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Recommended Reading

The books listed below—just some of our favorites—are recommended on one or more of the following merits:

They have been of service to us in evolving the organizational culture of the Whidbey Institute
They have been written by a program partner leading work at the Whidbey Institute
They have been written by a founder or Senior Fellow of the Whidbey Institute

Reinventing Organizations

EVOLVING OUR CULTURE

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Frederic Laloux

In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness in the past, it has invented a whole new way to structure and run organizations, each time bringing extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a radically more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals?

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Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone

EVOLVING OUR CULTURE

Leticia Nieto

Bringing a long-awaited breakthrough to the fields of liberation and cultural studies, Nieto offers a powerful analysis of the psychological dynamics of oppression and privilege and shows readers how to develop the skills that can promote social justice for themselves and those around them. Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future

EVOLVING OUR CULTURE

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Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry presents the culmination of his ideas and urges us to move from being a disrupting force on the Earth to a benign presence. This transition is the Great Work—the most necessary and most ennobling work we will ever undertake. Berry’s message is not one of doom but of hope.

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AfterNow: When We Cannot See the Future Where Do We Begin?

By Our Program Partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgBob Stilger

This book is about the awakening that follows disaster. About the minutes and months and years that come after now. It is about what happens when we’re smacked on the side of the head and open our eyes, startled out of the trance in which we have been living our days. It is about the opportunities always present, often invisible, to create the lives we want, now.

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Catch the Fire: An Art-full Guide to Unleashing the Creative Power of Youth, Adults and Communities

By Our Program Partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgPeggy Taylor and Charlie Murphy

A complete guide to using arts and empowerment techniques to bring greater vitality and depth to working with groups of youth or adults. This unique book invites group leaders into the realm of creativity-based facilitation, regardless of previous experience.

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Making a World of Difference: Personal Leadership, A Methodology

BY OUR PROGRAM PARTNERS

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Barbara F. Schaetti, Sheila J. Ramsey, and Gordon C. Watanabe

When people come together from different backgrounds or with different perspectives, and inherently creative possibility exists. One of the most profound things we humans can do today is move away from fear and mistrust of difference and instead open to that creative possibility.

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The Circumference of Home

By Our Program Partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgKurt Hoelting

After realizing the gaping hole between his convictions about climate change and his own carbon footprint, Kurt Hoelting embarked on a yearlong experiment to rediscover the heart of his own home: He traded his car and jet travel for a kayak, a bicycle, and his own two feet, traveling a radius of 100 kilometers from his home in Puget Sound. This “circumference of home” proved more than enough.

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Naming and Taming Overwhelm

By our program partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgSarri Gilman

Naming and Taming Overwhelm, by Sarri Gilman, will help you recognize if or when you’re becoming overwhelmed and provide simple steps to protect and care for yourself. Learn how to tune into your own personal signals as well as develop techniques for listening to and helping your colleagues who may experience their own early signs of feeling overwhelmed.

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Transform Your Boundaries

By our program partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgSarri Gilman

This book provides easy to follow examples and a step by step process to let your boundaries do their job. It is based on tried and true methods developed to help people working on boundary issues. The book provides a way to apply the information to your own life to deal with the emotions, stress, extreme challenges to your boundaries, and how to really do self-care.

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Writing on the Landscape

By our program partner

Support Independent Bookstores - Visit IndieBound.orgJennifer Wilhoit

Writing on the Landscape: Essays and Practices to Write, Roam, Renew is a practical, lyrical book aimed at helping blocked writers to become unstuck. Dr. Wilhoit brings joy to writing through her own revelations: “I am in love with writing; writing seduces me. I am in the landscape of my soul. I write from the very core of who I am. That is what the natural world does for me and for my writing no matter where I am.”

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Waymarkers: Collected Prayers, Poems and Reflections for the Preparation and Pilgrimage to Iona

BY OUR PROGRAM PARTNER

Mary DeJong 

This inspiring reflective journal traces each step of the journey from home to Iona and back again, guiding the pilgrim with poetry, sacred texts, and practical information gained from the author’s many visits to Iona. Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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Earth & Spirit: The Spiritual Dimension of the Environmental Crisis

By Our Founder

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Edited by Fritz Hull

A timely discussion of the spiritual problems and solutions which need to be faced and found if the earth is to survive. Contributors include: Stephanie Kaza, David Whyte, James Parks Morton and others.

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Iona: Guide to the Sacred Isle

BY OUR FOUNDER

Vivienne Hull 

A guide to the historic island of Iona in the Western Island of Scotland, known through the centuries as a sacred place where “the veil between the worlds is thin.” Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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Iona report: Story of an Enduring Vision

BY OUR FOUNDER

Fritz Hull

The story of Fritz and Vivienne Hull, who for 40 years have led retreats on the Island of Iona in Scotland. In addition to telling about these annual retreats, the island itself, and Celtic spirituality, the author brings the story to Whidbey Island and the emergence of the Whidbey Institute. Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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My Slovakia, My Family

By Our Senior Fellow

John Palka 

True to its title, this book presents much of the history of Slovakia while narrating the story of the author’s family, one of the most notable in the country’s history. Part genealogy, part historical analysis, and part immigrant story, Palka’s narrative covers a span of 300 years. Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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Mentor: Guiding the Journey of Adult Learners

By Our Senior Fellow

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Laurent Parks Daloz 

With a new introduction and afterword, this revised second edition is a practical, engaging exploration of mentoring and its power to transform learning. Filled with inspiring vignettes, Mentor shows how anyone who teaches can become a successful mentor to students.

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Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World

By Our Senior Fellow

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Sharon Daloz Parks

If leaders are made, not born, what is the best way to teach the skills they need to be effective? Today’s complex times require a new kind of leadership–one that encompasses a mind-set and capabilities that can’t necessarily be taught by conventional methods. In this unique leadership book, Sharon Daloz Parks invites readers to step into the classroom of Harvard leadership virtuoso Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues to understand this dynamic type of leadership and experience a corresponding mode of learning called “case in point.”

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Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith

By Our Senior Fellow

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Sharon Daloz Parks

The “twenty-something” years of emerging adulthood are increasingly recognized as a distinctive but puzzling era in the human life span. In this tenth anniversary revised edition of her 2001 classic, Sharon Daloz Parks, a pioneering voice in young adult development theory, builds on the foundation she established over two decades ago in The Critical Years, in which she recognized this significant stage in the human life span and underscored the role of mentors in the lives of young adults.

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Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World

By Our Senior Fellow

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Laurent Parks Daloz, Sharon Daloz Parks, and Cheryl and Jim Keen

A landmark study that reveals how we become committed to the common good and sustain such commitments in a changing world.

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Can Ethics Be Taught?

By Our Senior Fellow

Thomas R Piper, Mary C Gentile, and Sharon Daloz Parks

“Can Ethics Be Taught?” traces the evolution, strategy, and implementation of the pathbreaking Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility Programme at the Harvard Business School. Unavailable on IndieBound—try your local bookseller!

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The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement

By Our Senior Fellow

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Kate Davies

This book, named one of Booklist’s Top 10 books on sustainability in 2014, is the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the environmental health movement, which unlike many parts of the environmental movement, focuses on ways toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents in the environment effect human health and well-being.

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Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times

By Our Senior Fellow

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Kate Davies

Climate disruption. Growing social inequality. Pollution. We are living in an era of unprecedented crisis, resulting in widespread feelings of fear, despair, and grief. Now, more than ever, maintaining hope for the future is a monumental task. Intrinsic Hope offers a powerful antidote to these feelings. It shows how conventional ideas of hope are rooted in the belief that life will conform to our wishes and how this leads to disappointment, despair, and a dismal view of the future. As an alternative, it offers ‘intrinsic hope,’ a powerful, liberating, and positive approach to life based on having a deep trust in whatever happens.

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Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City

By Our Senior Fellow

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Sharon Betcher

Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet.

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Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

By Our Senior Fellow

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Sharon Betcher

In this remarkable and incisive work, Sharon Betcher analyzes our world and God’s embodied presence in the light of her own disability and the insight it affords. She claims disablement as a site of powerful social and religious critique and reflection. With searing honesty, she reveals how our culture, only recently tolerant and supportive of disabled people, still fears them. The presence of disabled persons stands as a rebuke to our images of body and health, to the distorted values of our consumerist culture, and the globalized economy that embodies those values in unjust structures.

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