Guest Post: Remembering the 60s and the Cold War for Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor

 

Our guest today is Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter. She is here to talk about the sixties and the Cold War. Be sure to check out her book, Fighter Pilot's Daughter!

Remembering the 60s and the Cold War for Fighter Pilot's Daughter 

By Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken. It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself. Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now. Part of this came with the clear

account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school). And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often. My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones. He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand. This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be. Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening. After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home. He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned. At home, there were only women. My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home. Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence. I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war. But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it. Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them. It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another. It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time. All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters. I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things. The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy. These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about. I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character. Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult. A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next. In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings. So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had. Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago. Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did. As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior. When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon. When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much. We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak. Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that. Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids. And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through. When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”? It’s surprising how often people ask that. The answer is no. Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life. His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families. Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments. I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments. For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids. And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

 

🏰 {BOOK TRAILER} THE WARS BETWEEN BY LEE MAVIN

 

 

BOOK DETAILS

For centuries there had been an ongoing war between Asalandia, the proud monarchy of the east and Kastanair the progressive democracy of the west. However, the years of war would end with the most unlikely turn of events.

Outis Everrett, the disappointment of his family, a measly poet, is suddenly thrusted into an epic adventure across the sea, with the King’s blessing. His poem, the poem that somehow won the first annual Asalandian poetry competition, was meant to be taken across the seas, to the enemy island of Kastanair, there, it would be read by the President of Kastanair, the newly elected and very progressive, Penelope Chinwa and she was supposed stop the war after reading those so special words.

So Outis set sail aboard the Golden ship, guided and protected by the Knights of Sunrise and their adventures began. The Knights are led by Bartholemew Aries, the most famous soldier in Asalandia, though when their ship drifts off course to the mysterious island of Aquos Atalantious, the Princess of the island soon lures him to stay. So, the Knights of Sunrise become distracted by the beauties of this foreign island.  After failing to find the prince, who had been taken by a monstrous octopus, the Golden ship sails onto Kastanair, without its leader, who had fallen in love with the Princess. They then sail to Syanthia, where the worlds’ meat was produced. There they meet, the young Kastanairian, Gwenia Xiachung, an enthusiastic vegan on a mission to stop everyone eating meat. Outis is thrown into a pig saving mission with Gwenia and is intrigued by the young girl. After saving the pigs and convincing the head of meat production to change his ways with a beautiful poem about animal empathy, Gwenia falls in love with Outis. She joins him and the Knights of Sunrise on the voyage to back to her country, Kastanair. Once they finally reach the shores of Kastanair, they are attacked on the shores by a small army, led by Caslian Jesper, the tough captain who worked his soldiers to exhaustion. The Knights, Outis and Gwenia are rescued by Nastab and his band of terrorists who take them on horseback through Kastanair to Mount Xian. Nastab and his men come from a rebel group who had been dwelling on the plateau of Mount Xian, plotting to overthrow the government of Kastanair. However, their leader, who had driven their group to crimes and violence, was hoarding their food and treasure.

Caslian Jesper follows the terrorists to Mount Xian, in pursuit of two of his enemies at once, the terrorists and the Asalandians. Outis and Gwenia are suddenly taken off their horses by huge hawks, who fly them up Mount Xian, to a cave opening. There Gwenia and Outis meet The Tall Man, a strange man with huge black eyes who has no name. He takes them into the cave, and they fall more tall people. There they learn that the tall people had been in the caves for hundreds of years and they care not for treasures of war. The tall man collects water from an underground stream and fruits from the cave roofs and they take Outis and Gwenia up to the top of the mountain. There they find Caslian’s army had managed to climb to the top of the mountain in attempt to attack but they were too drained to fight so the tall man shared his fruit with them. Both sides rested as Outis read a poem to the leader of the terrorists.

Outis and Gwenia are then taken to the capital, by an eclectic group including Nastab, The Tall Man and the Knights of Sunrise, they journey through the planes of Kastanair where they are attacked by wolves. The Knights and Nastab fight the wolves off valiantly and they continue. When they finally reach the capital Outis reads his poem to the President, but it is not the words of his poem alone that convince her to stop the war, it is the group he brings with him, a group of once enemies, who had come together with the same goal. 

The Wars Between is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Book Details

• Genre: YA Fantasy
• Language:English
• Pages: 300 

╰┈➤Read if you love…

YA

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧Fantasy

Unputdownable

Coming of Age

༄.ೃ࿔*Page Turner

 

 

About Lee Mavin

Lee J Mavin is the author of 11 books. He is also a teacher and father. He has a Masters in Creative Writing and am solely focused on writing fiction (fantasy and horror) and poetry. He is now in collaboration the illustrator Karolina Piotrowski, a Polish artist who has brought many stories to life. He has worked and studied in China and Japan and studied with Dr Xiaohuan Zhao (a master of Chinese poetry) to complete his book Li Bai’s Shadow, at the University of Sydney. He has two children who are both avid readers, so he is always in the loop with trends in children’s fiction. He is married and lives in Sydney, where he teaches English.

His latest book is the YA fantasy, The Wars Between.

Visit his website at leejmavin.com. 

Connect with him on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lee.mavin.925/ 

╰┈➤ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/mavin798 

╰┈➤ Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5103759.Lee_J_Mavin

╰┈➤ TikTok ➜ https://www.tiktok.com/@leemavin4  

 

 

New Christian Book! The Faithful, The Fearful & The Foolish: Living for God in Troubled Times by Luke Uebelher

 

 

Empowering readers to grow as Faithful Disciples of Christ by equipping them to overcome the fear of man, become effective in the Business of God, and prepare themselves to Rule & Reign with Christ…

Here is a timely word for the Church of Jesus Christ, for those who have a true desire to know and to be pleasing to God. The parable of the talents, while not necessarily an easy word to hear, is a much-needed word for the Church today. Brother Luke has perfectly captured the word of Jesus in his exposition on the parable of our Lord. 

The Faithful, The Fearful & The Foolish: Living for God in Troubled Times is available at Amazon. 

╰┈➤Book Details

• • Genre: Personal Transformation

  • Sub-genre: Spiritual Self-Help/Discipleship/Christian Leadership

  • Language:English

  • Pages: 124

  • Paperback ISBN: 979-8368097947

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“This book will encourage you, challenge you & remind you that YOU have a purpose & important kingdom work to do here, put your armor on Christian soldier.” – Valentina Anderson

“If you, like me, see that this world is getting darker and that the light is not as bright as it could be, then this book is for you.” – Joyful

“This book is very inspirational and a must read!” – Carla Price

Watch Luke Talk About His Book

 

About the Author

In 2012, Luke Uebelher began serving and supporting the needs of sex-trafficking and domestic violence survivors by working in partnership with ministries that are led by trafficking and abuse survivors. Under the guidance and leadership of his pastors, his ministry expanded to also serving and supporting the needs of homeless Military Veterans, and ministries in the Philippines. Luke and his wife Maggie were married in 2018 and have a home in the Philippines. Luke travels between the United States and the Philippines for business and ministry services. 

Luke’s latest book is The Faithful, The Fearful & The Foolish: Living for God in Troubled Times.

Connect with him on social media at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Luke-UebelherDiamond-Fire-Transport-Missions-100077395525353/ 

Sponsored By:

The Page 69 Test: *Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain* by Marie McGaha #page69

 

 

 

They say if you want to really find a good book, go to page 69 (the middle and meat of the book) and you like what's there, it's definitely worth reading the whole book. For today's feature, I'm zooming in on page 69 of Marie McGaha's memoir, Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain. 

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain is a searing, faith-anchored memoir of love, loss, and the long road back to oneself. When Marie’s husband dies without warning, her world fractures in an instant, leaving her to navigate the brutal, unfiltered landscape of grief. In the quiet of an empty house and the chaos of a shattered heart, she wrestles with God, memory, and the haunting presence of the man she can no longer touch but cannot let go.

Told with unflinching honesty and spiritual depth, Your Ghost traces the intimate, day-by-day unraveling and rebuilding of a woman who refuses to let tragedy define the rest of her life. As she confronts guilt, loneliness, anger, and the strange moments when his nearness feels almost tangible, Marie discovers that grief is not a straight line but a sacred, winding path. What emerges is a story not only of devastation, but of resilience—a testament to enduring love, stubborn hope, and the quiet miracles that carry us forward when we think we cannot take another step.

╰┈➤Book Details

• Genre: Memoir
• Sub-genre: Survival Biographies
• Language:English
• Pages: 105
• Hardcover: 979-8252998060 

Your Ghost is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“You will feel every emotion, especially the pain, of losing your soulmate unexpectedly as you read this deeply spiritual journey of recovery. This kind of loss is painful, emotionally draining and physically crippling. Through every stage of grief, Ms. McGaha helps us understand how we can begin to breathe again and move forward. I cried, I felt her pain and rejoiced as the agony slowly began to leave. The best book I’ve ever read about grief and recovery. A must read for anyone experiencing the loss of a loved one. Also, it’s proof God is still beside us at our lowest point… (this is) a woman trying to hang onto life. A life that crashed and burned unexpectedly… very inspiring.” – Vicki L.

 

“A beautifully written, heart-wrenching examination of deep-held grief, Marie McGaha pulls the reader in with her dynamic and impactful imagery, compelling us to understand her tragedy—the caregiving and ultimate loss of the one love of her life, her husband, Nathan. The thoughts, the analysis, and the unfolding of this unwanted, unasked-for journey from a woman familiar with grief are, at times, more than one can bear. Yet the sheer poetry, interwoven with the Word of God, brings us fully into the author’s world with brilliance. Her deeply personal exploration of grief—from exhaustion, to numbness, to heightened awareness—is extraordinary, leaving the reader with a greater understanding of our own journeys through death and loss. This is a journey that, once entered, will not easily be forgotten—a powerful and necessary read for anyone who has known love and loss.” – Linda W.

I don’t remember a life without pain because the only time the pain eased was when he was here.
When he died, every old wound returned with interest.
The grief didn’t just hit the moment he took his last breath — it reached backward into every part of my life — the girl who learned to survive, the woman who carried too much, the years before I
knew safety, the wounds that were never tended. Nathan didn’t erase those wounds. He held them with me. He made them lighter. And when he died, the pain came back like a flood.
Sometimes the grief hits like a crashing wave, sudden and violent. Other times it pulls me under slowly, like an undertow. And then I feel like I’m floating on the surface, waiting to see which will come next.
The calm between storms isn’t peace — it’s exhaustion.
It’s the moment after the scream has emptied itself, after the tears have burned through, when my body has nothing left to give.
It’s the gap between realizing this is how I live now and realizing I can’t change any of it.
It’s resignation, not because I don’t care, but because I cared so deeply that the loss broke something inside me that hasn’t had a chance to mend.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

 

Marie McGaha is an award-winning writer whose work includes clean historical romances, Christian devotionals, and heartfelt children’s books. A storyteller at her core, she weaves faith, resilience, and gentle humor through every page she writes.

She makes her home in southeast Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, where life is anything but quiet. Her days are shared with four spoiled dogs, a crippled rooster with more attitude than feathers, a noisy guinea who believes it runs the place, a couple of flighty hens, and a watchful roo who keeps an eye on everything that moves. This lively little farm—equal parts sanctuary and circus—provides endless inspiration, companionship, and the kind of grounding only God’s creation can offer.

Whether she’s crafting a tender love story, guiding readers through Scripture, or bringing the Bible to life for children through animal characters, Marie writes with a voice shaped by faith, loss, healing, and the stubborn hope that refuses to let go. Her work reflects the heart of a woman who has walked through fire and come out carrying stories worth telling.

You can also join her for daily devotionals on YouTube at @HeReignsChurch, where she shares encouragement, Scripture, and the steady reminder that hope is still alive. You can contact her by email: church.hereigns@gmail.com. 

Marie’s latest book is Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain.

Visit her blog at authormariemcgaha.blogspot.com. 

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: www.facebook.com/AuthorMarieMcGaha

╰┈➤ LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/mariemcgaha 

🏰 Author Interview Featuring Mary Lawlor, Author of 'Fighter Pilot's Daughter'

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

What inspired you to write your memoir?

When I started writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, Mad Men was still airing, and the Cold War was its entire cultural nest. And President Barack Obama had just signed the New START

Treaty with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Like START I, signed by the first President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, START II limited the number of nuclear warheads and missiles in both the US and Russia. It was an effort to bring about a real end to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war we’d been living with since the 1950s (and still are). Memories of my girlhood and forgotten fears of nuclear apocalypse were running through my brain day and night.

Back in those days, the fears were abstract as well as tangible. I grew up in a military family. My father was an aviator. Every two years, in response to demands from the Defense Department, we packed up all our cups, plates, sweaters, books, and everything else. The movers would come and take everything away, and off we’d go, by car, plane, or ship to the next posting — Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, California, Germany. By the time I was ready for college, we’d lived in I don’t know how many places and I’d been to 14 schools.

Outside our household, the Cold War climate kept fear hovering in the air all the time. Especially in Germany, we were constantly afraid the Russians would invade or set off a nuclear weapon. The earth would become a nightmare of emptiness, loneliness, hunger. Competition for survival would be vicious.

Through the years of college, graduate school and my work as a professor of literature, echoes of that upbringing moved to the background but kept driving things in the foreground. I moved a lot. I had difficult relationships with friends and boyfriends. Looking at Mad Men and seeing Obama sign that treaty, I saw more clearly how the fears and all the moves of my youth were part of that larger Cold War narrative. I revisited the photo albums my mother made and studied my father’s military record. A narrative of my own started taking shape in my head. I scratched out a draft, then another and another. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped sort out and make sense of the complicated past, not just of my own life but the bigger picture of those fractious and difficult years in the life of the nation.

What message do you hope to convey to readers with your book?

I want readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter to come away with a deeper understanding of what military kids and spouses experience. I hope the book will show people how complicated it is for these dependents (a fraught word, but it’s the term used in military circles) of service people to maintain healthy and happy family lives when they have to move all the time and when they spend long months separated from the father or mother who’s deployed to war.

The book is also about our patriotic culture, our many wars, and the perhaps inevitable reactions of young Americans to a national identity based on that sort of power projection. I’m thrilled when readers write to say the book has helped them remember and think about events of the time and see how much they’ve shaped history since.

I also have to admit that I’d like my mother and father to be remembered! They were complicated, fascinating, larger than life people. I suppose a lot of people can say that about their parents, but mine were hugely so for me. There are far more stories about them than I was able to recount in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter; but it makes me happy to hear from readers that they feel they know Jack and Frannie; and that they have an idea of what my early life was like. It makes me feel somewhat less of a stranger everywhere I go.

What was your childhood like?

I’ve said a lot about this already, but I’ll add here that there was a lot of tension in our house because of all the moving. Mostly we lived in military quarters and never had our own home. And my father was away from home a lot of the time — on a ship off the coast of Guatemala waiting an invasion to begin, or in northern Turkey investigating a fly-over of the Soviet border, or somewhere close to the border with East Germany, keeping tuned to news from the Fulda Gap. In these and other situations too frightening for my sisters and I to know about, he kept us in suspense from far away. We were happy when he came home, but without meaning to, he frightened us. He’d walk through the door, his head nearly touching the ceiling, his blue eyes lit with a long-distance gaze. It was like he hadn’t really landed. He had gifts. He told stories. But he wasn’t really home yet, and we weren’t sure who he was.

Throughout your childhood, and besides your parents, did you have people in your life that stood out and made a difference?

My Aunt Sandy and Uncle Philip Walsh and their children, my cousins, who lived in New Jersey were always a model for me of the kind of stability I always dreamed of. They lived in the same town and the same house until they were all grown up. They had their complications too, and not everything went perfectly smoothly as my cousins grew up. But they were energetic, imaginative people — and there were a lot of them. Their stability and intelligence meant a lot to me.

If you were to trade places with your father, how would you change his perspective on life? Do you see anything you would have liked to change about him?

My dad was a decorated war hero. My mother, my sisters and I lived in the glow and the shadow of his dangerous, turbulent life. Through all our many moves — I went to 14 schools before I turned seventeen — I remained a good Catholic, a good patriot, and a good student. But when I came of age in the late sixties, I turned away from much of what I’d been taught. Suddenly, the way of life I’d absorbed at Catholic schools and from uncounted patriotic sermons appeared distant and wrong. And all that my father had done in the Korean War and was still doing in Vietnam appeared in a different, darker light.

The confrontations between my father and me as a result of my involvement in the Paris demonstrations shattered my ties to the family and marked my psyche in ways I’ve tried for years to understand better. I was deeply conflicted about my parents at the time, especially about my dad. And I didn’t know how I felt or should feel about myself as the daughter of the man who flew the bombing and strafing missions he did. I wrote the book both to produce a fuller and more nuanced picture of those difficult times and to find a way beyond my own anger at parents I also loved, respected, and missed. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped me understand their choices much better than I had in the past.

Will there be a second memoir?

That’s an interesting question. I think about it from time to time, and one of these days I might actually sit down and do it. My husband and I live in Spain half the year and went through a lot buying the property we own there and building our little house. There are zillions of stories to tell about those years. It would be interesting to pick up the narrative from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter and try to connect the different but related experiences. And, of course, the times we’re living through right now bring the Cold War back into view, and I’d really like to roll up my sleeves and write that story too.

Please share what’s next for you?

I’ve just finished a historical novel called The Translators, based on the lives of two medieval priests who traveled from England and Croatia, respectively, to northern Spain in the 1140s. They met and became intimate friends, learned Arabic and translated works in the libraries that once belonged to the emirs of al-Andalus (what the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was called when it was Arab and Muslim). I’ve fictionalized much of the priests’ lives for the novel but relied on extensive research on the history of the time. A lot of the tension in the story arises from the Church’s attitude toward the books the priests translate for Christians to read. The climax involves the English priest’s sister, who escapes the chaos of home to meet her brother in France, where she helps him and his friend overcome their personal tensions and, indirectly, resolves their struggles with the Church.