Faithful Readers
We are meeting online! You are welcome to join us.
If you would like to be part of the online gathering and discussion, please email or call the church office and we’ll add you to the list.
Email secretary@harrowunited.ca or call the church office (204) 284-0079 to be included.
Zoom Meetings 1:30-3:30pm on the last Wednesday of the month or as indicated below.
Movies on Sunday afternoons.
Click on the photo above to DOWNLOAD or print the book list.
September 28, 2022: ‘Broken Circle: the Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools’ by Theodore Fontaine
Presenter: Shirley M.
Theodore (Ted) Fontaine lost his family and freedom just after his seventh birthday, when his parents were forced to leave him at an Indian residential school by order of the Roman Catholic Church and the Government of Canada. Twelve years later, he left school frozen at the emotional age of seven. He was confused, angry and conflicted, on a path of self-destruction. At age 29, he emerged from this blackness. By age 32, he had graduated from the Civil Engineering Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and begun a journey of self-exploration and healing.
Told as remembrances described with insights that have evolved through his healing, his story resonates with his resolve to help himself and other residential school survivors and to share his enduring belief that one can pick up the shattered pieces and use them for good.
Now an approved curriculum resource for grade 9–12 students in British Columbia and Manitoba.
October 16, 2022: ‘The Dharma of the Princess Bride:What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships’ by Ethan Nichtern
Book and movie
Friendship. Romance. Family. These are the three areas Ethan Nichtern delves into, taking as departure points the indelible characters from Rob Reiner’s perennially popular film―Westley, Fezzik, Vizzini, Count Rugen, Princess Buttercup, and others―as he also draws lessons from his own life and his work as a meditation teacher. Nichtern devotes the first section of the book to exploring the dynamics of friendship. Why do people become friends? What can we learn from the sufferings of Inigo Montoya and Fezzik?
October 26, 2022: ‘Permanent Astonishment’ by Thomson Highway
Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far-north childhood. But five of Tomson’s siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. A year later Rene joined him to begin the rest of their education.
November 20, 2022: ‘Children of the Stone: the Power of Music in a Hard Life’ by Sandy Tolan
It is an unlikely story. Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child from a Palestinian refugee camp, confronts an occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something much bigger than himself, and then, through his charisma and persistence, inspires scores of others to work with him to make that dream real. The dream: a school to transform the lives of thousands of children–as Ramzi’s life was transformed–through music.
January 15, 2023: ‘Scarborough’ by Catherine Hernandez
Book and movie
Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire.
Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
January 25, 2023: ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it”s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it”s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters” storylines intersect?
February 22 – ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
March 12 – ‘A Town Like Alice’ by Nevil Shute
Book and movie
Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. Jean’s travels leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.
March 29 – ‘Life in the City of Dirty Water’ by Clayton Thomas-Muller
Tying together personal stories of survival that bring the realities of Canada’s First Nations into sharp focus, and lessons learned from a career as a frontline activist committed to addressing environmental injustice on a global scale, Thomas-Muller offers a narrative and vision of healing and responsibility.
April 26 – ‘Washington Black’ by Esi Edugyan
From the sultry cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, Washington Black tells a story of friendship and betrayal, love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again–and asks the question, what is true freedom?