Slow Blogging to Start
This morning I am leading my Church's reading group. The book of the month is a very gentle, very lovely book by Augusta Trobaugh entitled Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb. After we had read a good many novels that have classically been identified as Catholic Novels, th group decided that they wanted to expand our reading to take in other novels in which religion plays a major part. For our purposes this is a most interesting novel--it is about a group of elderly white women in Georgia who live with an African American woman who has waited on them and served them their entire lives. It is the story of all of these women coming to terms with a secret buried deep in their past. The religion featured is Southern Baptist or a variant thereof, complete with a tent rivival in Georgia summer. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I said it is gentle, beautiful, interesting, and provides a nice comparison of how spiritual matters are handled in novels in a tradition outside of Catholicism. Needless to say, there are some pronounced differences between the two in how spiritual matters affect the outcomes and characters.
The group has expressed an interest in reading one nonfiction piece--Donald Currie's Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic. Most of the reading group members are cradle Catholics and so don't have any profound understanding of where a protestant is coming from. This book is helpful in understanding the protestant mindset, and would probably have helped before reading Trobaugh's book.
