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Title details for This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley - Wait list

This Here Flesh

Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

by Cole Arthur Riley
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her stunning debut, the creator of Black Liturgies weaves stories from three generations of her family alongside contemplative reflections to discover the “necessary rituals” that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation.

“This is the kind of book that makes you different when you’re done.”—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter
“Reaches deep beneath the surface of words unspoken, wounds unhealed, and secrets untempered to break them open in order for fresh light to break through.”—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Root, Library Journal
“From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.”
 
So writes Cole Arthur Riley in her unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Arthur Riley reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father, and how they revealed to her an embodied, dignity-affirming spirituality, not only in what they believed but in the act of living itself. Writing memorably of her own childhood and coming to self, Arthur Riley boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.
 
At once a compelling spiritual meditation, a powerful intergenerational account, and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh speaks potently to anyone who suspects that our stories might have something to say to us.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 22, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780593239780

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780593239780
      • File size: 1481 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from January 1, 2022

      With this debut, Arthur Riley, creator of Black Liturgies, has given us a wonderfully winsome, heartbreakingly honest, and ever-poetic work of spiritual biography and theological reflection. While some theologians will talk in the abstract about "incarnation," "enfleshment," or "embodiment," Arthur Riley's book is a lesson in concreteness, in Black theology, in seeing a body, being a body, being a person rooted in time, space, stories, and very particular flesh. Each chapter has a theme (e.g., "wonder"; "joy"; "memory") and the journey toward those themes always takes surprising turns. On page after page, Arthur Riley unfolds herself slowly through family stories, personal struggles, Bible passages, whimsical descriptions, and an unflinching gaze at both the joyful and the agonizing aspects of being a person, a body woven from all this beauty and pain. For her, being a body means being a Black body, a body with physical challenges and illness, a body connected to family, histories, and specific places. That self-revelation reaching toward acceptance and love is the motive power of the work. VERDICT A challenging and contemplative book, eminently readable as engaging prose while offering insight and depth throughout.--Zachariah Motts

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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