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Bookmark River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

REVIEWED BY JOAN MITCHELL, CSJ, ’62

Energetic and full of Cajun zest, Helen Prejean always connects the river and the fire that flowed through her with God. “Call it Mystery.

Call it Grace,” she writes in her memoir River of Fire. Helen describes feeling “aflow with yes” as her parents drive her to New Orleans to enter the

Sisters of St. Joseph. That call persists across Sister Helen’s 60 years in religious life and transforms her into a world leader in efforts to end the death penalty. Her memoir provides a lively record of one Sister living through the Second Vatican Council’s modern turn 1962–1965. The religious life Helen enters had not yet left behind medieval practices of penance and humility, nor does she find a wise and kind Sound of Music-style temperament in every religious superior — but Sr. Helen remains irrepressible. After a lecture about faults and foibles, her reaction is not to improve her behavior, but

instead to write “foibles” in her journal as a new word.

Helen’s resilience is born of a close, loving family, which includes her athletic sister Mary and her brother Louie — a family she recognizes as privileged when in her later years she moves into an impoverished housing project. After making vows, Helen begins several years of teaching in a traditional classroom of seventh graders who delight in her exuberance. As the Catholic Church turns toward the modern world and solidarity with the afflicted, Helen’s community sends her to study the new theology at Notre Dame. She fills her journals with insights, explores and later ends a close relationship with a priest, moves out of schools and into parish religious education, and is then elected director of novices. When she takes her novices to hear Sister Marie Augusta Neal, SND, speak, it is Helen who takes to heart the social justice message, “Integral to that good

news is that the poor are to be poor no longer.”

“Poor no longer.” These three words send Helen into free fall and haunt her for a year, until she moves to St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans and begins working at Hope House. It’s there she volunteers with the Prison Coalition and agrees to write to an inmate, which ignites her protests against the death penalty. Her memoir ends where her bestseller, Dead Man Walking, begins.

Joan Mitchell, CSJ, ’62 is a partner and publisher of Good Ground Press publishing house. She is an accomplished writer, theologian, and is a member of the Board of Trustees.

Women’s History Month Must-Reads

A recommended reading list from the Abigail Quigley McCarthy Center for Women.

Thick: And Other Essays

by Tressie McMillian Cottom

Essays on race, class, gender, media, beauty, and culture from the perspective of sociology and the lived experience of a black woman. Recommended by: Nancy A. Heitzeg, PhD, professor of sociology

The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Lê Thi Diem Thúy

A novel about a young Vietnamese refugee/immigrant girl that reads like a memoir with rich details and vulnerable language. Recommended by: Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, poet, lecturer, and administrative assistant for Core Curriculum

Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

A novel about a family road trip reinventing the American travel narrative. It encourages thought about the desert landscape, our sound environments, and how we might best document the past and present. Recommended by: Francine Conley, PhD, professor of international languages and literatures, English, and creative writing; and Allison Adrian, PhD, associate professor of music and women’s studies

Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love

By Xinran

Stories about the complex one-child policy in China, Chinese women and girls, and love. Recommended by: Jewelly Lee ’10, assistant director, Abigail Quigley McCarthy Center for Women

Anything of Which a Woman is Capable: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States, Volume 1

By Mary M. McGlone, CSJ

Sr. Mary McGlone traces the history of the Sisters and their values through a sociopolitical lens back to Le Puy, France and to their establishment in the United States. Readers will be inspired by the biographical stories and their passion for service. Recommended by: Anita Jones Thomas, PhD, executive vice president and provost

Read the full book list at stkate.edu/whm.