Canterbury Press, an English publisher, has bought the memoir of Bishop Gene Robinson from US Episcopal publisher Morehouse. The book, In the Eye of the Storm, will be published in April 2008 and recounts Bishop Robinson’s faith journey and shares his reflections on the current church situation.
The most recent issue of Atlantic includes a book review of Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours, which describes how the inner life of men and women in medieval times (mostly women) is disclosed in their scratchings in the margins of “the Book of Hours—a devotional assemblage for the laity, first compiled in the 13th century.”
Why has religion persisted in the West after the Enlightenment? Did the nature of Christianity itself push us toward secularism? Mark Lilla offers some answers in The Stillborn God, which is reviewed in the New York Times Book Review today
in his last completed book, “Moses and Monotheism,” something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present…..He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action.
“The vanishing point is always the same. Our eyes go out of focus as we try to discern where and when the world began, or to ascertain the source of the stories and graphic dreams that seethe in our heads,”writes Peter Conrad.
The New York Times has news today that the noted children’s author and active episcopal layperson and speaker had died at the age of 88.
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zambardo chronicles one disaster after another in which typically good people succumbed to the psychological forces of the situation, with the worst possible results; and how, in each case, those in power invariably drew the mistaken conclusion that the pathologies were the result of a few bad apples—when in fact the bigger problem was the nature of the barrel they were placed in.
Statistics published by Amazon suggest that the number of people buying books from it about religion or spirituality has soared in three years by 50 per cent. The increase has outshone all other categories, including history, which has grown by 38 per cent, and politics, which has grown by 30 per cent.
Dante invites us to go on pilgrimage with him as an act of spiritual transformation. The concept is not foreign to our age. Last year, an estimated 70 million Hindus journeyed to the sacred Ganges River in India for spiritual cleansing; a record six million people visited Jerusalem’s Western, or Wailing, Wall; 150 million Christians are estimated to be “on the move” each year to one pilgrimage site or another.
All year round, Episcopal Divinity School faculty get a lot requests to make book recommendations, according to the Rev. Dr. Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, academic dean at EDS. This year’s summer reading list includes books on the Millennium Development Goals, reconciliation, the Anglican Communion, classism, racism, sexism, and more.