by Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan
What are you reading this summer?
Do you love grabbing a book and soaking up the sun, or listening to an audiobook as you travel? Or do you read inside to hide from the heat? Maybe you used to read but have trouble focusing now and want to find a good book? Summer can be a time to reengage in reading, to try reading new kinds of books, or to read to escape. We hope you find inspiration in the articles that follow this month.
Books, religious and nonreligious, fiction and nonfiction, help so often with my ministry. The joke is that church is just a glorified book club anyway! Even outside of the Biblical text, I find stories for sermons or ideas or facts to mention from what I read, as well as opportunities for my own healing. Sometimes, they just give me a bit of escape in the chaos of my life and the world.
For almost a decade now, I have had a summer book club in the churches I serve where we read and discuss a fiction novel once a month out at an ice cream or coffee shop in town. These are usually novels with religious themes but not usually ones you would find in a Christian Book Store. People who never read fiction, and those who have much different taste in novels than I do, always show up interested to discuss the ideas about faith we can find in fiction. The Red Tent is always a favorite, and recently Psalm for the Wild Built has been one too! These books allow us to talk about how we can live our faith, and about how to read critically, in ways that are sometimes safer than we typically do in church.
We want to spend this month celebrating reading, sharing some of our reviews of everything from commentaries (cool ones!) to novels. There is no personal pan pizza coming your way at the end of this month, not from Young Clergywomen International anyway, but we hope you are blessed by the ways our spirituality is formed by our reading!
Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan
Content Editor (and formerly Managing Editor- they can’t get rid of me yet), Fidelia Magazine
Rev. Shannon E. Sullivan (she/her/hers) is a life-long feminist and United Methodist currently serving the community of Frederick, Maryland, as the senior pastor of Trinity UMC. She is a graduate of Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. She is married to Aaron Harrington, her high school sweetheart, who is a pilot and all around aviation geek. They have two living children who they are raising in a house cluttered by books and airplane parts. Shannon is a proud former Managing Editor of Fidelia, and more of her writing can be found through Fidelia and at shannonesullivan.com.
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