Seven Years Seven Ways

Terra Trevor (Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) sought healing and found belonging. After a difficult loss, Native women elders embraced and guided her over three decades, lifting her from grief and showing her how to age from youth into beauty.

In Seven Ways to Change the World, Jim Wallis argues that politics has failed to solve the biggest issues of our time: extreme and needless poverty, global warming and environmental degradation, terrorism and the endless cycle of violence, racism, human trafficking, health and education, respect for human life and the crisis in families and parenting. Whatever happened to the 'common good'? Writing out of a US context but applicable to the wider world, Wallis helps us rediscover our moral centre and infuses us with the inspiration and passion we need to chart a new course and build the kind of movements that change politics.

This practical guide to policing reform presents a call to action to address a threefold crisis in policing – a catastrophic loss of trust between police and the communities they serve; a sharp increase in violent crime after decades of decline; and a serious recruitment and retention challenge depleting police departments across the United States. The authors also recognize that, while these issues are now top of mind, policing needs far-reaching reform in order to respond to changes in society and its expectations, changes in crime and other threats to public safety, new technologies, and developments in best practice. Most reform to date has been piecemeal, as the book describes. The time has come to take a comprehensive look at every aspect of policing.

This philosophical inquiry into the problem of human suffering is “insightful, informative and deeply humane . . . a genuine pleasure to read” (Times Higher Education). Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition—which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable throughout the centuries: Why? In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson tackles this fundamental question. To do so, he travels through the history of philosophy and religion, while attending closely to the world we live in. Samuelson draws insight from sources that range from Confucius to Bugs Bunny, and from his time teaching philosophy to prisoners to Hannah Arendt’s attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust. Samuelson guides us through various attempts to explain why we suffer, explores the many ways we try to minimize or eliminate suffering, and examines people’s approaches to living with pointless suffering. Ultimately, Samuelson shows, to be fully human means to acknowledge a mysterious paradox: we must simultaneously accept suffering and oppose it. And understanding that is itself a step towards acceptance.