Grateful : The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks
Author(s): Diana Butler Bass
The Wilbur Award-winning book Grateful is now available in paperback and with an updated subtitle.
If gratitude is good, why is it so hard to do? In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass untangles our conflicting understandings of gratitude and sets the table for a renewed practice of giving thanks.
We know that gratitude is good, but many of us find it hard to sustain a meaningful life of gratefulness. Four out of five Americans report feeling gratitude on a regular basis, but those private feelings seem disconnected from larger concerns of our public lives. In Grateful, cultural observer and theologian Diana Butler Bass takes on this “gratitude gap” and offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude.
Bass, author of the award-winning Grounded and ten other books on spirituality and culture, explores the transformative, subversive power of gratitude for our personal lives and in communities. Using her trademark blend of historical research, spiritual insights, and timely cultural observation, she shows how we can overcome this gap and make change in our own lives and in the world.
With honest stories and heartrending examples from history and her own life, Bass reclaims gratitude as a path to greater connection with god, with others, with the world, and even with our own souls. It’s time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude—the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.
Review(s):
“What we have... [is a] utopian book [that] advocates a corrective vision of American society that is desperately needed. It is not impossible to imagine a society based on gratitude. It merely takes courage, creativity, and trust.”
“Bestselling author and scholar Bass takes two seemingly contradictory recent surveys of the mood of Americans as the jumping off point for her excellent call for a more conscientious practice of gratitude…. Will please longtime fans as well as readers interested in living a more productively thankful life.”
“There is no better response to this historical moment than cultivating gratitude. This book will show both why and how to do it, and in the process you will get the extraordinary pleasure of Diana’s company, as she rediscovers the gifts that gratitude brings.”
“Gratitude is the undeniable beginning of the spiritual life. Diana Butler Bass offers us a superb overview of this virtue in our individual and communal lives. As she unpacked the various graces and challenges associated with expressing thanks, I found myself grateful to her for this deeply spiritual book.”
“Diana Butler Bass is one of the most thoughtful, insightful voices to emerge among us. Her words are a gentle but fierce reminder that on some eternal level, all is well.”
“Grateful is a timely and beautifully-written book. The practice of gratitude has been a lifeline for me in a challenging season, and this wise book articulates both a helpful challenge and a soul-shaping framework.”
“An insightful, illuminating, and thought-provoking book on the subject, one that is simultaneously a meditation and celebration.”
“Provides a series of ethical actions to bring gratitude truly alive in our everyday lives, making it both a personal and a public practice.”
Bass writes about things that matter, and she does so with graceful, accessible intelligence. In Grateful, she guides us to discover how we can grow in gratitude as individuals and as communities. If you let this book into your mind, it will find its way to your deepest heart.
“In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass is a calming voice in raging cultural seas. She accomplishes this feat by flipping individualism on its head using a surprising lever: gratitude. Grateful is challenging and refreshing, and speaks to the core of so much modern misery.”
ISBN: 9780062659484