Embracing Refuge

Not your usual space opera, A Place of Refuge features badass lesbians in space, the kindness of strangers, banter, close-knit friends, found family, trauma recovery, and lots of delicious food. Is it too late for a cynical super soldier to right the wrongs in her past? Enhanced soldier Faigin Balfour defected from a fascist military to the revolution. Once the deadliest of warriors, now she fights to settle into a peaceful life on the utopian planet Refuge. Her two closest friends, Talia and Miki, are there to help, and have invited Faigin to join their loving bond for a peace they can all share. Faigin’s not a romantic, but she still craves the intimacy they offer. That’s something she’s willing to work on. For her, though, love is not enough. She needs to contribute something of herself to the planet that saved all their lives, to pay back some good for the harm she caused. She needs a mission. Refuge has no need for killers, so how can she find value, now, in the technological augmentations that changed her body and shaped her life? She’ll need to confront her past as child soldier and lethal guerilla, and ponder what actions she can take in the present to uphold life instead of death. Can a killer become worthy of utopia? Keywords: women loving women, lesfic, non-binary people, polyamory, polycules, misfits, outsiders, oddballs, found family, trauma recovery, telepaths, decolonization, speculative utopia, fighting fascism, anti-fascism, queer fiction, queer utopia, LGBTQIA+ fiction, far future sf, BAMF women, lovers reunited, friends to lovers, lesbian romance, lesbian science fiction, lesbian sci-fi, sci-fi romance, science fiction romance, after the war, artificial intelligence, cute robots, very large dogs, therapy, pastry, enhanced humans, cyborgs, augmented humans

The global crisis of forced displacement is growing every year. At the same time, Western Christians' sympathy toward refugees is increasingly overshadowed by concerns about personal and national security, economics, and culture. We urgently need a perspective that understands both Scripture and current political realities and that can be applied at the levels of the church, the nation, and the globe. In Refuge Reimagined, Mark R. Glanville and Luke Glanville offer a new approach to compassion for displaced people: a biblical ethic of kinship. God's people, they argue, are consistently called to extend kinship—a mutual responsibility and solidarity—to those who are marginalized and without a home. Drawing on their respective expertise in Old Testament studies and international relations, the two brothers engage a range of disciplines to demonstrate how this ethic is consistently conveyed throughout the Bible and can be practically embodied today. Glanville and Glanville apply the kinship ethic to issues such as the current mission of the church, national identity and sovereignty, and possibilities for a cooperative global response to the refugee crisis. Challenging the fear-based ethic that often motivates Christian approaches, they envision a more generous, creative, and hopeful way forward. Refuge Reimagined will equip students, activists, and anyone interested in refugee issues to understand the biblical model for communities and how it can transform our world.

Not your usual space opera, the cozy A Place of Refuge features badass lesbians in space, the kindness of strangers, banter, close-knit friends, found family, trauma recovery, and lots of delicious food. They lost the revolution. But then, they found sanctuary—and hope. Telepathic warrior Talia Avi, genius engineer Miki Boudreaux, and augmented soldier Faigin Balfour fought the fascist Federated Colonies for ten years, following the charismatic dissenter Jon Churchill. Then Jon disappeared, Talia was thought dead, and Miki and Faigin struggled to take Jon’s place and stay alive. When the FC is unexpectedly upended, Talia is reunited with her dearest friends and they find sanctuary on the isolated planet Refuge. The trio of former guerillas strive to recover from lifetimes of trauma by building new lives and forging intimate connections with each other. This omnibus edition of Finding Refuge, Accepting Refuge, and Embracing Refuge also includes a Refuge glossary and character list, plus the short story “A Day in the Life: Jefri Dantagnan.” Keywords: women loving women, lesfic, non-binary people, polyamory, polycules, misfits, outsiders, oddballs, found family, trauma recovery, telepaths, decolonization, speculative utopia, fighting fascism, anti-fascism, queer fiction, queer utopia, LGBTQIA fiction, far future sf, BAMF women, lovers reunited, friends to lovers, lesbian romance, lesbian science fiction, lesbian sci-fi, sci-fi romance, science fiction romance, after the war, artificial intelligence, cute robots, very large dogs, therapy, pastry, enhanced humans, cyborgs, augmented humans

On the eve of the American Revolution, the refugee was, according to British tradition, a Protestant who sought shelter from continental persecution. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, British refuge would be celebrated internationally as being open to all persecuted foreigners. Britain had become a haven for fugitives as diverse as Karl Marx and Louis Napoleon, Simón Bolívar and Frederick Douglass. How and why did the refugee category expand? How, in a period when no law forbade foreigners entry to Britain, did the refugee emerge as a category for humanitarian and political action? Why did the plight of these particular foreigners become such a characteristically British concern? Current understandings about the origins of refuge have focused on the period after 1914. Britannia's Embrace offers the first historical analysis of the origins of this modern humanitarian norm in the long nineteenth century. At a time when Britons were reshaping their own political culture, this charitable endeavor became constitutive of what it meant to be liberal on the global stage. Like British anti-slavery, its sister movement, campaigning on behalf of foreign refugees seemed to give purpose to the growing empire and the resources of empire gave it greater strength. By the dawn of the twentieth century, British efforts on behalf of persecuted foreigners declined precipitously, but its legacies in law and in modern humanitarian politics would be long-lasting. In telling this story, Britannia's Embrace puts refugee relief front and center in histories of human rights and international law and of studies of Britain in the world. In so doing, it describes the dynamic relationship between law, resources, and moral storytelling that remains critical to humanitarianism today.

On the eve of the American Revolution, the refugee was, according to British tradition, a Protestant who sought shelter from continental persecution. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, British refuge would be celebrated internationally as being open to all persecuted foreigners. Britain had become a haven for fugitives as diverse as Karl Marx and Louis Napoleon, Simón Bolívar and Frederick Douglass. How and why did the refugee category expand? How, in a period when no law forbade foreigners entry to Britain, did the refugee emerge as a category for humanitarian and political action? Why did the plight of these particular foreigners become such a characteristically British concern? Current understandings about the origins of refuge have focused on the period after 1914. Britannia's Embrace offers the first historical analysis of the origins of this modern humanitarian norm in the long nineteenth century. At a time when Britons were reshaping their own political culture, this charitable endeavor became constitutive of what it meant to be liberal on the global stage. Like British anti-slavery, its sister movement, campaigning on behalf of foreign refugees seemed to give purpose to the growing empire and the resources of empire gave it greater strength. By the dawn of the twentieth century, British efforts on behalf of persecuted foreigners declined precipitously, but its legacies in law and in modern humanitarian politics would be long-lasting. In telling this story, Britannia's Embrace puts refugee relief front and center in histories of human rights and international law and of studies of Britain in the world. In so doing, it describes the dynamic relationship between law, resources, and moral storytelling that remains critical to humanitarianism today.

Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world. In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity. In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher Michelle Cassandra Johnson offers those who feel brokenhearted, helpless, confused, powerless, and desperate the tools they need to be present with their grief while also remaining openhearted. Through powerful personal narrative and meditation and journaling practices at the end of each chapter that explore being present with your heart, Michelle empowers us to see that each of us has a role to play in building enough momentum to take intentional action and shift what is unsettled and unjust in the world. Finding Refuge is an invitation to pick up the shattered parts of yourself and remember your strength, wholeness, and sacredness through this practice of presence and attending to your grief.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.