On Books and Rereading Beloved

Just finished rereading Toni Morrison's great novel Beloved. I had heard that her new novel A Mercy was in some ways a prequel, though not in the sense of being about the same characters but in the sense of being an examination of slavery and its effect on people, but at a time earlier than that depicted in Beloved. It had been a long time since I had read Beloved. It was a more powerful book for me this time, reading it now after becoming a parent. (Without giving away too much, if you have not read the book, it involves something unthinkable that a parent does to a child.) It is a great work and very poetic. It is also brutal - as it should be given it is a book dealing with slavery. So I think instead of moving right into A Mercy, I am going to put it off for a little while to read something a bit lighter - so I am reading April's copy of Gordon Kaufman's In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. I will get back to blogging Tillich's The Courage to Be. I think these two will be interesting to read alongside one another.