Apostate Story @ New York Times (page 2)

Smiles

Brooklyn Bethel will see the story in The New York Times. The WT has researchers at Bethel that read a lot of media. The WT has used quotes from The New York Times in their publications. They will see this story and they won't care.

NewYork44M

Letter to the Editor.

In response to the Turn of Faith article there was one letter to the editor in the August 28, NYT Mag:

I am uneasy about the parallels I sense between Joy Castro's upbringing as a fundamentalist Jehovah's Witness and Muslims who are educated in fundamentalist Islamic madrasas around the world (Lives, Aug. 14). Everything Castro describes, from the social isolation to the promise of eternal life in paradise to the desire for destruction of everyone who isn't a Witness, sounds chillingly like the formula we now know breeds young people willing to blow themselves up along with everyone around them.

Gail Ostrow
Bridgeport, Conn.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: August 28, 2005

stillAwitness

I just requested my copy at my local library. Can't wait to read it!

makhosi

this story makes a sad reading considering that i am one person who wishes to join the WT cause most of those i have come to contact with have never exhibited such potraits of incalculated extreme religious inflexibilty this is not to say there should embrace unbiblcal practises cause the bible is clear that there are no two routes to god but only one and only route and that there are no extremes when it comes to following gods ways as long as you are properly following biblical scriptures but if the church as a whole condones such practises within its ranks than i will definately look somewhere else for spiritual satisfaction.The story leaves me pondering on the folllowing qeustions?

Is it right to right to orient a person rather than teach openly and let that person make an informed decision on his own ?

should we blame the WT?

where the parents really following the true teachings of the bible or were following their own misguided social norms?

is the WT ways the bibles ways?

hope someone from here can assist but definately when i come across WT people i will ask for their position.

Doubtfully Yours

Excellent article!

I really enjoy to see the WBTS exposed.

DY

TheListener

Good story.

Welcome Makhosi. I read your post with interest. I didn't completely understand where you're coming from though. Are you wanting to be a witness? or just interested in finding out some facts about them?

makhosi

the listener

iam interested in joining them as well as knowing some facts about them.

DannyHaszard

CHAPTER & VERSE
Fort Worth Star Telegram, TX - 3 hours ago ... the only way she knew.". But it gets worse in this memoir of abuse in a Jehovah's Witness family. Castro's charismatic father is ...
Just went up at another major news outlet

Posted on Sat, Sep. 24, 2005

R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

Book cover

More photos

CHAPTER & VERSE

The Truth Book

by Joy Castro

Arcade, $25

GRADE: B

The Truth Book hurts.

"I cannot say why my mother chose derision and sarcasm," Joy Castro writes. "Perhaps she wanted to leave her mark on her children, and drawing blood was the only way she knew."

But it gets worse in this memoir of abuse in a Jehovah's Witness family. Castro's charismatic father is excommunicated for smoking, an affair ensues, and the parents divorce. Then the mother remarries, and for two years Castro and her younger brother are tormented by a coarse stepfather who uses his standing in the authoritarian Witness culture to cloak his brutality and perversion.

And, yes, the children escape -- to their father's house, but not to a fairy-tale happy ending. Adult self-absorption is a powerful taint.

Castro's book is not a meticulously detailed portrait of life "in the Truth," and its language is occasionally R-rated without any real need for it. Nevertheless, The Truth Book is a sad, moving and sometimes lyric memoir.

-- Alan Cochrum

Honesty

iam interested in joining them as well as knowing some facts about them.

Be sure that you know ALL the Facts about the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society BEFORE you join the Jehovah's Witnesses because should you decide later on that they are not the only true religion you will be in for a very BIG SURPRISE if you decide to leave.

DannyHaszard

Rewriting damaged lives with eloquence and truth
Boston Globe, United States - 2 hours ago
... Joy Castro's ''The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah's Witnesses" (Arcade, $25) doesn't have the evocatively lit design that Skloot's ... ''The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah's Witnesses" (Arcade, $25) doesn't have the evocatively lit design that Skloot's book does -- in fact its jacket looks hard and uninviting, all red and white with a black banner and capital letters, with a subtitle that sounds like a sociological treatise. But inside is an exquisitely powerful and beautifully written memoir.

The ''truth book" is a text that contains the principles of the Jehovah's Witness faith. But the real truth here isn't religious tenets, but rather Castro's clear-eyed, unflinching depiction of the harrowing facts of her life. Castro, adopted as a baby by devout Jehovah's Witnesses, is fine until her parents divorce and she's left in the care of her irresponsible, cold mother, who quickly remarries someone described as a monster in religious clothing. Castro's stepfather mercilessly beats and abuses the whole family, she writes, and as Castro blooms into adolescence, she describes his sneaking into her bedroom at night to give her ''massages."

Castro's mother won't protect her kids. The church refuses to listen. Her stepfather mocks her urge to go to college even as he demands her participation in his sinister new hobby of photographing young girls. Castro's real father begs to take his children back, but her mother and stepfather forbid it, rewarding the kids' yearning to leave with vicious beatings, she writes. But even when Castro and her brother do escape and go to live with her father and his new wife, it's far from perfect. He's self-absorbed and materialistic, and prone to mood swings. His new wife's a reluctant and distant stepmother. And gradually, heart-wrenchingly, Castro begins to learn that if she wants a new life, she's going to have to create it herself.

Castro, like Skloot, moves effortlessly back and forth through memory, as she tries to ''feel my way into what it all means." Glimpses of her future spark and glint amid the rubble of her past, and she even imagines a richly evocative monologue from her heartbroken birth mother. Castro not only saves herself from her brutal childhood, she saves her brother. And when she has a son, she gives him the childhood she and her brother never had a chance for. Her son is doted on, never struck or scolded. ''Sweetheart, this is what you deserve," she tells him.

Gorgeous, disturbing, and grippingly alive, Castro's book offers the kind of hope her background never supplied. And it should be noted that part of the profits of the book are going to Childhelp USA, a national organization for the prevention of child abuse.

The past reverberates against the present. How then do we navigate and move beyond the damage in our lives? The first chapter of Skloot's book says, ''We're here now." And maybe that has to be enough -- that one moment, radiant with hope, where anything might happen to propel us forward.

Caroline Leavitt's latest novel is ''Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com © Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company. [email protected] Thank Caroline [email protected] Boston Globe newsdesk-thank the paper and give an apostate 'witness'

Apostate Story @ New York Times

CHAPTER & VERSE

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