An Indie Next Selection for April 2022 An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022 A Junior Library Guild Selection Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of “two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose” (The Guardian). Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape. In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

This guide for modern-day spiritual seekers draws wisdom from Celtic spiritual practices and leads readers through a pilgrimage of the soul to create space for grace.

Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land; how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area; and whether-as she believed-they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten. What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and in the United States, as well as her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places that are between?between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be.

This anthology reflects the life and witness of the Iona Community and is intended to encourage creativity in worship. Liturgies include: pilgrimage and journeys, healing, acts of witness and dissent, a sanctuary and a light, resources: beginnings and endings of worship, short prayers, prayers for forgiveness, words of faith, thanksgiving, concern, litanies and responses, cursings and blessings, reflections, readings and meditations.

In her moving spiritual memoir, Mary DeMuth traces the winding path of “thin places” in her life—places where she experienced longing and healing more intensely than before. As DeMuth writes, “Thin places are snatches of holy ground, tucked into the corners of our world, where we might just catch a glimpse of eternity. They are aha moments, beautiful realizations, when the Son of God bursts through the hazy fog of our monotony and shines on us afresh.”From losing her earthly father to discovering a heavenly Father who never leaves, from singing Olivia Newton-John songs to the sky to worshiping God under a French sun, from surviving abuse as a latchkey kid to experiencing the joy of mothering three children, DeMuth’s story calls readers to a deeper understanding of their own story. With unusual spiritual wisdom, she looks for God in the past so that she might experience him more profoundly in the present. Her powerful words invite readers to know God in a new way—a God ready to break through any ordinary day or extraordinary pain and offer a glimpse of eternity.

Learn to live in missional community, where heaven and earth are thinly separated.

Bill and Terry Treacy died three months apart, after fifty years of marriage and a lifetime of faith. Devastated by this loss, their ten children found comfort in inexplicable signs assuring them that their parents were at peace, reunited in heaven, and yet still present in the lives of those who grieved for them. In Thin Places: Where Faith Is Affirmed and Hope Dwells, Mary Treacy O?Keefe describes such signs as thin places'sudden realizations of that ethereal veil between what we know of earth and what we believe of heaven. In sharing her family's story (and those of many others), she shows how thin places are present in ordinary places at ordinary times'and how such moments of grace reveal Divine loving messages of faith and hope in our daily lives.