What’s Sarah Totten Reading?

Reading: Piazza, Jo. If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission. Open Road Media, 2014.

Since my day job involves reading non-fiction, a non-fiction book has to be very unusual to entice me to read it in my free time.

Each of the ten chapters in this book features a different nun’s life story.

I was interested to find out what a typical nun’s life is like, but that is not what this book is about. The nuns in this book are not garden-variety nuns. They are “badass nuns”, as the author calls them. And they are all American. Given the book’s title, I was hoping for a more international focus.

Two chapters were the highlights of the book for me, because they described how the nuns were making a positive impact on people’s lives.

Sister Joan Dawber runs a safe house for survivors of human trafficking. It’s a dangerous job, as not all of the perpetrators involved have been caught by the police.

Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, runs a charity (Hour Children) that helps mothers in prison stay connected to their children and on release, helps the mothers train for and find work and a safe place to live. Tesa fosters a lot of these children while their mothers are in prison. I would honestly read an entire book dedicated to her work, as I felt that a single chapter barely scratched the surface.

Photo by Flickr user adm