A typical Readers for Reconciliation literary lunch.

This spring, as around 40 students delve into Wild Swans , the story of three generations of women from China, they will also be maintaining a vital Calvin literary community. Readers for Reconciliation, a book club entering its fourth year, has already explored a reading list that spans cultures, histories and continents.

“I started the program shortly after I started this position,” said Jacque Rhodes, Calvin's dean of multicultural student development, “and I wanted a creative forum to dialogue about issues of race and class and gender. Reading is one of my all-time favorite pastimes, so I merged two of my passions.”

The group began with a mere seven students and two staff members, Rhodes included, and has added members with each title. “Each year, it just grows and grows and grows,” she said.

The group's first assignment was Things We Couldn't Say , the true story of Berendina “Diet” Eman, a young Dutch woman who saved hundreds of Jews' lives through her work for the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. “She lives here in Grand Rapids ,” Rhodes said of the book's heroine. “After we read the book, we met her. You felt like you were truly in the presence of Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or another amazing historical person — and yet she was this ordinary person.”

Eman's visit during that first semester spurred another Readers for Reconciliation tradition, the custom of enhancing the reading with expert speakers and cultural offerings, such as a trip to an art gallery or a special dinner.

Throughout the years, the group's dedicated readers have ventured into missionary life in the Congo through The Poisonwood Bible , '50s-era racism in the American South through Black Like Me , the vicissitudes of life on and off the reservation through Black Elk Speaks , the struggles of Mexican immigrants through The Short, Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez , and the life of an African-American girl in the South of the '60s through The Secret Life of Bees. Last fall, they read The Kite Runner , the story of boyhood friends set in Afghanistan .

“People are always amazed that I'm able to get that many students to read a book ‘just because,'” Rhodes said, “and I tell them they would be surprised at how many students simply love to read. I'm just tapping into those bookworms like myself.”

She enjoys the fact that the group is as diverse as its booklist: “They're from every major, every discipline you can imagine. They cross disciplines. On campus, off campus. Very multicultural,” Rhodes said. “I have international students; I have AH ANA (African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American) students; I have white students. And I love that. I don't see another opportunity on campus where you see such a mixture of students.”

The mix makes for some good discussions. Rhodes remembers in particular a conversation about The Poisonwood Bible . The talk moved from the role of the missionary in preserving a foreign culture into the implications of From Every Nation , Calvin's multicultural statement of mission. “I remember being blown away by the level of conversation,” Rhodes said.

Two student leader-coordinators, Peter Ippel and Christina Ludema, help to keep Readers for Reconciliation reading along. Their most important chore for the club is to join Rhodes on a long journey of reading and culling titles for the upcoming year. “They started with me back with The Things We Couldn't Say ,” Rhodes said. “They were in that first group, and they've stuck with me, and each year I've given them a little more responsibility — and now they're seniors,” she added, mock-weeping.

The three leaders look for a specific kind of book: “I want a book that can engage students in thinking about race and gender or even class,” Rhodes said. “Whatever the atrocity that is going on in that text —
because we pick books with conflict — we ask how is it happening around us right now, and how are we responding?”

The response is key, she believes. As she looks forward to a spring of Wild Swans , and perhaps picking new student leaders, Rhodes recalls the group's first guest speaker: “I go back to Diet Eman who said to the students that each of them had been called by God to do something extraordinary that may seem very small in their eyes. But in God's eyes, it was very big.” — Myrna Anderson

Readers for Reconciliation meets in three groups: from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesdays in the Knollcrest Room and from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Fridays in both the Knollcrest Room and Uppercrust. Contact Rhodes at jrhodes@calvin.edu for more information.