Bookwi.se

Summary: Neuroscience and psychology can be helpful to understanding our spiritual life. 

After having read The Body Keeps Score on the science and psychology of Trauma, I wanted to read something similar from an explicitly Christian perspective and Anatomy of the Soul was recommended to me. (I also picked up This is Your Brain on Joy to read later.)

Part of the message of The Body Keeps Score is that our mental, spiritual, and emotional states impact our body and vice versa. The wholeness of our physical, emotional, and spiritual states matters. As Christians, especially as a Christian that is interested in the spiritual development of others, we need to think about how we can incorporate the knowledge of the physical into the practice of spiritual direction without attempting to be a psychologist or neurologist.

Anatomy of the Soul is broadly divided into two parts. The science and background about neurology, trauma, attachment, emotions, the prefrontal cortex, etc. and the shorter spiritual implications to our understanding of sin, repentance and forgiveness, and community.

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Summary: Spiritual Direction from a book.

As I have mentioned a number of times in these reviews, I have been meeting with a spiritual director for more than five years now. I also am considering seeking formal training to become a spiritual director in the future. My current commitment is to read at least one book broadly related to spiritual direction a month. In February, three books “˜by Henri Nouwen’ were on sale and Spiritual Direction was the first of the three that I have read.

Henri Nouwen passend away in 1996. In addition to the many books that he directly wrote, several of his students compiled additional books based on his lectures, unpublished essays, and notes. Nouwen is worth reading for his spiritual insight, even if this book is not directly written by him for publication. There are hint here of things that I have read before, especially the chapter on solitude, community and service that feels like a shortened form of Out of Solitude.

A book cannot replace spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is personal and more about the individual receiving the direction than just wisdom from the director. But there is a sense of how this book does hint at what spiritual direction is like because of Nouwen’s self disclosure and focus on his own spiritual growth.

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Summary: A bad priest suffers persecution in Mexico in the 1920-30s.

I can’t really review or even comment on a book that is on almost every best of the 20th century list. The Power and the Glory is not long and I spend a week pretty much only reading it. I can not help but compare it to ShÅ«saku Endo’s Silence. Endo’s book was written later, but I read it first and I have read it twice. Greene has one of the most famous endorsements ever included in the book Silence, “Endo, to my mind, is one of the finest living novelists.”

Both books are about persecution, but the level of persecution did not rise to the same level in The Power and the Glory as it did in Silence. The real story that Silence is based on, there were likely around 300,000 Christians killed. The Mexican persecution, while serious, was much more limited and as mentioned in the book was also much more regional. The church, alcohol, and jazz were all banned.

The strength of the book I think hinges on the discussion about what motivates the self-admitted bad priest (he has fathered a child, is an alcoholic, and a coward, facing a crisis of faith), in spite of it all, to stay in the area of the persecution and continue to minister to the Catholics there. I find the discussion both realistic to faith and fascinating. But I can also see how apart from faith, the motivation is ridiculous.

The story is fairly simple. There are a number of characters for a simple story and the movement is not quite wrapped up in all of the threads. The priest is being sought by the police. He is considered much more dangerous than an American serial killer, who is also being pursued, because the priest is a traitor to the state, while the killer is just killing people. The police eventually start taking captives and killing them in order to motivate someone to turn the Priest in. But as much as the priest would like to escape, someone’s spiritual need keeps pulling him back.

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Summary: A man who appears to have had his brain completely erased is found in the woods in a future post-apocalyptic Earth.

I have been very slowly working through Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. These are a series of science fiction books that are only very loosely related. Most within the series have almost no connection to any other book in the series. But they all are set in a future where hundreds of worlds have been settled by humanity. But due to genetic manipulation and isolation due to war or other reasons there have been evolutionary shifts that have altered humanity to be a number of different species. This has allowed Le Guin to explore a number of features of what it means to be human or in society. Although they are considered a series, Le Guin says they are not intended to have internal cohesion and form a single story or even have a suggested reading order.

The Disposessed explored how societies organize politically and socially as a scientist moved from an anarchist utopia (described as non-authoritarian communism’ to a repressive capitalist system that permits a type of slavery. The Left Hand of Darkness is a more physical exploration of what gender means. An outsider comes to a isolated world to attempt to bring them into an intergalactic United Nations style system. But this isolated world does not have fixed gender. Everyone is genderless except once a month when they create gender to mate, each person sometimes becoming male and sometimes becoming female. Most people will be both fathers and mothers at different times and in general mating is temporary and not a permanent marriage arrangement. Children after infancy are raised communally.

The City of Illusions was the third published book in 1967. The Earth has been reduced to a small fraction of its population, most of whom live in small villages or in nomadic tribal system. There is very little trust of outsiders, but a man is found without memory and with the bodily control of an newborn. He is nursed to health and taught so that after about 5 years he has developed the skills and understanding of an adult, but without any knowledge of where he came from or how he came to be in the woods near the community that found him.

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Summary: A post WWII mystery set in Vienna. 

In general I like to know almost nothing about fiction books going into them. I picked up the audiobook during an Audible sale almost two years ago because of the comparisons between Graham Green and Shusaku Endo. Prior to picking this up I had listened to the excellent End of the Affair only because it was narrated by Colin Firth. (After picking this up original I also listened to the Comedians, which was good, but not as good.)

The Third Man is a mystery set soon after the end of the Second World War. A novelist specializing in pulp westerns is invited to Vienna to visit a old school friend and arrives just in time to attend his funeral. What appears to be an accidental death (hit by a car while crossing the street) eventually grows into something bigger.

The Third Man was originally written as a screen play and only turned into novella after the movie was completed. I have not seen the movie (or either of the movies of the End of the Affair). This feels like a screen play and I think may have been a better screen play than novel. The jumping narration was not enhanced in audiobook (although the narrator was fine, it was difficult to figure out who was narrating the story for much of the early parts of the book.) The narration alternates between the novelist and an British military detective working in Vienna.

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Summary: One of the enduring realities of racism in the United States is the persistence of housing segregation. Many believe that housing segregation today is largely a result of personal preference. But the historic role of government in creating and maintaining segregation has been largely ignored.

In the United States homeownership is one of the most significant methods of wealth creation and generational wealth transfer. Because of that, differences in rates of home ownership plays a significant role in the difference in personal wealth between racial groups and the transfer of that wealth from one generation to the next.

Discussion of race in the US often will eventually come to a question similar to, “˜slavery ended over 150 years ago and the Civil Rights era was 50 years ago, how can the aggregate differences between economic and social realities continue to be persistent.’ The Color of Law attempts to tell part of the story about how persistence of economic and social realities is at least partially dependent upon historic (and sometimes recent) role of government.

Color of Law is not an anti or pro-government book, but an attempt at an honest accounting of the role of government. Throughout the book there is a continual question of whether particular actions were the responsibility of individual actors that happened to have government positions or if the actions were part of an intentional or unintentional action of a branch or level of government as a whole.

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