PDF A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism by John Buehrens; Forrest Church in History

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A breakaway bestseller since its first printing; All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie; the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie; Boston’s working class Irish community; branding it as a violent; racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie’s Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: “[as if] we were protected; as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats; watching for all the enemies we could never really define.”But the threats-poverty; drugs; a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early; and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”We meet Ma; Michael’s mini-skirted; accordian-playing; usually single mother who cares for her children there are eventually eleven through a combination of high spirits and inspired “getting over.” And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey; sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin; child genius of scam; and Frankie; Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride.But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger; later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then; with deadly and sickening inevitability; of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald; eight years old when the riots hit; gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling “part of it all; part of something bigger than I’d ever imagined; part of something that was on the national news every night.”Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood’s collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family’s tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn’t allow him to feel it; MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist; first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury; then back to the Southie he can’t help but love; is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.