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For Teachers, Parents: The Stranger’s Son and Teacher’s Guide

In African diaspora, Faith, Schooling on October 13, 2010 at 8:12 am

The Stranger’s Son by Grace Allman Burke will be a welcome addition to your family or school library.

A page-turner, moving in a couple of hours through the tumultuous years of a pre-teen-aged boy’s life, the book puts the reader right in the middle of a time and place that we rarely hear about from a young person’s perspective – the ancient world of Old Testament times. For kids that think they don’t like history, it’s a story that opens them to history, without the baggage of that label.

The main character, a pre-teen named Gershom, experiences crossing cultural barriers, discrimination, physical pain, and family dysfunction, but also discovers adventure, faith, hope and purpose. Other characters in the book help shape important themes about cross-cultural family relationships, parenting, cruelty and justice. Although it’s a fictional account, Bible readers will find it amazingly accurate to the biblical narratives, but with a fresh cultural perspective that speaks to readers of diverse backgrounds. It is appropriate for both religious and secular families and settings.

As an educator, I highly recommend The Stranger’s Son for classrooms and afterschool programs, home schoolers, family devotions, rites-of-passage programs, and book clubs for boys, girls and adults.   I was so inspired that I have created a teacher’s guide that includes language arts, social studies, geography and mathematics activities inspired by the book. 

You can order the book from the author’s publisher ( www.Winepresspublishing.com )  or www.BarnesandNoble.com or www.amazon.com .  The teacher’s guide will be available from the author’s website, which is coming soon.  In the meantime, you can order or get more information on the guide here:  

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Hello world!

In Faith on June 15, 2010 at 12:45 pm

Welcome to my blog – at long last! 

Thanks to my family and friends for keeping the fire lit under me. 

Part of my delay in getting started is that I have so many interests, I was having trouble zeroing in on one theme.  Today,  I was reading Michael Catt’s book on prayer, the Power of Persistence, and he referred to the Old Testament prophet Elijah (story in the book of 1st Kings).  He said that Elijah had only one ambition, and it was that people in his cynical society would know that The Lord really is God.  Catt said that single-minded people like Elijah are the ones who facilitate God showing his power on behalf of people.  I want to do what I can to cause the rain to fall on the parched ground in so many places in our society and world.

So, that was it.  There was my theme.  Everything I do – teaching math to people who think they can’t make sense of it, supporting school leaders to serve every learner well, talking about the Bible to anyone who with the least curiosity about what it says, and encouraging people (especially young people of African descent) to be all God intended them to be – all of my interests converge in faith that God can and will do what may seem impossible. 

Rainmaking is what God did in response to Elijah’s unrelenting stance.  He coaxed God into sending rain so that a famine-starved nation could survive.  The culture was starving, physically and spiritually, under a character-challenged ruler named Ahab and a first lady named Jezebel.  They worshipped a symbol of a bull – and were fixated on money, sex and power.  But, Elijah asked God to make it rain, and put everything on the line, so people would know that it was The Lord, not the bull, who is God. 

 

I hope that visitors to my blog, for whatever reason you originally come,  will leave with a broader picture of who God is.  And, not just cognitively get it, but emotionally and spiritually respond to what you experience here.  And, in turn, help cause rain to fall in the places you were made to serve …