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In Your Parish Library this Week
Please come in and visit your parish library! We have a very fine collection of books, and you will definitely find something that intrigues you. We are open and available before, between, and after services on Sunday and almost any time the church is open during the week. You’ll find us just inside the front door on the left!
It’s easy to check out a book; just pull the card from inside the front cover of the book you select, sign your name and the date, and leave the card in the receptacle on the desk or on the truck. Keep the book as long as you need, but try to return it expeditiously. Return it to the desk in the library when you are finished; we’ll reshelve it for you.
A new book we just received is a profound contribution to North American history. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the continent. The Other Slavery by Andres Resendez reveals how it was practiced as an open secret for centuries. Here is a key missing piece of American history illuminated through testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives. Resendez builds an incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated native populations across North America.
Also new in our library is an exciting little book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic. In Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his adolescent son, Coates looks at our nation’s history and current crises, and particularly on how the United States has built an empire on the idea of “race.” He examines what it is like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it when black bodies have been exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today are threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion.
And then for those who enjoy novels with spirituality impact, our copy of the newly published Driving Jesus to Little Rock by Roland Merullo will be a hit. It’s a story about Eddie Valpolicella, an author, on his way from Massachusetts to Arkansas to give a talk on his novel, Breakfast with Buddha. Not far from home, he picks up a mysterious hitchhiker who claims to be Jesus, the Jesus, and during the five day road trip there are meals and drinks, wrong turns and intriguing scenery, deep philosophical discussions, set amidst a look at boots-on-the-ground views of America and lots of amusement and entertainment.
Bill Myers, Parish Librarian
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