Zoom Author Talk: Ginny Sassaman “Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World”

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Join author and co-founder of Gross National Happiness USA, Ginny Sassaman, for a Zoom author talk about her book “Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World” on Thursday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. with the Jesup Memorial Library. The book features a series of secular sermons on a wide range of happiness skills and teaches and encourages the transformation needed to live a full and happy life while also creating conditions for maximum well-being for the whole planet.
 
Topics touched on in the book range from beauty to the need for an alternative economic framework, from kindness to social comparison, from lifelong learning to happiness skills for activists. The sermons included give a much deeper understanding of changes each of us can make to be our best selves, and work together for a better world. This book does not have all the answers — but it will provide readers with a lot of incredibly valuable and timely information, and may also help us frame the questions we need to be asking.
 
Maria Sirois, author of “A Short Course in Happiness After Loss (and Other Dark, Difficult Times)” writes, “In clear and no uncertain terms Ginny Sassaman lays out for us the significant and uplifting reasons we all ought to be investing in happiness while building the internal life of goodness we all seek to find inside the temples of our living.” Laura Musikanski, executive director of Happiness Alliance and co-author of “The Happiness Policy Handbook” adds, “Move over Gretchen Rubin. Ginny Sassaman brings at once her unique perspective, some valuable lessons, and inspiration. Each sermon is a bite-size entry into positive psychology, the happiness movement, and the lovely wonderful world of Ginny Sassaman. Whether you count yourself as religious, spiritual but not religious, or atheist, this book is a fun and worthy read.”
 
Sassaman is a co-founder, past president, and advisory board member of Gross National Happiness USA, and the creator of the Happiness Paradigm. She has served as a lay preacher at Unitarian Universalist churches in Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and South Carolina. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Ginny and her husband spent many years living in Washington, D.C., before settling near Montpelier, Vermont. She has a master’s in mediation and a certificate in positive psychology and teaches secular meditation classes.
 
Copies of “Preaching Happiness” are available for purchase from co-sponsor Sherman’s Books and can be purchased at Sherman’s Bar Harbor, by calling 288-3161 or on shermans.com. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link. To register fill out the form at jesuplibrary.org/events/sassaman or by emailing kchagnon@jesuplibrary.org.