Book Clubs at Christ Church

Non Fiction Book Club

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 16, 2025 AT 3:00 PM, to discuss Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez.  Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” … the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism.  … Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of 'Christian America.' Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.  (www.wwnorton.com)

Our meetings are in a hybrid format with in-person attendance and via Zoom. Zoom information will be distributed before each meeting.  To get more information about the book club, to be added to our distribution list or to suggest a book discussion, please get in touch with Jim Baroody (jimbaroody@gmail.com).

Women's Book Club

Women’s Book Club 

Thursday, September 25 at 7:00 pm Fellowship Room and on Zoom

We hope you will join us in a great discussion of the book below.  There are lots of copies in all formats. 

Kirkus Review of THE WHITE LADY by Jacqueline Winspear

A tense history-based thriller filled with anguish and suspense.  A poignant story of courage, misogyny, and misused power.

In 1947, Elinor White lives in a village in Kent in a grace-and-favor house, rewarded for her service to the crown, and keeps her own counsel. A farmworkers's cottage nearby is home to the Mackie family: Jim, Rose, and little Susie, who befriends the wary Elinor. Jim comes from a family of notorious London gangsters, and when they want him to return to the fold, they'll resort to violence to convince him. In interspersed chapters we learn about the background that Elinor keeps to herself: She was a spy during both world wars. Back in 1914, in Belgium, 10-year-old Elinor, youngest daughter of a Belgian father and English mother, tries to catch a boat to England along with her mother and sister, Cecily, before the German advance, but they're too late and return to their home, now under occupation. Some time later, a mysterious woman named Isabelle approaches their mother and recruits the two girls to spy on the Germans. It's easy for schoolgirls to appear innocuous as they count the number of trains that pass by their village. The sisters are trained in sabotage and self-defense. Elinor is a natural, but Cecily is not, and when Elinor kills two German soldiers trying to rape her sister, Isabelle smuggles them out to England—where Elinor faces another war, decades later, by working with the Special Operations Executive and returning to Belgium. Now she hopes her contacts from those days will save Jim from the clutches of the Mackie family. Her wartime experiences come back to haunt her, leaving her unable to trust anyone. In the end, it’s the gangsters who tell her the truth that will shatter her world and give her hope for the future.

For more information please contact Pam Burch, pburch1@rochester.rr.com.