Category: religion

Clark in the Dark
Waking 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 ...
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Seeker on Steroids
Waking 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 ...
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Get Back, Jo Jo
How 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 ...
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In That Stillness is the Great Dynamic Activity
Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity by Edward Slingerland. Crown. 296 pp. $26.00. When he was a teenager, we all noticed that my nephew Charlie was surrounded by beautiful young women, though he seemed less accomplished than his older brothers (he wasn’t; he was just younger). You’d go over in the morning ...
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A Wrong Turn
Lost 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. ...
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The Beer-Sodden Mystery of Chogyam Trungpa
Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala. 196 pp. $21.95. Twenty-seven years ago, on my first trip to Mexico, I was sitting in the back seat of a bus on the outskirts of Oaxaca. My wife and I weren’t on a tour; we had joined a group that was studying Spanish at a school in Cuernavaca, ...
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Gilead
Gilead 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 ...
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Heaven All the Way
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Riverhead Books 250 pp $16.00 Peter Matthiessen’s final novel—it was published right around the time of his death in 2014—concerns a group of people who come together to do a meditation retreat at Auschwitz. Matthiessen’s Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, conducted such a retreat, perhaps more than one, and I don’t know ...
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