No Hiding Place: Empowerment and Recovery for Our Troubled Communities
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 0062509675 / Publisher: HarperCollins, September 1992
Relates the efforts of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco to eradicate drug use in the community
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Known nationally for his spirited fight against addiction and for the empowerment of the African American family, Reverend Cecil Williams envisions a society in which there is no need to hide, one in which we recognize our problems, define ourselves, feel our pain, tell our truths, and come together in a community that accepts us as we are and nurtures us to wholeness and health.No Hiding Place tells the extraordinary story of a community where recovery is working - where Crack addicts are giving up the pipe, where abused women are coming to heal their pain, and abusive men are letting go of their rage, where the approach to recovery empowers the disempowered to define themselves, live authentically, and embrace the present moment with faith.This is the true story of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, an inner-city locus of self-transformation and action, where Williams has been the Minister of Liberation for twenty-nine years.In the late 1980s, Cecil Williams began to "smell death" on the streets and in "the glittering hotel lobbies" of the city of San Francisco. He realized it was drugs that were openly destroying the lives of Tenderloin district residents and secretly destroying the lives of corporate leaders and members of suburban households.Williams describes how Glide's innovative recovery programs were born, and reflects on the values and spiritual truths that make recovery possible. He decries the drug trade as an agent of genocide for African Americans and shows how black history, cultural values, and spirituality provide vital tools for resisting and overcoming the slavery of drugs. Earthy, sensitive, warm, and hard-hitting, Williams shows how communities can "put people in [their] bosom and rock the pain away."
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