book review – Page 3 – Spiritual accompaniment

Book Review: The Person…Readings in Human Nature

February 20, 2024

I came upon this The Person…Readings in Human Nature – edited by William O Stephens – recently in a Little Free Library. While skimming through it at the Little Free Library, I found the book to be – as per the book’s description – be an anthology of modern and historical perspectives on “personhood” from well-recognized writers and philosophers over the centuries (our modern view of personhood is actually a fairy recent perspective….).

I’ve always taken an interest in the psychology of human development. I brought home this particular book as it speaks to a particular interest I have at the moment: the distinct impact of living a Christian life on the human person (and, how a person lives their life).

Many of the historical and contemporary thinkers whose perspectives are included in this book are secular. One of them is St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century). The opportunity to look at these multiple perspectives is interesting…..

Anyone who has ever sat in a church pew knows that what we hear of Christianity on Sunday is suppose to be applied in our lives…. And, that it isn’t always applied in people’s lives Monday through Saturday.

Last Wednesday, I was at mass listening to an Ash Wednesday homily. During the homily, it occurred to me that the perspective was a perspective that has infused my life “more than I had realized.” I found myself noticing that the perspective offered in the homily was a perspective that I had learned growing in my denomination and that it had fundamentally become part of my worldview….. Several years ago, I was struggling through a difficult period. Myself and the people around me were trying to make sense of my situation and how I might move out of the difficult period. I was away from church at the time and simply saw my perspective at the time as “my perspective” (and, a perspective – if you would have asked me at the time – was a perspective no different than anyone else’s. Or, since we all have a perspective, I might have thought my perspective to be a secular one since I wasn’t religiously active at the time)….. As we searched for ways to mentally frame both my situation and a solution, I noticed that myself and secular folks around me at the time were framing an effort to find a solution very differently. I didn’t have a sense at the time of what those differing perspectives were…… Later – during last Wednesday’s Ash Wednesday homily – I realized that the perspective I was applying at the time was rooted in a very Catholic perspective; even though I wasn’t religiously active at the time. Having grown up Catholic, I had absorbed a world view that was more distinct than I had realized. Fish don’t realize they are swimming in water as water is what they know.

A solution to my above-mentioned challenge was found later – in the Catholic pews to which I had returned. Allowing God to work in my life brought me to a solution to a vexing challenge.

I am looking forward to reading at least several sections The Person…Readings in Human Nature. I look forward to reflecting via this book – from the perspective of “how we live in the world as persons” – the distinctiveness of the worldview I pondered on Ash Wednesday. How well I apply that worldview to living well and being of service is always up for review…..

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Further consideration of “Embodying Forgiveness”

January 26, 2024

I reviewed L. Gregory Jones’ book E mbodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis in early January. The book is important enough to discuss a second time.

Embodying Forgiveness is not a quick read. It’s written rather academically. It is densely packed with important ideas that require thoughtful reading. The book is about a sometimes difficult topic that can take great commitment to apply in one’s life. The book also supports a well-lived faith in which we – as a friend often says – do the “adulting” of living one’s faith (i.e., we grow up and live out the responsibilities we are called to do. In fact, this book helps us “find our inner adult!”). This is the type of book to read when we want to move beyond “easy principles of faith” and fluffy phrases to a faith in which we grow and mature. In other words – it draws us toward meaningful liberation and to living in right relationship with God and the people in our lives. The principles in this book can be intimidating, but that doesn’t mean that the book is a “nonjoyous downer – it’s liberating. In this book, we learn about living for our community rather than being self-centric. We learn about giving up self without being a doormat. Good news: the author draws readers toward practicing forgiveness, making it palatable when forgiveness feel unpalatable.

This book is so important that I’m posting several excerpts (hint: yes, this is an effort to tempt readers to read the book!):

“Forgiveness has long been hard to embody, even among those committed to its importance” (page xi).

“…the craft of forgiveness involves the ongoing and ever deepening process of unlearning sin through forgiveness and learning, through specific habits and practices, to live in communion – with the Triune God, with one another, and with the whole Creation” (page xii).

The ideas in this book move “beyond….pious, sentimental affirmations that ‘Jesus is my friend,'” to friendship being “a much more formative and transformative relationship” (page xiii).

“….forgiveness serves primarily not to absolve guilt but as a reminder, a gracious irritant, of what communion with God and with one another can and should be: and so it should enable and motivate our protest against any situation where people (either ourselves or others) are diminished or destroyed” (page xvi).

“….the purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness” (page 5).

I am the type of reader who thinks that a book worth reading should be read in its’ entirety. In the case of this book, reading even just a chapter or two – and really applying it in one’s life – would move a person forward in a faith well-lived. A worthwhile read!

Book Review: Embodying Forgiveness

January 5, 2024

This book, Embodying Forgiveness by Methodist pastor L. Gregory Jones, makes forgiveness more possible by demonstrating its’ theological necessity. Therefore, this is an important grow-my-faith book for individuals committed to truly living their faith. The book challenges readers to grow in ways that can be uncomfortable (growth that’s challenging to achieve can move us with particular stride along the long-haul journey of genuine maturing in faith).

This is a book that must be read slowly. The concepts presented grab a reader’s attention such that one must pause to take in the book’s ideas, find the emotional capacity to live each aspect of the book’s insights.

Sample excerpts include:

“….people are mistaken if they think of Christian forgiveness primarily as absolution from guilt. The purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion [between parties] (page five).”
“Christian forgiveness involves a high cost, both for God and for those who embody it. It requires the disciplines of dying and rising with Christ, disciplines for which there are no shortcuts, no handy techniques to replace the risk and vulnerability of giving up ‘possession’ of one’s self, which is done through the practices of forgiveness and repentance. This does not involve self-denial, nor the ‘death’ of self through annihilation. Rather, it is learning to see oneself and one’s life in the context of communion [i.e., community] (pages 5-6).”

A worthwhile read!

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a “Content Creator/Individual” member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: This is My Body, A Call to Eucharistic Revival

December 4, 2023

I was recently given Bishop Robert Barron’s book This is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival. When I started reading it, I quickly found it as readable and engaging as Henri Nouwen’s book With Burning Hearts.

The author, Bishop Robert Barron, wrote this book as part of a U.S. “call to Eucharistic renewal” (he helped initiate a U.S. call to Eucharistic renewal while the Chair of the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB). This book is engaging because it takes readers to the deeper meaning of faith concepts we’re meant to learn; he does so in an easily readable and interesting manner – plenty of “ah ha” moments. At the risk of reviewing this book with too much hyperbole, I stopped earmarking interesting pages after a few pages because I was earmarking most pages.

Here are two excerpts from This is My Body, A Call to Eucharistic Revival :

….”The opening line of the book of Genesis tells us that ‘in the beginning, God created the heavens and the eart’ (Gen. 1:1). Why did God, who is perfect in every way and who stands in need of nothing outside himself, bother to create at all? There are mythologies and philosophies galore – both ancient and modern – that speak of God needing the universe or benefiting from it in some fashion, but Catholic theology has always repudiated these approaches and affirmed God’s total self-sufficiency….God created the heaven and earth ‘of his own goodness and almighty power, not for the increase of his own happiness.'”

“Love, in the theological sense, is not a feeling or a sentiment, though it is often accompanied by those psychological states. In its essence, love is an act of the will, more precisely, the willing of the good of the other as other. To love is really to want what is good for someone else and then to act on that desire.”

This book is intentionally priced affordably to get it into the hands of readers. I am passing along copies to fellow readers who live in my community. If you are looking for something to read, you can order it online here.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a “Content Creator/Individual” member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: Playing with Dragons – Living with Suffering and God

November 21, 2023

I heard of this book recently while watching a “Great Course” about the history of the Old Testament. The Great Courses presenter who mentioned this book was discussing the cultural context of how dragons came to be mentioned in the Hebrew Bible; in the context of that presentation, he referred to this book Playing with Dragons in the same sense of the book’s Goodreads summary, saying (in effect): “This is a book for those want to go beyond standard discussions of faith and suffering.”

There are multiple layers of opportunity for understanding the depths of religious meaning. The academic/sociologist/theologian James Fowler chronicles in his book Stages of Faith the six stages we have the opportunities to progress through in faith as we age; too often, we adults settle for remaining perpetually in a high-school level of a stage three faith (as described by Fowler). In hindsight, I got stuck for some years as an adult in a transition moving from a stage three faith to stage four faith (a common occurrence, according to Fowler). It took time for me to begin growing in faith again; once I did, I was happy to discover new depths of religious insight – such as metaphors provided to us in Biblical texts and religious ritual. Therefore, I looked forward to Andy Angel’s book Playing with Dragons, Living with Suffering and God when I found recently found the book. I, as the Goodreads summary for this book mentions, “find standard discussions of faith and suffering frustrating” – I often find such discussions inadequate.

Personally, I accept that suffering is “part of the human condition” and a consequence of original sin. God gave us humans the opportunity to have a naturally happy time of it on earth; that opportunity was destroyed through free will via “original sin.” I don’t find the concept of original sin to be a limiting and heavy weight put on humanity; rather, we are provided with the opportunity to move beyond it through baptism and by nurturing a right relationship with God and the people around us.

In this Playing with Dragons book, I am hoped for discussion about how dragons are provided as a metaphor for us to wrestle on a human level with the challenges we must contend with during this lifetime.

This book is summarized on Goodreads as follows: “There be dragons all over the Bible. From the great sea monsters of Genesis to the great dragon of Revelation, dragons appear as the Bible opens and closes, and they pop their grisly heads up at various junctures in between. How did they get there and what on earth (or indeed in heaven) are they doing there? This is a book for those who find standard discussions of faith and suffering frustrating. Andy Angel opens up the rich biblical tradition of living with God in the midst of suffering. He takes the reader on a journey of exploration through biblical texts that are often overlooked on account of their strangeness–texts about dragons. He shows how these peculiar passages open up a language of prayer through suffering in which people share their anger, weariness, disillusionment, and even joy in suffering with God. Angel explores how such “weird” Scriptures open up a whole new way of praying and reveal a God who approves of honest spirituality, a spirituality that the Bible holds open but too many of its interpreters do not.”

What I found in the book was a cultural and religious context of the Old Testament – how and why dragons were symbolic representations of the challenges we wrestle with and – importantly – that metaphor provides us with a way to “wrestle with life’s challenges” in ways that literal vocabulary fails us. Epic dramas are useful.

Book Review: C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Screwtape Letters’

November 15, 2023

I am not sure how I feel about reviewing a book that many people have already read (i.e., it’s so widely read that it perhaps doesn’t need much of an introduction!)…. With that said, I ended up choosing to review this timeless classic for anyone who hasn’t yet found and read this must-read book.

A friend – and spiritual guide – gave me a copy of The Screwtape Letters when I was in high school. Because it’s such a well-written and insightful spiritual classic, the book’s insights practically inform my faith life. I return to the book periodically, though I don’t ever need to re-read the entire book because the book’s contents impacted me enough the first time for its’ content to leave a lasting impression.

This book is well-described on Goodreads: “The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is a classic masterpiece of religious satire that entertains readers with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to ‘Our Father Below.’ At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging account of temptation — and triumph over it — ever written.”

When I first read this book (high school), I was just old enough to grasp what C.S. Lewis was getting at in this insightful, informing, and at the same time entertaining read. I had moved beyond Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (my third grade teacher introduced us to that wonderful series of children’s books, which I read six times in elementary school) and was ready to start having my faith challenged on a maturing level. The Screwtape Letters helped me grasp – in an immensely readable way – that temptation comes to us in subtle and psychologically powerful ways in order to tempt us effectively.

I’ve still got the copy of The Screwtape Letters that I was given in high school. I recently came upon another copy in a Little Free Library – I brought it home because I want to pass it on to another reader (if I can find someone who hasn’t yet read it!)… (note: that second copy led to this book review). This book’s writing style makes it a worthwhile read for Christians and non-Christians alike – it tells us as much about our own psychological makeup and how we humans surrender to temptation’s allure as it does about the devils who are out to outwit us. A book for all ages (chronological ages and eras).

Book Review: Nourishing Love – A Franciscan Celebration of Mary

November 6, 2023

This book takes readers on a novel way of exploring Mary’s life (no, not a novel). For those of us who tend think of Mary either historically and/or as a saint, this book brings us an additional way to consider Mary.

Franciscan author (and priest) Murray Bodo offers us something similar to that of The Chosen TV series: a conceptual view of what it could have been like living Jesus’ or Mary’s lives – making their day-to-day lives more tangible for us than what many of us consider when reading the Gospels. Both this book and The Chosen contain historical aspects of the lives of Mary and Jesus (respectively). Reading historical accounts alone – however – don’t necessarily take us into thinking about the daily aspects what they did and felt as people.

In this book, Nourishing Love, there are reflections that take us to ponder, “what thoughts did Mary ponder?” After Jesus offered her and John to one another as mother-and-son, what conversations Mary and John have about Jesus? Possibly ponderings by Mary and possible – plausible – conversations between Mary and John are presented here to bring us into considering their lives on a very human level.

At one point in the book, the author writes, “Since Jesus was both God and man, he had his mother’s genes and was deeply influenced genetically, as most of us are, by his mother. He was Mary’s son, prompting us to imagine how Mary herself was in fact revealed in the person of her son.” Hmm….. Did genetics cause Jesus to look like his mother? Did Mary and Jesus share similar voice inflections? Did Jesus maintain some of Mary’s habits once he became an adult (ate the same foods for breakfast, had the same evening routines, etc.)? How much did Mary’s human personality influence Jesus’ human personality? The author of this book observes that the stories Mary told Jesus during his infancy and childhood may have influenced the types of stories Jesus chose to tell as an adult – including the parables he told. How she cared for the people around her could have been socially instructive for the human Jesus.

The way this book is constructed made me think of Ignatian exercises in terms of the creativity brought to subjects of faith. There’s a degree to which I felt uncomfortable with this book – I would more naturally gravitate to an academically-oriented sociological construct/analysis of people’s daily lives in first-century Palestine to get a sense of Mary’s life (that type of book would also be interesting!). Sometimes, though, discomfort is good. Discomfort can challenge us to consider topics in new ways; new perspectives help us grow.

Book Review: Introduction to Christian Worship

October 26, 2023

This book – Introduction to Christian Worship (Third Edition) by James F. White – is an academic book elucidating the how-and-why of how Christian church services are organized, how the structure of church services have developed and changed over the centuries (i.e., pastors, liturgists, interested congregants, academics, and religious historians).

This book covers every aspect of the Christian liturgy – both in minutia and comparative details on how (and why) Christian church services (and other aspects of Christian worship such as Christian Initiation, baptism, weddings, and anointing of the sick) are the same across denominations as well as detailed discussion of how various aspects of church liturgy vary among denominations. The history of how church liturgy developed over the centuries is widely covered throughout the book. The wide breadth – and detail – of knowledgeable insight demonstrate many years of comparative religious study by the author (he was, after all, an academic).

Among the very readable insights of this book is an interesting point about the Bible readings that many denominations hear read at church on Sunday (page 75 of the third edition). James White informs readers that the Catholic church developed its’ current cycle of biblical readings read at mass after Vatican II. Many Catholics know of the three-year cycles of readings known as years A, B, C (there is a two-year cycle for the readings at weekday masses); White informs readers that many Protestant denominations also adopted the same reading cycle for weekend services – meaning there is a broad level of uniformity among many denominations of which Bible passages are heard each Sunday (news to me! I knew that several denominations – such as Episcopalians, Anglicans, Presbyterians, perhaps Lutherans and Methodists – read many of the same readings at church on the same calendar as Catholics; this shared practice seems to be more uniform and widespread than I realized. Denominations that read these shared Bible readings each weekend read from “The Lectionary for Mass” for Catholics and “The Common Lectionary” for Protestants). This standardization of readings moved some Protestant pastors away from only reading self-selected Bible passages at church that supported the political views of pastors and/or their congregations.

James F. White’s Introduction to Christian Worship is an informative read for anyone interested in Christian liturgy.

Book Review: Daily strengths for daily needs

August 25, 2023

Thank you to A Parish Catechist friend Karen Chartier for this book review. Much appreciated!

Book Review: Daily Strengths for Daily Needs

Mary W. Tileston

The Family Inspirational Library

Mary Tileston’s book Daily Strengths for Daily Needs offers a compilation of quotes from thoughtful, spiritual thinkers throughout the ages, from those found in the Bible to R.W. Emerson, to Marcus Antoninus, to George Elliot, to St. Frances de Sales — and scores of others.

Published first in 1884, it remains pertinent to the present. ‘In these days of great emotion and radical changes, we need the steady, persistent and refreshing inspiration of spiritual thoughts, which, entering the texture of our life in the morning, will guide and refresh us through the day, or, in the evening, give a sense of confidence and peace.’ opens the preface, and both the need and the outcomes outlined are relevant.

I was given this book by a friend and have been inspired by it throughout the year. I highly recommend it. Below are examples of quotes of Tileson’s book.

The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love, is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones. F. W. Robertson

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. R. W. Emerson

We may, if we choose, make the worst of one another. Everyone has his weak points; everyone has his faults; we may make the worst of these; we may fix our attention constantly upon these. But we may also make the best of one another. We may forgive, even as we hope to be forgiven…By loving whatever is loveable in those around us, love will flow back from them to us, and life will become a pleasure instead of a pain; and earth will become like heaven; and we shall become not unworthy followers of Him whose name is Love. A. P. Stanley

Book Reviewer: Karen Chartier