Welcome to this double session delving into proximate justice. I’ll be sharing stories, insights, pain and dreams culled from my last many years on the front lines of justice work. We’ll confront hard truths together, shedding light on both brokenness and purpose, joining hands, hearts, souls as we look for hope on the road we are traveling into the future.
Below is an ambitious list of worthwhile books, podcasts, movies. I invite you to lean into one or more of these as mood-setting/foundation-building work before we gather.
As further enrichment to your reading/viewing, I encourage you to engage in some journaling as you encounter these works: What do you notice? What are powerful images you’re encountering? What are you feeling as you meet these people, in books or on film? What questions would you like to ask them?
Looking forward to our time together!
Michael Lezak
JUSTICE BOOKS AND MOVIES
BOOKS
• Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
• Between The World and Me, Ta Nahesi-Coates
• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
• The Warmth Of Other Suns, Isabella Wilkerson
• Caste, Isabella Wilkerson
• Heavy, Kiese Laymon
• Evicted, Mathew Desmond
• Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
• The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee
• The Sun Does Shine, Anthony Ray Hinton
• My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem
PODCASTS
• White Lies, NPR
• Serial, Season Three
• 1619
• The Cost All Americans Pay for Racism
MOVIES
• When They See Us (Netflix)
• 13th (Netflix)
• Do the Right Thing
• High on the Hog (Netflix)
• Summer of Soul (Hulu)
• Colin in Black and White (Netflix)
ETC.
• Bryan Stevenson’s TED Talk