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Tag: books

  • Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

    By Jack Miles. Just as good as God: A biography. Even the epilogue and the appendices, on his process and the field of literary criticism of the Christian Bible itself, are good reading.

    Repentance in the Greek of the Gospels is metanoia, a changing of the mind. The changing of the mind of God is the great subject, the epic argument, of the Christian Bible. Having blighted his own work and cursed his own image with misery and mortality, God faced an immense challenge. He had to restore his masterpiece. He had to redeem those whom he himself had exiled from paradise. For his own sake and not just for theirs, he had to recover the lost crown of his creation.

  • The Subtle Knife

    By Philip Pullman. Second reading is much richer.

  • Samuel Pepys: The Unequaled Self

    By Claire Tomalin. Fantastic. What a glimpse Sam gives us into the Restoration. Of particular interest to me because Pepys is contemporary with the rise of Quakerism. I bought the book because of my delight in the Pepys diary weblog, and it lived up to my expectations to fill me in on Sam’s life in a readable fashion.

  • Sarah Mapps Douglass: Faithful Attender of Quaker Meeting: View from the Back Bench

    By Margaret Hope Bacon. With a foreword by Vanessa Julye. It’s really good to have this story published. Bits of Sarah Mapps Douglass’s story have been told before, but this pamphlet places what Margaret Bacon has found about her life into the context of the times and of her family and friendships. It makes clear a shameful part of Quaker history.

  • Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians

    By Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. A kind and warm-hearted book. It is brief, and I found it to be very pertinent to my own spiritual life.

  • The Reality Dysfunction: Expansion

    By Peter F. Hamilton. The plot thickens. The characters continue to draw you in. But I stalled out upon buying #3. (I skimmed–a sure kiss of death in a page-turner. It was late at night and I should have just gone to bed, but you know how it is, turn one page, then “let’s see what happens”.)

  • Zen and the Art of Knitting: Exploring the Links between Knitting, Spirituality, and Creativity

    By Bernadette Murphy. Not in any way a zen book, but the subtitle is accurate. She gets self-indulgent at times, but many of the women she talks to are very interesting (and they are all women).

  • The Reality Disfunction, Part 1: Emergence

    By Peter F. Hamilton. A space opera in every sense. 588 pages and it’s only the first volume of six. A tad on the horror side, and a bit salacious, but it manages to be a page-turner.

  • A History of Hand Knitting

    R

  • Galileo’s Daughter

    By Dava Sobel. An easy, informative read. I was most shocked by the incidental details of life in early 16th-century Italy. And some details of modern progress came home vis-a-vis the foundation of Quakerism just a few decades later: no gravitational theory; only recently invented pendulum clocks; and of course the Inquisition still at work in Italy declaring a heliocentric world heretical.