Reading Group

We met last night for our reading group. Every year a couple of the guys bid on a "Traditional High Tea" at a charity auction, so rather than the usual meeting at the pub, we met on the house of one of our members for Oolong and Black Pearl (yo ho ho?) tea and a couple of others, along with a big variety of scones and other foods. In past years we've combined it with a time to drink a variety of single malt Scotch whisky (my favorite last year was the Laphroaig), but this year our two experts on single malts were both out of town, so we decided to have that another night.

The person whose house we were at is also hosting a grad student in (micro-) finance/business who was born and grew up in a Tutsi refugee camp in Uganda. So he recommended the book Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza as a good way to understand the 1994 genocide. Immaculée's story is a powerful one, and I was especially struck by the way it was neighbors and childhood friends who, convinced by the wild propaganda, turned on her family and so many others. It also made me ashamed that more wasn't done internationally to try to stop it. The discussion of the book was good, as was the chance we had to hear the student's own story.

One of our members, a psychology professor, is fascinated with memoirs of theologians apparently...so our next book is Lewis Smede's My God and I.