The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part Two)

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part One) sch 10/5/2025] 

What (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (Harper Perennial, 1999)) a wonderful companion also to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (Anchor Books). Also, another book cited by Kingsolver. The former hits the start of European colonialism, while The Poisonwood Bible chronicles its end. Ah, to have that kind of subject. All I can come up with is the decline of factory towns in Indiana. Consider this paragraph:

Bongo Bango Bingo. That is the story of Congo they are telling  now in America: a tale of cannibals. I know about this kind of story - the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It amkes everyone feel much better. So, Krushchev is said to be here dancing witht he man-eating natives, teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones. Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes. Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom, Power, and the Glory.

p. 174

The father, the Southern Baptist minister, epitomized everything I came to dislike about the Protestant church. Only when I immersed myself in Orthodox Christianity did I see the good obscured by religious tyrants. Now, I prefer the church of Father Arseny.

sch

[10/5/2025: this will be continued again, and finally in The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part Three). sch]