Best Selling Books by Brenna Moore

The stories of 18 immigrant families from East Harlem and their experiences with one of New York’s deeply-rooted organizations On any given weekday, people stream in and out of Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service’s bright, airy building on 115th Street. They are mostly mothers who find their way to LSA, sometimes only weeks after crossing the border from Mexico, having heard of the support that las hermanitas (“the little sisters”) offer. Opening a window into the world of New York’s Spanish-speaking newcomers, Mutuality in El Barrio combines oral histories with archival research of the history, spirituality, and ministry of LSA to present how this well-established organization serves vulnerable populations with a unique approach they call “mutuality.” LSA is part of a network of East Harlem’s powerful grassroots organizations that draws from the remarkable strengths of local families in its community. It is a place of healing and empowerment focused on the overall holistic health of resident families. Long-term relationships are cultivated here rather than quick fixes, and it is a place that nurtures people’s full potential as leaders, parents, and advocates for themselves. In Mutuality in El Barrio, eighteen mothers share how, through the help of LSA, they managed to navigate a strange city and an unfamiliar language in a neighborhood that has long been a site of incredible challenges and extraordinary strength, creativity, and cultural vitality. These personal accounts of mothers, long-time LSA staff, and nuns reveal how these women found solidarity, accompaniment, care, neighborhood transformation, and binding connections through mutuality that helped them grow and connect in East Harlem. Their stories shine a light on an organization that began as a small community of vowed nuns who, like these mothers, also trace their origins abroad.

Kindred Spirits takes us inside a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges. For this group, spiritual friendship was inseparable from resistance to European xenophobia and nationalism, anti-racist activism in the United States, and solidarity with Muslims during the Algerian War. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. Some of the figures are still well known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Much more than an idealized portrait of a remarkable group of Catholic intellectuals from the past, Kindred Spirits is a compelling exploration of both the beauty and flaws of a vibrant social network worth remembering.

In Sacred Dread, Brenna Moore examines the life and writings of Raïssa Maritain (1883-1960), one of the few women to contribute to this French Catholic revival movement.