Sometimes Reading is Hard...
Sometimes reading is hard. Oh, not the words or the way they are strung together, but what they say...the subject matter... the story they tell...the information they impart. I have just finished two hard books...very different in subject matter but both heart-rending and mind-boggling and certain to stay with me for a long, long time, perhaps for the rest of my life. The first was The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by African- American theologian, James H. Cone, in which the author links- in some dramatically intense ways- the cross of Jesus the Christ and the lynchings of African-Americans in this country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a white American growing up in in the North during years when such reprehensible behavior was still taking place, I must confess my total ignorance of the history of what had and was still taking place during my childhood. And we learned nothing about it in school...nothing. Throughout my elementary school years I knew only...