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| The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008 (The Best American Series) | 
 enlarge | Creators: Jimmy Carter, Philip Zaleski
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $8.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 49403
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0618833757
Dewey Decimal Number: 810.8038
EAN: 9780618833757
ASIN: 0618833757
Publication Date: October 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In his introduction to this volume, President Jimmy Carter writes that The Best American Spiritual Writing "approaches the writing of both poetry and prose as a spiritual discipline, a way to explore the mysteries of the soul and the soul's relationship with God." As always, editor Philip Zaleski has assembled a wide-ranging and wonderfully eclectic collection that delves headlong into that spiritual discipline, looking to inspire, provoke, and offer insight into modern spirituality and religion.
Here you will find Walter Isaacson's brilliant and provocative portrait of Einstein's religious life?a cross between his parents' secularism, his native Judaism, and his Catholic grade-school education. Drawing from his own experience of trying to inhabit multiple worlds, Noah Feldman examines the difficulties facing faith communities as they adhere to tradition yet also strive to be modern, in "Orthodox Paradox." When "Meeting the Chinese in St. Paul," Natalie Goldberg, with the help of a broken rhinoceros fan, grapples with this question: how should I live, knowing the world is a confusing place? Pico Iyer weighs in on his tranquil retreat, the holiest place in Japan; Oliver Sacks gives a moving account of a man with retrograde amnesia, striving for a meaningful life devoid of memory; and Ursula K. Le Guin passionately explains, as only she can, the appeal and subtle morality of A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad: XXXII."
Committed to literary excellence, this "invaluable collection" (Library Journal) also features poetry from distinguished voices such as Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, John Updike, and Charles Wright. As Zaleski writes in his foreword, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008 proves that the writing in this edition is a stirring "medium for contemplating, via the things of the flesh, the things of the spirit."
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"Help me, please, to carry / this candle against the wind." October 11, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The above quotation is from Wendell Berry's "Sabbaths 2005," the second of thirty-five offerings in THE BEST AMERICAN SPIRITUAL WRITING 2008. In nineteen poetry sections consisting of varying-length stanzas and different poetic forms, he waxes on eternity, ornithology, grandchildren, the body, pastures, woods, and graves. The last one serves as a fitting epitaph: "Born by our birth / Here on the earth / Our flesh to wear / Our death to bear." His candle is lit and glowing, even in a storm.
Berry meets abundantly the criteria set by Philip Zaleski, the editor of this collection: "The spiritual writer, then, acts in service to something higher, purer, truer than himself." Interestingly, a number of this year's selections (perhaps more than in previous collections) deal with this definition from an other-than-religious standpoint. In other words, even atheistic viewpoints are represented. Consider the two-page "About a Poem" by Ursula K. Le Guin in which she discusses A. E. Houseman's unwillingness to abandon rhyme and beat. Le Guin notes, "What he did makes you realize the infinite suppleness and the subtlety of simple forms when used by a great poet" even though "Houseman was god-free." In his poems, she writes beautifully, "Human love and pain are all the deeper for their brevity; human honor burns all the brighter because it has no reward."
In Walter Isaacson's "Einstein & Faith" is another creative man who wasn't conventionally religious. The famous physicist's brief answer to the question "Do you believe in God?" is reprinted: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." Einstein also wrote, "To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."
Science's tendency to elicit an agnostic or atheistic sense of mystery is also conveyed in "Faith and Quantum Theory," by Stephen Barr. This selection discusses the "death of determinism...that follows from the probabilistic nature of quantum theory" and goes on to ask "why should a mere theory of matter imply anything about the mind?" Barr says, "One can find religious scientists in every camp" (one-world, Bohmian, or the Copenhagen school of quantum thought), but his concluding paragraph admits "quantum theory is as mysterious as ever."
Richard Rodriguez, in "Atheism Is Wasted on the Nonbeliever," notes that Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and others espouse the idea that science is more trustworthy than religion. Rodriguez, a practicing Catholic, say he doesn't need " 'The New Atheists' to persuade me to disbelief." He says, "I share with the atheist and the agnostic a sense of a God who is hidden. (I say hidden; an atheist would say never there in the first place."
But of course this noticeable theme doesn't pervade all the essays or poems. The 2008 edition, as in previous years, includes varied offerings: travelogues, coping with illness, a rumination about religious universities, a homeschooling piece, Noah Feldman on "The Orthodox Paradox," and Peter Everwine's achingly gentle "Aubade in Autumn." Not to mention Paul Elie's "A Man for All Reasons" about Reinhold Niebuhr and an observation that Christmas celebrations have gobbled up the traditional Advent season.
Jimmy Carter writes in his Introduction that this anthology is "a way to explore the mysteries of the soul and the soul's relationship to God." One may wonder though, after reading THE BEST AMERICAN SPIRITUAL WRITING 2008, whether more and more of us aren't becoming Albert Einsteins -- at least insofar as our beliefs about God and religion go. Feeling a sense of awe at the unknown seems a more prevalent topic in this year's "spiritual writing" than a personal God or a devout belief in religious dogmas. Carrying a candle against the wind may increasingly not mean what is used to mean. See what you think....
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