New at Nimble Spirit

Just added at Nimble Spirit (in our never-ending quest to actually show up with something NEW once in a while!):

A Special Selectionfor theChristmas Season:

Tala's Gift by Paul Nicholas Mason.

Mason, a Canadian raconteur with a touch of Garrison Keillor, Jean Shepherd, and Gamble Rogers about him, is the author of Battered Soles, three plays, and the forthcoming novel The Red Dress.

Also, a few new book reviews:

Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale by Donna Jo Napoli
The Cure by Athol Dickson
One Hundred Great Catholic Books by Don Brophy

Best wishes for a great holiday season and new year.

Many thanks for your support of Nimble Spirit.

Nimble Spirit at Gather.com

A new Nimble Spirit feature, "Nimble Spirit at Gather," is now available at Gather.com. Follow this link to the Nimble Spirit at Gather web page and follow the instructions to join Gather (FREE) and participate in or start a conversation.

The first post at Gather is the following. Join in and put in your two cents:

At some time or another most of us have been challenged to name our “desert island” choices: What music or book would you want to have with you if you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island?

Well, Nimble Spirit has this question for you:

If you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island, what 3 pieces of spiritual literature—fiction, nonfiction, scripture, poetry, whatever—would you want to have with you?

Send your answer to the nimblespirittalk group at Gather.com, and include 3-5 sentences about the reasons behind each of your choices. Let’s see how many books and authors we can turn one another on to.

Remember, you can visit Nimble Spirit: The Literary Spirituality Review, anytime.

New at Nimble Spirit

Review
Epiphanies & Elegies by Brian Doyle

Several years ago Brian Doyle told me that he’d like to publish, when he’s about eighty years old, a collection of the little poems he has made and found and tossed into the ether over the years but that won’t amount to a critical mass worth publishing till he’s at least that old. Apparently someone talked him into pulling those pages together about thirty years ahead of schedule, and we should be glad they did. Read the Review

Review
On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher

Somewhere along the line a few years ago I picked up a copy of Howard Frank Mosher’s novel In the Fall of the Year. I think it was at a book trade show. It was maybe another two years before I actually cracked the book open and read it, then smacked myself on the head and asked “What was I waiting for?,” and undertook to read the rest of Mosher’s work. Read the Review

New at Nimble Spirit

Review
God’s Echo by Sandy Sasso

About midway through her eminently accessible and perfectly tuned little book, Rabbi Sandy Sasso recounts a tale from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s childhood. When the future scholar, sage, and ecumenist first heard the story of the binding of Isaac, he began to weep inconsolably. “But, rabbi,” the future co-worker of Dr. King asked his teacher, “what if the angel had come a second too late?” Read the Review

Review
Roots and Wings by Margaret Silf

. . . Be not afraid, Silf tells those who are devoted to Jesus. Neither of science, nor of empirical evidence, nor of hard questions, nor of your own imagination. “Do you think creation has ‘peaked’ in homo sapiens, or are we going farther?” Before addressing questions like that, Silf says, Take a deep breath, stay calm, go only as far as you’d like. Read the Review

Review
The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard’s powers of meditative reflection and his profound reverence for the physical world deepened self-awareness about how I experience a dwelling and the significance my dwelling space has for me. Read the Review

Curators of Meteorites, Inspectors of Snow-Storms

It tickled me, perhaps more than one might expect, when I read that the author of a column on the back page of the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet, “is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.”

Tickled as I was, I turned to the friend sitting beside me, showed him the author bio, and said, “Charles, can that really be a fulltime job?”

I’m a job-seeker these days, so I guess I think that way sometimes.

Help Wanted: Large institutional religious organization seeks curator of meteorites.

Help Wanted: Archivist of tree bark to organize collection of Protestant sect.

Help Wanted: Buddhist dot.org seeks indexer of creeks and streams.

And then I thought of that old pal of mine, Henry David Thoreau, and some of the “jobs” he had in and around Concord, Massachusetts and the pond called Walden:

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

It felt good to read that again.

[For a bit of Thoreauvian fun, click here.]

The Book on Tech Support

Just for the fun of it. . .

Cosmology Cavalcade

I had the privilege to be involved in the making of a brand new book by John Kotre titled The Story of Everything.* In this little book, John uses an extended parable to find a way by which the “competing” cosmologies of religion and science might better coexist. The The Story of Everything is a unique, compelling, and welcome addition to the literature that deals with this aspect of the “culture wars” that plague our society.

Stories of ultimate beginnings have always fascinated me. That there are so many of them is no surprise, given the diversity found on the planet in terms of geography, climate, and general living conditions. One could hardly expect peoples, preliterate or otherwise, to come up with common expressions of their origins when day-to-day experience ranges from Arctic ice to Saharan desert to Amazon rainforest to Rocky Mountains. Life experience at the 65th parallel will undoubtedly lead to a different cosmology than that at the equator. The cosmology of people who are enslaved will be different from that of those who enslave them. And then science brings its own vast set of empirical observation to bear on our exploration.

John Kotre revels in the diversity of stories and the way we pass them from generation to generation. In The Story of Everything he explores religious and scientific cosmologies, and, by way of parable, creates a new cosmology that is traditional, contemporary, mythological, and scientific.

To support this effort, John has created a website called The Story-of-Everything Place (www.thestoryofeverything.com). Here, he invites discussion of his parable; but more importantly, he invites readers to share their own stories of everything. The Story-of-Everything Place is bound to become a sort of cosmological bazaar where people can bring the stories they’ve been told since they were children, as well as create new stories.It’s a big universe, worthy of many stories. John Kotre is giving us all a chance to join in the play of it all.

*If you click on the Amazon link, don’t be put off by the slightly different title; a late alteration by the publisher has apparently not been updated in the various bookselling databases.

Nonfictioned to Death

In his piece “Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a Realistic Novel,” posted recently at Nimble Spirit, L. D. Gussin observes:

Nor is today’s secular art of much apparent use to counterculture forces that care most about political change. A member’s manual for The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an outgrowth of Tikkun Magazine, has a reading list for study groups that are pursuing a spiritualized politics. All sixty recommended books are nonfiction—there is no fiction, poetry, or drama. Yet a similar study group of a century ago would surely have been reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.

I sometimes feel as though I am being “nonfictioned” to death. Facts, opinions, punditry. Whether it’s CSPAN’s admirable BookTV, or the authors featured on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, nonfiction seems to be the star of the book show. And when that happens, the upshot often seems to be the kind of go-nowhere shouting match that’s been the stock-in-trade of talk radio since the 1980s and has spread like kudzu to the 24/7 news networks, public-access cable, and, no doubt, Memorial Day picnics and the local bus stop.

Come on. Tell me a story.

If you want, for example, to explore the faith/reason, sacred/secular dichotomy, you couldn’t do much better than to read Chet Raymo’s In the Falcon's Claw: A Novel of the Year 1000, in which an Irish monk accused of heresy for denying miracles faces a world in which end-of-millennium superstition rivals that of the lead-up to Y2K just a few years ago. It’s entertaining and instructive and will keep you turning the pages late into the evening.

But you can’t soundbite it. And Chet’s a nice guy who’s not really pushing an agenda; he’s exploring the world in all its complexity and nuance. He won't be likely to get into a shouting match on CNN or Fox News with James Dobson or Bill Donohue. So instead we get Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and their nonfiction cohorts versus the above-named and their cohorts.

It gets a little tiresome. Come on, tell me a story.

I’ve written elsewhere about how reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five when I was 16 influenced my worldview, especially around topics of war and peace and violence. And very little nonfiction can hold a candle to a Charles Dickens underdog like Nicholas Nickleby overcoming the machinations and abuses of his money-grubbing Uncle Ralph. Even the most well-intentioned action-item email from your favorite dot-org, on the left or the right, is not likely to get your dander up the way a good story will.

Stories take time. You might have to sit still for a while to take a story all in. You might have to hear it or read it twice or more. You might have to tell it yourself in order to see it more clearly.

Stories can be looked at from many angles, just as facts and statistics can be, but, unlike the latter, it’s tougher to make a story say what you wish it would say. A story sets its own terms and it won’t ring true if it’s manipulated for purposes other than its own. Religions are made from piles and piles of stories. Theologians and religious power-brokers like to whittle the stories down to dogmas and rules—the who, why, when, where, what of faith and spirituality—but they fail to do justice to the stories when they reduce them so. Jesus may very well “save”—who knows?—but the story of Jesus is sure as heck salvific.

Do yourself a favor. Tell someone a story.

New at Nimble Spirit

Reflections on Literary Spirituality:
Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a Realistic Novel
by L. D. Gussin

The Western spiritual-based counterculture called variously new age, holistic, human potential (its first name), east-west, integral and mind-body-spirit took direct inspiration from major Western literary figures. Yet, during most of its fifty-year history, literary critics have dismissed it as a subject—even while, as a maker of meaning, the movement reaches many more people than do literary works.Read the essay

New Poems in the Nimble Spirit Poetry Gallery:

Martin Burke, Robert Elzy Cogswell, Kim M. Baker, Fred Allen, Tom Gibbs, Leonore Wilson, Duane Tucker

Review
Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns

An acclaimed poet and a Baptist-raised convert to Greek Orthodoxy, Scott Cairns proves himself to be an engaging companion in this account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos. His goal, to experience “genuine prayer, prayer of a sort I could only suspect, and desire” is a worthy and elusive one. Read the review

Review
Grace Period by Gerald Haslam

Gerald Haslam’s reputation as a writer seems to have limited general knowledge of his work to folks out West. Born in Bakersfield, California, he was raised in that state’s Great Central Valley, and much of his work has been set there. But, like writers such as Wendell Berry of Kentucky, Haslam takes on issues and situations that transcend specific places but are effectively grounded by the concreteness of those places because of the author’s love of his place and his ability to share it with readers who have no firsthand knowledge of it. Read the review

New Reviews at Nimble Spirit

Review:
Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

The characters Jim Harrison imagines are largely untamed by suburban ways of life. Even as they enjoy their meals and notice sublime scenes in nature, one notes that Harrison’s creations have not been smoothed by money, business, fashion, or technology. Haunted and challenged in a number of ways, they struggle against themselves and against one another in settings of rural isolation. Read the review

Review:
The Red Thread by Roderick Townley

The Red Thread tells a story that covers a period of 500 or so years and in which the heroine, a present-day sixteen-year-old student and photographer Dana Landgrave, discovers through dreams and hypnosis that she has lived two earlier incarnations, and that events in those lives continue to have implications in her life in twenty-first-century New Hampshire. Dana’s story grabs you from the beginning and is hard to put down . . . Read the review

Review:
Saving Erasmus by Steven Cleaver

In Saving Erasmus, his brief and breezy first novel, Steven Cleaver tells the story of Andrew Benoit, a recent seminary graduate facing a choice between a big-city assignment and something that feels like banishment to a small town. True to the idea of “call,” like a modern-day Jonah, Andrew finds himself in the small town of Erasmus facing a daunting first assignment: Heed your call to be a prophet and save the town immediately, for the Angel of Death is set to destroy the faithless place in one week. Read the review

What's Up with Nimble Spirit

I’m sure that many of you have noticed that there hasn’t been much new activity at Nimble Spirit lately, so I’d like to offer a bit of an explanation.

As you may be aware, Nimble Spirit is largely the work of one person — me. I have help from a handful of volunteer writers and friends and contributors, but getting it done depends on my being able to find the time and energy to pull it together.

Over the past several weeks, going back to November of 2006, I have been preoccupied with the task of finding a new job. Back in 2003 I relocated my family from Minneapolis to the Boston area to take the job of editorial director of a publishing company owned by a small religious order based in Cambridge. The order was yearning to grow its audience, its sales, and its offerings. All of which were good goals. It took some time to get all the pieces and personnel in place to effect the company’s turnaround. But a year into the 3-to-5 year turnaround that the monastics had so deeply desired, at a time when the work of the staff was beginning to bear noticeable fruit in sales figures and in the company’s raised profile, the monastics suddenly changed their priorities. Rather than work hard to grow a vital business, the monastics decided to focus their efforts on quickly raising millions of dollars through donations so as to make infrastructural changes to their buildings, as well as add on to those facilities. So the fewer-than-twenty men who make up this monastic order, which is financed by a rather healthy endowment/portfolio and has its donated HQ on a piece of donated land that would command a price in the many many millions if it were to be commercialized, put four hard-working professionals out of their jobs, alienated dozens of authors, sold their inventory and most of their forthcoming book contracts to another publishing entity, canceled other contracts, wiped their hands of it, and put their noses to the grindstone of getting money for nothing so they can improve the manner in which they live behind the cloister wall.

So I’m looking for a new job.

The past few months have been filled with that activity, along with working for the monastics up to the bitter end to effect as good a transition as possible for the sake of the books and their authors. My time has also been filled with an intense experience of grieving, of dealing with the utter sense of being betrayed by colleagues while trying to maintain a professional demeanor with these individuals just the same.

I consequently have not had much energy for adding material to Nimble Spirit, and I apologize to readers who have come here hoping for something new. I hope to get back on track soon, and I am also working on a business plan with the goal of taking the site to the next level and perhaps create something really quite special, with more interactivity and a variety of additional types of content. All of this goes on in the context of staying sane and making ends meet — and going through my resume umpteen times and writing umpteen cover letters to go with it and viewing site after site of job listings, etc., etc. I hope to be able to report soon of success of some sort or another, as well as get Nimble Spirit moving again. Thanks for your patience, your interest, and your support.

Another Great Crazy Dog Production

Infidel
By Roger Gregg
Presented by Crazy Dog Audio Theatre
Available for download at ZBS
Go to www.crazydogaudiotheatre.com for more information

Following on the success of their prophetic radio drama The Last Harbinger, Ireland’s Crazy Dog Audio Theatre has gone from the futuristic to the historical with a new production of Infidel by Crazy Dog founder Roger Gregg.

Infidel takes place in the early 13th century during the Fifth Crusade. In the context of the factual history of the Crusade, Infidel tells the fictional story of brothers Hugh and Philip of Beauvais, and Omar, the youngest son of the sultan and to whom Hugh becomes a tutor and unlikely friend.

As one would expect from the players and technicians at Crazy Dog, Infidel is an outstanding achievement on the levels of acting, directing, and production. A visit to the Crazy Dog website affords behind-the-scenes views of the production process, complete with scenes recorded at night in the rain and on location with galloping horses (no Pythonesque coconuts in this production!).

The care and professionalism with which Crazy Dog makes its state-of-the-art radio drama bespeaks the importance of the lessons Infidel offers contemporary listeners about the reality of culture clashes and the absolute necessity of dialogue and tolerance. Infidel has all the elements of great drama—high-quality writing, acting, and production. As a piece about war and religion, Infidel offers a unique angle on the familiar story of the Crusades: a pair of brothers who go together to the Crusades but find themselves in conflict; an unlikely friendship between enemies; the just-outside-the-viewfinder presence of an Italian ascetic from Assisi who preaches the God of love in the midst of soldiers acting on behalf of the God of war. This compelling play succeeds on the levels of historical authenticity, commentary on contemporary issues, and sheer entertainment. Highly recommended.

Look for a review of The Last Harbinger at www.NimbleSpirit.com

The Angelic Doctor

by Chet Raymo, from www.sciencemusings.com (June 4, 2006)

A half-century ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, Thomas Aquinas ruled the roost. If you were a student at a Catholic college or university anywhere in the world in those days you were probably required to take a course or two of Thomistic theology. The Angelic Doctor's massive, multi-volume Summa Theologica stood as the rock-solid foundation of Catholic education.

Aquinas's method is to state a thesis, raise objections, then refute the objections. My problem was, as an undergraduate, that I usually found the objections more cogent than the thesis or refutations.

The Summa is clearly a monumental achievement of the human mind, and I am glad to have been exposed to it, as I was exposed to Aquinas' 13th-century contemporary Dante Alighieri. But although I return often to Dante, I left Aquinas behind. I fail to see what relevance a natural theology based on an Aristotelian or medieval world view has to our own times.

Reading Thomas Aquinas for natural theology is like reading his contemporary Johannes de Sacrobosco for astronomy: interesting as history, but not terribly relevant to contemporary thought.

I recall a time when I was a young graduate student in physics at UCLA and attended a talk at the Newman House (the Catholic chaplaincy) on the morality of artificial contraception. My wife and I had started a family, and could have used somthing besides "rhythm" to help us achieve the family we wanted. But alas there was something called "the natural law," so forcefully articulated by Aquinas, that put contraception out of the reach of "good" Catholics. I struggled to understand what this "natural law" stuff had to do with the laws of nature I was learning in my science classes. It seemed perfectly natural to me that a young married couple in the mid-20th century might not want a child every year ad infinitum, and that human intellect was a gift not to be wasted.

When I began teaching at Stonehill College, students of philosophy used as a text Thomistic philosopher Vincent Edward Smith's The General Science of Nature (bearing, of course, the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur designating doctrinal purity), which had about as much to do with modern science as did Sacrobosco's astronomy -- and an impenetrable prose style to boot. How much more exhilarating it must be for young Catholics today to go to the philosophy of science section of the library and find books by Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins, Gerald Holton, John Ziman, Lewis Wolpert, Steve Fuller, and many others who know contemporary science from the inside and who appreciate why we now live in a universe of galaxies and DNA rather than a universe of angels and demons. The writers available to our present students would be appalled to have anyone's imprimatur of doctrinal purity.

So I leave Thomas Aquinas where I found him those many years ago on the sagging shelves. But also in those early days I read the great spiritual writers of Christian Europe: Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, and others. Their celebratory spirit has stayed with me, and transcends any particular theological formulation (even Buddhists feel at home among the Christian mystics). Eckhart, for example -- a contemporary of Aquinas and fellow Dominican -- considered every plant, every stone a revelation of the divine. He was not quite a pantheist, but neither was he an orthodox theist (he was condemned as a pantheist by the official Church); that is, he did not identify God with the visible world, but neither did he imagine a God who exists outside of creation. Eckhart's God and the creation are inseparable: all things in God, God in all things. This may be the stuff of Inquisitional nitpicking, but it represents a tradition of joyful creation spirituality that rests more comformably with modern science than do Aquinas's volumes of verbal boilerplate. No less a philosopher than Hegel thought Eckhart a reconciler of science and faith. The contemporary spiritual writer Matthew Fox, himself an ex-Dominican, says of Eckhart; "[He] is an Aquinas with imagination, an Aquinas freed of too tightly woven Scholastic language, an Aquinas in poetry."

Of course, the Thomists shoulder on, although they have lost their commanding position in Catholic education, still hoping to find more wisdom on the sagging library shelves than in the creation itself. The Times Literary Supplement recently reviewed a book by the Thomistic philosopher Jean Porter on the foundations of ethics in natural law. The review is quite favorable, but I confess to being as baffled by Thomistic discourse today as I was half-a-century ago. I quote from the review: "Where nature is understood 'more as nature,' we have in view the way in which, as Porter puts it, 'every creature manifests certain orderly patterns of action, simply as such -- to be, to maintain its existence -- and in addition, every living creature manifests further, more complex patterns, for example, orderly growth and reproduction.' These 'intelligible structures of natural processes' provide the basis for the 'properly rational activities of the human creature...", and so on. Whatever this means is beyond the ken of my poor rational faculties.


Further Reading

My book Honey From Stone, recently reissued by Cowley Books, is an attempt to show that the ancient tradition of creation spirituality in Western Christianity is not at odds with modern science. Granted, the people I quote there -- Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Richard Rolle, and the rest -- lived in a different world, with a very different understanding of nature and God, but their responses to the world -- attention, celebration, and a profound awareness of the thing that cannot be spoken -- are not unworthy of our own time.

Meister Eckhart seems to have been deeply influenced by the Celtic (druidic) tradition of creation mysticsm that I have written about in Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain. Irish monks were instrumental in establishing schools along the Rhine Valley, Eckhart's homeland.

Dixie Flak: Eight Thoughts

1: I’m a big fan of the Dixie Chicks, make no mistake about it.

2: In 2003, when Natalie Maines made an anti-Bush comment during a concert in England, I was glad to hear an American citizen exercise her First Amendment right in a way that was critical of the U.S. president.

3: Given my support of the First Amendment, I would expect citizens who wish to exercise it to feel free to express their agreement or disagreement with Maines, and I would support that expression.

4: Agreement or disagreement is one thing; an out-an-out campaign of hate-speech against Maines and her colleagues is another. Comments referring to the Chicks as “sluts,” “whores,” and “Saddam’s bitches” were out of line. Death threats crossed the line entirely into the realm of unprotected speech.

5: When Maines made her statement, Bush’s approval ratings were quite high. For several weeks and months now, his ratings have been extremely low, 30 percent and below. Make of that what you will.

6: Now that the new Dixie Chicks album, “Taking the Long Way,” has been released, the media is all over the album and the group. The album takes on, straight on, the reaction of fans and the press to Maines’s statement and the ensuing flak. The first single from the album, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” considers the possibility of “forgive and forget,” a possibility that is made remote by realities such as “It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her / Daughter to hate a perfect stranger,” and threats of violence. Some might think the song is combative; the press apparently does. On “60 Minutes” Steve Croft conducted an inane interview in which he asked the Chicks over and over but with slightly different wording each time, if they had not “betrayed” their fans with what was said two years ago and now with the new album. Kalefa Sanneh, writing in the New York Times, concludes that the Chicks “shouldn’t be too surprised if some fans jeer – angry, but also disappointed – as they walk off the court.”

For one thing, I don’t think people who have received death threats and have been called names such as those mentioned above need to worry about betraying fans. Real fans continued to show up: The Chicks’ “Top of the World” tour continued in packed houses even after Maines’s comment had become right-wing talk-show fodder. And any artist who will tailor the product simply to satisfy the marketing department’s concern about certain “jeering” fans isn’t worthy of the designation “artist.”

7: There are two kinds of music: Good music and bad music. “Taking the Long Way” is very good music. It’s not a “country” album. If it’s not played on “country radio,” too bad. That’s country radio’s loss. None of the albums the Chicks have released since the addition of Natalie Maines as lead vocalist – “Wide Open Spaces,” “Fly,” “Home,” and now “Taking the Long Way” – are country albums. The Chicks have consistently transcended category and drawn their audience from multiple demographics. The group’s history as a bluegrass band and its primary instrumentation notwithstanding, the Chicks and country radio have very little in common. There is a lot of bad music played on commercial radio, and some good music. Wherever you can hear the Chicks on commercial radio, you’re hearing good music.

8: It’s true that the lyrics of the songs on “Taking the Long Way” (all of the songs were co-written by the Chicks) are quite challenging and point fingers at what the authors see as hypocrisy and confusion in America today. In “Lubbock or Leave It” Maines sings “On the strip the kids get lit / So they can have a real good time / Come Sunday they can just take their pick / From the crucifix skyline.” But if you listen to the album from start to finish (which is perhaps a rarity in our buy-by-the-song iTunes world), you end up with “I Hope,” a sacred song co-written by the Chicks and Keb’ Mo’:

Sunday morningI heard the preacher say
Thou shall not kill
I don’t wanna hear nothin’ else
About killin’ and that it’s God’s will.
’Cause our children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They’re gonna be like us
So let’s learn from our history
And do it differently

(I hope) For more love, more joy and laughter
(I hope) We’ll have more than you’ll ever need
(I hope) We’ll have more happy ever afters
(I hope) And we can all live more fearlessly
And we can lose all the pain and misery

That’s the Chicks’ destination on this album. Yeah, they have to work throught some stuff to get there. Don't we all? But they get there.

Duncan's New Must-Read Book

God Laughs & Plays
Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
by David James Duncan
Triad Books, 2006. Xxvii plus 230 pages.
www.triadinstitute.org

Reading about religion and society can be tedious, infuriating, and comical. Some writers, convinced that “it’s my way or the highway,” elicit a full range of reactions. There is nothing more annoying than certainty in a world in which one might drop dead from causes internal or external at any moment. There is nothing more maddening than dogmatism based on questionable readings of ancient texts written in now nearly-dead languages. There is nothing more tragically comical than listening to churchmen twist themselves into pretzels to justify immoral “moral stances” or to “discover” the Christian message in some vapid pop song, like Karl Rahner claiming “anonymous Christianity” for good people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes I just get damn tired of reading about religion.

But not when David James Duncan is doing the writing.

Duncan, one of America’s best writers, has written God Laughs & Plays, a book that is likely the most important book on religion this year, perhaps this decade. Responding to what he calls “the preachments of the fundamentalist right,” Duncan, with passion, compassion, and a powerful intellect that is characterized by grace and humor, takes on the dehumanizing fundamentalisms that plague our world, threaten it with wholesale destruction, and give insult to the very notion of God.

Duncan has a pedigree that gives him ample credibility. “I was born a chosen person,” he begins, into a family of Seventh-day Adventists, “an Apocalypse-preaching, Saturday-worshiping fundamentalist sect.” He walked away from the church at the earliest opportunity, as a teenager, but Duncan had an abiding sense of the spirit.

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during
my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing
or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection
I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

Along with developing a strong sense of “the Presence of God,” Duncan has engaged in “three decades of intimacy with the world’s greatest Wisdom texts.” While he is not associated with any particular religion, Duncan is hardly a secularist. His knowledge of world scriptures and the personages and sages of various traditions easily exceeds that of the average self-identified denominationalist as well as some of their most famous and infamous leaders.

Having been raised in a fundamentalist household, Duncan does not yield to the temptation of negativity and venom toward fundamentalism that many on the sociopolitical left are unable to resist. He has written with great love and affection of his grandmother and mother, the “strong women” who raised him in Adventism and in some way gave him gifts of character that allowed him to grow into the man, artist, and critic he has become. Duncan thus speaks with authority when he says:

Fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews are
armed, so they each believe, with the One True Book. But they
are four different books, and the four faiths are also each armed
with nuclear weapons. No form of fundamentalism from the
Ayatollahs’ to John Paul II’s can defuse this fatal impasse, because
every fundamentalism believes it owns the One Book, One God,
and sole faith. At the same time, no secular philosophy addresses
the fact that we’re born alone and die alone, and naturally
seek the solace of divine truth amid our mortal suffering.
Though the faith traditions offer this solace, I would argue
that they are able to do so only quietly, and only humbly—
and the recent fusion of fundamentalism and politics is
destroying this quiet humility. This is why I feel that the
great religious traditions stand in need not of a secular
turning away, but of a compassion rebellion against the
“certainties” of cocksure zealots claiming to own each
tradition. The fundamentalists of every faith remain
blind to the truth that “the sigh within the prayer is the
same in the heart of the Christian, the Muhammadan,
and the Jew.” I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard
it with my ears, felt it with all my being. Let those who
haven’t grumble, if they so choose. The world’s major
faiths are not identical, but they are alike enough in
ultimate aim that those striving to love, emulate, and honor
Jesus, Muhammad, Rama, Shakyamuni, and Abraham have,
in many times and places, proven themselves able to live
side by side in peace.

The project of God Laughs & Plays (the title is from a quote by Meister Eckhart) is to explore the unity that Duncan claims to have seen, heard, and felt. And explore it he does, in the exuberant and eclectic fashion that readers of Duncan’s novels, stories, and essays have come to expect of him. Duncan ranges far and wide, utilizing personal experience from childhood to the present; fly-fishing and environmental activism; his readings of world scriptures; and the teachings of the many masters he has discovered in his lifelong mystical journey with God, humans, and nature. Essays such as “What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation,” “When Compassion Becomes Dissent,” and the stunning “Assailed” should be required reading for anyone interested in the state of religion today—and that should include every citizen who intends to form an opinion or cast a vote in an election anytime soon. All of the pieces are filled with eye-opening gems of insight that make God Laughs & Plays a most informative and entertaining read.

But reading and enjoying are not enough. Those of us who do not wish to see the world overtaken by the fundamentalism of any religious tradition will do well to hear Duncan’s words as a call to action, action that begins with taking a stand in favor God’s creation and the multiplicity of God’s self-expression in the universe. Duncan himself makes liars out of those religionists who believe that spirituality without commitment to a particular religion (“spiritual but not religious”) is a low-grade substitute for the adherence demonstrated by true believers, and that only the latter are capable of participating in the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. God Laughs & Plays will make you think and laugh, it will upset you, it will make you say “A-ha!” dozens of times, and it will restore your faith in the idea of faith in a world in which too many of the “faithful” are rabid participants in the tearing down of the world and hearts and minds that God has given. This book can help turn the tide.