Table of Contents | If you have read a book recently that engaged your thinking and stirred your heart then you may want to share your thoughts about the book in a review that can be posted on this web log. The topics can vary and anything that interests you will find someone who resonates with it. So the invitation goes out. Submit your review by sending it to me at my e-mail address (BobSueSand@aol.com). I have chosen to review one myself! When Bill Moyers writes something, I always read it. On the back of a book by James A. Autry he says, "Yes, it's true: I did urge Jim Autry to write this book. For lesser sins the Good Lord may yet forgive me; this one could be unpardonable." That was enough for me so I bought Looking Around for God. The rest of that assertion is "...I am now a co-conspirator in the promotion of a heresy that could prove contagious if this book is widely read and Christians snagged in the cul-de-sac of fundamentalism discover that faith is a continuing and exhilarating course in adult education....But I accept the hazard of putting in peril my prospects for paradise. We have need of the Gospel According to St. James, and someone had to insist that he put down on paper what privately he had been sharing for so long with a company of old friends and fellow sinners whose eccentric pieties and personal traits and travails have few equals since John Bunyan dined alone at some 17th century English crossroads before beginning his pilgrim's progress. We have sat many an evening around a roaring fire -- this band of souls bonded mainly by affection that requires no parsing -- as Jim recited a poem he had just written about love and ritual and community, or regaled us from memory with a risque epic of spiritual exultation taken to carnal extremes, or reported on the latest ground won in the long slow journey to independent living of the autistic son he and Sally loved and esteemed since birth....I have marveled at the faith of a man who had said he had little." I "took up and read" the book on the word of Bill Moyers and what a read! Autry's essays are delightful and insightful, and, dare I say it, exposes of the church at the exact points I have explored on this site. For me, his essays are delightful because they indicate what I believe, namely, that religious leaders should always share, caringly and sparingly and honestly, their own "sacred journeys" or what I call for me "A Perpetual Journey to An Unreachable Destination." Just as Moyers' comments haven't led me astray (and I have been an admirer for decades!) so this book will challenge you and cause you to reconsider your own journey. Yes, the pathway to light and truth runs through the heresies that must be brought to light for what they are. He does no less with his gentle touch. Although it isn't a theological heresy, he writes an essay that should be read by all those who have questions about the invasion of Iraq and "pre-emptive war;" he calls it "Who Would Jesus Kill?" Here is a book that blends prose and poetry in such a fashion of generosity and humililty that he even dares to conclude with "Just asking." Read it and enjoy. |
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