Category: Books

  • Compact DiscList™

    The Compact DiscList™ [now owned by Connert Media, LLC; aka Infomedia, Inc.] was originally published during the early 1980s when music CDs became very popular. It was one of the first companies to index new releases and provide catalogues to various music stores and distributors. Once the Internet became the source of this data, the company ceased publication of the Compact DiscList™.

    The first sample was created “in-house” by a great staff who collated and GBC punched thousands of these directories. Once these directories because so popular, they were split into three separate catalogs (Popular, Classical, and Imports) and professionally printed by Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

    Here is some samples.

    Compact DiscList - May 1985
    Click to open PDF of this sample.
    The Compact DiscList - Spring 1987
    Click to open PDF of this sample.

    References:

    The following links were provided by Mike Brown, who is helping to make sure the archived data is available to various music enthusiasts.

  • The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness

    The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness

    by Rhonda V. Magee

    The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness
    Amazon Available from Amazon.com

    In a society where unconscious bias, microaggressions, institutionalized racism, and systemic injustices are so deeply ingrained, healing is an ongoing process. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of those like us, and to blame others. This book profoundly shows that in order to have the difficult conversations required for working toward racial justice, inner work is essential. Through the practice of embodied mindfulness–paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way–we increase our emotional resilience, recognize our own biases, and become less reactive when triggered.

    As Sharon Salzberg, New York Times-bestselling author of Real Happiness writes, “Rhonda Magee is a significant new voice I’ve wanted to hear for a long time—a voice both unabashedly powerful and deeply loving in looking at race and racism.” Magee shows that embodied mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. These practices help us to slow down and reflect on microaggressions–to hold them with some objectivity and distance–rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. Magee helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division.

    It is only by healing from injustices and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Magee’s hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.

  • Christian Nationalists Hate this Book

    Christian Nationalists Hate this Book

    If God Is Love, Don't Be a Jerk
    Available from Amazon.com

    If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk: Finding a Faith That Makes Us Better Humans

    Thou Shalt Not Be Horrible. – Imagine for a moment what the world might look like if we as people of faith, morality, and conscience actually aspired to this mantra.

    What if we were fully burdened to create a world that was more loving and equitable than when we arrived?

    What if we invited one another to share in wide-open, fearless, spiritual communities truly marked by compassion and interdependence?

    What if we daily challenged ourselves to live a faith that simply made us better humans?

    John Pavlovitz explores how we can embody this kinder kind of spirituality where we humbly examine our belief system to understand how it might compel us to act in less-than-loving ways toward others.

    This simple phrase, “Thou Shalt Not Be Horrible,” could help us practice what we preach by creating a world where:

    • spiritual community provides a sense of belonging where all people are received as we are;
    • the most important question we ask of a religious belief is not Is it true? but rather, is it helpful?
    • it is morally impossible to pledge complete allegiance to both Jesus and America simultaneously;
    • the way we treat others is the most tangible and meaningful expression of our belief system.

    In If God Is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk, John Pavlovitz examines the bedrock ideas of our religion: the existence of hell, the utility of prayer, the way we treat LGBTQ people, the value of anger, and other doctrines to help all of us take a good, honest look at how the beliefs we hold can shape our relationships with God and our fellow humans—and to make sure that love has the last, loudest word.

  • The Queer God by Marcella Althaus-Reid

    The Queer God by Marcella Althaus-Reid

    The Queer God
    Amazon.com Available from Amazon.com

    There are those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms. Others enter churches with love letters hidden in their bags, because their need for God and their need for love refuse to fit into different compartments. But what goodness and righteousness can prevail if you are in love with someone whom you are ecclesiastically not supposed to love? Where is God in a salsa bar?

    The Queer God introduces a new theology from the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion. Its chapters on Bisexual Theology, Sadean holiness, gay worship in Brazil and Queer sainthood mark the search for a different face of God – the Queer God who challenges the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness and global capitalism. Inspired by the transgressive spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with Queer interpretations of grace and holiness, The Queer God seeks to liberate God from the closet of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God’s part in the lives of gays, lesbians and the poor.

    Only a theology that dares to be radical can show us the presence of God in our times. The Queer God creates a concept of holiness that overcomes sexual and colonial prejudices and shows how Queer Theology is ultimately the search for God’s own deliverance. Using Liberation Theology and Queer Theory, it exposes the sexual roots that underlie all theology, and takes the search for God to new depths of social and sexual exclusion.

  • Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology

    Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology

    LGBTQ+ Introduction to Queer Theology

    Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology
    Amazon.com Available from Amazon.com

    Queer theology is more than LGBT people talking about God, according to Cheng, professor at Episcopal Divinity School and ordained minister in the Metropolitan Community Church. The real enterprise for queer theology is challenging binary distinctions and erasing boundaries. This erasure is made possible (indeed demanded) by the radical love espoused by Christianity. Through this love, all boundaries (gay/straight, male/female, life/death, divine/human) are dissolved. – Publishers Weekly