دانلود رمان انگلیسی “خواهر ساندرا” – یک راهبه کاتولیک سیاه‌پوست و مبارزه برای برابری در کلیسا و جامعه

I believe the first time I met Sister Sandra Smithson, SSSF, was at the W.A. Bass school building in a pre-gentrified version of the Nations neighborhood in west Nashville. She was sitting at a low wooden table in a colorful, child-sized plastic library chair that was much too small for her, most likely puzzling over her next move for Project Reflect, one of its literacy programs, or one of her efforts to establish the city’s first charter school—all designed to serve struggling public school children. I was assigned to interview her for the Tennessee Register, the newspaper of the Catholic Diocese of Nashville. I was fairly new to the job, and, while I had done some research on Sister Sandra ahead of the interview, I was unprepared for the life force I would soon encounter. I came to that first meeting with little knowledge of the stories and the history I would begin to explore with her over the next two decades. I was unfamiliar with her order, the School Sisters of St. Francis. I had heard of St. Katharine Drexel and her order of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, but only had a surface familiarity with them. In my upbringing in the White Catholic church of Nashville and the South, I never knew a Black Catholic nun, did not know the stories of their long struggles and deep impact. I had little knowledge of the tight-knit Black Catholic community in Nashville. After that wide-ranging first conversation with Sister Sandra back at the start of the new millennium, I knew that I wanted to know more. I may have been assigned to interview her for a story on her after-school literacy program, but of course she never quite stayed on topic. In that first meeting I learned that she had served in Central America and Milwaukee but now lived with a small community of School Sisters in an unassuming house in west Nashville, where they were deep in formulating a plan to launch Smithson Craighead Academy. A Black nun living in an ordinary neighborhood ministering to children outside the confines of a Catholic church or school? One who spoke frankly about the challenges she faced from both Catholic and secular institutions? I was immediately fascinated by this new world she had cracked open for me. I quickly claimed the “Sister Sandra beat” for the Tennessee Register, as well as assignments related to her childhood parish of St. Vincent de Paul and its small but mighty Black Catholic community in Nashville. As I delved deeper into Sister Sandra’s stories and the history of the Black Catholic experience in the diocese, I felt that they should be better known to a wider audience. In many parts of the church, the legacy of Black Catholics—who have been part of the American Church for centuries—is still not well known or celebrated. Since the history of the Diocese of Nashville, and the history of the American Catholic church as a whole, had mostly been written from a White man’s perspective, there was still much I had to learn. As a Catholic journalist, I felt something of a calling to devote more time and energy to telling these stories from my corner of the world, to help preserve these stories that originated and shaped my beloved hometown of Nashville. When I initially approached Sister Sandra about writing the story of her life in 2011, she was somewhat dismissive, ever humble and selfdeprecating, attempting to convince me that “nobody would want to read that thing,” and I should not put my time into a project like this when I had two young children at home (not to mention a full-time job). After some back and forth, she graciously agreed to sit with me for a series of interviews, some in her home, some in the newly opened Smithson Craighead Academy public charter school. About a year later, after a number of meetings and interview sessions, she handed over about two hundred pages of detailed, handwritten memoirs. I have since read and reread these memories many times as they were an essential resource for me while compiling this book. Her memories include wonderful and somewhat magical-thinking visions of a happy childhood in Nashville, with her loving parents and nine siblings, memories of early convent life and ministries in Milwaukee and Chicago, as well as richly detailed accounts of her work in Costa Rica and Honduras. As she was a deeply spiritual person, living not far from the realm of the Spirit and her God, Sister Sandra also included dense and meandering theological musings in these writings. Poring over her words and adapting them into a general, reader-friendly format was challenging, a project that I have now been working on for over a dozen years, which is how long it takes when you’re a full-time mother working a full-time job with a global pandemic thrown in the mix. Between the birth of my third child and the pandemic, Sister Sandra and I had only sporadic contact for a few years, but once things settled into the “new normal,” I reached out again to revive the project. While she never fully admitted that writing her life story was a worthy endeavor, she did start calling me more often in the final years of her life, sometimes noting that “I’m not dead yet,” and reminding me that she was in her mid-nineties, hinting that I might not finish the book before her death. Unfortunately, she was correct with that prediction. In my mind, I would have loved to be able to hand her a copy of the finished product, to bring her to a book signing and see her finally embrace the worthiness of this endeavor. Ultimately, I hope I have done Sister Sandra’s story justice, painting an intimate portrait of a person who deserves to be known and remembered, who lived her extraordinary life on the forefront of change, revolutions even, in her country and her church. I have added some historical context and additional voices to the story, but this book is very much told through the lens of Sister Sandra’s personal experiences as she remembered them, close to the bone, without much distance. Much of the dialogue from her early life is transcribed here as she wrote it. I have tried to corroborate her memoirs where it was possible to do so, but some names, specific timelines and conversations have no historical record or could not be verified. Everything contained here is true to the best of my knowledge. This book also includes the memories of Sister Sandra’s family members, former students and Project Reflect colleagues. I’ve also incorporated stories from St. Vincent parishioners and pioneers of Catholic school integration from personal interviews and Diocese of Nashville archives, which offer a fuller picture of the struggles Black Catholics faced when challenging their church and community to embrace racial justice as a moral issue. This book does not comprehensively delve into all the multitudes of lives Sister Sandra led during her ninety-six years on Earth. But I hope it does preserve the story of her life and legacy well and pays forward some of the inspiration she provided during her long life. I hope it cracks open the door to learn more about the history of Black Catholics in Nashville and beyond, and the stories of women of faith doing the work (so often without recognition), and making the difference. The stories are theirs, but I am honored to be able to share them.