Mysteries

As a member of Sisters in Crime, I volunteered at the Takoma Park Neighborhood Library in DC April 21 (note this blog runs on Afghanistan time). It's a great reminder of how librarians are tireless in their work, dispensing advice with wisdom and grace. Librarians urge their visitors to explore, even though it always makes more work or them.

Check out the event on Facebook or Pinterest.

Booksellers & Librarians Solve Mysteries Everyday

Please drop in between 10 a.m. and  4 p.m. on Saturday, April 21st to have your writing questions (any type and all ages welcome) answered by Susan Froetschel as part of Sisters in Crime's "Booksellers and Librarians Solve Mysteries Every Day." Susan also will be helping with other library tasks as part of this event.

Author Susan Froetschel Is Library Staffer for a Day
Takes Part in Sisters in Crime's "Booksellers and Librarians Solve Mysteries Every Day" Event

Washington, DC—Susan Froetschel, mystery author and member of Sisters in Crime—an international organization founded to support the professional development of women writing crime fiction—will work as a volunteer staffer at Takoma Park Neighborhood Library in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, April 21, from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. as part of a "Booksellers and Librarians Solve Mysteries Every Day" celebration.  The event, produced by Sisters in Crime, is designed to thank librarians and booksellers for 25 years of support of the mystery genre. Sisters in Crime was established with an organizational meeting held in New York City in the spring of 1987.

"I am very excited about spending time at the beautiful Takoma Park Library," Froetschel said. "In helping readers find their way to the right book at the right time, librarians solve mysteries every day."

Crackdown

"American sisters do outnumber the priests, and it’s the women who have the troops, too – at schools and hospitals the bishops couldn’t close if they wanted to," reports Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post. "The nuns no longer only empty the bed pans, you see, but now also own the institutions where they work. And you have to wonder whether that’s the real problem."

Courage

"A Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing 80 percent of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States, found serious theological errors in statements by members, widespread dissent on the church’s teaching on sexuality and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” a church report released Wednesday stated." So reports Elizabeth Tenety for the Washington Post.
The brave words of Catholic sisters are guided by reason and their consciences. Faith is unsustainable if it cannot endure such independent and sincere questions and tests.

The sisters are far more courageous and determined than women such as myself. Disgusted by child-abuse scandals of the early 1990s and the church's irrational arguments and response - blaming the media and the messenger - I abandoned the Catholic Church. If they were so irrational on one point, how could they not be wrong on so many others? I did not need such men to supervise my spirituality. No women or child does.

 "Like everything else in the United States, religion must compete under the free-market system. In this country, we have the privilege of free thought and speech, and we can decide which 'moral' rules imposed by religious leaders, mere mortals, should be kept and which are meant to be broken," I wrote for the Hartford Courant, March 24, 2002, in an essay titled "The Church Must Change." Not many traces of that 2002 opinion essay remain online.

I admire the nuns and would consider attending a church run by nuns.

Image courtesy of From Eternity to Here.