Book Clubs at Christ Church

Non Fiction Book Club

We will meet on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, to discuss The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert Putnam with Shaylyn Garret.  Deep accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism --  Americans today seem to agree on only one thing:  This is the worst of times.  But we've been here before.  During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today.  However, as the twentieth century opened, America began - slowly, unevenly, but steadily - more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest.  Sometime during the 1960s, however, our nation turned another corner, and all of these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray.  (www.goodreads.com)

We will take a break over the summer so our next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 16, 2025, to discuss Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez.  Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” … the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism.  … Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of 'Christian America.' Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.  (www.wwnorton.com)

At each meeting we will also select books for our future meetings.  Books that have been proposed for consideration include:

• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)  "Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.  The copying and translation of this ancient book ... fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson." (www.goodreads.com)

• A Fever In the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plan to Take over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan.  "The Roaring Twenties–the Jazz Age–has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.  Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees."  (www.penguinrandomhouse.com)

If you have other books to suggest, please share them with the group.

Our meetings are in a hybrid format with in-person attendance and via Zoom. Zoom information will be distributed before each meeting.  To get more information about the book club, to be added to our distribution list or to suggest a book discussion, please get in touch with Jim Baroody (jimbaroody@gmail.com).

Jim

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Jim Baroody

email: jimbaroody@gmail.com

Women's Book Club

May 1st and June 5th, both at 7pm in the Fellowship Room

May 1st : Fuzz: when nature breaks the law by Mary Roach   Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to “problem” wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.

June 5th: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez   When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the dog he left behind. Now her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of a huge Great Dane, and by the threat of eviction. Increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

 - Provided by publisher.For more information, please contact Pam Burch, (pburch1@rochester.rr.com.)