Events

Our September read is Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. From Amazon:

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

We will be sending out the llink to our Zoom Page Turners meet-up the week before we meet on Monday, September 28th at 6:30 pm.

SO, YOU'RE WONDERING: "WHAT IS A CEREBRATION?"

Well, it's an enjoyable, social activity like a "celebration" in which we use our the front part of our brain - the "cerebrum" - to develop and share our thoughts, perspectives and insights on chapters of a short contemporary spiritual work.

ABOUT THE BOOK

From Amazon: If gratitude is good, why is it so hard to do? In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass untangles our conflicting understandings of gratitude and sets the table for a renewed practice of giving thanks.

We know that gratitude is good, but many of us find it hard to sustain a meaningful life of gratefulness. Four out of five Americans report feeling gratitude on a regular basis, but those private feelings seem disconnected from larger concerns of our public lives. In Grateful, cultural observer and theologian Diana Butler Bass takes on this “gratitude gap” and offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude.

Bass, author of the award-winning Grounded and ten other books on spirituality and culture, explores the transformative, subversive power of gratitude for our personal lives and in communities. Using her trademark blend of historical research, spiritual insights, and timely cultural observation, she shows how we can overcome this gap and make change in our own lives and in the world.

With honest stories and heartrending examples from history and her own life, Bass reclaims gratitude as a path to greater connection with god, with others, with the world, and even with our own souls. It’s time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude—the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.

HOW IT WORKS

We will be reading, thinking about and sharing our thoughts on one chapter per week for 8 weeks.

The sessions will run each Tuesday from October 6th through November 24th. You don't need to attend each session to Cerebrate!

The first Cerebration is will be on Tuesday, October 6 at 6:30 pm. Please read the Prologue: Confession, No Thanks and Chapter 1: Feeling Grateful prior to our first meet-up.

People who register for this Cerebration will receive a Zoom link prior to the first meeting.