Category: christianity
- 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
- All Religions Are OneThe Blake Project: All Religions Are One; There Is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell I first studied William Blake in my survey of English literature course at Duke University. To say that I was excited would be a vast understatement: I had a ...Read more
- Fearful SymmetryBlake by Peter Ackroyd. Knopf. 399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand. I clicked to see the rest of ...Read more
- Whattya Know?Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the seventh and final piece in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here, here, here, here, here, and ...Read more
- Beyond BeliefDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the sixth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. This series has got to end sometime but hasn’t ended yet. Earlier ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old Lady IIThe Lady in the Van. A film by Nicholas Hytner. With Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alex Jennings. I’m as much a fan of oldster movies as anyone—they’re about me, after all—and, like everyone else in the world, I love Maggie Smith. I especially like her as the outraged Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, though the series ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old LadyIris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...Read more
- Everybody Knew but Nobody Was Talkin’Spotlight A film by Tom McCarthy Spotlight is an absolutely thrilling movie, one of those newspaper movies where reporters shout at each other, slam their fists on the desk, burst into the records office a few minutes before closing time, run down the sidewalk shouting for a taxi, stay up too late, write at incredible speeds, ...Read more
- Clark in the DarkWaking up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age by Clark Strand. Spiegel & Grau. 140 pp. $26.00. I seem to be reading a lot of Clark Strand. One book has led to another. And though I’ve made light of his tendency to try every spiritual practice known to man, I’ve genuinely enjoyed his ...Read more
- Seeker on SteroidsWaking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion by Clark Strand. Middleway Press. 184 pp. $14.95 As long as I have known Clark Strand, he has been searching for—and repeatedly finding—the ideal spiritual practice, and writing a book about it that he thought would be ...Read more
- Get Back, Jo JoHow to Believe in God Whether You Believe in Religion or Not by Clark Strand. Doubleday. 237 pp. $24.95 Clark Strand—to say the very least—can’t make up his mind. You probably know the kind of spiritual seeker who keeps trying different things; Strand is that person on steroids. For a while he wanted to be a ...Read more
- A Wrong TurnLost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery By Jacob Needleman. Tarcher/Penguin. 228 pp. $15.95 I had thought I would only reread the opening section of this book—Three Christians—because I love the portrait the author draws there of three unusual Christians and their transformative practices, but as I finished that section I continued and reread the whole book. ...Read more
- Lost SoulsHome by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 325pp. $14.00 I have now read all three novels of what I suppose might be called the Gilead trilogy, Gilead itself, Home, and Lila. I unfortunately read them out of order, Lila first. I also read them when I was moving out of a tiny apartment and back into our renovated ...Read more
- GileadGilead by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 247 pp. $16.00 This novel has an almost irresistible premise for me: an older father writing to his son about the past life that he’ll never have a chance to discuss with him, since he expects to have died by the time then son gets interested. My own father died when ...Read more
- The Utopian Theology of Guy DavenportThe Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign. Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard. 379 pp. $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...Read more
Recent Evening Mind Posts
And Is He PissedLooks Pretty Good to MeShe Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.Elmore the GreatWriting Like God
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (213)art (112)Buddhism (167)Christianity (124)creative process (244)death and dying (137)meditation (122)movies (158)music (36)race (104)religion (185)sex (167)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (251)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)
Print
And Is He PissedLooks Pretty Good to MeShe Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.Elmore the GreatWriting Like God
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (213)art (112)Buddhism (167)Christianity (124)creative process (244)death and dying (137)meditation (122)movies (158)music (36)race (104)religion (185)sex (167)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (251)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)