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Dear Church
Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors. Formerly incarcerated, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make all the headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work--drawing a direct line between the church's lack of diversity and the church's lack of vitality. The problems the ELCA faces are theological, not sociological. But so are the answers. Part manifesto, part confession, and all love letter, Dear Church offers a bold new vision for the future of Duncan's denomination and the broader mainline Christian community of faith. Dear Church rejects th...
United States of Grace
"This lyrical testament to life as 'a blind date with mercy' will challenge and inspire."--Publishers Weekly [Starred Review] In 1991, when he was 13 years old, Lenny Duncan stepped out of his house in West Philadelphia, walked to the Greyhound station, and bought a ticket--the start of his great American adventure. Today Duncan, who inspired and challenged audiences with his breakout first book, Dear Church, brings us a deeply personal story about growing up Black and queer in the U.S. In his characteristically powerful voice he recounts hitchhiking across the country, spending time in solitary confinement, battling for sobriety, and discovering a deep faith, examining pressing issues like poverty, mass incarceration, white supremacy, and LGBTQ inclusion through an intimate portrayal of his life's struggles and joys. United States of Grace is a love story about America, revealing the joy and resilience of those places in this country many call "the margins" but that Lenny Duncan has called home. This book makes the bold claim that God is present with us in the most difficult of circumstances, bringing life out of death.
Dialogues on
"Race and racism are so prevalent in US culture, that few stop to reflect upon what race is, why it was created, and how deeply ingrained race has become in American Christianity. It has left American churches segregated in the pews and divided in faith. Can this damage be repaired? Dialogues on race explores that very question. With seven essays from leading Christian thinkers, Dialogues on race asks penetrating questions about how the church in the US got to this point, and how, or if, white supremacy can be expelled from American Christianity. Dialogues On is an adult small group resource that encourages honest talk about difficult topics. In a time when so many conversations end in conflict, these resources equip readers to share their ideas, listen well, learn from other viewpoints, and develop action plans to bring hope and healing out of the church and into the world." -- Back cover.
Baptized in Tear Gas
For years Elle Dowd considered herself an advocate for justice, but her well-meaning support always took a back burner to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the tension-free, ordered "negative peace" of white moderates. Then Michael Brown, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Uprising changed everything. In Baptized in Tear Gas, minister and activist Elle Dowd tells the gripping story of her transformation into an Assata Shakur-reading, courthouse-occupying abolitionist with an arrest record, hungry for the revolution. Thanks to deep relationships with people in Ferguson and St. Louis, and to experiencing a fraction of the system for h...
Sanctuary
“Through the pages of this book, I invite you into various spaces of sanctuary—not as places of retreat, but for the deepened resistance, vision, and transformation that these days, and the gospel, require.” Throughout her nearly forty years in ministry, Heidi Neumark has strived to make communities of faith into sanctuaries amid the turmoils of life. Now, with the social and political upheaval of the years since Donald Trump was elected president, Neumark believes the true Christian calling is to live out a counterpoint to today’s prevailing spirits of exclusion and hatred. Using her own bilingual, multicultural congregation as a model, she moves through the seasons of the church ca...
The Guv'nor
THIS IS THE CLASSIC BOOK THAT STARTED AN ENTIRE GENRE – THE STORY OF THE MOST ICONIC HARDMAN OF THEM ALL. Lenny McLean was one of the deadliest bareknuckle fighters Britain has ever seen. He had dear, powerful friends, but he also had terrible enemies. So much so that he had two bullet wounds in his back – each from a different attack. He was also stabbed repeatedly – always from behind. But Lenny was also a warm, big-hearted grizzly bear of a man, whose main weakness was an overwhelming desire to put the welfare of his mates ahead of his own well-being. In his extraordinary autobiography, he tells of how the mafia flew him to New York to take on their greatest bareknuckle boxer in a m...
Dear Revolutionaries
When Lenny Duncan wrote Dear Church in 2018, they had a vision for a church that could and would reform itself into something new. After four years, a pandemic, a global uprising for racial equity, and what Duncan describes as "the death of the republic" on January 6, 2021, we now live in a vastly different landscape than the one Duncan wrote about previously. Lenny now contends that we no longer need a reformation--we need a revolution. Dear Revolutionaries is a handbook for a new generation that sees, clear-eyed, the series of catastrophes we have inherited, the road that lies ahead, and the improbability of victory, yet are still ready to build the tomorrow we so desperately want to be bo...
The Rebel Café
Subterranean nightspots in 1950s New York and San Francisco were social, cultural, and political hothouses for left-wing bohemians. The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife—from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians—have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Café, Stephen R. Duncan flips the frame, focusing on the New York and San Francisco bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses from which these cultural icons emerged. Duncan shows that the sexy, smoky sites of bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach offered not just entertainment but doorways to a new sociopolitical consciousness. This book is a collective biography of ...
Juliet the Maniac
"For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Juliet the Maniac is a worthy new entry in that pantheon of deconstruction... Dazzling."—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW This portrait of a young teenager's fight toward understanding and recovering from mental illness is shockingly honest, funny, and heartfelt. Ambitious, talented fourteen-year-old honors student Juliet is poised for success at her Southern California high school. However, she soon finds herself in an increasingly frightening spiral of drug use, self-harm, and mental illness that lands her in a remote therapeutic boarding school, where she must ultimately find the inner strength to survive. A highly anticipated debut—from a writer hailed as "a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion" (Dazed)—that brilliantly captures the intimate triumph of a girl's struggle to become the woman she knows she can be.
Friendship Leadership
No one can deny that friendships are powerful relationships of influence. Why not strategically incorporate friendship within a philosophy of leadership? People long for relational models of leadership, yet few specific methodologies have been developed. This book examines the friendship of God with humanity, and the leadership of Jesus with his disciples, to whom he declared, "I no longer call you servants . . . Instead, I have called you friends" (John 15:15). In response to this enduring example of the Divine bringing together both friendship and leadership, this book presents an unexplored model of leadership for the Christian practitioner: Friendship Leadership. The authors of Friendshi...
