Special guest blogger: the divine miss m

Today Mommy and I made brownies. After Mommy put them in the oven it was time to put baby J down for a nap. So she gave me a spoon to lick and told me to put it in the sink when I was done, then go upstairs to my room and look at books for a few minutes.

I did it all just right! Here I am waiting patiently in my room:

So I said the other day that a friend linked to this blog under my real name, even though this is an intentionally pseudonymous space.

All along I have been much more concerned about the real name –> blog scenario than the blog –> real name one. Readers of this blog could find out my identity pretty easily. Most of the pseudonyms are easily sussed out for anyone with a basic awareness of the PC(USA). It doesn’t bother me. I don’t blog about confidential church matters, and I have a basic personal filter on. What you read here is me, but there are parts of my life that the Internet doesn’t get to be privy to.

No, my one goal was to be ungoogleable.

What I didn’t want was for some church’s search committee to have this blog be literally the first thing they knew about me after reading my PIF. Or for a youth director or parent from the Mondo Youth Conference to raise a stink because the preacher for that conference has a potty mouth (assuming I ever get to preach there again). I didn’t want myself googleable here, not because I’m ashamed of what I’ve written here, but because others may perceive that a person who blogs about her personal life is going to use the pulpit as therapy, or a person who’s dropped the F-bomb is going to let it fly around “impressionable children.”

*I* understand that different venues have different norms of communication. But it’s very hard to reassure others that you get that when you don’t even know they’re out there. Just yesterday I heard from a friend that a blogger in our denomination is having some trouble finding a call. There may be many reasons for that, but my friend (who is a blogger herself) suspected that there were some TMI things on his blog that were off-putting to search committees, particularly older members who don’t get technology.

That’s what I wanted to avoid. However, even though my friend has updated his page, this blog is still the number one search result when one googles my name. Numero uno. Listed ahead of the church I serve, the column I write for Denominational Magazine, the little piece that was published in the WaPo last year.

So all of this has been bugging me. But not for the reason I expected, but because… I’m not sure I care anymore. Would the kind of church that would be bothered by this (really rather innocuous) blog be the kind of church I’d want to serve as pastor anyway? My husband, who is admittedly biased, actually suggests that this blog would be an asset.

This all came up recently in the context of political bumper stickers. I was talking to the other pastors on staff about how clergy should or should not make their political opinions known. I said that it was unlikely to shock anyone at our church that I am supporting Obama over McCain. One of them responded that it’s a question of it being “in someone’s face.” Ministry is a sacred trust and you don’t want to do anything to compromise your ability to provide care for someone.

(What about Facebook? I wonder. Members of the church have friended me and I’ve got my little Obama icon there. Is that in their face?)

Which leads me to ask, are they right? Would I not feel like I could receive pastoral care from a die-hard Republican? On the contrary, I’m sure I have. Now, if I were to visit two churches, and if the pastor at the first had a “God bless the people of every nation” bumper sticker and the other had one that said “Abortion: A Doctor’s Right to Make a Killing,” I would, well, factor that into my decision. But if I had a long and deep relationship with the second one first, I don’t think I could dismiss him or her that easily.

Is this a generational thing? Do people my age want or expect their pastor to be an ideological blank slate? Is that even realistic? My daughter will be going to kindergarten next year, and we’re told that 50% of her class will speak a language other than English at home. The kindergarten parent meeting had five language translators there. Diversity is going to be a way of life for her, whether it’s religious, culturally, racially or otherwise. The church is still a pretty segregated place, but one thing we do have is ideological diversity. To say that a minister should exist outside of that, or needs to keep a lid on it, is feeling increasingly strange to me.

So this blogging conundrum has been part of a larger questioning about what it means to be a minister. I value my privacy and don’t want my family on display. On the other hand, keeping certain aspects of my core self hidden feels very inauthentic, when part of what I’m preaching is the need for all of us to live whole and congruent lives.

Ah, photos. The lazy blogger’s crutch.

But seriously, I’ve been meaning to take the centerpiece of our kitchen table for a while, since it is such a weird collection of stuff:

• communion set given to me by Senior Pastor for my fifth ordination anniversary
• homemade “sparkler” craft perched in the communion chalice
• pink butterfly craft made by C
• round oil lamp given to me by R a decade or more ago
• matches from ridiculous hoity-toity restaurant
• Russian dolls given by G-mommy on recent trip to, well, Russia
• assorted seashells
• small paper hearts cut with a heart-shaped hole punch and colored with red marker by C
• John F. Kennedy paper doll

Its the presidential paper doll that makes it art.

I have been in a foul mood the last few days.

Prickly, edgy, really really tired. If I went somewhere and just slept, I wonder how many days it would take me to feel like myself again.

I’m tired of washing those damn breastpump parts, every freakin’ day.

I’m ready for J to eat what we all eat. Getting lunch together for a baby, a toddler and an adult is tedious.

A friend linked to this site from his blog, using my real name. The link has been removed, but this site is still the second search result when you google my name. I guess 4 1/2 years of pseudonymous blogging had to end sometime. My in-house tech support person is working on the problem, but our next step is un-googling this site, which is kinda thermonuclear. Frankly the whole thing makes me tired (see a theme developing?).

I did four loads of laundry and visited two grocery stores today. Milk is $6 a gallon.

I could not care less about what happened at General Assembly this year. Honestly, it just makes me cranky.

J got up last night at 1 a.m., screaming. This morning R said something chipper about our getting a good night’s sleep. Note to new dads: Don’t assume that everyone slept well just because you did.

The greasy stuff we slather on J to keep his eczema at bay gives me the willies. Truly, it’s like I have some kind of OCD thing going on with it.

Too much to do and too little time to do it.

So evangelism, hospitality and welcoming are a big part of my job description now. We do pretty well, but we know we have some cultural issues to work on. Sunday our pastor preached a sermon on “top 10 characteristics of a welcoming congregation” and had us sing a short song or hymn for each one—with no song sheet. Yes, a sermon on hospitality to visitors, presupposing knowledge of 10 churchy songs. After artfully wielding my cluestick, I got some sheets printed up for the second service. I fully admit I have my blind spots too, but… !!!

Re-entry after study leave can be tough. This time seems tougher.

I was working on the dad project, which means immersion in the grief issues.

Bright spots: our church accompanist’s retirement party yesterday, taking little she-who-is to the Lion King on Saturday, playing hide and seek with M, watching her improvise a conversation between a clothespin doll and a jumbo pretzel stick. Sermon series begins this Sunday.

Sweet Baby J on his seven-month birthday. We love your sparkle, SBJ!

Recently I took part in a roundtable discussion at the Alban Institute about secular and spiritual narrative. We were talking about technology as a means of telling one’s story and the conversation drifted to Facebook. A boomer-aged male said, “At least with blogs you do have some narrative element, but Facebook is for people who just can’t be bothered to go into that much depth about their lives.”

I instantly blurted out, “Wow, that’s really pejorative!” and then stammered out something incoherent. Because apparently I’m enough of an introvert that I need time to think through my comments, but enough of an extrovert that my mouth engages before my mind can say Stop.

What I intended to say is that some people point to Facebook as a sign of some catastrophic cultural decline, but I don’t think FB users have any illusions about it being some deep interaction. It’s a great strawman, allowing people to tut-tut the shallow kids and their quote-unquote relationships with their quote-unquote friends, when I really don’t think anyone’s claiming it as anything particularly deep. (Are they?)

At the same time, you better believe that a person’s Facebook profile offers a narrative about his or her life.

And finally, what a strange thing for a pastor to say. Let’s not accept uncritically the ways that people try to make sense of the world, but let’s not be insulting either. Do we love the people God loves or not?

Too often I am the only person under the age of 50 at these things, so I end up having to defend stuff that I normally would take a more nuanced position on. I use Facebook, like many of you do, and it is a handy tool, but there are undeniable limitations to social networking. But unless I say something, and say it more emphatically than I might normally be inclined, the strawman stands.

It happens around blogging too. I feel really betwixt and between in terms of “publishing” on a blog vs. publishing in a book or magazine, but I’m one of the few bloggers I know in my social circle. If I don’t speak up for it, nobody will.

Is there a lot of crap out there in the blogosphere? Would lots of bloggers benefit from a good editor? Is there a lot of chaff on this here blog? Yes, yes and *cough* yes. But there is also a lot of great writing on blogs. Good bloggers find an audience. There is this great democratizing thing about blogging. I don’t need an agent or a publisher. I just hang out my shingle and if people come, they come. And they tell their friends, or forward links to their students or parishioners, and boom, I have an audience. You’re not likely to find War and Peace; on the other hand, I don’t know any blogger who claimed to be Tolstoy. And if writers don’t make much money, why not put stuff out there and see who bothers to show up and read it?

On a personal note, there’s also something theological about all this. I really do understand people who want to protect their words, and I know firsthand that once your stuff’s out on the net, it’s out there—stuff you spent a lot of time crafting, stuff that should be your intellectual property. And if you are making money off it, even if it’s not enough to live on, that’s a big deal. But lots of us blog for our own amusement and for the building up of the church. I have to let it out of my control for the Spirit to have her way with it.

If this doesn’t make you smile then you are dead inside and I pity you.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

If I were scheduled to preach on World Communion Sunday this year I would SO use this.

“Portrait of My Brother”
little she-who-is
marker on white board, 2008

———–

I’m in a writing workshop this week at Downtown Cathedral. There are three workshop leaders—I am in BBT’s group. (Those who care already know; those who don’t know, don’t care.)

We have each morning free to write, then there are afternoon group sessions, individual conferences with our group leaders, then evening plenary/discussion.

I have a project I’m working on, but have decided to go where the spirit leads. I realized I haven’t done a snapshot of our life lately, and am feeling the need to do so since all my friends with high school graduates are taking me by the shoulders and saying, “You have no idea how fast it goes.” Yikes! OK!

So…

general
Just recently R and I decided to modify our weekly schedule. For 14 years we have gone to bed at the same time because that’s when we catch up on our day. But we’ve finally faced the fact that he’s a morning person, and I’m a night person. So he gets up at 5:45 to work out or catch up on paperwork, and I sleep until 6:30ish. He goes to bed between 9:30 and 10 (we try to check in then) and I’m up until 10:30 or 11.

We also recently geeked out and got our family calendar up on Google and syncable with my iCal so that we know who’s where and when, and we can make sure we are intentional about family time—either having a do-nothing Saturday or going somewhere together (which right now is complicated enough to pull off that we need some advance notice). We’re going to talk one evening in the middle of each month to look at the following month.

If this all sounds really rigid, it kinda is, except that we are both Getting Things Done disciples which talks about capturing everything in a system so you don’t have to spend any mental energy worrying “Am I forgetting something?” Also, the whole point of this is to protect our leisure and recreation time from being encroached upon by the endless list of things to do around the house.

We’ll see how it works.

I really like the part-time schedule. I would say basically, it works fine. Church members seem to be very encouraging and understanding of this change. The person I job-share with is a jewel.

R enjoys working for a company again. He got a very positive performance review two weeks ago and might be getting a small raise.

We are looking forward to our August vacation/family reunion with my sibs and Mamala in Florida, during which time we will worship at the Church of Disney.

little she-who-is
I just registered C for kindergarten, and I have mixed feelings about it. I know she will love it, and we feel good about the school, and she is certainly ready. But I also love how herself she is and wonder what interesting edges of her personality will be ground down by 13 years of public education. Right now she’ll wear a homemade rainbow crown with a “mismatched” skirt and shirt with a flowery hair clip pinned to the middle of her shirt like a necklace. Along with various necklaces and beads (preschool bling). She adored her science class and it would never occur to her that science is boy’s stuff (God I hope that has changed at least a little since I was in school). The kids at her daycare/preschool (all girls) are lovely good-heated kids, and she is the oldest. It’s the age-old thing of letting go for me, I guess.

She is starting to read words on signs and packages, or at least guess at them. When R and I spell something to one another she is desperate to know what we’re saying.

Her favorite sentence is “tell me a story” and was entertained for hours by my tales of her uncles M and L.

Grammy gave her an Illustory kit which she used to write and illustrate a story about how R and I adopted our cats. She was so incredibly excited about this. Why am I not surprised.

The other night at dinner we somehow got into this thing of saying words rrrrrrreeeeeeeeaaaaaaallllllllyyyyyyy sssssslllllllooooooowwwwwwww, like a record on 16 rpm (a simile that is lost on her, by the way). The game was to try to guess what the person was saying before he or she finished the word. She laughed until she hiccuped. Which is not unusual.

Yesterday she cut MaDear’s bangs and wanted to trim her dolls’ hair.

When we butt heads, she usually stomps into the living room and says, “Come in here in 4 minutes!” Meaning she needs time by herself but then wants to talk. This morning she was being a pill (teasing M) and I asked her (OK told her) to leave the room. I found her up in my room, where she handed me a picture she’d made a few years back on Mother’s Day that had her handprint on it. I think it was her way of apologizing.

She says, “renember” and “comtor-full.”

She has a romantic streak and loves magic tricks.

the divine miss m
M is the prototypical toddler. She has no idea what she wants until she doesn’t get it. Her favorite sentence is “But I really want it right now!” Oh, well when you put it that way…

She is rough and tumble and is perpetually bruised. She also is often in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other day she was on her way into the kiddie pool at our public pool and the kid in front of her slammed the gate without looking behind him. It got her right below the eye so when I took them to get their picture taken for Father’s Day she had a nice little shiner. I wouldn’t airbrush it out for anything. (By the way, I apologize for calling that kid names under my breath. But the little punk didn’t even apologize!)

She has huge brown eyes and the longest lashes you’ve ever seen. She tans easily, like her dad. When she’s really mad or crying, her lower lip sticks out completely flat, like a little shelf for drool.

sweet baby j
SBJ lives more and more into his blog moniker. He absolutely lights up when I am in the room. Other people have confirmed this. The other night R went to him after his nap and he got rather pissed that he was not mommy.

We still struggle with eczema but is basically under control. He never has that smooth baby skin but we are mostly successful in keeping it from getting too rashy. We are taking the food just one at a time, but haven’t found anything he refuses to eat. He’s on oatmeal, barley, banana, applesauce, carrot, sweet potato, squash, Gerber wagon wheels, and cheerios. He can rake at the cheerios but has a hard time getting them in his mouth.

Yesteday we put him in the johnny jumper (seat on a spring that clips to the doorway) and after a few false starts he was quickly boinging boinging like mad. Unfortunately, because he’s so heavy (23+ pounds) we made it as short as we could and still he is not going to be able to use it for long before it starts to drag on the ground. Need a higher doorway.

Today we just started size 4 diapers.

He still sleeps in a blanket-lined carseat at night—a carseat that is way too small for him, but he does not like sleeping flat for too long. We’ve done some naps in his crib and are slowly making the transition.

Partly because he doesn’t sleep flat very much, he is not rolling over. He is working on crawling but really is not even close. The mother of three is fine with this.

He has three teeth, all in the bottom.

Want a guaranteed guffaw? Sing the baseline to “Another One Bites the Dust.”

And speaking of J, he’s waking from his nap.

“Ambition is a morally neutral principle.”

Discuss.

A review for MotherTalk

The Pregnancy Journal by A. Christine Harris

I received this book in the mail a couple of weeks ago and set it aside: This won’t take long to review… a few thought-provoking paragraphs about pregnancy amid lots of empty space.

Yesterday I opened it. Oops. There’s tons of great info in this book.

This is a day-by-day guide to pregnancy with space for journaling every week or so (and a larger writing space every month), which sets a much more realistic expectation for pregnancy journaling than I was prepared to find in this book. The back of the book has an extended journaling section for “Labor and Delivery Details.” The format is perfect for people who want to record a few pertinent details but don’t have the time or inclination to get into extended meditations on pregnancy. (If that’s your thing, then get this book and supplement it with a good spiral notebook.)

Each day includes a short piece about the baby’s development, a paragraph about changes in the mother, tidbits about nutrition, childbirth in other cultures, and fascinating pregnancy trivia (do you know how fast blood travels through the umbilical cord?*). Towards the end of the journal, parenting tips are sprinkled throughout. The book has great information in it but is also easy and soothing to read. This would be a good choice for women who are anticipating pregnancy and childbirth to be profound rites of passage, but who might find Birthing from Within (a book I adored) a little too woo-woo.

The challenge with books organized chronologically is that the reader might be wondering about a topic in week 8 that the author doesn’t address until week 15. Thankfully The Pregnancy Journal has a good index.

*Four miles an hour.

So I read a lot about simplicity and “living lightly” on the earth. It’s a topic that has financial, environmental and spiritual implications. I’ve pondered in this space the gift and curse that is the iPhone–having the means to organize my life and respond to people and issues as they arise, yet finding it difficult to unplug.

I love the idea of simplicity and frugality, but some of the contradictions amuse me, others bug me. The fact that many aspects of “simple” living are incredibly inconvenient need not be said… except to say that I don’t have time to hang my clothes on a clothesline, and I certainly don’t have time to fight the homeowner’s association to allow me to do so.

Here are a few other examples:

• Keeping hand-me-down clothes and other items instead of buying all new stuff, which requires a lot of personal storage space on the one hand, yet not living in a house that’s much bigger than you really need on the other.
• Ditto growing your own food (necessitating a yard big enough to accomplish this). Aren’t we supposed to, like, live in town so we can walk everywhere and participate in the local economy? Yet we’re also supposed to grow stuff in our postage-stamp-sized yard.
• Buying locally grown and baked foods… and driving to 3-4 different places on a Saturday to acquire these items. (I know it’s still better than buying stuff that’s been shipped her from Chile, but still. It’s not simple.)
• Washing your clothes in cold water to save on energy costs, except for your sheets which must be washed in hot water to kill dust mites.
• “If it’s yellow, leave it mellow,” leading to a situation that “green” cleaning products are just not effective at alleviating. Enough said.

Can you think of others?

[Edited to add]: There’s also the one that encourages people to live near their work so they don’t have a long commute… but you’re also supposed to stay put in your house so as to put down roots in the community… so if you change jobs and the job is far from home…? You fail! FAIL!!!!!!!

Is the simplicity movement just another means of generating liberal guilt?

And how can spiritual communities help people take their commitments to the earth and their families seriously without setting the standards impossibly high and giving in to a greener-than-thou attitude?

Photo is from Walden Pond. By the way, I’ve heard that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.

Del Martin (L) and Phyllis Lyon (R), partners for 55 years, exchange rings as they are married by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom in a private ceremony at San Francisco City Hall June 16, 2008 in San Francisco, California. Martin and Lyon were among the first couples to be married in San Francisco as same-sex marriages become legal in California.

Hat tip: Sullivan
Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez-Pool/Getty Images.

So there’s been a lot of talk about sexism and racism in the presidential campaign. Some have said that Hillary Clinton was the subject of a lot of sexist media coverage. (A few of those people go on to say that they won’t vote for Barack Obama because of that sexism. On the part of the media. Mmmm-kay…)

Others say it’s not Hillary’s femaleness that made her a target, it was her Clinton-ness. Still others say that she received as much negative coverage as anyone else—maybe more, but that’s what only because she was a front runner for so long.

I was not a Hillary supporter, but I cringed at a lot of the coverage of her. (Sickening video there) I loved her line from her concession speech about there being 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, allowing the light to shine through like never before. But I was disheartened by some of the comments I heard and read.

So what makes something sexist or racist? Is it solely in the eye of the beholder? Do we just know it when we see it? Is it solely a matter of intent?

Randi Rhodes was suspended from Air America Radio for calling Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro “f*cking whores” during a comedy show. Is that sexist? I’ve heard people say no, that Rhodes called several male politicians the same thing in that show—she was criticizing them for having sold out their principles. In this case “whore” has nothing to do with selling one’s body sexually. And yet I think that epithet has added potency when applied to women. So I would argue that it was sexist, even though Rhodes would say she was an equal opportunity offender/criticizer.

Similarly, I’ve heard that someone came up with a T-shirt that has Obama’s name with a picture of Curious George on it. The T-shirt designer said it’s because Obama has big ears. That may be (though I seriously doubt it), but I think such an image is racist, because of that additional layer of potency due to past uses of “monkey” to demean black people. You can make a T-shirt with a monkey and George Bush’s name on it and it’s commentary. Connect that image to a black man and it’s something else entirely.

This doesn’t encompass every example of sexism or racism. I’m just trying to think of a response to “I said the same thing about [some other group], so how can my comment be sexist/racist?”

I had a doctor’s appointment today. Nothing wrong, just the regular checkup.

I had both the divine miss M and sweet baby J with me. This went fine, though it took us an hour to travel a distance that usually takes 20 minutes.

My face has been breaking out a bit lately. Past experience suggests the problem will go away when I stop nursing, and in any case, it would never occur to me to mention it in a physical. But the nurse brought it up, asking whether I had seen anyone about it. When I said “No,” she said incredulously, “Why?! You’ll scar you know!!!!”

Yes. I’m perched on the table in a paper gown, handing J his pacifier with one hand and helping M dial the Fisher-Price phone with the other and she’s acting like I’m medically negligent for not visiting the dermatologist.

And in spite of all that, my blood pressure was 80/60!

Quoted in a letter to the editor in the latest Christian Century:

Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category… The opposite of radical is superficial; the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal.

…Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade.

–Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

A note to the nefarious:

You have been warned.

Our first box of Community-Supported Agriculture arrived today:
-strawberries
-a basil plant
-spring onions
-asparagus
-kale (you knew there had to be kale)

Exciting!

(Photo is from a CSA website)

I’ve been feeling like Bilbo: “stretched… like butter, scraped over too much bread.”

The upside of having a bullet-proof organizational system is that you can always, always, find a way to maximize any available moment.

Wait, that’s the downside.

So, I’m going to pray more. This has already produced interesting results.

I’m also going to goof off more. Just as soon as I…

The series I’m working on for Denominational Magazine will explore spiritual/Christian themes in various works of children’s literature. Here is a draft list with blurbs for each…

September 2008: Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
Our series begins with the second installment in the classic Chronicles of Narnia, in which the Pevensie children return to Narnia and take up the struggle to assist Caspian as he reclaims Narnia in the name of Aslan, a lion who serves as the Christ figure throughout the series.

October 2008: Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
A lonely preacher’s kid finds a sense of belonging through the companionship of a scruffy stray dog and various other colorful characters in her small Florida town.

November 2008: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
The sixth volume in the Harry Potter series, the book explores Lord Voldemort’s tragic past as Harry comes to terms with his destiny–to fight Voldemort in a battle in which only one will survive. We feature this book in November in anticipation of the film adaptation, due to be released this month.

December 2008: The Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle
The followup from L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, this book has Meg and her friend Calvin O’Keefe racing against time to defeat the Echthroi: sinister, mysterious beings which threaten to tear the universe apart.

January/February 2009: Holes by Louis Sachar
Unlucky Stanley Yelnats finds himself sentenced to hard labor at a Texas juvenile detention center. The boys are forced to dig holes in the desert, day after day… what are they looking for?

March 2009: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
A classic tale of friendship and imagination, Bridge to Terabithia chronicles the unlikely relationship between Jesse Aarons and his new neighbor Leslie Burke, the mystical land of Terabithia that unites them, and the real-life tragedy that rocks Jesse’s world.

April 2009: The Book of Jude by Kimberley Heuston
Sixteen-year-old Jude finds her world turned upside down when her mother receives a fellowship to study for a year in Czechoslovakia. This book sensitively explores themes of adolescence, identity and mental illness, all against the backdrop of Prague at the end of the Cold War.

May 2009: The Giver by Lois Lowry
This book is set in a pseudo-utopian society in which Sameness is the ideal and strong emotions are all but eradicated. Jonas is a twelve-year-old boy who receives an unusual assignment–to become the sole Receiver of Memory, the only one who knows the people’s history and all that came before.

June 2009: The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron
Lucky is a ten-year-old girl who lives with her father’s ex-wife after the untimely death of her mother. Her favorite pastime is eavesdropping on Twelve-Step meetings, which inspire her own plucky search for a Higher Power–though she’s not sure what that is. The story explores family and faith with wit and grace.

July/August 2009: The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
Poor Holling Hoodhood is the sole Presbyterian in his sevent-grade class. His Jewish and Catholic classmates all leave school early on Wednesdays for religious instruction, while Holling is stuck with his teacher, who he’s sure is out to get him because she makes him read Shakespeare. The horror! Set in 1968, our series closes on a high note with this poignant and humorous book.

There will be an article in each print issue of the magazine, accompanied by a discussion guide available online. Should be fun.

It was hard to narrow the list to ten books. I tried to include some books that might appeal to boys, and I asked around a bit, but I don’t have a lot of elementary-age boys in my life so I don’t know what they read. I also wish this list reflected more ethnic diversity. Next year…?

I’m also looking for a name for this series. Any ideas? For the sermon series I’m toying with “the Word within the words,” but that requires a small-caps font for people to “get” it.