If you are struggling with change in some part of your life, I highly recommend it. It is not the same old you can do it motivation speech. Instead, she builds a case for changing your mind. Then, she outline practical everyday steps for living a life of learning.
Like my other recent reading, it comes back to the notion that beliefs change the way we behave. All things, we learn once again, are subject to change. That is the closest thing we have to hope.
Like so many literary critics, Kitchen has the ability to crack open a poem. Her comments on internal sound relationships between words in "Traveling Through the Dark" is worth the price of the book (by the way it is on remainder at Powell's Books).
In the end, it fits with my summer theme because it is a story about beliefs. Stafford believed that language matters and it is important to teach language to incline toward peace. He brought about peace by reminding all of us of our own humanity, fragility, and open-ended mystery. He was not an Oregon poet, Kansas poet, or U.S. poet. Stafford was a poet-philosopher who helped the world understand what it means to be a human being.
In an apparant contrast to Kitchen's book, I finally read Sam Harris' The End of Faith, one of my new favorite books. Like Letters to a Christian Nation, Harris is rough on liberal theists for their blind tolerance of irrational thinking from their more radical bretheren. To that end, he actually defends more extreme theologies as a more adequate representation of the texts that they celebrate.
Some people my criticize Harris as being anti-spiritiual or angry. These people have not read the entire book. Harris, like Stafford, is a passionate advocate for love, compassion, humility, mystery, and spirituatlity. What he really wants to see is a world in which people use their heads and openly invite civilization forward. Also, he makes a compelling argument supporting the dangers in not helping the world abandon theism. For anybody concerned about the rold of religion in current affairs, this book is a must read.
For me, the most challenging section of the book was Harris' critique of pacifism. I will write about pacifism in a seperate blog post. It is an issue worthy of its very own mini-essay.
Last night I finished Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams. I am reading it as part of a book club at work. Like the Kitchen and Harris books, it dealt with how people fold belief into their experience of suffering. Kingsolver seems to take a more mythopoeic approach to faith than Harris, Stafford, or Kitchen; though, she does seem a bit like Stafford.
A chapter toward the end of the book called "Ground Orientation" dragged as a muddled through the history of one of the main character, but the rest of the book chugged along like a fast train in the barren desert. I liked it, but I did not love it. I'll tell the truth, it made me cry. It had the quality of a really well made Hollywodd film, but it did not bring me toward seeing the world in any kind of new way. It did remind me of the power of love, death, and family. Three things that we cannot forget when we want to find love in a world that offers up question marks and suffering alongside sunrises and open sky.
My best understanding of his intentions is that he is taking aim at our mutual and collective urge to construct a unified narrative when that effort may not adequately square with reality. His copious use of surrealism, minimalism, and repetition mocks our efforts to tell one tidy story about the human experience. Every time I read one of his books, I get the same feeling that I derived from my first exposure to albums like Bitch's Brew and Love Supreme. Each book invites subtle transformation.
Try on Murakami in the new year.
How are you spending Christmas Day?
I am spending it with family, exchanging gifts and enjoying one another's company. I know that I have been most remiss in posting to Vox. I just finished the new Sherman Alexie book and I will post a review of that soon.
What can I say about this book? It should be read by every American, especially liberal Christians. It is fine to be invigorated and refined by mythology. To organize your life around a system that creates suffering is, on the other hand, unethical and insincere. If you haven't picked up your copy, please do.
In McCarthy's postapocalyptic world, there are no more "godspoke men". He imagines a world where morality is limited to small acts of love toward kin. Nothing else matters. Only a father and a grieving son can feel this in the deep-gut. Fortunately, there are many of us.
McCarthy finds and names our ash-soaked creosote landscape.
O, well, thank`s for the article that you wrote your article. A lot of time I was trying to find... read more
on My Summer Reading, so far