Education of the Heart: 35 Children's Books Featuring POC

All of these books are books I personally read and enjoyed as a child, with the exception of the two marked by asterisks. The first of those is a recently-published book by a favorite children's author of mine, and the second comes recommended by several friends.

Obviously there are many people of color who are not African-Americans--I'd love to put together another list of those books if there is interest. In light of the current heightened awareness of racial division in our country following the death of George Floyd (requiescat in pace), I want to bring especial attention to these books at this time.

There are no books listed for high school students, not because they do not exist, but because many high-schoolers can read adult books, and lists of adult books on this topic can more easily be found.

Picture Books
Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats
Whistle for Willie, Ezra Jack Keats
The Drinking Gourd, Jeanette Winter
Color Dance, Anne Jonas
A Fist for Joe Louis and Me, Trinka Hikes Noble*
Ragtime Tumpie, Alan Schroeder
Henry's Freedom Box, Ellen Levine
Wilma Unlimited, Kathleen Krull
Ellen's Broom, Kelly Starling Lyons
Freedom Summer, Deborah Wiles
Virgie Goes to School with Us Boys, Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
A Picture Book of George Washington Carver, David A. Adler (illustrations: Dan Brown)
Everybody Cooks Rice, Norah Dooley
The Land is Your Land, by Woodie Guthrie (illustrations: Kathy Jakobsen)

Elementary-Level Chapter Books
Freedom's Wings, Flying Free, Message in the Sky (Corey's Underground Railroad Diaries), Sharon Dennis Wyeth
Meet Addy, Addy Learns a Lesson, Addy's Surprise, Happy Birthday, Addy!, Addy Saves the Day, Changes for Addy, Connie Porter
The Jacket, Andrew Clements
Rosa Parks, Kathleen Kudlinksi

Junior High
Yankee Girl, Mary Anne Rodman
The Journal of Biddy Owens, Walter Dean Myers
The Journal of Joshua Loper, Walter Dean Myers
Circle of Fire, Evelyn Coleman
The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
Bud, Not Buddy, Christopher Paul Curtis
Sounder, William H. Armstrong
Lilies of the Field, William Edmund Barrett*
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, Gary Schmidt

they shall be satisfied

"The Church has an obligation to feed the poor, and we cannot spend all our money on buildings. However, there are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty--and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. Here is a place of transcendent beauty, and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco." (Dorothy Day, speaking in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco)

"The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole Continent. America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization." (Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia in America)

Earlier this semester, when my students were studying the colonization of the Americas, I had them read parts of a translation of the earliest record we have of the Guadalupe apparitions. We had just been discussing the horrific treatment perpetrated on the people of the Americas by Spanish soldiers, many of whom justified their imperial project on the grounds of evangelization but in fact cared for nothing of the sort (without disparagement intended towards those small groups of religious who came and valiantly spread the Gospel without sequestering land, money, or power for themselves). A Spanish Dominican friar, observing these crimes, remarked with ire that "the Spaniards, from the beginning of their first entrance upon America to this present day, were no more eager to promote the preaching of the Gospel of Christ to these nations, than if they had been dogs or beasts. Worst of all, they specifically laid many restrictions on the Religious, daily afflicting and persecuting them, so that they would not have time or leisure to attend to preaching and the Divine Service, for they looked upon that to be an obstacle to their getting gold, and raking up riches which their greed pressed them to obtain."

If I were in those circumstances, I thought as I prepared for class, what would I say to the faith of these men who came from without, who brought more disease and violence than they brought order and love? Why would God send the message of His universal redemption through people who did not live the universal love demanded by the Incarnation? Why would I accept a faith that seemed more an imposition of European-ness than a gift intended for the ends of the earth? To be honest, I thought, I probably wouldn't. The relationship of conqueror to conquered is not a relationship that manifests the living reality of the Church.

The ten years after Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico became ten years of increasing failure on the part of God's wayward Spanish sons to show the American people a Church is a mother and bride, not master. Could it be coincidence, then, that at Tepeyac He gave, not an education broken by sin and language barriers, but contact with the living reality of His Mother, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the type par excellence of the Church Herself? You are mine, Juan Diego, she said, not because you are Spanish or European but because you are a man, just as my dearest Jesus was a man.

Someone once told me that people study history because they don't have the balls to study philosophy (rough paraphrase). Maybe, if you're a Gnostic (and then who cares what you have the balls to do anyhow?) But if you're Catholic, philosophical truth (logos, if you will) became incarnate at a particular time at a particular place. History is important to us because history is important to God. It matters not just that our Lady appeared, by when she appeared and where she appeared. She appeared in 1531 at Tepeyac because she was needed there. She was needed then.

I tried to say this in class somehow, but the reflection was still new and more tinged with awe than eloquence, so I'm not sure how much of what I tried to articulate above really made it from my heart into my students' minds. But I do remember that one of my students, who isn't always particularly attentive, was leaning forward in his chair with every ounce of concentration focused on what I was saying. When I bumbled my way rather clumsily into some kind of conclusion about the historical import of the event, his eyes got wide, and I almost started crying right there in class. I still do when I remember it, because I could see in his eyes that he got it. History was suddenly no longer one damn thing after another but a narrative unfurling within the providential grace of God.

Why do the liberal arts, the studia humanitatis matter to a developing country? After moments like that, how could one say they do not?

Medieval-Enlightenment Humanities

My second-year students have worked really hard this semester. Below, a tribute to them: the list of works whose excerpts they valiantly soldiered through at the behest of their crazy instructor. (I didn't fully realize how crazy this was until I actually sat down to type out the list. Yikes.)

St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne

Letters from King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII

Magna Carta

St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Canons of Lateran IV

The Rule of the Franciscan Order

The Primitive Constitutions of the Order of Friars Preacher

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron

Canons of the Council of Constance

Dante, Inferno (no excerpting here--we walked alongside Virgil & his pupil to the depths of despair)

Diary of Christopher Columbus

Nican Mopohua

Bartolomeo de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

Machiavelli, The Prince

Martin Luther, 95 Theses and Babylonian Captivity

John Calvin, Genevan Catechism and Institutes

Schleitheim Confession

39 Articles of the Church of England

William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canons of the Council of Trent

St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises

St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Francis Bacon, aphorisms from the Novum Organum

Descartes, Discourse on Method (and a short jaunt into Meditations on First Philosophy for my favorite Descartes passage)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Greco-Roman Roots of Civilization

I'm very proud of my freshmen class. Most of them come to JPII with no exposure to studying the great works of Western civilization, and most dove right into the material and really worked hard to understand what was going on in each work and how they connected to each other.

This semester covered excerpts from the following works:

• Much of Homer's Iliad
• All of Sophocles, Antigone
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Plato, Apology
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics
• Polybius, Histories
• Cicero, On Duties
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Gospel of Matthew
• Acts of the Apostles
• Letters to the Romans and Galatians
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• St. Clement of Alexandria, On Philosophy
• Passion of the Holy Martyrs Felicity and Perpetua
• David Bentley Hart, "Human Dignity was a Rarity Before Christianity"
• St. Augustine, City of God
• Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

medieval philosophy + big band

what do Boethius, Dante, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Robin Williams have in common?

I'm glad you asked.

seeds of the Word (or, my working defense of the humanities)

I'll be teaching two humanities courses this upcoming semester, one on the Greeks and Romans and one on the medievals. Preparing for these classes has been an exciting and maybe too-consuming adventure, but it's been forcing me to look squarely at a question I usually shrugged off at Hillsdale: why prioritize studying the humanities?

I loved the classes I took for my history major, and I went that direction in the first place because I'd been enchanted by courses taught by the most wise and loving Great Books teacher a high-schooler could ask for. At Hillsdale, I took classes in philosophy of education and the liberal arts tradition, and I read A.G. Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life for devotional reading (ha! the Dominican spirit strikes again!) because it set my heart on fire. I thought then, and do now, that reading history, literature, political theory, philosophy, and theology impelled me to examine my life more intentionally and opened me to dimensions of human experience with which I had been unacquainted.

As I began to put together syllabi for my courses, though, I began to realize that my own experience did not constitute a sufficient apology for others to pursue a similar course of study. When one of the other missionary teachers asked me to describe in one word what I was hoping to find in Belize, I said, "integration." Integration of all this abstract thinking I've been doing for years with the practical realities of human life. Taking what I have discovered to be true and letting its implications permeate what I do and how I do it.

Well, here we are. The intellectual rubber meets the road to Benque Viejo.

The act of standing in front of a classroom and asking students to read Homer, Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, and Shakespeare stakes my integrity as a teacher and a human being on the assertion that these authors are worth reading and thinking about, not just for economically-privileged American students but also for economically-challenged Central American students. I will be cheating my students if I offer them anything less than a completely worthy use of their limited time and money.

The value of the liberal arts education that John Paul Junior College offers holds true only if liberal arts education is what it purports to be--an education based not on the particular race, nationality, sex, religious background, or economic situation of the person receiving it, but on the fact that he is a human being. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to understand and responsibly exercise freedom. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to wonder about and reflect on the conflicts and questions raised by his own experience. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to discuss these questions with other human beings and alongside them to seek the truth about the human condition. An education which helps him to do these things is an education in realizing the potential inherent in his humanity.

One could reasonably object that exercising freedom, reflecting on one's experience and seeking truth can be done without reading ancient texts. True enough. It seems to me, however, that one can think about reading these tests in (at least) two ways:

(a) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) so then I will know what an influential ancient bard thought about these things, and if I ever write a textbook on ancient Greece, then I can write about what Homer thought," or,
(b) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) and what the implications would be of thinking that way. I will think about why he thinks those things, and about whether or not I agree with him, and I will allow his perspective to bring nuance and depth to the way I think about these things."

No contest, folks.

The perspective of any given person is pretty limited, such that we learn best in the company of others. Reading ancient authors enables part of that company to be formed of those who have lived in times and places quite different from our own, who may think in categories utterly foreign to us, and who have foreseen difficulties (or solutions) in various paths of thinking not immediately evident to us.

SO. Super cool example I ran into the other day:

While putting together the ancient humanities course, I'd been pulling some sections from Justin Martyr's 1st Apology where he discusses pagan philosophy. He says, for example, pretty shockingly: "we have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them." Justin attributes the possibility of the rational pagan to the fact that "there seem to be seeds of truth among all men."

Ok, yes, he did just say that those who lived reasonably before Christ are Christians which is W I L D. Stick that on your back burner to consider, though, because it's not my point at present. 

Know where that same phrase popped up the other day, only a few weeks after I'd read it in Justin? The Instrumentum Laboris for the 2019 Synod on the Amazonian Region, the very same document which has created a tizzy in much of the English-speaking Catholic world, despite the general difficulty of source-checking any of the claims made by various Catholic news agencies as it is not yet available in English. One of the questions addressed in the document is the complicated question of what it means for Catholicism to engage with a non-Catholic culture. Where does the Church learn, and where does it teach?

Section 108 of the document reads "inculturation and interculturality complement rather than oppose each other. Just as Jesus was incarnate in a particular, determined culture (inculturation), his missionary disciples followed his paths. For their part, the Christians of a culture leave so as to encounter persons of other cultures (interculturality). This occurred from the beginnings of the Church when the Jewish apostles brought the Good News to different cultures, such as that of the Greeks, discovering there “seeds of the Word.” From that encounter and dialogue between cultures emerge new paths of the Spirit. Today, in this encounter and dialogue with the Amazonian cultures, the Church examines these new paths."

Yep, the Instrumentum Laboris explicitly invokes Justin's phrase. This suggests that the Synodal bishops think that understanding how Catholicism engaged with pagan Greek philosophy in the first centuries A.D. can help us understand how the Church today can engage with the cultures of the Amazon region. Not understanding the first will hinder our efforts to sort out the second--we'd have to re-do a lot of legwork that was already done, so to speak. (At least, the authors think that they think this; I'll have to read more of the document to get a better idea of how far the historical parallel can be drawn and how far the authors would want it to be.) This is a huge question being worked out by the Church right now, but it can be at least partially elucidated by our understanding of the past.

It's easy to treat great texts as desiccated museum specimens, but how much richer for us to know they contain dormant seeds of the Word to be watered by our encounter with them.