Mentoring Society

Critical Mentoring: A Practical Guide

The next generation is always society’s most important resource, so it follows that mentoring youth is an important activity. The author Weiston-Serdan leads a non-profit network of youth mentors in Southern California. She encounters situations where mentors have to unpack social baggage that can hold youth back – issues like race, gender, class, and sexuality. These issues are often classified under the label of critical theory, issues where power relationships can exist. Therefore, her message…

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Fiction-Stories History Religion-Philosophy

The Fire & the Ore: A Novel

This book is an exploration of polygamy – i.e., plural marriage – how it forms and how it operates. It’s an exploration of a topic that is controversial because of its place in early Mormon society and curious because it runs contrary to how much of society has organized itself. I live in the American South and am a Protestant Christian. Southern Christians would never deign to practice public plural marriages. (Polyamory is another matter,…

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Fiction-Stories Religion-Philosophy

Moses, Man of the Mountain: A Novel

In Western and Middle-Eastern thought, undergirded by three monotheistic faiths, the Moses story carries overarching significance. It tells of liberation from bondage and the struggle of living with that freedom. It tells of the temptations to lapse into prior, seeming comforts of slavery. It tells how freedom, best exercised, consists of communing with a transcendent yet imminent God. This story is taught to children regularly in synagogues, churches, and mosques the world over. For those…

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Management-Business Mentoring

How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up

Modern culture sometimes has hard-to-shake core beliefs. The social mores tend to suggest that workers specialize (or sub-specialize) in one thing. We expect people to define themselves by their work, and their work must consist of one main task or calling. That’s easy for people who are good at only one thing or favor/enjoy only one thing. However, some of us have trouble fitting into that mold. We do multiple things well and enjoy the…

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Biography-Memoir History

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary, is often credited with forming the nation’s new economic system. Not far behind him (or even beside him) sits Cornelius Vanderbilt. In modern times, his name is most associated with a university in Nashville, but his legacy touched many turning points of nineteenth-century America. In this biography, Stiles describes Vanderbilt’s story beginning with the waning years of the eighteenth century and continuing after the Civil War until railroads united…

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Management-Business

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Organizations Need & Employees Want

Leading and developing a dynamic team is tough in any business field. Many people move from job to job and never gain critical depth. The organizational ladder used to reflect the “true path” towards career growth, but organizations are much flatter than they used to be. This means that career development needs to be rethought for new situations. In this book, Kaye and Winkle Giulioni try to help managers think about how to have these…

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Fiction-Stories

A Tangled Mercy: A Novel

Known for its history and beauty, Charleston, South Carolina, is one of my favorite places in the United States. My favorite Charlestonian of all time (besides my wife) is Denmark Vesey, who led a failed slave revolt in 1822. He left my church in Charleston (Second Presbyterian Church) to help found Mother Emmanuel AME Church – the same church that hosted a horrific Bible study in 2015 that ended when a white racist murdered nine…

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Management-Business Society

How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI, for short) were thrust towards the focal center of the workplace recently in the United States. Not only has white supremacy become more vocal, but well-reported events, such as the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the Charleston Nine, irrefutably show that America is still overcoming systemic racism. Our racial struggles were not all settled with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. One place of multifaceted struggle is…

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Fiction-Stories

Breach: A Novel

Some of us bear continual hardships that others might never encounter. Marleigh Mulcahy is one of these people. Both her parents are addicted to alcohol, and she was raised in a boxing gym by her grandfather. She is working through school to be a dental technologist, but has to work several jobs to make ends meet. Her grandfather fades into dementia and eventual death. Life seems stacked against her. While in the gym, she meets…

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Management-Business

Show the Value of What You Do: Measuring & Achieving Success in Any Endeavor

Job security is a desire common to many employees, yet full security remains an elusive goal in almost any endeavor. Patti and Jack Phillips, in this book, show how to calculate the value of your work so that you can communicate its value to decision-makers in a business setting. This value is called “Return on Investment” (or ROI, for short) and provides a business case for your labor. If you honestly contribute more than you…

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