Writer

seeing the landscape through a camera on a cell phone

Seeing the Sacred: A Year In Snapshots

This book is a thought-provoking exploration into how the simple act of taking snapshots can be a spiritual practice. It is an invitation to busy people who wish they had more contemplative time, to make this simple practice part of their day. Neraas explores the meaning of the sacred, she offers tips about how to be available to the sacred, and she relates it to: relationships, work, home, beauty, blessing, time, the city, the sea, and much more. 

Now available on Amazon

Seeing the Sacred:
Guidebook for Kids and Families

$5 easy download

Download this guidebook as a PDF and easily open it on your computer, tablet, or phone. Companion to Seeing the Sacred: A Year in Snapshots.

seeing the landscape through a camera on a cell phone

Seeing the Sacred: A Year In Snapshots

This book is a thought-provoking exploration into how the simple act of taking snapshots can be a spiritual practice. It is an invitation to busy people who wish they had more contemplative time, to make this simple practice part of their day. Neraas explores the meaning of the sacred, she offers tips about how to be available to the sacred, and she relates it to: relationships, work, home, beauty, blessing, time, the city, the sea, and much more. 

Now available on Amazon

Seeing the Sacred:
Guidebook for Kids and Families

$5 easy download

Download this guidebook as a PDF and easily open it on your computer, tablet, or phone. Companion to Seeing the Sacred: A Year in Snapshots.

Praise for Seeing the Sacred

“Gawk, gaze, or merely glimpse – Julie Neraas alerts us to the deep truth that our eyes are windows to our souls. This gem of a book reveals a role for our smartphones in the formation of a life that is more meaningful, joyful, and just. A gifted writer and spiritual guide, she illumines a path from infinite distractions to paying attention to what matters most.”

— Sharon Daloz Parks, author of Common Fire and Big Questions, Worthy Dreams

 

“A reverend and a writer, Julie Neraas becomes a seer of the sacred as she engages a new spiritual practice – taking a photo everyday for one year.  With an eye for the glint of agates, Julie finds in her lens unknown people and unexpected delights —a gnarled tree, a giggling neighbor, the living city —and wrestles the images into insights, inviting us on a journey of the eye and heart.”

— Joan Mitchell, CSJ, author of Mark’s Gospel: The Whole Story

 

“Julie Neraas’ Seeing the Sacred is a deeply engaging and inspiring meditation on our everyday world, and photos that remind us of the astonishing fact, in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, ‘that there’re are facts at all.’ Heschel is one of many thoughtful guides she introduces along the way —each calling us to look – and look again.” 

— Earl Schwartz, Professor of Religion, Hamline University

 

Hope and Poetry: How They Sustain Us (forthcoming)

In this challenging time in our world, hope may be our greatest need, its viability our greatest question. Many forces threaten to force hope into hiding. For hope to thrive people have to feel they have a future. This is at the heart of young peoples’ anguish about our planet and our world. But even in times of crisis hope sustains us in our living. I believe there is a deep human intuition of hope. Like an invisible signature, the capacity to hope is an indispensable human quality. I draw from poetry to illustrate how hope works in peoples’ lives. Poems distill the nature of hope, highlight its many sources, name its greatest threats, offer suggestions about the habits and practices that can strengthen it.

Apprenticed to Hope

This book is a compilation of essays exploring the nature of hope in human life, including the many ways in which it can be lost and found again. She draws from her experience as a chaplain and minister, working in settings where hope is tested. They include a prison, a hospital, a treatment center, as well as colleges and religious congregations. She also draws on her own experience of living with a chronic illness. Julie offers a variety of ways to think about hope, including its relationship with faith, its partnership with the imagination, as well as the importance of community. She distinguishes between authentic hope and optimism, and offers suggestions about where hope might be found, or created, in turbulent times. 

Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2009
Paperback: 176 pages

Paperback and Kindle versions available on Amazon

Praise for Apprenticed to Hope

 “Julie Neraas chose exactly the right title for her superb book on personal and communal hope.  She writes clearly and compellingly of how all of us, no matter what sort of individual or collective obstacles we face, can keep hope alive as we seek personal wholeness and a better world for everyone.”

— Parker Palmer, author of A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, and The Active Life

 

 “Julie Neraas tackles a seemingly familiar topic and turns it inside out. The urgent questions posed by a baffling illness fuel her investigations into psychology, theology and poetry for a new definition of hope. In the tradition of the best essayists, Neraas moves between the personal and the theoretical, between the dilemmas of lived experience and the wisdom of art and scholarship. The interdisciplinary method of her book mirrors the style of her teaching and academic interests, a product of twenty years teaching in a graduate program at Hamline University. it will be truly useful to a wide range of readers wishing to deepen their understanding of life.”

— Margaret Todd Maitland, author of The Dome of Creation