News - January 2016 RSS Feed

Due to road conditions for our staff and catechists and concern for the safety of all, there will be no PREP preschool or grade school sessions and the nursery will be closed on Sunday, January 24.

Please note that the Women's Council Retreat has been rescheduled for Mar. 5th

Father Dexter has a new letter to the parish reporting on his recent trip to our sister parish and school in Haiti.

Unlikely alliances are a staple of fiction, and the unlikelier the better, from Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi to Frodo and Gollum creeping toward Mordor — because the real drama lies in watching how dissimilar characters turn out to be brothers (or sisters) under the skin. Sue Monk Kidd followed this principle in her best-selling first novel, “The Secret Life of Bees,” in which a 14-year-old white girl and her family’s black servant join in fleeing abuse in the South Carolina of the civil rights era. Kidd’s latest novel, “The Invention of Wings,” also set largely in South Carolina, involves another unusual duo, in this case a slave and a daughter of the family that owns her. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage The author Sue Monk Kidd at her home on Marco Island, Fla. The South figures prominently in her work. Sue Monk Kidd Tackles Race in ‘The Invention of Wings’JAN. 6, 2014 Sue Monk Kidd By the Book: Sue Monk Kidd: By the BookJAN. 9, 2014 The story begins in Charleston in 1803 on the day 11-year-old Sarah Grimké is given Hetty, or “Handful,” roughly her same age, as a birthday present. A born abolitionist whose earliest memory is of witnessing a slave being whipped (a trauma that’s responsible for the stammer that still afflicts her), Sarah immediately tries to “return” Handful. When this attempt fails, she writes an official “certificate of manumission,” which is promptly torn in two. Although Handful has to serve as Sarah’s personal maidservant, the girls share confidences and even an illicit picnic on the roof. Sarah also teaches Handful to read and write, an infraction that results in harsh penalties for both.

Looking for info on the Women's Retreat in Topeka? Click here.