Say no to development
Seminole County should just say no to a proposed development called River Cross which called for 1,370 residents in a protected rural area.
GUEST COLUMNIST
The hardest thing about leaving Central Florida later this spring, after more than 25 years, is saying goodbye to old friends and colleagues.
We will miss are our Maitland neighbors, our synagogue family, former co-workers and members of the greater Orlando faith community, who enriched my life and helped me to understand and interpret their diverse traditions as I covered them for nearly15 years for the
With our son and daughter long out of the house, we are downsizing, and moving to North Carolina.
But there are other old friends we also need to leave: a good part of our family’s extensive library. As an author myself, I want the hundreds of books we have accumulated — but cannot take — to have good homes where they will be loved, read and reread.
This dilemma is not unique. Downsizing baby boomers may be the last generation with such a close attachment to the bound books that have shaped our lives. Some of this I understand. With failing eyesight, I find myself relying more on e-books, with their high contrast and enlarged type.
Still, parting with them is hard. Some of mine date back to my undergraduate years. If you are like me, each recalls a personal connection, a time in our lives when books opened our eyes to worlds we never knew. Even before our move, I felt guilty about the hundreds of books our family had accumulated that were only collecting dust on sagging shelves — more furniture than function.
These books deserve a home, and people of our generation ought to work a bit to find a home instead of tossing them, or leaving them for our kids to dispose of. If we don’t do something to preserve this legacy, our children will eventually toss them into the dumpster or offer them for 50 cents apiece in a hurried garage sale.
So, a good number of our family library are going to the rare places on the planet where there is no competition from computer and phone screens, or streaming services: jails and prisons. For me, that means sending paperbacks to the Asheville, North Carolina, Prison Books Program, run by lefties and progressive
HOME DELIVERY RATES activists who in my view are doing the Lord’s work.
Others are headed for libraries, starting with our friendly Maitland Public Library branch. Books on the religious response to genocide went to the Holocaust Memorial Education and Research Center. Those on mainline Protestantism and the intersection of religion and popular culture (including Disney) I dropped off at Asbury Theological Seminary; on Catholicism, to the Diocese of Orlando; on Islam, to the Muslim Academy of Central Florida.
Some donations require more personal handling.
The books about writing and journalism I handed off to my old Sentinel colleague, Rick Brunson, for his students at UCF’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media, where I once taught as an adjunct. Students there face a future that is challenging and uncertain.
Other donations have felt like a reverse road map of the chapters in my book-writing life. Each revives memories and allows me to repay old debts, at least in small measure.
Books about the Appalachian Mountains are going to the Madison County Public Library in North Carolina, where the staff was welcoming and helpful while I was researching my 2013 true crime book about a cold case murder. Another box has gone to the Madison County Jail, where some of characters in that book spent time.
Books on evangelicals went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Oviedo, in gratitude for what I have learned about that world while writing a book on evangelicals in 2006.
Our collection of books on African American history, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the civil-rights movement and resurgence of white supremacist terror, which shaped our family’s adult lives, and this part of my writing career, is extensive. The books we can bear to part with have gone to a Christian community center serving the African American community of Greensboro, North Carolina.