Discussion questions for You Are a Sacred Place
General book club questions
The book is broken up into 17 sections. What was your favorite section? Your least favorite?
What was your emotional experience reading the book?
What did you think of the book’s visual format? Were there any images that stood out to you?
The book goes through an intense series of emotions: Grief, rage, love, and hope. Did the way the author depicted those emotions resonate with you? Why or why not?
How have you felt about the climate crisis in the past? Did this book change the way you think about it?
Questions to go deeper about political ideas
The book begins with an extended meditation on mourning and grief, and this climate grief catalyzes political action. Not all grief leads people to political action.
What sorts of grief isolates and alienates us? And what sorts of grief moves us towards solidarity?
What reasons — social, political, or economic — might stop us from accessing that grief or lead us to alienated and isolated grief?
A central theme throughout the book is the sacredness of bodies, human and otherwise, and the ways in which the the dominant political economy desecrates those bodies to generate profit.
How does the book use this framework of sacredness-desecration to get at the core of the problems of capitalism?
What other issues come to mind when you think about this framework?
The book presents the hope of mutual, collective action as an antidote to isolation and despair.
What metaphors or images of collective action resonated with you? What didn’t?
What is one image or idea from this book that you might bring into your own work building a better world?
Christian-specific questions
The book uses Christian ideas, images, and metaphors to reflect on the climate crisis.
How have you seen the environment discussed (or not discussed) in Christian spaces?
What does this book have in common with those discussions? What is new or different?
The Bible overflows with lamentations, collective grief, and imprecatory psalms. This book invites us back into that rich and often underused tradition.
How does this book make you think about the place of collective grief — whether in worship or in public?
What might it look like to reconnect with that tradition of collective grief?