"SHE MADE A WAY - PART 3"

 “SHE MADE A WAY” – PART 3

“She Made A Way” is now out and about for reading, review and discussion – get your copy now!  I’d love to come to your church group, community group, or book club to talk about the book.  Central Presbyterian in Atlanta and North Decatur Presbyterian have already scheduled times, and I’ll be glad to schedule one for you.  One of my friends will be hosting a “salon” at her house, inviting friends and family to meet and talk with me about the book. I’ll be glad to do that with you too!  Here’s my friend and colleague Dr. Susan Hylen’s endorsement.  She is Professor of New Testament at Emory University:

“This is a memoir of a man and his mother, but it is also the story of a journey away from the racism that still dominates our country.  Although we often imagine people as either good or bad, racist or ‘woke,’ Nibs Stroupe understands racism to be deeply entrenched in caring people, even those who start to move away from their prejudice.  This rich and honest account moves beyond the simplistic binaries to help us understand the American South – and ourselves – in new ways.”

This book is written in honor of my mother, Mary Armour Stroupe, but also as an answer to a question with which I have long wrestled in my adult life:  How did I – and how do any of us – get caught in the web of racism and sexism and materialism?  How do we get so captured by demonic powers like this?  It is a captivity so deep that it changes the way that we perceive ourselves and perceive the world around us.  It is a captivity that is so subtle that it takes over our hearts long before we know anything about it.  We are taken so deeply into such a captivity because it is given to us by those we love and whom we love.  That is the stark and difficult answer, and this is why so many people who are classified as “white” are in such deep denial about our captivity.  To acknowledge our captivity would be to put ourselves in conflict with those we love, and it is a great price to pay.

This book does not leave us in despair, however.  It offers us hope for beginning to find some liberation from our captivity.  While my mother helped to bind me into this captivity, she also offered me ways to find a different path.  Her love, her compassion, her tenacity, her decency, her sense of fairness – all these factored into the tentative steps that I began to take to find some liberation from my captivity, steps that brought me into tension with her.  

So, go get the book!  You can find it at bookshop.org (the link is https://bookshop.org/p/books/she-made-a-way-mother-and-me-in-a-deep-south-world-nibs-stroupe/21530365?ean=9798385208548), your local bookstore, Amazon, or me.  I’ll be glad to get your comments on it.  And, of course, I’ll be glad to come to any of your groups to do a book talk/signing.  Thanks to our daughter Susan, I now have an author page on Facebook, and here’s the link for that: https://www.facebook.com/nibsstroupeauthor/