A New Beginning to a New Year – January 15, 2020

Join us with authors Bernadette Walsh, Pastor Nancy Rakoczy, and Jack Bilello  – “A New Beginning to a New Year”

Bernadette Walsh, author of “Johnny Be Good” – Peggy Lynch has too many children and too much to do. Unlike the pampered wives in her affluent Long Island suburb, Peggy’s not married to a doctor or a lawyer. She’s married to an uneducated Irish immigrant twelve years her junior and has to work two jobs to help make ends meet. In between the carpools, the laundry, and the food shopping, she also has to make sure her youngest son takes his ADHD medicine so he doesn’t flunk out of high school. Maybe if her lazy husband would get off his ass and help around the house, she’d have time to connect with her children and be the type of mother they deserve. But Peggy lacks that luxury because if it wasn’t for her, the whole family would fall to pieces. www.bernadettewalsh.com

Years have passed since Peggy ruled the house and Veronica is no longer her mother’s obedient little girl. Moving into her childhood home with her husband and infant twins, she’s starting a new life and should finally be happy. Right? Wrong.

While cleaning out her old bedroom, Veronica finds a letter from her deceased mother. If Veronica were smart she’d burn it and leave her family secrets buried with the dead. But as her mother so often said, Veronica’s never been that smart.

She rips open the envelope and proves her mother right…

Pastor Nancy Rakoczy, contributor to “T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change”  The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change entails a wide-ranging conversation between Christian theology and various other discourses on climate change. Given the far-reaching complicity of “North Atlantic Christianity” in anthropogenic climate change, the question is whether it can still collaborate with and contribute to ongoing mitigation and adaptation efforts. The main essays in this volume are written by leading scholars from within North Atlantic Christianity and addressed primarily to readers in the same context; these essays are critically engaged by respondents situated in other geographic regions, minority communities, non-Christian traditions, or non-theological disciplines.

Structured in seven main parts, the handbook explores: 1) the need for collaboration with disciplines outside of Christian theology to address climate change; 2) the need to find common moral ground for such collaboration; 3) the difficulties posed by collaborating with other Christian traditions from within; 4) the questions that emerge from such collaboration for understanding the story of God’s work; and 5) God’s identity and character; 6) the implications of such collaboration for ecclesial praxis; and 7) concluding reflections examining whether this volume does justice to issues of race, gender, class, other animals, religious diversity, geographical divides and carbon mitigation.

This rich ecumenical, cross-cultural conversation provides a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the theological and moral challenges raised by anthropogenic climate change.

Jack Bilello, author of “Bonds of War” – Jesse VanTwelves kept his “rendezvous with destiny” during the savage, furious sea battle for Guadalcanal in November, 1942. Still plagued by the demons of the war, Jesse is tormented by the knowledge that out of seven hundred men aboard his ship, The USS Juneau, he is one of ten to have survived the instantaneous destruction of his ship and the most brutal, intense suffering imaginable.
Consequently, he has failed his only son, Donnie, himself hounded by the dark shadows of the Vietnam conflict. Father and son, in conflict, can’t escape their feelings of defeat, failure and guilt.
Jesse revisits the heartland, Waterloo, Iowa, for a re-dedication ceremony. There, via a flashback, he gives the present the slip and revisits the past. He returns to the fullness, spontaneity and goodness of beginning and learns some important truths about himself, his buddies, the fallen, and above all, his son Donnie.