First of all, before launching into my proposed list of good summer reading, I want to thank all of you once again for your amazing stewardship of our parish here at St. Mary during this strange and difficult time.   Regarding Stewardship of Treasure, our parish tithing has remained very strong – in spite of Mass and other services being closed to the public for two months before we finally began re-opening.   Regarding Stewardship of Time and Talent, when we finally did start re-opening, a lot of our people who had never served as Lectors or Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion before at Mass have begun doing so.  Some parishioners have begun helping with usher duties as folks have been returning to Mass:  checking people in, explaining the various protocols, helping them to find seating, and so forth.  Parishioners have been a great help with church landscaping, wanting our grounds to continue looking as beautiful as possible for our return to Mass as well as for the glorious majesty of God in celebration of Creation.  

A rich embrace of the disciple’s call to stewardship has been profoundly abundant through all of this, for which, again, I am very grateful.   Thank you, and God bless you all!

And now, onto my proposed list of good summer reads.  This has been a custom of mine as pastor for the eight years (and counting) that I have been a pastor.  Below, you will find various books that I, for one, definitely have enjoyed reading, arranged by general subject matter, fiction as well as non-fiction.  Any of these should be available online, or better yet, look to support our own local brick-and-mortar bookstores to help out our local business:  Barnes & Noble at the mall; Auntie’s Books in downtown Spokane, and so forth.  Happy reading!

Fiction (I recommend these titles in particular because they feature great priest characters, even if only in minor roles, or they feature great Christ-like heroes.)

~ Fr. Lewis