Katharine Reading

2009-12-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

I just finished Roberta Bondi's Memories of God and found it to be a wonderful spiritual memoir. Maybe for me it was just the right book at the right time, but she really walks the reader through her struggles to overcome the bad theology that both the Church and our culture can give us, especially as we absorb it as children, not having the sophistication to understand it even the way the adults around us do. For example, her first chapter is on the metaphor of God as father and the problems so many of us have with those fallen fathers who raised us. Bondi reached a deeper level of understanding God as father when she was reading chapter 14 of John's gospel and came to the phrase "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." When she thought about Jesus as demonstrating the father, she didn't find that judgmental, demanding God at all. I recommend this book.

Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith

2009-12-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

I've finished Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith and liked it. I've long been a fan of her public radio program and get her weekly email about the programming. (podcasts at speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/ ) I thought her book started slowly and I was disappointed that it has no index. But she shows in so many ways how mainstream media oversimplifies religious questions. And she talks about so many other religious figures: Reinhold Niebuhr, Deitrich Bonhoffer. I started my own index:
pg 169 - Buddhism
215 - depression
76 - Darwin
68 - Genesis
81 - theodicy
84 - Margaret Spufford
113- John Polkinghorn
Also, she talks of reading Roberta Bondi: Memories of God. I'm reading it now and really like it.

2009-11-29T12:50:00.000-08:00

A friend introduced me to the fantasy writer Sharon Shinn. I find a good bit of theology in her novels. I'm on the 3rd of her Archangel series.

2009-11-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

I read the ICPL (public library)'s copy of Bishop Spong's new book Eternal Life. I'm afraid I found it too slow and repetitive for me at this time. There are a lot of wonderful reviews of it on Amazon, so I think I just didn't fit well. At times in my life Spong has been my favorite church writer. I've always been able to trust him to tell me the unadorned truth. So my library contains several of his books. I just won't be buying this one.

2009-10-20T07:34:00.000-07:00

Nancy and Polly have me reading Sara Miles: Take This Bread, a Radical Converson. I usually get bogged down about halfway through a non-fiction, but I've almost finished reading the entire book. Sara Miles is a member of St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco and a founder of food pantries there and elsewhere. She was raised by atheist parents and converted after she decided to drop in on her daily walk and received communion. I'm always interested in adult converts like Nevada Barr, the mystery writer, for example. Her spiritual memoir is also good: Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat. Adult converts don't seem to carry all that guilt baggage the rest of us are sometimes saddled with.

Katharine blogging as a New Song Reader

2009-10-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

There are 2 books that have caught my interest lately. One is Erik Reese: An American Gospel. It has an excellent commentary on the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. The other is Phyllis Tickle: The Great Emergence. I understand that our bishop had the clergy read it. In the way of fiction I liked Susan Howatch: The Heartbreaker. I had been disappointed in her two novels before that one, which I felt had too much or the paranormal.