Ted Turnau introduces readers to the major themes of his in-depth Oasis of Imagination by collaborating with Ruth Naomi Floyd. Floyd brings her distinctive experience as a Christian artist to make this a practical guide that distils the "why" and "how" of embracing Christian creative cultural engagement. Why does the church need to pay more attention to the imagination? How can we, in this day and age, best enter our cultural conversations for the common good? How can the local church better support its creatives, enriching its own imaginative life and building bridges to their neighbours and the wider culture? Whether you are a Christian artist or creative yourself, or an everyday Christian searching for a path beyond the culture wars and Christian bubble, Imagination Manifesto will give you biblical foundations, practical pointers, discussion starters, and inspiration for "planting oases" in today's culture.

Elegant and audacious possibilities that push the boundaries of contemporary environmentalism

Bring more fun, unity, and love to your household through creative activities the whole family will enjoy—featuring ideas for imaginative play, arts and crafts, nature explorations, and more Embrace family life with creativity at its heart. The Creative Family Manifesto is a guide to using the simple tools around you—your imagination, basic art supplies, household objects, and natural materials—to relax, play, and grow together as a family. When you learn to awaken your family’s creativity, wonderful things will happen: you’ll make meaningful connections with your children, your children’s imaginations will flourish, and you’ll learn to express love and gratitude for each other. This book is just what you need to get started. Amanda Soule has charmed many with her tales of creativity and parenting on her blog, SouleMama. Here she shares ideas and projects with the same warm tone and down-to-earth voice. Perfect for all families, the wide range of projects presented here offers ideas for imaginative play, art and crafts, nature explorations, and family celebrations. Released on its ten-year anniversary, this revised and updated edition of The Creative Family, carries on Amanda Soule’s thoughtful perspectives on parenting.

“Big ideas that just might save the world”—The Guardian The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it. In these times of deep division and deeper despair, if there is a consensus about anything in the world, it is that the future is going to be awful. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety, a mental health crisis of vast proportions, especially among young people. There’s a rise in extremist movements and governments. Catastrophic climate change. Biodiversity loss. Food insecurity. The fracturing of ecosystems and communities beyond, it seems, repair. The future—to say nothing of the present—looks grim. But as Transition movement cofounder Rob Hopkins tells us, there is plenty of evidence that things can change, and cultures can change, rapidly, dramatically, and unexpectedly—for the better. He has seen it happen around the world and in his own town of Totnes, England, where the community is becoming its own housing developer, energy company, enterprise incubator, and local food network—with cascading benefits to the community that extend far beyond the projects themselves. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish. From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.

"An instant classic." —Arianna Huffington "Will inspire people from across the political spectrum." —Jonathan Haidt Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, an essential shortlist of leadership ideas for everyone who wants to do good in this world, from Jacqueline Novogratz, author of the New York Times bestseller The Blue Sweater and founder and CEO of Acumen. In 2001, when Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a global community of socially and environmentally responsible partners dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty, few had heard of impact investing—Acumen’s practice of “doing well by doing good.” Nineteen years later, there’s been a seismic shift in how corporate boards and other stakeholders evaluate businesses: impact investment is not only morally defensible but now also economically advantageous, even necessary. Still, it isn’t easy to reach a success that includes profits as well as mutually favorable relationships with workers and the communities in which they live. So how can today’s leaders, who often kick off their enterprises with high hopes and short timetables, navigate the challenges of poverty and war, of egos and impatience, which have stymied generations of investors who came before? Drawing on inspiring stories from change-makers around the world and on memories of her own most difficult experiences, Jacqueline divulges the most common leadership mistakes and the mind-sets needed to rise above them. The culmination of thirty years of work developing sustainable solutions for the problems of the poor, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution offers the perspectives necessary for all those—whether ascending the corporate ladder or bringing solar light to rural villages—who seek to leave this world better off than they found it.

When you learn to awaken your family’s creativity, wonderful things will happen: you’ll make meaningful connections with your children in large and small ways; your children will more often engage in their own creative discoveries; and your family will embrace new ways to relax, play, and grow together. With just the simple tools around you—your imagination, basic art supplies, household objects, and natural materials—you can transform your family life, and have so much more fun! Amanda Soule has charmed many with her tales of creativity and parenting on her blog, SouleMama. Here she shares ideas and projects with the same warm tone and down-to-earth voice. Perfect for all families, the wide range of projects presented here offers ideas for imaginative play, art and crafts, nature explorations, and family celebrations. This book embraces a whole new way of living that will engage your children’s imagination, celebrate their achievements, and help you to express love and gratitude for each other as a family.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com

Drawing on the collaborative expertise of three senior scholars, The Journalism Manifesto makes a powerful case for why journalism has become outdated and why it is in need of a long-overdue transformation. Focusing on the relevance of elites, norms and audiences, Zelizer, Boczkowski and Anderson reveal how these previously integral components of journalism have become outdated: Elites, the sources from which journalists draw much of their information and around whom they orient their coverage, have become dysfunctional; The relevance of norms, the cues by which journalists do newswork, has eroded so fundamentally that journalists are repeatedly entrenching themselves as negligible and out of sync; and because audiences have shattered beyond recognition, the correspondence between what journalists think of as news and what audiences care about can no longer be assumed. This authoritative manifesto argues that journalism has become decoupled from the dynamics of everyday life in contemporary society and outlines pathways for fixing this essential institution of democracy. It is a must-read for students, scholars and activists in the fields of journalism, media, policy, and political communication.

From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and rising rates of HIV to opposition to marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Antagonism toward reproductive freedom, partner rights, and transgender rights has revealed a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality. In A Dirty South Manifesto, L. H. Stallings celebrates the roots of radical sexual resistance in the New South—a movement that is antiracist, decolonial, and transnational. For people within economically disenfranchised segments of society, those in sexually marginalized communities, and the racially oppressed, the South has been a sexual dystopia. Throughout this book, Stallings delivers hard-hitting manifestos for the new sex wars. With her focus on contemporary Black southern life, Stallings offers an invitation to anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from leading experts. It showcases a rich and detailed analysis on how the imagination is understood across several disciplines of study, including anthropology, archaeology, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. An integrated theoretical-empirical-applied picture of the field is presented, which stands to inform researchers, students, and practitioners about the issues of relevance across the board when considering the imagination. With each chapter, the nature of human imagination is examined - what it entails, how it evolved, and why it singularly defines us as a species.