Welcome to the SSUC Library page. Please visit the library in the main floor lounge of our building, browse the shelves, grab a cup of coffee and settle in for a read, or borrow a book and bring it back when you’re done. Would you like to browse the catalogue from home? See the Title catalogue here; the Author catalogue here; and the Reference books catalogue here. In the meantime, get introduced to a new book: read a preview of a featured book every two weeks, written by our librarians. Enjoy
Experiencing Cabin Fever?
Introducing the SSUC Library’s collection
“No doubt cabin fever is having its way with me,” Mark Athitakis allows, this in his account of his recent visit to a Goodwill outlet. Not to buy second-hand clothes, mind you, but simply to peruse its used-book shelves. “My local independent bookstore was shuttered, but my local Goodwill was open,” he explained, this in a story for The Washington Post, which the Edmonton Journal carried in its July 11 edition: “Shelf life: there’s no match to browsing in a bookstore”. Works by this Phoenix-based freelance writer, editor, author, and critic appear often in The Post.
“…as weeks of quarantine have dragged on, I’ve wanted a browsing experience,” he confesses. Even so, “A Goodwill isn’t my preferred browsing experience, but any shelf of books, besides my own, would be a balm,” he reasoned. Yes, it “felt chancy to do what I did, [but this was] one of the things I most missed doing during quarantine: go into a store, and browse bookshelves.” He believes that, “The COVID-19/Zoom era has made bookshelf snoops of all of us.”
Now it is that in his Goodwill he came upon “programming manuals, Mormon doctrine, math textbooks, dog-eared classics, stacks of Tom Clancy and Stephen King.” Which was just “fine” by him: as Athitakis has it, “Shuttered bookstores are a reminder of how much of our reading lives is a process of discovery. …Many of the books I love most and recommend most fervently were books I stumbled upon. …We find our favourite books in the same way we often find our closest friends—brought together by circumstances that are unexpected….”
Books found in unexpected circumstances, eh? Books stumbled upon, really? A process of discovery, no kidding? If all that can happen in bookshops, even Goodwill stores, it sure can, and does happen in libraries. Including ours. Maybe especially in ours. Certainly for seekers, the works to be found in the SSUC Library can be soul-satisfying: come on Thursday, between 10 and 1, and see for yourself.
The collection—of about 600 books, of ideas—explores religion, church, spirituality, theology, faith, doubt, values, beliefs, Jesus, God and gods, and all such things. These are writings to be pored over and pondered, weighed and wondered about. And valued.
The classics are present and accounted for, everything from The Confessions of St. Augustine to Martin Buber’s I and Thou. There are works written by such luminaries as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Northrop Frye, Abraham Heschel, Albert Schweitzer, Paul Tillich, and Simone Weil. Others will acquaint you with such great church figures as John Wesley and Hildegard of Bingen. There are plays—The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel, and Lucas Hnath’s The Christians. Progressive Christianity pioneers like Jack Spong and Lloyd Geering penned still other of the volumes. Consider Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, but also Richard Dawkins’ refutation in The God Delusion.
On the shelves you’ll come upon the Iona Abbey Worship Book, Bible atlases, an eco-foods guide, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, self-help books, including lots on loss and grieving by the likes of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, even Nancy Steeves’ doctoral thesis. There’s fiction, too: challenge yourself and read Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, and Putting Away Childish Things, the novel that, as one reviewer put it, “flows out of Marcus Borg’s life.” There are books about the Earth Charter, LGBTQ concerns, the Dead Sea Scrolls, fundamentalism, myths and mythology, bullying, preaching, sexism, the labyrinth, mid-life crises, evolution, Christmas, human rights and humanism, feminist theology, Buddha, Islam, justice, the parables, prayer, Christian ethics, Celtic wisdom, parenting, sin, eternal life, shamanism. Whoa, catch you breath.
Discover The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot; read how Jesus became Christian, and also God; see why No Man is an Island; explore The World of Anne Frank; join in The Battle for God, or play Hide and Seek with God, or go along with SSUC’s Clair Woodbury Looking for God; go In Search of Paul; learn how to love nature; spend The Last Week with Jesus; get acquainted with the Middle East; ask, Can We Trust the New Testament?; ask also The Great Questions of Life; meet The Pagan Christ; find faith, peace, the right words, your way home, and your religion. Why, You Can Teach Yourself Philosophy of Religion. And this litany of authors, titles, and topics, only scratches the surface!
Along with handfuls of DVDs and videos, all this is waiting to be browsed and borrowed; what’s not to be circulated are the slim number of reference works. The collection is housed in bookcases in SSUC’s Library & Lounge—it’s the inviting room off the foyer, on the right as you enter the church. Everything has been ordered and shelved, arranged by author, from A (Abbott, Deborah) to Z (Zuckerman, Andrew).
Book-borrowing has been made as easy as can be: you’ll find lists, both by author and title, in a binder atop the first of the bookcases; as well, these can be accessed on the Library’s webpage (ssucedmonton.com/library), so you can pick and choose what you’ll want right from home. Simply sign out the books using the in-and-out form—it’s in the same binder; later on, please be sure to note on the form the date you return the items you’ll have borrowed, and place them in the basket atop the second bookcase. It’s pretty much grab and go!
So, please, get going!
Ellen & Ken Fredrick
Featured Book: On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old
A while ago, Parker Palmer’s On the Brink of Everything served as the focus of an adult study at SSUC. With reason. According to infed.org, Palmer has “touched many people through his work. In that old Quaker phrase, he has been able to speak to their condition.” In his book, the “religious educator in a broad sense,” as Biola University calls him, reflected on
Featured Book: Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
“Hello, I’m Barbara Brown Taylor. I say things you’re not supposed to say.” It’s with these words that the “spiritual contrarian” [her words] welcomes you to her website. And one of the things she wasn’t supposed to say is “goodbye” to ministry. She recounts her breakout—an “often-painful, if ultimately redemptive, journey away from pastoring,” according to Religious News Service—in her
Featured Book: God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time
“God says to you, ‘I have a dream. Please help me to realize it.’” In these few words, Archbishop Desmond Tutu invites the reader of his 2004 book to take up the “deceptively simple challenges,” as enotes.com puts it, “based on the the notion that all people have a role to play in the realization of God’s ‘dream’.” And what that is, in the words
Library Learnings: “No Word Does God Justice”
In early summer, Deutsche Welle’s Christoph Strack—DW is Germany’s international broadcaster—riddled the massive decline in 2019 in membership in both Protestant and Catholic churches in his nation: over half a million Germans “turned their back on organized religion.” In that one year alone! He concluded his treatise urging, “…society needs to reflect on religion, and on that which so many people call God.” Let’s. And let’s
Featured Book: Eighteen Takes on God: A Short Guide for Those Who Are Still Perplexed
“…our ideas of God are formed in one way or another from our human experience,” Leslie Stevenson affirms, “as all our ideas about anything surely are….” This philosopher, who taught for 32 years at St. Andrews University—he now serves both as honorary reader in philosophy and honorary Quaker chaplain at this famous Scottish school—introduces in this succinct and lively new-in-2020 book
Featured Book: Fishing Tips: How Curiosity Transformed a Community of Faith
“Hillhurst has become a poster child for congregational renewal in The United Church of Canada,” editor David Wilson wrote in The United Church Observer in 2015. “…Pentland clearly has good intentions, but…good intentions can go awry, especially when they are not tempered by the qualities of Christian humility…,” UCC minister-turned-Anglican priest Jeff Seaton demurred in his 2018 book, Who’s Minding the Store? The United Church
Featured Book: Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner
“Maybe once a generation, or once every few generations, someone is born with gifts literary and sacred in equal measure.” Frederick Buechner [pronounced Beek-ner] is such a person, the Chicago Tribune goes on to insist in its critique of Buechner 101, pointing up “the depth and breadth of this rare thinker’s gifts.” Now 93, this ordained Presbyterian minister is a theologian who’s authored over three
Featured Book: Reimagining God: The Faith Journey of a Modern Heretic
Lloyd Geering is remarkable…and not just because he’s 102 years old. A free-thinker, humanist, and existentialist, Sir Lloyd is New Zealand’s best-known and most controversial commentator on theological issues. The author of dozens of books—his A Time to Speak was published just last year—this ordained Presbyterian minister is emeritus professor of religious studies at Wellington’s Victoria University. In 1967, he was
Featured Book: The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be Christian
In book after book, Brian McLaren has shown himself moving from “his native fundamentalism toward becoming a ‘hopeful pilgrim moving forward in the journey of faith’,” Jack Heppner writes on mysteinbach.ca. Too far!, cries Patty Houser in “Misguided Migration,” her Christian Research Institute review of our featured book: “The truth is, what McLaren really is asking his readers to do” is subscribe to his
Featured Book: Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
Renovare has it that, when Henri Nouwen “was asked by a secular Jewish friend to explain his faith in simple language, he responded with his greatest legacy, Life of the Beloved, which shows that all people, believers and nonbelievers, are beloved by God unconditionally.” The stretching blogspot adds, “The book is written as a very personal letter to a dear friend.” A Dutch Catholic priest and celebrated spiritual
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