Category: christianity
- How Long, Baby How Long, Has That Evenin’ Train Been Gone?The Grass Flute Zen Master: Sodo Yokoyama by Arthur Braverman. Counterpoint. 148 pp. $16.95. How much time should we give to spiritual practice? It’s a question I often ask myself. Twenty minutes twice a day, as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi suggested? A forty minute sitting, ten minutes of walking, and a thirty minute sitting, as we do ...Read more
- Doing Nothing for No Good ReasonDogen Zen. Translations by Shohaku Okamura. Kyoto Soto Zen Center. 1988. $198 pp. Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Durckheim. Inner Traditions. 202 pp. $14.95. I have been known to complain—mostly to myself—that many of the works of a man I consider one of the great religious minds of the twentieth century have not ...Read more
- Dat Fig Tree Had It Comin’A Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my eighth and final piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) There are any number of things toward the end of the Gospel that I don’t understand, ...Read more
- What Does It Mean to Love God? Jesus and the Bean CountersA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my seventh piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here, here, here, here, here, and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) The pace of the Gospel of Mark has ...Read more
- Difficult TeachingsA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my sixth piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here, here, here, here, and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) The Gospel continues with what is for me a ...Read more
- Having Faith Is Not KnowingA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my fifth piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here and here and here and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) My impression of the early part of Mark ...Read more
- There Is EnoughA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my fourth piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here and here and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) There is still, as the Gospel enters Chapter 6, a ...Read more
- Nothing is HiddenA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my third piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) One reason that the Gospel of Mark seems an authentic historical document ...Read more
- The World Needs HealingA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my second piece on the Gospel of Mark, reading it not as a Buddhist or Christian but just an interested reader; the first piece is here. I’ll blunder along at my snail-like pace until I finish.) It seems that ...Read more
- My First Teacher Was a RabbiA Buddhist Reads the Bible: the Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. Various things are conspiring to make me read the Bible, which I last read—a rather thorough reading—in 1966-7, when I was a freshman at Duke. At a recent sesshin, I did dokusan with Shohaku Okumura and he mentioned ...Read more
- Zazen as True ReligionThe Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen’s Bendowa With a Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. 211 pp. “My late teacher Sawaki Kodo Roshi used to say that when we read Buddhist scriptures, we should illuminate our own mind with the ancient teachings and squeeze out the Buddha-dharma as our own expression. I have been following ...Read more
- Who Are Your People?The Sympathizer a novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press. 385 pp. $16.00 This novel won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a remarkable work of art—I’m stunned at the way this younger novelist projects himself back into this tumultuous time—but I’m more interested in it as a human document than as a ...Read more
- Greatest Zen Book EverOpening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. By Kosho Uchiyama, Translated and Edited by Tom Wright, Jisho Warner, and Shohaku Okumura. Wisdom Publications. 205 pp. $16.95. Factoids that I’ve picked up about Kosho Uchiyama through years of being obsessed with him: He was an expert at origami, as his father had been, and ...Read more
- Where the Boys AreWo Es War, Soll Ich Werden, the Restored Original Text by Guy Davenport. The Finial Press in Champaign, Illinois. $525.00 Once before on this website I reviewed a book that I was sure none of my readers would ever see, an obscure Buddhist text that had been out of print forever and that I was quite ...Read more
- Silence of the LeavingAwake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care. Edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast. Wisdom Publications. 346 pp. $19.95. This all began when Koshin Paley Ellison’s Grandma Mimi—certainly the most adorable character in this book, and perhaps the wisest—asked if he could look after her while she stayed in New York. ...Read more
- Get Your Buns Over HereSausage Party, a film by Gret Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. With Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. *** What a cast, right? Five Oscar nominees in one movie. Unfortunately, it’s an animated film about food products in the supermarket. The voices are great. But the cast doesn’t show its stuff. Apparently this ...Read more
- AIDS Comes HomeMy Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 432 pp. $16.00. I’m full of admiration for this book, and there’s no single reason. It’s an AIDS memoir, told from the standpoint of the doctor who cared for the patients, and who just happened to be a gifted writer who would later write a bestselling ...Read more
- Angry Men and Wild Women12 Angry Men a film by Sydney Lumet. With Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam. ***** Ghostbusters a film by Paul Feig. With Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones. **** Last spring my wife and I saw By Sydney Lumet at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and set about watching the work of ...Read more
- Unrepeatable MiracleStimp Hawkins, 1933-2016 My friend Stimp Hawkins died in mid-June, but I just found out, almost by accident, this past weekend. He’d gotten in touch with me several months ago to let me know about an article that had just come out about his new career as what he called a death pimp, and we agreed ...Read more
- Becoming the True SelfThe Blake Project: Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 332 pp. In my last post in the Blake project, I spoke of a book that my wife was reading but that I had avoided because I wanted to explore my own reading of Blake’s work. That strategy worked ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)