By Joe Mancini
Published December 2024
This issue’s collection of books point in new directions. The Working Centre is bridging two gaps between a homelessness crisis and climate change. The depth of homelessness was made real by The Working Centre naming over 900 people who are homeless. Each day we see in the news scathing hot temperatures, swaths of forests burning and villages washed away by surging water.
The book section can be divided in two. The first group is about The Primacy of Love. We cannot understand and respond to homelessness unless we deeply understand the meaning of love. Ilia Delio, paraphrasing Jesus, “one cannot live on reason alone but on every act of love that flows through the human heart into the heart of the world.” When you read Helen Davies’ The Rose Bird, a loving account of her daughters’ fall into a fentanyl addiction on the Kitchener streets, your heart cannot fail but to be moved. Sam Quinone’s The Least of Us, dissects the opioid epidemic by looking at the culture of pills and drugs, of our wider addictions to things no less dangerous, and he reminds us of how our work culture has broken down. He also points to actions for recovery. In Tattoos of the Heart, Fr. Gregory Boyle, describes the essence of the Homeboy community he founded with radical kindness and compassion as the answer to every question. This of course is the message of Transition to Common Work.
The second grouping is a model of thinking called Interdependence that responds to both homelessness and climate change. The Light Eaters and Entangled Life are two books that change how we think the world works. The viewpoint is from two different perspectives – one from a journalist, the other from a scientist, both looking at the mind boggling biological creativity of plants and fungi, a world of ingenious communication and interconnectivity that us humans barely understand. Both authors implore the reader to develop the same creativity for how we share the world. All We Can Save is designed to show the renaissance in the climate movement led by women who model compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration as the change we need to live. Come Have Breakfast reinterprets the Bible by giving equal standing to the whole biological world, as it is integral to our Common Home. Finally IntraConnected helps the reader to see our identity as a verb, a dynamic flow of energy in and through the world around us.
Radical kindness and intraconnected wholeness are new emergent ways of thinking that lead us to see, with joy, the complex pathways from which new regenerative practices grow.
