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NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Monica Appleby and Helen M. Lewis. Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003. 299 pages. Hardcover. $35.00. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 1 John 3:17-18 In 1967, forty-four brave young women, disappointed by the restrictions imposed on their mission work with the Roman Catholic Church, left their order: the Glenmary Sisters. Determined to continue work with rural Appalachians and Appalachian migrants, they sought justice, notjust charity, through truth and action. They committed their lives to supporting one another while serving the poor in the spirit of Christ. Mountain Sisters, by Helen M. Lewis and former Glenmary sister Monica Appleby, tells their story. Vital to anyone in Appalachian Studies and equally relevant to readers of feminist theology, community development, grassroots organizing, or the Catholic Church, Mountain Sisters is a book of inspiration and a lesson in what it means to be a committed seeker of justice. Appleby and Lewis chronologically recount how seventy sisters came to leave the order of Glenmary Sisters and how forty-four banded together to form a secular organization, the Federation Of Communities In Service (FOCIS). Following FOCIS members from the time of their exodus from the church through thirty-five years of individual and collective transformation, the story unfolds primarily through recorded recollections from interviews as well as letters, diary entries and transcripts of phone conversations. The authors gently piece and tease substantial first-person narrative in with third-person prose. The Glenmary/FOCIS history is not just well archived, it is woven by Lewis and Appleby into an illustrative tapestry of women who bring halos to the human condition. Raised among protestants in Appalachia, I hadn't the slightest inkling of understanding of Catholicism, and, unfortunately, this book's religious vocabulary might as well, for me, have been in Latin. Thus, Part I of the book was challenging. Although the authors kindly 86 include a glossary in the back of the book to help the reader navigate terminology such as chancery, novitiate, and hebdomadarian, I found myself ignoring it, and plowing through anxious to get to the "good stuff." Being acquainted with a couple of the women associated with the book, I knew just enough going in to expect the story to climax with tales of former sisters and their adventures in the mountains. What I didn't expect was to finish with a profound appreciation for the individual women whose decision to leave the Glenmary order, and often the Church as well, was the painful equivalent of leaving home and kin never to return. I also didn't initially comprehend the vast influence and far-reaching network the women of FOCIS created for the betterment of communities in Appalachia and for displaced Appalachians in northern cities. Looking beyond the initial differences that seemed to exist between the women of Glenmary/FOCIS and the mountain communities they have come to work with and live in all these years, parallels of similar experience and situation are easy to discern. The era of great cultural and social upheaval that was born in the early 1960s was far reaching. Shaking off old constraints that dictated behaviors and social norms that reinforced hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, sexism, and oppression, whole segments of society were born again. For the Glenmary Sisters, this meant opposing the rules and restrictions of the Roman Catholic Church that impeded their work in non-Catholic Appalachian communities, and taking to heart Christ's admonition to take action for social change by leaving their order altogether. It also meant re-rooting their deep spiritual faith in the communities in which they lived. ThroughoutAppalachia, from holler to hill, people were also beginning to question the hierarchical framework that left the masses impoverished and the few enriched from the feast on their blood and sweat. The War on Poverty brought infamy to the mountains, and, in spite of the negative reflection often cast, something of a cultural renaissance took...

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