Seminarian

With the ever-increasing demands placed on our parish leaders, what can seminaries do to prepare priests to deal with the difficult issues they will face? In addition to formation in priestly spirituality and pastoral care, future pastors require lasting support as they discern the call to priesthood and prepare to enter parish leadership after ordination. Filled with valuable information for supporting seminarians in their ongoing formation, A Seminarian's Toolbox provides practical tools and guidance for achieving best practices in parish leadership. This book is a project of The Leadership Roundtable, a nonprofit organization of Catholic lay leaders, religious, and clergy working together to promote best practices in the formation of clergy and lay leaders in the United States. Learn more at www.LeadershipRoundtable.org.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend seminary up north. At Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or "ML" back then, immediately found himself surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Young ML was a prankster and a late-night, chain-smoking pool player who fell in love with a white woman while facing discrimination from students and the locals in the surrounding town of Chester, Pennsylvania. In class, ML performed well, though he developed a habit of plagiarizing that continued throughout his academic career. In his three years at Crozer between 1948 and 1951, King delivered dozens of sermons around the Philadelphia area, had a gun pointed at him (twice) and eventually became student body president. These experiences shaped him into a man ready to take on even greater challenges. The Seminarian is the first definitive, full-length account of King's years as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary. Long passed over by biographers and historians, this period in King's life is vital to understanding the historical figure he soon became.

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbethâe(tm)s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils...' Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.