Book Discussion Group
Wednesdays, 7:00-8:15pm, Zoom
These gatherings are a connective time to engage books and one another on various spiritual topics. Our goal is to support one another as we each discover and express God’s Love.
Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made
By Kristin Kobes Du Mez
“From the New York Times best-selling author of Jesus and John Wayne, a revelatory history of white Christian womanhood in the United States.
In Jesus and John Wayne, a book that has changed how countless Americans understand their faith, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez showed how evangelicals made Jesus into an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. Now she unearths the roots of the glittering, Instagram-ready culture of white Christian femininity.
Opening in the late nineteenth century, Live Laugh Love traces how New Thought, a movement that championed the power of the mind to shape reality, combined with holiness evangelicalism to create the world inhabited by millions of Christian women. Du Mez introduces us to religious innovators who taught that positivity was the secret to spiritual and material success and reveals how they worked through consumer culture: mommy blogs and romance novels, Hobby Lobby aisles and pastel-scripted wall art. Marketed as empowerment, these products and slogans elevate vulnerability and domesticity, and in the process draw women into systems prone to manipulation and abuse. In this brilliant recasting of modern American Christianity, Du Mez unearths the hidden origins of our reactionary moment.
Meeting ID: 886 2715 7442 Passcode: 845069
Tentative Reading Schedule:
Oct 21 // Introduction & Ch 1 (“The Secret”) // pp 1-33
Oct 28 // Ch 2 (“Believe and Want”) & Ch 3 (“God-Control”) // pp 34-65
Nov 4 // Ch 4 (“Different Sides of the Same Street) & Ch 5 (“Cinderella’s Rags”) // pp 66-111
Nov 11 // Ch 6 (“It Is You Who Have Failed”) & Ch 7 (“Love and Obey”) // pp 112-159
Nov 18 // Ch 8 (“Selling America”) & Ch 9 (“Root, Hog, or Die”) // pp 160-205
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Dec 2 // Ch 10 (“Like a Virgin”) & Ch 11 (“Holy Crap”) // pp 206-255
Dec 9 // Ch 12 (“Kill the Darlings”) & Ch 13 (“Lipstick on Pit Bulls”) // pp 259-315
Dec 16 // Conclusion (“Live Laugh Lie”) // pp 316-336
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Matthew Fox’s Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson’s All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
Amy Kenny’s My Body is Not a Prayer Request
Cherice Bock’s A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends
Brian McLaren’s Should I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned
Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe
Joan Chittister’s The Time is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage
Phuc Luu’s Jesus of the East: Reclaiming the Gospel for the Wounded
Walter Brueggemann’s Materiality as Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World
Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ
Melissa Florer-Bixler’s How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger & the Work of Peace
Kaitlin Curtice’s Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God
Marcelle Martin’s Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey
Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others