Providential
A Memoir of Growing Up, Education, and Learning to Be What We Are
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
Initially immersing readers in the life of a closeknit, largely Italian family in an ethnic neighborhood in the cultural and historical milieu of the city of Providence in the 1960s, Providential becomes the story of an intellectual, vocational, and spiritual journey, and of an education. Featuring formative experiences; vignettes drawn from Catholic schooling, Scout camp, university studies, and teaching; and sketches of the kind of powerful teachers and mentors and friends everyone needs in their lives, Providential follows a path of learning to be, in the words of Thomas Merton, “what we are.”
Endorsements (3)
“In the early pages of Tom Del Prete’s memoir, we are treated to an evocative, vivid account of growing up in an embracing (mostly) Italian family in Providence, Rhode Island’s Catholic community. . . . The focus zooms out from there to paint a compelling portrait of the forces that shape the author’s intellectual, moral, and emotional development, a kind of portrait of the educator as a young man.”
“Del Prete’s memoir is entitled Providential because of the city that was his home, but also because, like Roger Williams who named that space, he locates his personal story within the wider human stories being made and told around him. It’s about him, of course, but also about a lot of other people, and maybe about us. . . . Del Prete is an educator whose life and work embodies that educational ideal of developing as a lifelong learner.”
“In our troubled and troubling time Tom Del Prete’s autobiographical journey as recorded in Providential seems to speak of a different age. Yet, as with his prominent mentor, Thomas Merton, this book carries a message of an alternative way. The prioritizing of family, friendship, and fellowship demonstrated by the author is the pathway to a deeper sense of a life well lived than is often the case with many of the superficial and fragmentizing solutions so readily presented to us as the norm. Del Prete’s story reminds us of those deeper things and is a beacon of hope.”
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