What we’re reading this month: July 2024

In the Shadow of Freedom

By Alessandra Harris (Orbis, 2024)

Alessandra Harris offers an extensively researched work on the Christian world’s role in the enslavement of Africans and the marginalization of their descendants. In the Shadow of Freedom highlights the Catholic Church’s culpability via the papal endorsement of the African slave trade. This set in motion a trajectory from which emerged the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Black people in the United States today.

Harris pinpoints the fact that emancipation, which the majority of Catholic organizations in the United States impeded despite Pope Gregory XVI’s condemnation of the trade, led to escalating oppression against African Americans. Instead of full citizenship in the “land of the free,” Black people became victims of indentured servitude, assault, and lynching. The laws did not protect Black people but led to their oppression by the penal system. Unwilling to relinquish its racist and inhumane view of African Americans, the United States kept them in an evolving bondage.

Rather than participate in Christ’s mission to “set the captives free” (Isa. 61:1), white Christians have perpetuated the dehumanization of Black Americans. As Harris explains, the majority of Catholic and Protestant groups not only were bystanders to these grave injustices but also actively participated in the marginalization of Black people.

Underlying Harris’ writing is her own experience as a Black woman raising a son who experienced inequitable treatment from early elementary school on, largely due to inherent biases that continue to subject Black people to discriminatory treatment by law enforcement and authority figures.

In the Shadow of Freedom is a clarion call to U.S. Christians to end this destructive trajectory—not only to promote the liberation of Black people but also to find their own spiritual liberation from the sin of systemic racism.

—Matt Kappadakunnel

The Cemetery of Untold Stories

By Julia Alverez (Hachette, 2024)

Readers familiar with Julia Alvarez’s work will recognize the memoir-like qualities of her latest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories. The author of a number of well-received novels, including How the Garcia Sisters Lost Their Accents, Alvarez has long been fascinated with the power of story to offer insights into human life. This mid-length novel captures the thoughts of a veteran poet and storyteller as she muses on the duty of writers to act as the repository and disseminator of the stories they absorb throughout their lives.

The protagonist, Alma, is an American-raised writer who returns to her native Dominican Republic to settle family estate issues. Having inherited a plot of land, she decides to turn it into a “cemetery” for her untold stories. As the quirky title and premise suggest, the work is Alvarez’s paean to the writing life and the role it can play in directing readers’ imaginations toward larger things.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories often reads like the work of a seasoned writer coming to terms with her life and work—all its accomplishments and disappointments, hopes and resignations. There’s a wistful quality in the telling, one that I suspect touches most writers as they approach the twilight of their years. The book captures many of the themes and memories Alvarez reiterated in her earlier novels: in particular, the suffering of Dominicans and neighboring Haitians during the mid-20th-century reign of Dominican dictator Raphael Trujillo and the sense of “otherness” ex-patriate Latino/a people contend with when moving to “el Norte.”

A brief afterward in the text reads simply, “Este cuento se ha acabado,” which translates as “This story is over.” Whether or not Alvarez takes on another writing project, anyone interested in the alchemy of storytelling would do well to look at this book.

—Mike Mastromatteo