Recent Reading
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
A Paradise for Perusers
I have given away four copies of James Mustich’s chef d’oeuvre, 1,000 Books to Read before You Die: A Life-Changing List, before I bought and kept one for myself. I became acquainted with Mr. Mustich…
Share the Wealth with Thuy Khuu: A Dream Come True… Two Months Living in Japan
I first met Thuy Khuu in 2006 when she took my Social Justice class at Saint Louis University. Born in Vietnam, she moved to the US at the age of eight with her parents, sister and brother. In…
From 7 P.M. to 7 A.M.
Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth Schocken paperback, 1988 I first read this book eighteen years ago. So much time has passed since those Maryknoll days when I thought I wanted to…
Share the Wealth with Mary & Cami: How to Stay Human in Grad School
WASHU’s Brown School is consistently ranked at the top of social work schools in the nation. But what does that mean if you lose your own humanity in the process? In this Share the Wealth,…
“I Remember” by Loran Aladdin
Loran wrote the following for my Humanities 101 class at Maryville University this past spring semester. _______________________ I remember a lifetime of feeling as though I should refrain from being proud of my identity. I…
Keeping Their Language Alive
Joseph Leftwich, Great Yiddish Writers of the Twentieth Century The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your…
Share the Wealth with Gabriela Keator: The Spiritual Path of a Barista
Merriam-Webster: “n: coffee brewed by forcing hot water through finely ground darkly roasted coffee beans” Gabriela Keator: “n: a vocational calling. A thing that sparks immense joy” For the majority of my life, I forced myself…
Share the Wealth with Elizabeth Burkemper on Tuesday 6 July … Bovine Bodhisattvas: My Springtime of Cows, Poetry, and Compassion
With luddite pipe dreams, I struggle in general with living in an increasingly technological, frenzied, and noisy world, and in specific with taking my first year of graduate classes on Zoom. In the midst of…