Book Club

Love to read? In the grand tradition of passing on a great book to a friend, we invite you to share and discuss your reading experience with fellow book lovers. Our Book Club meets on the third Thursday of each month at 10am in The Other Cup, September through May. Even if you haven’t read the book we’re discussing, you may still enjoy the conversation. You are welcome to arrive at 9:30am for fellowship; our discussion begins at 10am. All are invited to participate in our book club: a beloved group that has been a part of life at Saint Barnabas for over 30 years. Read Below for this month’s book reading.   Questions? Contact the church office.

See our 2023/2024 schedule and reading list by CLICKING HERE.

Nov. 16 – Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay, 504 page.

“We have a glut of text and trade books on American history. But what we don’t have is a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that will offer to American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their own country. Such an account can shape and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and, by making them understand that land’s roots, and share in its memories, will equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society. It will provide them with an enduring sense of membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the exciting, perilous, and consequential story of their own country.

The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. They are more likely to reflect the skeptical or partial outlook of specialized professional academic historians, an outlook that leads to a fragmented and fractured view of modern American society and fails to convey to American readers the greater arc of their own history. Or they disproportionately reflect the outlook of radical critics of American society, whose one-sided accounts lack the balance of a larger perspective and have had an enormous, and largely negative, effect upon the teaching of American history in American high schools and colleges.”

 (Source: goodreads.com)

Questions? Please email Ann Brenner.