Spiritual Living

This year has been a difficult one for believers—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise—in the wake of such books as Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religions Poison Everything. The response is an almost frantic variety of spirituality titles, from Paul Wesley Chilcote's stimulating take on theology and hymnody to Sister Wendy Beckett's cozy but experiential treatment of the prayerful life. Nancy Rue is on board to keep children and families hip, engaged, and true to themselves while securely situated at the right hand of the Father, Fanny Neuda testifies to the realities of devout Jewish womanhood, and Joel Osteen offers another set of seven steps for improving our lives. Coleman Barks, meanwhile, translates Rumi's insights in honor of the universally admired Sufi mystic poet's 800th birthday. Readers can also eavesdrop on Joan Duncan Oliver as she shares a cup of coffee with an even older spiritual guru, the Buddha.

Nancy Rue, for her part, takes on the tricky female preteen market, offering them girl-to-girl Christian advice on subjects like boys and bullying. Finally, Patricia Broersma trots in with an argument for the horse as spiritual guide.

It is one of the finer paradoxes of our time that Beckett, aka Sister Wendy, who professes constantly that she craves the Carmelite's solitude in meditation, has become one of the more familiar faces on television and book jackets. Beckett's idiosyncratic perceptions of art and art history, because they are so remote from the arcane language of the museum professional, amount to something like genius; the same is true of her current volume on prayer. She cannot tell you what a theologian ought to say; instead, she tells you what she knows. Beckett's new volume still engages art—it includes full-color reproductions of several canvases pertinent to her reflections. Highly recommended.

If dogs can be angels, there is no reason horses can't be guides on a spiritual journey. Broersma, an experienced horse trainer and instructor with a special outreach to handicapped riders, has written a gently phrased book that champions horses “with power, grace, and beauty, offering their mythic talents to teach us greater compassion for all sentient life.” Including simple rituals, Broersma argues for the horse in terms that might well apply to any of the animals we view as companions. The full treatment of the horse's archetypal power as spirit guide, however, remains to be written. For most collections.

Chandler, an Episcopal priest serving in the Middle East, has written a fascinating and stimulating book about the life and work of Syrian novelist Mazhar Mallouhi. Relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, Mallouhi considers himself a “Sufi Muslim follower of Christ”; he accepts Christ and Christian ideas without jettisoning his origins in Islam. Mallouhi's assertions have proved controversial, resulting in his exile and imprisonment. Neither a conventional biography nor a systematic study of Islam or Sufistic Christianity, Chandler's book uses Mallouhi to ask new questions about Eastern and Western interpretations of Christianity and goes a long way toward fostering multicultural understanding as it restores “Eastern-ness” to the image of Jesus. Highly recommended.

Chilcote (practice of evangelism, Duke Univ.; president, Charles Wesley Soc.) is a veritable authority on the theology and history of Wesleyanism, having written, among other books, Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision: An Introduction to the Faith of John and Charles Wesley. Charles Wesley (1707–88) was an Anglican priest and cofounder of the Methodist movement, and this brief devotional volume shrewdly approaches his theology pertinent to Advent and Christmas through the medium in which most Christians experience theology most fully and persistently: hymnody. Chilcote skillfully uses the words of many of Wesley's most appealing hymns as points of departure for devotion and reflection. [Though he shares their name, the author is not a descendent of the Wesleys.—Ed.]

Fanny Neuda, little known today, was the daughter of a rabbi left widowed by the death of her reform-minded rabbi husband in the mid-19th century. Following in the tradition of tkhines (women's prayers—see Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women), author and editor Berland (contributor, Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in America) has selected prayers from Neuda's volume and adapted them into a kind of loose English free verse. Neuda's prayers are a wonderful discovery for modern audiences and should appeal to historians of Jewish life as well as to women of all faiths. Berland's introduction touchingly weaves her discovery of Neuda into her own life. For most collections.

This is the welcome sequel to Kaplan's (humanities, Brandeis Univ.) biography of Abraham Heschel's early years (1907–40), Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, coauthored with Samuel H. Dresner. It carries Heschel from 1940 through 1972 and examines his years of greatest prominence as a social activist and friend/ally of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. It is hard to think of a more important touchstone for American Jewish identity in the 20th century than Heschel, and while Kaplan's rather quotidian approach declines to attempt any full assessment of Heschel's legacy, this volume should still be an important addition to libraries with strong Jewish readership.

This first treatment of the Virginia Tech massacre for the spirituality market is unlikely to be the last. Lueders' principal qualification for writing it seems to be her sometime-membership in the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC). She was moved to create this work of comfort and faith around the memory of Lauren McCain, one of the massacre's 32 victims and herself a leader in the CCC. Although—well into the work—Lueders acknowledges all the slain, she mostly addresses Christians or those considering conversion. A more inclusive, interfaith treatment of the disaster would be welcome.

This unassuming little book is part of a series spotlighting such figures as Groucho Marx, Marilyn Monroe, and Oscar Wilde. Ordinarily, company like that—entertaining as it might be—is no preparation for the Buddha, but Oliver's (Contemplative Living) charming text manages to offer a short biography of the Buddha and present in dialog form the broadly accepted essentials of Mahayana Buddhism. In a sea of introductions to Buddhism, Oliver touches on most of the basics of interest to Western readers, and appealing as singer/Buddhist Annie Lennox's introduction may be, Oliver's work stands on its own merit.

One of the world's best-known preachers, not to mention one of its most controversial, Pastor Osteen preaches to more than 42,000 in Houston's Lakewood Church and millions more by television every week. This is a kind of sequel to Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. Both books exemplify the distinctively American take on conservative Christianity existing at least since the days of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Generally, Osteen's theology accentuates the positive and stresses God's blessings and material rewards for the faithful. Distasteful though his chipper faith may be to some, his voice cannot be ignored.

This work collects Rosenwein's articles for “The Home Front,” a column that ran in the New York Jewish Week for seven years. With unfailing fluency, humor, and an accessible style, Rosenwein wrote about her children, New York, the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, Israel, her battle with cancer, and more. Through it all, Judaism informed her outlook and gave her strength. She rightly perceives herself as belonging to a “conduit” generation, i.e., one falling between her parents' Holocaust sorrows and the American pleasures of her children's lives. Rosenwein's writings exemplify the pleasures of reading journalistic columns dealing with daily matters that touch on universals.

These two little volumes are the latest entries in a distinctive series in Christian publishing. Rue—author of many “Faithgirlz!” books (www.faithgirlz.com)—writes in an accessible, from-the-hip style in an effort to reach the important but elusive “tween” female market. She offers Christian-inflected advice on puberty, personal hygiene, friendship, and girl-on-girl bullying. Whether 13-year-olds will respond, this reviewer is not qualified to say, but Rue's approach has its charm, and her advice is sound. Librarians will want to watch this series as an example of the expanding purview of Christian publishing. For most collections, especially those with a large YA population.

At least half a dozen poets and scholars could claim partial responsibility for the remarkable renaissance in the study of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Islamic poet/mystic and favored saint of Sufism. He has now surpassed Rainer Maria Rilke and Khalil Gibran as the poet of the spiritual seeker. Barks (The Essential Rumi) is arguably the most eminent of these writers, and his book, issued in celebration of Rumi's 800th birthday, presents 90 new translations of Rumi's ecstatic insights, most never before published. Barks's translations are no less incandescent than those that have come before; his long introduction speaks eloquently of his commitment to Rumi and of the strangeness of his quest in the context of a very changed Middle East.