Jews seeking a new life in Canada faced problems beyond those of other immigrants. Farm colonists often lived in communities too small to afford a rabbi or ritual slaughterer, or even to form a minyan for worship. In French Canada, Protestant and Catholic school boards battled over who was responsible for educating Jewish children. In the cities, the socialist philosophies of Jews fleeing the poverty and oppression of Europe were anathema to aggressive New World capitalists. And when suspicion or resentment arose, there was always someone to revive the old antisemitic slurs and myths. Taking Root is the meticulously researched record of how Canadian Jewry coped with these obstacles, and flourished despite them. The book covers the 160 years from the beginnings of the community in the 1760s to the end of the First World War, including the great European upheavals that forever changed the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe and their migration to Canada. Canada's Jews took root in a nation with a distinctive history, political structure, and cultural diversity Gerald Tulchinsky weaves the threads of Canadian Jewish history into the wider Canadian fabric, and shows how the unique character of this history reflects the political, economic, and social development of the country. Drawing on letters, synagogue records, diaries, newspapers, and biographies, as well as a host of archival sources, Tulchinsky makes Taking Root not just a historical account, but a very personal one.

Human rights organizations have grown exponentially across the globe, particularly in the global South, and the term human rights is now common parlance among politicians and civil society activists. While debates about human rights are waged in elite circles, what do publics in the global South think about human rights ideas and the organizations that promote them? Drawing on large-scale public opinion surveys and interviews with human rights practitioners in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria, Taking Root finds that most people are in fact broadly supportive of human rights discourse, trust local human rights groups, and do not view human rights as a tool of foreign powers. However, this general public support isn't grounded in strong commitments of public engagement, money, or local ties to the human rights sector. Publics in the global South do donate to charitable causes and organizations but rarely give to local rights groups, and these organizations must instead seek aid from foreign sources. As the most informative and comprehensive account of public perceptions of human rights available across several regions of the world, Taking Root challenges a number of accepted truths held by human rights supporters and skeptics alike.

This anthology is a catalog of seeds—the work of a network of young writers and mentors, each cultivating a shimmering, emergent voice. For the past two years, New York City high school students have weathered an adolescence shaped by an ongoing global pandemic. Throughout it all, they have found new ways to build community and take root. Roots allow for living beings to journey into our past and forward into the future, toward and away from home, and enable us to withstand the storms that invariably pass through. In short stories, personal essays, poetry, and more, the students reflect on endurance, change, and growth. For twenty-five years, Girls Write Now has been amplifying transformative stories that break down the barriers of gender, race, age and poverty. In addition to being the first writing and mentoring organization of its kind, Girls Write Now continually ranks among the top programs nationwide for driving social-emotional growth for youth. The nationally award-winning nonprofit mentors the next generation of female and gender expansive writers and leaders who are shaping culture, impacting businesses and creating change.

Wangari Maathai, founder of The Green Belt Movement, tells its story including the philosophy behind it, its challenges, and objectives.

In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Jewish immigrant families searched for a new home and identity in predominantly Catholic societies. The essays included here examine the religious, economic, social, and political choices these families have made and continue to make as they forge Jewish identities in the New World. Marjorie Agosín has gathered narratives and testimonies that reveal the immense diversity of Latin American Jewish experience. These essays, based on first- and second-generation immigrant experience, describe differing points of view and levels of involvement in Jewish tradition. In Taking Root, Agosín presents us with a contemporary and vivid account of the Jewish experience in Latin America. Taking Root documents the sadness of exile and loss but also a fierce determination to maintain Jewish traditions. This is Jewish history but it is also part of the untold history of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and all of Latin America.

After her assault one year ago, Brooklyn Wilde left her husband and her nursing career to return to her family circle in Candlewood Falls and heal her broken soul. A stranger arriving at her door in the middle of the night turns her world upside down, because he isn’t any stranger. He’s the man who went to prison for killing her uncle. Caleb Ransom accepted his life sentence to wander from town to town without a family or a home. Even though he was wrongly accused of murder and released, suspicion hangs over him like a bank of rain clouds. Only Brooklyn sees the man he truly is, and he falls hard for her. But someone in Candlewood Falls has different plans for these two and will stop at nothing until Caleb disappears. As long as they are together, lives are at stake. They will have to find the person determined to destroy them before it’s too late or lose the thing they have wanted all along – deep rooted love.

Collected essays by two of America's earliest environmental authors retain relevance today William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering wide varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South. Summer also published catalogs containing well-selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s until 1862. In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler, Jr., collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America's earliest environmental authors. Their essays on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, local food production, soil regeneration, and respect for Mother Earth have surprising relevance today. The Summer brothers owned farms in Newberry and Lexington Counties, where they created veritable experimental stations for plants adapted to the southern climate. At its peak the nursery offered more than one thousand varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, and grapes developed and chosen specifically for the southern climate, as well as offering an equal number of ornamentals, including four hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses. The brothers experimented with and reported on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, land reclamation, soil regeneration, crop diversity rather than the prevalent cotton monoculture, and animal breeds accustomed to hot climates from Carolina to Central Florida. Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. By 1860 Adam had concluded that a person's treatment of nature is a moral issue. Sustainability and long-term goals, rather than get-rich-quick schemes, were key to this philosophy. The brothers' keen interest in literature is evident in the quality of their writing; their essays and sketches are always readable, sometimes poetic, and occasionally humorous and satiric. A representative sampling of their more-than-six hundred articles appear in this volume.

Building and operating successful public institutions is a perennial and long-term challenge for governments, which is compounded by the volatile conditions found in fragile settings. Yet some government agencies do manage to take root and achieve success in delivering results earning legitimacy and forging resilience in otherwise challenging contexts. Drawing on mixed-method empirical research carried out on nine public agencies in Lao PDR, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Timor Leste, this volume identifies the shared causal mechanisms underpinning institutional success in fragile states by examining the inner workings of these institutions, along with the external operational environment and sociopolitical context in which they exist. Successful institutions share and deploy a common repertoire of internal and external operational strategies. In addition they connect this micro-institutional repertoire to the macro-sociopolitical context along three discernible pathways to institutional success. Institutional development is a heavily contextual, dynamic, and non-linear process but certain actionable lessons emerge for policy-makiers and development partners.

The picture of a plant taking root is used in the Bible to teach us the idea of conversion. When someone’s heart is turned from himself and his sinful ways to faith in Jesus and devotion to God, it is like a plant which starts to shoot out roots into rich soil so that it can live and take nourishment. There is no way for a plant to have life unless it takes root, and there is no way for a person to have spiritual life unless God turns him or her out of the way of death and into the way of life. The stories in this book have to do with plants taking roots. But as you read through them, you will not run across tales of flowers, leaves, and dirt as much as you will about spiritual plants in the garden of the Lord. They are stories about how God gives people new spiritual life by rooting their hearts in the grace of His Son Jesus Christ. Read these stories and take the time to ask God about causing your heart to take deep root into the life-giving soil of Jesus. Contents: Taking Root 1. A Little Girl’s Sin Found Out 2. The Pickpocket’s Story 3. A Change of Heart 4. Martha’s Bible 5. “What Shall It Profit?” 6. God’s Word Satisfies 7. A Mocking Discussion of the Bible 8. Shusco the Indian 9. Afraid to Go Home 10. The Gift 11. Trying to Enter by the Wrong Door 12. Jack and His Master 13. A New Year’s Start for Eternity 14. Clean Within 15. The Bird in the Church 16. A Search for Atoning Blood 17. “Can I Become a Christian?” 18. Little Johnny’s First Bible 19. More about Johnny 20. True Safety 21. A Sermon in the Woods 22. Debra’s Plan 23. The Conversion of a “Good Girl” 24. A Sunday School Student 25. Torn in Half 26. “Led by the Spirit of God” 27. Afraid to Swear Alone 28. The Sailor’s Bible 29. “What If It Had Been You?” 30. An Unexpected Change 31. The Good One Bible Did 32. Prayers for Salvation 33. The Watchword 34. Songs in the Night 35. The Siberian Leper 36. Rebecca’s Refuge 37. The Mathematician Confounded 38. The Hour Alone with God 39. Protection through Prayer 40. The Sleepless Night 41. The Story of Emilia 42. The Saints’ Everlasting Rest 43. An Attentive Daughter 44. A Woman Set Free About the Series: The Lord’s Garden is a series of devotional stories for children. The stories are based on true happenings, gleaned from a variety of sources, and rewritten for contemporary readers. Each story accompanies a passage of Scripture, and is intended to illustrate that particular biblical truth. Some stories are shorter, some longer. However, all will capture the attention of children, and hopefully their hearts. Every story begins with a Scripture verse and ends with questions for understanding the story, further points to think about, and directions for prayer.

ÒAs long as humans have been around, weÕve had to move in order to survive.Ó So arises that most universal and elemental human longing for home, and so begins Greta GaardÕs exploration of just precisely what it means to be at home in the world. Gaard journeys through the deserts of southern California, through the High Sierras, the Wind River Mountains, and the Northern Cascades, through the wildlands and waterways of Washington and Minnesota, through snow season, rain season, mud season, and lilac season, yet her essays transcend mere description of natural beauty to investigate the interplay between place and identity. Gaard examines the earliest environments of childhood and the relocations of adulthood, expanding the feminist insight that identity is formed through relationships to include relationships to place. ÒHomeÓ becomes not a static noun, but an active verb: the process of cultivating the connections with place and people that shape who we become. Striving to create a sense of home, Gaard involves herself socially, culturally, and ecologically within her communities, discovering that as she works to change her environment, her environment changes her. As Gaard investigates environmental concerns such as water quality, oil spills, or logging, she touches on their parallels to community issues such as racism, classism, and sexism, uncovering the dynamic interaction by which Òhumans, like other life on earth, both shape and are shaped by our environments.Ó While maintaining an understanding of the complex systems and structures that govern communities and environments, GaardÕs writing delves deeper to reveal the experiences and realities we displace through euphemisms or stereotypes, presenting issues such as homelessness or hunger with compelling honesty and sensitivity. GaardÕs essays form a quest narrative, expressing the process of letting go that is an inherent part of an impermanent life. And when a person is broken, in the aftermath of that letting go, it is a place that holds the pieces together. As long as we are forced to moveÑby economics, by war, by colonialismÑthe strategies we possess to make and redefine home are imperative to our survival, and vital in the shaping of our very identities.