Alison Mearns Benders – författare

Just Prayer is a four-week prayer cycle for morning and evening readings to support people who “hunger and thirst for justice.” Patterned on the ancient monastic Hours, it offers psalms, intercessions, and reflections fashioned to strengthen a personal commitment to justice. The weekly themes are: recognizing God’s command that we act justly; lamenting suffering and injustice in our world; repenting our failures and renewing our commitment to justice; and, finally, celebrating God’s promise of justice lived as a new heaven and new earth. Weekly reflections encourage personal transformation by emphasizing the connection between justice action and peaceful communities. Created with parishes, youth groups, mission trip participants, and social justice organizations in mind, Just Prayer supports hands-on service work in local communities. By repeating and building upon the prayer sequences in Just Prayer, we can conform our hearts more fully to Christ’s living message of compassion and justice for the least among us. The print edition features a soft, leather-like cover and a durable ribbon for convenient daily prayer.

Recollecting America's Original Sin: A Pilgrimage of Race and Grace journeys into anti-black racism throughout US history through a Christian spirituality lens. The reflections are fashioned as a spiritual pilgrimage that integrates listening, reflecting, and daily living. It recollects the nation’s freedom struggles around race, our original sin, which constrains and stains us now as ever. Walking a holy road of past, present, and future meaning, the chapters interlace historical moments and places into a web of provocative concerns. Anyone desiring to respond faithfully to the justice reckonings now seizing our country will travel the race-and-grace journey in these pages.

In 2018, for the first time in nearly forty years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published a pastoral letter against racism. Open Wide Our Hearts is a call to a humble and expansive love that respects human dignity and unites us all in Christ. Now, in Reading, Praying, LivingThe US Bishops' Open Wide Our Hearts, Alison Benders offers a resource designed to help parishes, RCIA programs, campus ministries, and Catholic readers unpack and grapple with this important document.

Benders provides background on the social doctrine that grounds the document, describes why it’s so timely, and offers a plan for studying the letter, personally or as a group. In an engaging and accessible way, she walks readers through the scriptural, theological, and moral guidance needed to form our consciences and convert our hearts. And because the work of racial healing is a journey, not an event, each section of the guide also includes questions for personal reflection and attentive discussion and prayers for spiritual renewal or reconciliation.

Morning and evening prayer for those seeking to respond to Pope Francis’s call for greater care for our common home.  “God saw everything that was made, and indeed, it was very good.” Yet human disregard for creation endangers that goodness. In Living Prayer: A Book of Hours for Cultivating Life, authors Alison M. Benders, Lisa Fullam, and Gina Hens-Piazza invite readers to embrace our role as servant-cultivators in the ecology of God, celebrating and sustaining all that is.Following the pattern of the daily prayer of the church, Living Prayer offers a four-week cycle of morning and evening prayer to support a more sustainable lifestyle and embodies an ethic of care for our common home. Created with ecological and social justice-oriented individuals and organizations in mind, Living Prayer supports hands-on work in local communities, empowered by reflection and prayer. The book also includes a variety of green rituals to extend ecological prayer through practices that enlist elements of the reader’s environment to connect to God’s presence in the created world. It is an invitation to live the prayer of our hearts so that the ecology of God flourishes to cultivate the new creation.

Morning and evening prayer for those seeking to respond to Pope Francis’s call for greater care for our common home.   “God saw everything that was made, and indeed, it was very good.” Yet human disregard for creation endangers that goodness. In Living Prayer: A Book of Hours for Cultivating Life, authors Alison M. Benders, Lisa Fullam, and Gina Hens-Piazza invite readers to embrace our role as servant-cultivators in the ecology of God, celebrating and sustaining all that is. Following the pattern of the daily prayer of the church, Living Prayer offers a four-week cycle of morning and evening prayer to support a more sustainable lifestyle and embodies an ethic of care for our common home. Created with ecological and social justice-oriented individuals and organizations in mind, Living Prayer supports hands-on work in local communities, empowered by reflection and prayer. The book also includes a variety of green rituals to extend ecological prayer through practices that enlist elements of the reader’s environment to connect to God’s presence in the created world. It is an invitation to live the prayer of our hearts so that the ecology of God flourishes to cultivate the new creation.