Jan 7, 2011 / 03:52 am
As Cheryl Dickow was teaching English and Religion to Catholic junior high students over the course of several years, she began to notice a problem. Although she was able to provide books to her kids that addressed basic Christian values, she had difficulty finding material that was explicitly Catholic and saw the hunger her students had to learn more about the faith.
“I was always searching for books that were Catholic in content and would appeal to that particularly challenging age group,” Dickow said Jan. 5. “They want and need so much in their books – they want 'real' characters and situations but need to see truth and honesty and integrity; they need role models who are worthy of such a position.”
Dickow, who holds a Master's Degree in Education and lives in Waterfront, Michigan, said that for years she relied on books that reflected “good Christian values,” but that a Catholic book is “a very specific entity.”
“Catholic,” she said, translates into books “that may have a priest or a character receiving communion or it may have reference to the Blessed Mother or the Rosary and so on.”