepreneur develops a detailed plan, finds money to fund it, and then pursues it to its conclusion. But conditions can change drastically at any point - you can end up locked into a process based on now-obsolete assumptions. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is "build, measure, learn": create small, experimental initiatives, get real-world feedback on them quickly, and use that data to identify what works and discard what doesn't. And then test some more.

Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges - climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved while substantial progress is ongoing on others. The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species - from bald eagles to gray whales - pulled back from the precipice of extinction.

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color.

Robin Attfield introduces environmental ethics, exploring the values involved in issues, such as pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. Considering the different groups involved in environmental ethics and the attitudes of the world's religions to environmental stewardship, he calls for action from us all to manage our environment ethically.

In India Positive, best-selling author and columnist Chetan Bhagat brings together essays that work as a manifesto for change. Examining a gamut of subjects—from education to employment, from GST to infrastructure, from corruption to casteism—Bhagat reflects on what we can do right in order to move forward and become a truly modern, progressive country. He expresses in this book his belief that, if we want to see reform, we—as citizens—need to be the solution. If our country is to shine, Bhagat says, we need to stand up and be 'India Positive Citizens'.

In some of the bleakest corners of the world, an unprecedented movement is taking root. From the favelas of Brazil to the Maori villages in New Zealand, from occupied Palestine to South Central Los Angeles, musicians with strong social consciences are founding intensive orchestra programs for children in need. In this captivating and inspiring account, authors Tricia Tunstall and Eric Booth tell the remarkable story of the international El Sistema movement.

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to "solve" social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only be entrenching the status quo. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Simple yet profound, these stories distill timely lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability - and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it - the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action.

This stimulating collection of essays in an autobiographical framework encompasses Gerda Lerner's theoretical writing and her organizational work in transforming the history profession and in establishing Women's History as a mainstream field.

Is it possible to be both a Catholic and a feminist? Claire Swinarski, writer and creator of The Catholic Feminist podcast, believes it is: "I'm a feminist for the same reason I'm bold and honest and sometimes ragey: because Jesus was all of those things." In Girl, Arise!, Swinarski reconciles the two identities by demonstrating the strength and abilities women have to share with the Body of Christ, the importance of women throughout the history of the faith, and how the love you experience through Christ and the Church can change you and the world around you.